At this time of year—with Thanksgiving as the launching of the Christmas sales period—all the avid consumers in America go wild.  My Thursday newspaper, full of “black Friday” sales, weighed almost as much as the turkey I’ll be enjoying later today.  Backbreaking stuff!  It’s the season when things we don’t really need are being marketed with even more gusto than usual.  And the marketers will have real successes even in these lean economic times.  Soulbreaking stuff!  Which leads me to offer this ‘extra’ Thanksgiving posting on Spreadinggoodness.

Marketing speaks to our real needs, to our felt needs, and to our unimagined needs.  And far too often it is mainly to the latter—to the needs we never knew we had!  It’s called “creating a need”—birthed by a producer’s ambition to build new markets, with attending profits, among the consuming masses.  

If this sounds manipulative. . . well, it is!  But we actually enjoy it because good marketing first captures our hearts—our desires—and only then our cash.  And if a new desire is well planted and watered it becomes a “natural” priority.  

I think, as a very ordinary example, of what bathrooms used to be like in the homes of a century ago: one per house; a modest rectangular room with a sink, a stool, a tub, a mirror, and a towel shelf.  They were basic but they satisfied the family needs.  However since then—coaxed by tens of thousands of home improvement magazines and advertisements—we now have master bathrooms as big as bedrooms used to be, filled with a multitude of comfort features.  And we also have annually enhanced visions of kitchens, cars, and computers.  In fact almost everything gets grander each year!

Yet my point isn’t to challenge our having nice bathrooms, kitchens, cars, or computers, but to reflect on what draws us beyond our actual needs to the point of soulbreaking excess.  We need to remember—with a certain grace—that the ambition of good marketers is to make sure we are never satisfied—so our unending exposure to new “needs” never ends.  But, given this induced climate of perpetual dissatisfaction, how can we avoid an enslavement to the stuff and status that goes with consumerism?

This is where thanksgiving offers us a wonderful solution.  But let me start by asking about the problem of sin—what are we up against?

If we have an enemy of our souls—and we do—and if he (as the ultimate status-seeker) wanted to have us turn from God in order to draw us into his own alternative kingdom, how could he do it?

Augustine, the 4^th century bishop of Hippo in Africa, asked just this sort of question.  In answering he first affirmed a pair of Christian axioms: that God cannot be the author of evil, and that God created all things.  So how did that leave space for any evil to arise?  The answer is: by stepping away from God’s love.  Satan, who was created as one who was good, ceased loving God and conceived an “unreal” realm away from God’s loving rule.  At that moment a binary opposition between love and hate was birthed.  This realm of rebellion would be a virtual world existing outside God’s realm of reality—as a shadow does to a real object—and as an opposite to all that God is and stands for.  It is the realm where God (as he truly exists) is denied—“hated”—along with all his goodness, and where new versions of God are imagined.

Let me expand on Augustine’s insight.  In the realm of truth—the “true realm” called God’s kingdom—all that God created is “good”, “good”, and “very good”.  And the greatest goodness was for God’s new companions to be united in the communion of the Triune God by the Spirit pouring out this mutual, active love in their hearts.  Satan, however, looked away from God’s goodness in order to explore a possibility God left open.  The creation is never forced to love God because love is a devotion of reciprocated desire, not of demand or duty.  So Satan conceived of a new sort of love—an oxymoronic “self-love”—as a new basis for goodness rooted in personal ambition.  He, in turn, dismissed the relational mutuality of the triune God.  God summarized what happened next: “Your heart was proud because of your beauty; you corrupted your wisdom for the sake of your splendor” [Ezekiel 28:17].  

Evil then began and grew as the negative image to all that is positive.  If, for instance, God created us to be selfless, Satan offers selfishness.  When God created sexuality as a goodness in bonding the husband and his wife, Satan promoted a selfish sexuality that abandoned that goodness.  In sum, God offered a wisdom from above and Satan a wisdom from below.

So it was this pseudo-reality that God’s human companions embraced.  Satan’s kingdom—what God calls death, darkness, the Lie, and evil—was captivating not just for Adam and Eve, but for their offspring as well.  Especially as the Spirit, who spread God’s love, joy, peace, and patience, withdrew after the Fall.

What was Satan’s marketing ploy in achieving all this?  He offered the benefits of being “like God”!  It wasn’t that he was suggesting God’s kingdom should be dismissed or destroyed.  Instead he offered Adam the opportunity to have a free will—a will free from God’s loving ways.  This would, supposedly, lead to a mature, peer-to-peer relationship with God.  Adam and Eve, for instance, would become God’s partners in determining good and evil.  They would have their own wisdom enhanced by seeking to develop more of an equal relationship with him.  Hierarchy was now passé and unexamined trust was now naive.  Instead, as Satan marketed his vision of a new kind of deity, a new motivation of self-love was offered.  This was the basis of being “like God”.  With it came an appetite for god-like qualities—with Satan’s version of a self-centered God now in play.  This, in turn, called for more comfort, more status, more capacities, more knowledge, more security . . . more and more and more of everything.

 All of which takes us back to thanksgiving.  Augustine had drawn his own insights from reading the Bible, and the epistles of Paul were central to what he concluded.  Paul, for instance, began the letter to the Romans with an exposé of evil.  He wrote of how humanity is without excuse for its rejection of God.  He chastised those who toy with sin as actually embracing futility—of claiming to be wise while actually becoming fools.

What is striking is Paul’s linkage, in Romans 1:21, between the rebellion of Satan and Adam’s offspring, and their shared refusal to be thankful: “although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him . . .” 

Thanksgiving, is, in effect, the first and foremost expression of our “getting it”!  Faith is the restoration of a life of devotion to, and dependence on, God.  Of affirming our faith as a vine-and-branch bond: “for apart from me you can do nothing.”  Nothing at all.  Everything depends on him, whether by creation, or by relational devotion to him.  Without him we are still in the un-world of the wicked one, pretending to be real while actually living in a vast shadowland of opposition.

So now that we are children of God, how shall we grow in our faith?  By giving thanks.  By thanking him in everything—as we are invited to do in 1 Thessalonians 5:18.  Of enjoying God with every breath we take, in every move we make, knowing that we are beloved by him.

Thanksgiving—full and robust—is our continuing response to the Spirit’s renewed presence in us: sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted.  Thanksgiving is the heartbeat of a living faith.  God, in turn, loves to hear our thanksgiving.  And why not!  He made us in order to be partners in his joyous, eternal, triune communion.  The enthusiasm of the Son in his John 17 prayer is all about our experience of the love and glory the Son has eternally enjoyed with the Father and the Spirit.  So our own exercises of giving thanks are steps into the atmosphere of heaven, and of returning to what Adam dismissed for the sake of self-love.  In effect, we actually become “more Godly” by giving up our old ambition to be “like God.”  True Godliness is only discovered in God’s embrace.

What, then, shelters our hearts in a consumeristic world with its systemic dissatisfaction, especially on black Friday?  Our thanksgiving.  And our thanksgiving is not artificial if we pause long enough to both consider and then respond to God’s ever-present mercies and love.  We love him because he first loved us.  And it only takes a moment for us to turn our heart towards him by saying “Thank you, Lord!”  As we do his Spirit begins to reciprocate our response.  The result is that now we can truly be “more Godly”.

After an early church service this past Sunday I drove to Hug Point.  It’s an aptly named scenic section of the Oregon coast, a few miles south of Cannon Beach.  I visit there at times to enjoy God’s embrace—a good time of Bible reading, praying, and taking a nap while serenaded by the thundering surf.

It turned out that I wasn’t the only person napping there on Sunday.  Near the end of my stay I was surprised by a Coast Guard helicopter that slowed near the southern point of the beach where a cliff rises up out of the waves.  Just 250 yards from me it came to a hover and dropped a rescue diver down on a long cable to a spot around the bend.  After a few moments the diver was reeled back up but now with another person attached.  Then the aircraft began to move back and forth in a search pattern over the churning sea for most of the next two hours. 

I changed locations to the other side of the craggy cliff in order to watch the helicopter operate.  There I heard a lady telling some other viewers that she was the person who had called 911 for emergency help.  She explained to us that she spotted the couple napping on the rock.  They were in terrible danger because during their sleep the incoming tide had cut off any escape from their spot.  So she immediately phoned for help and then raced towards the couple to shout for them to stay up on the rock and that help was on the way. 

Before she could get close a wave caught the now-awakened couple as they tried to get off the rock through the chest-high surf.  It was a hopeless effort so the man helped the woman climb back up on the rock but he was then lifted by a wave and slammed against the cliff.  With that he disappeared from view.  The helicopter arrived minutes later and rescued his companion but the man was never seen again.  Given the frigid water there was no hope of finding him alive.

This week I’ve mulled over what I watched that Sunday and what I had been reading from my safe spot up on the shoreline.  In the two hours before the helicopter interrupted our peace I had completed most of Jeremiah—a book with stark warnings against spiritual danger, yet with a promise that help was on the way.  What I saw and heard from the lady telling her story, with her still bare feet and sopping-wet blue jeans from her rescue efforts, was a living reminder to me of Jeremiah’s rescue efforts so many years ago.  Jeremiah knew, by God’s counsel, that Judea was facing an incoming tide of the Babylonian invaders and there would be no escape.  Yet they could still look to God for spiritual rescue.

Let me follow up this connection by considering some features of Jeremiah’s warning. 

The problems the nation of Judah faced in Jeremiah’s days were both spiritual and tangible.  Spiritual in that Judah’s religion was void of substance; and tangible in that their enemies, the Babylonians, were launching an invasion because Judea had become an unreliable vassal state.  But these were not separate matters: Jeremiah linked them in a cause-and-effect unity.  The perpetual sin of the people forced God to catch their attention by a sharp mercy—and Babylon was to be his instrument.

The main target in Jeremiah’s warnings were religious leaders who had separated worship from relationship.  He spoke on God’s behalf: “The priests did not say, ‘Where is the LORD?’  Those who handle the law did not know me; the shepherds transgressed against me” [2:8].

Judah’s northern sister-nation, Israel, had already been carried away to captivity by the Assyrians a few decades earlier for having practiced spiritual adultery, “Yet for all this her treacherous sister Judah did not return to me with her whole heart, but in pretense, declares the LORD” [3:10].

The problem of Jeremiah’s day was not that the people were skipping weekly attendance at worship services but that they lacked any real transformation.  They were stubbornly ungodly while claiming to be committed to God.

Run to and fro through the streets of Jerusalem, look and take note!  Search her squares to see if you can find a man , one who does justice and seeks truth, that I may pardon her.  Though they say, “As the LORD lives, “ yet they swear falsely.  [5:1-2]

But what about the academics of Jeremiah’s day?  The role of the wise men of his day was to offer truth to the population, truth rooted in the Scriptures.  Jeremiah answered with a rebuke: “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the LORD is with us’?”  Clearly he rejected their status as leaders. 

What was the problem?  Jeremiah answered, “behold, they have rejected the word of the LORD, so what wisdom is in them?” [8:8-9]  But there was a deeper issue at stake that Jeremiah next raised: “everyone is greedy for unjust gain; from prophet to priest, everyone deals falsely.  They have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, ‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.”

Let me summarize what we’ve seen so far.  God had warned Judah that the tide of his judgment was coming in.  Her sin, however, had her sleeping on a sunny rock in the tidal zone.  Yet the men who had the jobs of posting local tidal charts, of putting up warning signs, and of patrolling the beaches for unsafe activities, were up in the parking lot selling lattes and hot chocolates with one ambition: to get paid and to keep beach goers feeling good.  No matter that there was danger at hand.

What made Jeremiah remarkable in his day is that he just would not quit.  In time he had all the local preachers and politicians—and finally even his extended family members—absolutely fed up with him.  All his negativism and nay saying was ultimately directed at them so they fought back.  If Jeremiah warned about coming judgment, one of the local preachers would preach the exact opposite to his warning.  Anything to keep the congregations happy.  Yet it was God himself who was telling Jeremiah what to say! 

So what were the listeners to think, with both Jeremiah and his opponents claiming to speak on God’s behalf?  The book offers two main responses: the moral ground for discrimination (the other prophets of Jerusalem were committing adultery and walking in lies [23:14]), and the outcome basis for discrimination.  I’ll say more about the second of these.

The premise of Jeremiah’s opponents was that Judah would have a happy ending.  No warnings to worry about.  No incoming tide.  No insecurity.  But their promises were empty.  Why?  Jeremiah answered: they didn’t spend time listening to God.  Only when the judgment arrived would it be clear that Jeremiah was the one who, alone, had really listened to God.  With his unique confidence Jeremiah reported God’s own words on the subject:

They say continually to those who despise the word of the LORD, “It shall be well with you”; and to everyone who stubbornly follows his own heart, they say, “No disaster shall come upon you.”  For who among them has stood in the council of the LORD to see and to hear his word, or who has paid attention to his word and listened?  Behold, the storm of the LORD!  Wrath has gone forth . . . .  In the latter days you will understand it clearly.  [23:17-20]

As I think of the lady who tried to warn the couple on the dangerous rock I wonder at my own role in a culture that is too much like that of Jeremiah’s day.  Is it time to sound a warning?  Are we, as religious leaders of various stripes and standing, calling out the warning of the tide of coming trouble to a church satisfied with promises of spiritual self-fulfillment?

As I reflect on the messages being preached by many in the church today who are the contemporary counterparts of the Old Testament prophets and priests, I’m struck by how much focus is placed on “personal application.”  It’s as if the whole point of the Bible is to fulfill our needs.  Isn’t the real purpose of the word to offer us the “council of God”?  To bring us to a moral and spiritual awakening—to offer warnings to leave the dangerous tidal zones behind us?

My invitation to us all is to become much bolder Bible readers.  Not with a view to consume any personal benefits we might find—though benefits will certainly be discovered—but to hear God’s heart.  To become aligned with his ways.  To stand in his council.  The world needs us to shout out to them on the basis of what we hear.  Help is certainly on the way, but right now we face some serious dangers.

This week I was reminded that I share a very small feature of life with Charles, Prince of Wales.  We have lived the same number of years.  By almost every other measure I have little in common with his royal highness.  The difference is summed up by the rubric of nobility.  He’s a nobleman and I’m a common man.  My home is merely a house while any home he lives in is called a palace.  I’m called on to serve others while he has any number of servants.  And so on.

So my question of the day is this: how can I gain nobility?  And, so I won’t be seen as selfish, I happily invite others to take up the same ambition. 

I’m aware that I probably won’t get there by any genealogical links.  Prince Charles is a blueblood and my blood is merely red.  Nevertheless my deep ambition still is to be a noble man.

Some readers may already be asking, “As a follower of Christ aren’t you being pretentious in seeking nobility?”  Maybe, but maybe not.  On the one hand I know that being part of a royal family is a gift of birth that, in God’s wisdom, I seem not to have been given.  But what if I dig deep enough to find some intersection with royalty in my heritage?  There’s no harm in asking.

I should say what motivated me to chase this topic—apart from the news of Prince Charles’ birthday.  Two things came together this week.  First I was reading in Isaiah.  In chapter 32 the prophet spoke of a coming king who is clearly a very compelling figure.  As I read it my ambition to be a noble man surged—to be someone appropriate to his retinue.

Second, I was listening to a radio summary of the current economic crisis the world is facing.  “It started in the United States with home loans that were deceptively overvalued,” the speaker said, “and with that came a loss of mutual trust among both the regional and then the national and international banks.”  How could this happen?  The speaker went on, “In a system that separated the original lenders from the consequences of making bad loans, there was too much room for abuse.  Greed took over and here we are today facing a cascade of economic consequences vastly bigger than anyone could have foreseen.”

Wow!  A few dishonest realtors, loan brokers, and mortgage companies working together with some slightly dishonest home buyers could have that much impact?!  There may have been more, of course.  In other reports I’ve heard of other forms of misconduct.  Stock market manipulations, for instance.  A lack of oversight and limits on various exotic trading instruments that offered no real economic benefit other than to produce enormous profits for the traders.  So, too, what the journalists label “excessive and unwarranted” salaries and bonuses paid to officers of financial companies.  It was enough to make me wonder if the movie Wall Street that tried to overstate and mock the limitless greed of the protagonist has some basis in life! 

But, I’m told, there will always be a few bad apples in any crate of good fruit—so let’s not worry about just a little bit of corruption.  If someone is clever enough to pull it off, does it really make a difference to anyone else?

That’s not to say this week’s bad news was devoted solely to economic woes.  There were reports of killings among the various drug cartels in certain countries, with police also being killed and other police being implicated as part of the problem.  The real issue, we’re told, is that so many billions of dollars are flowing back to the cartel leaders that they have more than enough funds to overturn governments if they need to.  But who buys all these drugs?  Where are the actual faces, hands, and feet that spend those billions of dollars?  Are they my friends and neighbors?

In Isaiah 32 the prophet tells us that “a king will reign in righteousness, and princes will rule in justice.”  In the same context Isaiah also speaks of nobility, but he treats it as a character quality rather than a position in society—although it might apply to both: “The fool will no more be called noble, nor the scoundrel said to be honorable.”

The problem Isaiah addressed was the corruption of both the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel—led by Samaria and Jerusalem.  These were religious countries, but they rejected the unwanted warnings that God offered them through the prophets.

For they are a rebellious people, lying children, children unwilling to hear the instruction of the LORD; who say to the seers, “Do not see,” and to the prophets, “Do not prophesy to us what is right; speak to us smooth things, prophesy illusions . . . let us hear no more about the Holy One of Israel.”  [30:9-10]

How does this reluctance to listen to God play itself out?  In social and economic collapse.  Isaiah used the imagery of a landslide that breaks through a high retaining wall.  At one moment there seemed to be security and stability for those on the road beneath the wall and in the homes above.  The next moment everything breaks loose in catastrophe.  Small increments of moral defection and spiritual disaffection culminated in a collective collapse.

Therefore thus says the Holy One of Israel, Because you despise this word and trust in oppression and perverseness and rely on them, therefore this iniquity shall be to you like a breach in a high wall, bulging out, and about to collapse, whose breaking comes suddenly, in an instant . . .  [30:12-13]

Isaiah was remarkably prescient about today’s economic and spiritual scene, wasn’t he?  I know of many who were buying well over their heads in the housing boom before the present debacle.  They were certain the market would only go up.  Up, up, up.  Folly followed.

But how does God view such things?  Redemptively.

For thus said the Lord GOD, the Holy One of Israel, “In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.”  [30:15]

His compassionate character—call it his nobility—is a bedrock we can trust.

Therefore the LORD waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you.  For the LORD is a God of justice; blessed are those who wait for him.  [30:18]

Let me return to my ambition to be noble.  While I’ve teased the issue by mentioning Prince Charles, I do understand the difference between being a nobleman and being a man who is noble—they may or may not overlap.  One is a position in society and the other is position in God.  One is an artifice that will pass away the moment any given royal figure breathes his or her last breath.  The other is a quality that is only fully displayed when the accolade, “Well done my good and faithful servant” is offered by God—the God who searches our hearts and minds—as we arrive in his presence.

So this calling to nobility—to be noble in a world that is often blind to the intrinsic power of godliness—is not to be pursued for the sake of human acclaim.  Rather it is an instinct of heart produced by the paternity of God himself. 

Who is this God and king?  Isaiah only knew of the coming king in broad terms, “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful Counselor, Might God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” [9:6]  We, by contrast, have met him as Jesus of Nazareth. 

But how should we respond to him?  By becoming like him.  Nobility reveals God on earth—as the body of his Son, the Church.  It is measured by more than mere conduct—as in “What would Jesus do?—but more profoundly as a disposition, “What would delight my savior the most?!”  Nobility is a deep quality of heart.

So listen, again, to Isaiah [in 32:8] for a final bit of advice in joining the nobility:

But he who is noble plans noble things, and on noble things he stands.

And all God’s people said, “Amen!”

A man who already had his PhD warned me before I started my own adventure, “Be sure to pick a topic you can live with.  If you pick something that doesn’t satisfy, you’ll pay for it!”  Good advice, and advice I followed when I selected Richard Sibbes as my subject of study! 

Getting to know Sibbes was a special treat.  I’m now sure—after getting to know him rather well in a four-year effort—that when he arrived to be with his Lord on July 5, 1635, he must have been ushered to a seat of special honor as crowds gathered to welcome him home.  He was a man captured by God’s love, and he faithfully and freely shared that love with others.  I’m blessed to be included among the recipients of that care, even if at a distance of a few hundred years.  I now hope to spread that goodness even more widely.  As a small step in that direction let me share just one segment of Sibbes’ writings here as a way to introduce him to readers who may not know of him yet.

But first let me say a bit more about him.  He preached and taught in Cambridge and London, and was what now would be called a trinitarian theologian.  This grew out of his adult Bible study and by reading the first Reformers as well as the medieval Bernard of Clairvaux and the early church fathers such as Augustine, Athanasius, and the Cappadocians.

Let me underscore that to call him a trinitarian theologian speaks of more than his belief in the Trinity—something every orthodox Christian shares.  It represents, instead, a belief that nothing said about God can be said outside his relational reality.  It is a theology aligned with the great teachings of the early church councils at Nicaea and Cappadocia, holding that the eternal triune communion of three persons is the ultimate reality about God, a reality out of which every other discussion about God must begin.  In a basic text on theology, for instance, it is a major misstep to spend hundreds of pages on God’s attributes prior to addressing the Trinity.  And an error to discuss God’s various qualities without first affirming the bedrock relational reality that “God is love.”  May a new generation of Christian writers do better in this regard than past practitioners!

A major feature of Sibbes’ ministry was his fascination with Jesus.  This is illustrated in a series of sermons published as A Description of Christ.  In this post I will refer to that series as found in his Works [noting just 1.17-18 here].  The Description was, as suggested already, embedded in a trinitarian context as were the rest of his mature works.  Christ’s humanity, Sibbes taught, was dependent on the Spirit’s presence and activity:

Whatsoever Christ did as man, he did by the Spirit.  Christ’s human nature, therefore, must be sanctified and have the Spirit put upon it.  God the Father, the first person in Trinity, and God the Son, the second, they work not immediately, but by the Holy Ghost, the third Person.

Sibbes was conscious of the Gospel summaries of the Spirit descending on Jesus at his baptism as well as the Spirit directing Jesus to his wilderness temptation.  This arrangement of Christ’s human dependence was for our sake as those who need his presence and leading.  But most important is the Spirit’s work of distributing the communion of the Godhead to those united to Christ by his unique work.

Now as the Holy Spirit is from the Father and the Son, so he works from the Father and the Son.  He sanctifies and purifies, and does all from the Father and the Son, and knits us to the Father and the Son; to the Son first, and then to the Father . . . [citing 2 Cor. 13:14].  All the communion that Christ as man had with God was by the Holy Ghost; and all the communion that God has with us, and we with God, is by the Holy Ghost; for the Spirit is the bond of union between Christ and us, and between God and us.

It was crucial, Sibbes believed, for Christ to have experienced the Spirit in his own life and work as a man in order for him to send the Spirit as the agent of that life and ministry, so that “Whatsoever the Holy Ghost works in us, he takes of Christ first.”

What was of monumental importance to Sibbes is that the bond of the Father and the Son, by the Spirit, was and is a bond of love.  What Jesus experienced of the Father’s love, through the Spirit, is now present to us!

The Holy Ghost tells our souls that God loves Christ first, and he loves us in Christ, and that we are those that God gave Christ for, that we are those that Christ makes intercession for in heaven.  The Holy Ghost witnesses to us the love of the Father and the Son, and so he draws from Christ whatsoever he works.

All this does much to correct misunderstandings of the Spirit’s ministry, Sibbes concluded.  No longer do we connect the Spirit with “illusions and delusions, that are nothing but frantic conceits of comfort that are groundless.”  Instead we engage Christ himself through the Spirit’s ministry in us.

So, to wrap up this brief post, let me invite readers to reflect, with Sibbes, on the union of the Godhead.  May we have a greater sense than ever before that we have been drawn into “the” love relationship of all relationships.  May we realize that the whole point of the incarnation of Christ is to draw us into the communion that God has experienced for all of eternity.  Why?  Because his love is free for the sharing.  The Father delights in the Son.  He sent his greatest joy to be the source of our own joy by sending us the Spirit who is the bond of union between the Father and the Son; and between the Son and us.  Wow!  That’s some very good news.  Call it the gospel truth!

This week included two separate experiences.  I read from Job and I had a vivid dream of an earthquake.  Let me link them here in a single reflection on God’s greatness in the face of human self-confidence.

I’ll start with the earthquake dream.  In the dream I saw a hillside in motion as I looked out through a moving window.  Then the building I was in collapsed sideways as one wall gave way.  A frightening image followed by a quick wake up! 

My point in mentioning this little nightmare isn’t to make much of the dream itself but to share how it launched my reflection on the ways we view disasters: our earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis.  These acts of God, or, in the common coinage of today, natural disasters, are events that threaten our personal security.  They make us realize just how small we are in the face of massive and overwhelming forces that readily crush our otherwise secure spaces. 

What came to mind is how our modern point of view disengages these events from God’s rule of the universe.  That is, the Bible always owns the linkage between natural events of just this kind: that God forms the storms, rules the earthquakes, and owns the seashores of the world.  He even goes so far as to claim that every sparrow is under his care and every hair on our head is numbered.  There are no surprises in God’s universe: he rules over every event.  Whether the tsunami in Indonesia, the many earthquakes throughout the world, or the great storms like Katrina.  Yet the naturalistic impulse of our modern world is to describe these huge events as if a scientific description of how they came about removes the divine role in having them happen. 

To say, for instance, that tectonic plate movements led to an earthquake doesn’t displace God’s role in directing that earthquake—it only explains how he did it.  To treat a low-pressure system formed off the coast of Africa as a strictly “natural” event just because we can trace its movements with satellite images is biblically naïve.  There has never been a storm, a fire, a quake, or a flood in the Bible times that God didn’t own as part of his realm.  Elijah ruled the weather in Israel under God’s direction for three years.  The storms and sequential tragedies that plagued the Egyptians in Moses’ days were signals of God’s rule.  The promise of future earthquakes as a sign of Christ’s return tells us that the supernatural connection is not yet broken.

What we cannot do is assign a specific meaning to these events, as did at least one prominent public minister in recent days.  He pronounced Katrina to be God’s judgment on New Orleans.  The man might have had some credibility if he had prophesied six months beforehand that God would soon bring about a major hurricane against the city.  But to make his claims afterwards, to a city that held a cross section of sinners and saints, was to kick people once they were down, at a time when grace and compassion was needed rather than blame-casting.  Even if God was judging New Orleans (that is, some who live in the city) in a unique way, we need to let him convict those to whom any lesson is offered.  To offer a broad-brush post-event charge is just not convincing.  I’m sure that if God regularly set up storms and earthquakes to judge sinful cities as a direct consequence for their sins more than a few cities that are currently prospering should have long since disappeared!

So how do we link the power of God to the power of natural forces?  Job’s narrative offers a key insight.   As God, in chapters 38-41, charged Job with impudence for his questioning God’s goodness, most of the features involved “nature.”  God asked Job to explain how the earth was formed and operates, how the animal kingdom carries on under divine directives, and how the weather runs through its courses.  

In the middle of this listing comes a unique charge that addressed humanity in particular: “Look,” God told Job, “on everyone who is proud and bring him low and tread down the wicked where they stand” [40:12].  In this cryptic saying God challenged Job to do what God alone can do—to bring about human humility.  Only if Job could achieve this miracle would God feel obliged to answer him: “Then will I also acknowledge to you that your own right hand can save you” [40:14].

What can we learn here?  Without reviewing all of Job’s narrative and theology here, I can at least remind readers that Job was unjustly charged by his erstwhile friends with being struck down with terrible tragedies because of his sins.  We learn, in fact, from the narrator that Job was blameless and that the charges were mislaid.  But we also learn that God is not apologetic for what Job endured and that through the tragedies Job’s soul grew and prospered.

We can also learn that nature brings us God-defined tragedies.  What if my nightmare about an earthquake proved to be a premonition of a coming event?  And in such an event both Christians and non-Christians were spared in some cases, and struck dead or injured in other cases?  Would we then be able to say “I have a lesson from God for you!”  God forbid!

But we can be certain that God is an expert in humbling us.  And in our humility we will at last cease blaming God for events in nature that are byproducts of Adam’s fall; and then begin to acknowledge that he is God!  His purpose, both in allowing tragedies and in giving his graces, is to expose pride as an ultimate barrier to his love.  A barrier only God can remove, sometimes with a tender touch, and sometimes with hard surgery.  The proper response to a tragic event is to call on the God of all mercies.  As C. S. Lewis put it, pain is God’s megaphone.  If some event helps us listen to him, trust him, and follow him it can never be called a tragedy of nature.  Call it, instead, a divine tragedy that offers pathways to life through the humility it brings us.  Even when it’s an earthquake, a hurricane, or a flood.