Where Is God’s Wrath Burning Now?

“While Jesus rejected this kind of thinking, I don’t find his response — “this happened to that the works of God might be displayed in him” — much more palatable.”

So you finally admit that not only do you not believe what Paul wrote, you also disagree with Jesus. Stop calling yourself a CHRISTian, and we’ll all be the better.

Re: “If you believe that God sends rain in mercy, you’ve also got to believe that God sends wildfires in his wrath.”
Well, I don’t have to believe this. I believe God is a God of mercy, not of wrath. I believe God takes the evil, sin, “fires” and makes all things new and heals. That is God’s primary attribute. God doesn’t just wield out mercy and wrath on some balanced continuum. While these CO fires are horrible, God will reign down God’s mercy in the aftermath. If I’m honest, I don’t really know how God works. Does God throw down some proverbial “zap” to the clouds so it will rain? I doubt that. But rain will remind people of God’s mercy and begin the process of healing for these people. And God will be in the midst of that.

Every time I hear people saying that disasters/miracles are punishments/blessings from God because of our actions, in my head I’m going “Matthew5:45Matthew5:45Matthew5:45Matthew5:45Matthew5:45Matthew5:45”

The past few days, I was wondering if anyone would claim these fires are from God for some reason, but I thought maybe we’ll be safe from that bs because the fires are in an area with a lot of Christians and Christian organizations, not in a sinful, awful city somewhere… but then someone posted this link…
http://flashtrafficblog.wordpress.com/2012/06/27/epic-fires-in-colorado-is-god-using-natural-disasters-to-get-our-attention/

Also, I totally agree with your thoughts about praying for rain… so I’m never sure how to respond when someone mentions it.

I appreciate significant parts of this post and respectfully disagree with others.
I loathed Piper’s statements that made the case for God punishing through weather. It’s a terrible vision of God and out of some respect for him, I find it remarkable that he would express such a thought.

Jesus’ response after healing the blind man in John 9 – I find it unpalatable as well, but I want to submit to the idea that this was this man’s calling in life (I use calling language for lack of better descriptors). Go through a difficult life of blindness so that one random day, Jesus could come through and heal him and that’s glorifying God?? The “calling” of God is the only it could work for me. The flip side of all that is that this man lives out the rest of his days resolved that God exists has heard his prayers and that Jesus is Lord. Would I want that? I don’t have faith to say yes (hence “calling” seems to work better).

Regarding the fires of CS, I don’t think they were of God even after writing that last paragraph. And my simple reason is that God has not proclaimed this (just like I don’t believe that God has taken sight from everyone born blind).

I do think you can have one without the other, so long as we do not actually act as if we can demand God’s action through our sincere prayers for rain. Otherwise, none of this is faith at all. So, we must believe that God can intervene. Further though, I also believe that this is an opportunity for others to show care, compassion, and serve those affected and it’s my hope that the Church would lead in this way. Goodness and justice in the mist of pain and evil is the way of Jesus and an opportunity to allow God to work through us.

Great post Tony, thanks for forcing me to think through this.

I had a friend tell me that it was God’s protection that I was at church one evening while a few blocks over Texas-sized hail demolished a bunch of church members’ homes in the neighborhood. Why would God protect me and not my church members? I can’t believe in that God, although I know there are stories throughout the Bible that seem to line up with it. In the end, it’s just hail. In the end, it’s just fire, which occur naturally from time to time as an important part of nature’s process of renewal. We just happen to be caught in the midst of it.

Tony, do you believe God “does” anything at all these days?

I tend to agree with your overall argument but think you take it too far.

At the risk of sounding like a polytheist, I think the problem here is that the “God” of nature is different from the “God” of human community. The “God” of human community is a personified power that reigns over our human interactions whereas the “God” of nature is a name for the natural forces in which we are immersed.

From the following quote, I deduce that some of the (post-biblical) ancients actually personified natural phenomena (which today we have scientific terms for) as Gods: “Theopompus records that the people who live toward the west believe that the winter is Cronus, the summer Aphrodite, and the spring Persephone, and that they call them by these names and believe that from Cronus and Aphrodite all things have their origin.” Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 378E-379E trans. Frank Cole Babbitt in “Paganism and Christianity 100-425 C.E., a sourcebook” by Macmullen and Lane. Thus natural phenomena, i.e. the seasons, were personified in god-forms and ruled over by these gods. In Greek mythology, the realm of natural disasters and natural beautification is usually presided over by Gaea, mother earth, and her direct spawn even though Poseidon has been known to shake the ground and Zeus throws thunderbolts.

So, if you want to take a primitive view of natural forces and put them under the purview of God then you have to realize that the sins addressed by the wrath of natural forces are different than the sins addressed by the wrath of the God of human community. Assuming that your concept of sin is that it is a result of human alienation from God or misunderstanding of God, the sins punished by the God of nature pertain to our pomposity to think that we can actually control nature and that we have some dominion over nature. When you build a house in a flood plain, you can expect it to be flooded every x number of years. When you build a house in an area of high earthquake hazard, you’d better be ready to suck it up when the earthquake strikes. If you build on the Gulf Coast, you’d better be ready for a hurricane. If you smell smoke and know that there is a forest fire near your house, be prepared to lose your belongings and run for your life. If you can’t bear this risk, don’t live in these areas and don’t identify with your accumulated “stuff” since nothing is permanent. On the flip side, believing that God sent natural forces to demolish New Orleans because of man-on-man sins is just silly. The only sins addressed by the hurricane that demolished New Orleans were failure to maintain the performance of the floodgates and the building of homes in low-lying areas in a region prone to hurricane damage. These sins are related to either laziness or greed in direct relation to protecting the city from a hurricane and ignorance of the potential of the hurricane hazard.

It’s quite possible that the people who are willing to take environmental risks or who are ignorant of environmental hazards are the same people who are willing to sin against their fellow man in the sense that we normally think of sin so there may be a strong correlation in punishment for the two groups but I don’t think there is any obvious cause and effect between man-on-man sins and punishment by natural forces.

John Piper saying that fires, earthquakes, floods, and or whatever is a sin of God’s wrath on the sinner, is no different than Joel Osteen saying that God rewards the faithful with riches. Both have a view of God that says bad things happen? Must be God being mad at you for not being a good enough believer. Which means the inverse is true, God must allow good things to happen, because you are not that bad of a sinner and he is extending his grace to you.

But that ignores the scripture of “Rain falls on the just and unjust alike”. Surely God wouldn’t pour wrath out on true Christians, right? If yes, then why should we expect Christ’s death to be atoning for our sins? And we have to be certain that in both the flooding and fires, Christians are losing their property. If weather is judgement, then God is being cruel towards his own people.

OR, we can believe that weather is naturally occurring events, and our world being in a sinful state, bad things happen to both good and bad people, just as good things happen to good and bad people.

So, I’m coming to the conclusion that sin and punishment for sin is more about how we respond to things that happen to us rather than us doing sinful things (which, because of our inevitable ignorance, we don’t really know are sinful) and getting punished for them. If Piper thinks people are being punished or if he thinks that people need to repent, then Piper really needs to examine his ungodly response to the occurrences in his life.

When I saw that Colorado Springs was on fire, I could only think about how certain people suggested New Orleans’ spiritual shortcomings were being punished by Hurricane Katrina. The fact that the home of the Religious Right is literally burning in an election year is either something, or just an interesting thing to think about.

The problem with Piper’s outbursts — theologically speaking — is that he portrays a God who is entirely arbitrary… This is a very primitive view of God.

From an old article of Piper’s:

I have three sons. Every night after they are asleep I turn on the hall light, open their bedroom door, and walk from bed to bed, laying my hands on them and praying. Often I am moved to tears of joy and longing. I pray that Karsten Luke become a great physician of the soul, that Benjamin John become the beloved son of my right hand in the gospel, and that Abraham Christian give glory to God as he grows strong in his faith.

But I am not ignorant that God may not have chosen my sons for his sons. And-, though I think I would give my life for their salvation, if they should be lost to me, I would not rail against the Almighty. He is God. I am but a man. The potter has absolute rights over the clay. Mine is to bow before his unimpeachable character and believe that the Judge of all the earth has ever and always will do right.

In other words, “If God created my kids for the purpose of torturing them for eternity, I’m just fine with it.”

Primitive outbursts from a man operating at a primitive level of cognitive and emotional development. Nothing unexpected there.

I fully agree with Tony being in Colorado Springs and about 5 miles from the fire but plenty of smoke. It is interesting he does seem to be really quick with the wrath of God syndrome but silent on biblical marriage (along with NAE) in Minnesota. It is to political… excuse me WHAT!
So, Piper has to learn the difference of speaking truth rather than selling book deals. For we are, accordingly, faced with the following quandary: when assaulted by real evil (not NATURAL DISASTERS!) , we must oppose it directly. We have no other option. The failure to act is simply to condone evil. I do not and nor can Government, expect people of real faith to leave faith at their door otherwise it wouldn’t be faith (life). Walk out that door and shout “NOT AFRAID ANYMORE! … NOT ASHAMED OF MY LORD! … NOT…!” No matter what Politian’s or “popular iconic” preach, there isn’t such a world of utopian possibilities it always leads to dystopian evil the facts of history scream with the billions terrorized by such desire for utopian dreams. “Unless we have the courage to fight for a revival of wholesome reserve between man and man, we shall perish in an anarchy of human values…. Socially it means the renunciation of all place-hunting (positional power!), a break with the cult of the “star,” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer ).
Piper and Anderson might be right on “some” things but they are condoning evil hiding behind the veil of self-righteousness to sell books or their speaking engagement at holy conventions/pep rallies.

It’s not hard to find a valid link between a specific weather disaster and a specific offense against God if you look hard enough. For example, Cuba. Ever since Cuba adopted a godless, atheistic ideology (Communism) and persecuted God’s people, it has been struck year after year without fail by hurricanes. The catastrophic hurricane that destroyed Galveston, TX 100 years ago can be linked to God’s anger over Jim Crow. The storm that destroyed the Spanish Armada in 1588 (and left England a Protestant nation) was because decades earlier, the Catholic Church allowed the Prince of Wales (later Henry VIII) to marry his brother’s widow, thus committing incest. The Church then compounded this grave error by not allowing an annulment. The destruction of the Soviet Union, in part because it suffered bad harvest after bad harvest due to continuing bad weather was due to the annihilation of the faithful after the 1917 revolution. I could go on, but you get the point.