Where is God in the tornado?

Denver Post (AP Photo; Sue Ogrocki)

I’m watching the tornado coverage from Oklahoma tonight, and I’m angry!

Yes, I’ve searched my feelings and realized that the emotion that best describes me right now, a handful of hours into this crisis, is anger.

A few short months ago, a man carried a gun into an elementary school in Connecticut and indiscriminately killed people—most of them were children. That made me really angry, too. But quite honestly it was anger directed towards a single individual who was twisted and broken, and who had manifested an extreme result of allowing evil to rule.

But today when an elementary school was ripped apart, my anger couldn’t be directed to a person, so where is the target of my rage? Could it be towards God?

When a natural disaster strikes, buildings are torn down, and bodies pile up, humans will tend to shake their fists at God. Our culture calls these events, “Acts of God”, since there isn’t anyone else to blame. Even those who spend most of their life denying that any deity exists will sometimes strike out at this ‘nonexistent’ being: “How could an all-powerful good God allow something like this to happen?”

And those of us that spend our lives worshiping and preaching about this all-powerful and good God, if we are honest, in the deepest parts of our heart, ask a similar question:

“God, I do believe you are all-powerful and all-loving; isn’t this something you would have been interested in stopping?”

To understand how to wrestle with this question, we have to remember there are many such events; just because this particular horror is seared into the collective consciousness of our country at this moment, we shouldn’t forget that the occurrences that cause these questions happen all the time. In just the last decade:

• A tsunami hits on the other side of the world, wiping out a quarter of a million people.

• A devastating earthquake in a country that doesn’t have building codes kills 300,000.

• A Hurricane wipes out a modern American city, and kills over 1,000.

• And just last year over 35,000 children in the United States died of natural causes—diseases, sicknesses and infections.

And we want to figure out who is responsible for all this, because we’d like to make it right.

The story Christians believe says that sin is not only the reason that evil manifests in and through the lives of broken individuals, but that it is also the root cause of natural pain in our broken world.

God created humans and nature to live in perfect harmony with Him, but original human pride not only messed up humans, it messed up everything!

We see it starting in Genesis 3 where the result of human sin was a curse that impacted all of creation. We see it again in Romans 8 where this same creation groans, waiting for the redemption that will liberate it from its bondage to decay. We see it in Revelation where there will be a fully redeemed and restored heaven and earth. And if we scan the rest of the Bible and review history with even a cursory glance, we will see that our created world is not untouched by sin, and sin is the reason for all brokenness that exists.

So, I’m angry at sin! Does that mean I should focus my frustration at Adam and Eve? Not so fast.

If Adam and Eve had sinned and the rest of us hadn’t, we could certainly point our righteous fingers at the fountainhead of humanity—our first parents would bear all the blame for the pain. But every human heart is twisted by sin, and every one of us has gone our own way. The rebellion against God and His design wasn’t an isolated incident, it continues to this day. And if I’m honest, I can’t simply point my finger at a lunatic who pulls a trigger or grumble against my ancestors for starting a chain of events that would result in messed up situations, but I have to look inward to recognize the sin and brokenness that I carry myself.

So my burning rage at this unfolding story I am watching right now can be directed inward; my own rebellion has somehow contributed to this devastation and death; my own sin was somehow connected to the cause of this wanton destruction.

And God is angry, too.

I know it’s not popular to portray God as angry, and I certainly don’t mean by this the kind of Angry God that some twisted religious people portray while they are protesting at the graves of children and soldiers. And God doesn’t direct His anger towards you or me. But I really do believe that the God we serve is even more frustrated at the brokenness that sin causes than we are. And I believe this for a reason:

God created us for relationship with Him. Once our world was plunged into the darkness caused by human rebellion, the relationship we were created for was broken, and all hell broke loose. AT THAT MOMENT, God put a plan at work that would bring redemption from this brokenness, and that plan would include His personal sacrifice to bring healing first to humans, and then to all of creation. Through Jesus’ death and resurrection, a Kingdom was inaugurated that would eventually bring an end to brokenness. And though we who have been made alive by His Spirit are subjects and ambassadors of that Kingdom, we still live in a world that is waiting for the full realization of the coming age.

So I’m wrestling with my anger as I take in the implications of bare and bloodied hands digging through the rubble of a grade school, racing against the clock hoping for miracle survivors. I’m choking back my own tears as I hear about the tear-streaked faces of parents who have spent every last bit of energy searching for their beloved children, and who now sit staring off into space not wanting to imagine the probabilities that they face tomorrow. Many of these people who are searching, and hoping, and staring, have no more home to go home to themselves; no school where they can finish out their last week of classes; no place to get away from it all.

Unlike me, they can’t turn off the television and go to bed tonight.

And as I wrestle, I am also reminded that our world needs a savior—that this sinner needs a savior—and each time I hear about a deranged person who hurts others, or when my heart breaks over a collective catastrophe like this tornado, or when I experience a personal tragedy that happens to me, or my own family, or my own friends, I am driven to my knees to ask God to root out sin in me, and to believe Him for the power to live out His Kingdom life and be a part of the redemption that creation will yet experience.