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Wind, earthquake and the voice of God
Monday 19 May 2008
Have you puzzled over the cyclone in Burma and the earthquake in China which caused death, injury, distress and homelessness to thousands of people? How could a God of love allow such things to happen? Does the Bible have any answers?
I do not think the Bible has any easy answers – although it does wrestle with the problem of innocent suffering especially and dramatically in the Book of Job. Like all of us I am sure that the biblical writers would have been shocked, saddened and dismayed by the recent series of natural disasters – but they would not have been surprised: for earthquakes are recorded in the Bible at 1 Samuel 14:15, 1 Kings 19:11, Psalm 18:7, Matthew 27:51-54 and Acts 16:26 as well as appearing in prophetic imagery in Isaiah, Mark and Revelation.
Perhaps most striking of all, in the context of recent events, is the story recorded in 1 Kings 18:11-13. Here Elijah experiences a great wind, so strong that it splits mountains and breaks rocks in pieces, ‘but the Lord was not in the wind’. After the wind there is an earthquake, ‘but the Lord was not in the earthquake’. After the earthquake there is a fire, ‘but the Lord was not in the fire’. After the fire Elijah hears a still small voice which says, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’ After wind and earthquake it is a time to be quiet and listen to what God is saying.
In that remarkable and often puzzling book with which the Bible ends, in Revelation chapters 6 and 7, there is a great earthquake followed by the most appalling cosmic convulsions. The sun turns black and the moon red; the stars fall and the sky disintegrates; all mountains and islands are dislodged. I do not think these are to be interpreted as literal events, but as social, political and ‘natural’ upheavals described in the familiar apocalyptic imagery of the Bible.
The dramatic imagery in Revelation gives us a tantalising glimpse of history between the first and second comings of Christ. It will be a time of violent disturbance and suffering. But the eye of faith looks beyond these things to Christ as the Lamb of God who – even when we find it difficult to believe – controls the course of history.
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