How Could God Allow Natural Disasters?

With all the natural disasters, such as Hurricanes Helene and Milton, that have happened recently and are continuing to happen worldwide, the question is being asked, “How could God allow natural disasters?”

Randy Alcorn, author of over 50 books and founder of Eternal Perspective Ministries, addresses this question in his book “If God Is Good”. The following March 25, 2010 edited article by him is based on this book:

Many people blame God for natural disasters. “How could he allow this?” they ask. But what if the Architect and Builder crafted a beautiful and perfect home for Earth’s inhabitants, who despite his warnings carelessly cracked its foundation, punched holes in the walls, and trashed the house? Why blame the builder when the occupants took a sledgehammer to their own home?

Fatalities caused by natural disasters multiply because of morally evil human actions. People frequently cause forest fires and other large-scale disasters. They build houses in areas long proven vulnerable to floods, landslides, fires, tornadoes, and earthquakes. Some perish when they refuse warnings to vacate their homes.

Humans misuse land, resulting in disastrous mud slides. Polluted rivers cause deaths and physical deformities. More people may suffer losses from looting following a hurricane than in the hurricane itself. National leaders may hoard aid sent to help their dying people. People may fail to generously share their God-given resources to rescue the needy.

Natural disasters become most disastrous when they take human life—but they never did so until after humans committed moral evil against God.

God placed a curse on the earth due to Adam’s sin (see Genesis 3:17). That curse extends to everything in the natural world and makes it harder for people to live productively. Paul says that “the creation was subjected to frustration” by God’s curse, until that day when “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay” (Romans 8:20–21). The next verse says, “The whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth.” Earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis reflect the frustration, bondage, and decay of an earth groaning under sin’s curse.

The best answer to a parallel question “Why would God create a world with natural disasters?” is that he didn’t. Many experts believe the world’s atmosphere originally acted like an umbrella, protecting its inhabitants from harm. But now the umbrella has holes in it, sometimes protecting us, sometimes not. While some people may blame God for death and disaster, Scripture blames human evil for the cataclysmic Fall and consequent distortion of a once-perfect world (see Romans 8:18–22).

People who have survived disasters often say they understand on a far deeper level the biblical truth that this world as it now is—under the Curse—is not our home.

God is sovereign over all nature.

Good weather and bad both come at God’s discretion. Jesus said of God, “He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). Note that he did not say, “God created natural laws and lets the course of nature go its own way.” Those who argue that God has given the operation of the world over to Satan contradict these passages. The Bible never speaks of nature as an impersonal mechanism. Nature does not govern the universe; God does.

This doesn’t mean that Satan, called “ruler of this world” (John 12:31), and “prince of the power of the air” (Ephesians 2:2), doesn’t have power over weather. Even when Christ calmed the Sea of Galilee, it may speak of his primary power over the secondary powers of pagan demon gods.

The synonym for natural disasters is an act of God. Interestingly, beautiful weather isn’t widely referred to as “an act of God.”

Sometimes God uses natural disasters to punish evil.

God brought the Great Flood upon humanity as a judgment for sin (see Genesis 6–8).

When the “LORD rained down burning sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah” (Genesis 19:24), he told Abraham and Lot that he had destroyed the cities because of their sin (see Genesis 18:20, 21; 19:12–13).

God said, “I gave you empty stomachs in every city and lack of bread in every town.... I also withheld rain from you when the harvest was still three months away.... Many times I struck your gardens and vineyards, I struck them with blight and mildew” (Amos 4:6–7, 9).

Likewise, after saying he would bless them with rain to help grow crops, he warns his people that if they disobey, he would bring down curses, including drought (see Deuteronomy 28:15–68).

Natural disasters ordinarily are general results of the Curse, not specifically linked to the sins of individuals who perish or suffer in them.

Some Christian leaders have embarrassed themselves by pointing to various natural disasters as “God’s judgment on sin.” How would they know? And if it were true for some of those who died, what about the righteous who died alongside them?

Unless God clearly reveals it, we should never assume that a natural disaster or moral atrocity comes upon this earth as his specific judgment on specific people. Jesus made this clear by saying that some people murdered by Pilate and those crushed by a falling tower were no worse sinners than others (see Luke 13:2–5).

Scripture does not distance God from disasters and secondary evils the way his children often do.

God makes an unapologetic statement about himself: “I form the light and create darkness, I bring prosperity and create disaster; I, the LORD, do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7).

As we see in Jeremiah 11:17 and 32:23, so in Isaiah 45 God brings disastrous consequences to deal with people’s moral evil. God righteously brings terrible judgment upon human evil.

Amos 3:6 says, “When disaster comes to a city, has not the LORD caused it?” A description of natural disasters follows in Amos 4:6–12, where God says he brought hunger, drought, blight, mildew, locusts, pestilence, and the death of men and horses, “yet you have not returned to me” (verse 11). God intended these disasters not only as punishment, but as discipline designed to draw his people back to himself.

Even when Satan is behind natural disasters and diseases, God hasn’t relinquished his world-governing power.

Some authors emphasize that Satan, not God, brings natural disasters, inflicts diseases, orchestrates tragedies, and takes lives. And some passages appear to support that view, including those in the gospels that ascribe demon affliction to certain diseased people.

Satan may bring about a natural disaster, but the book of Job makes clear that God continues to reign, even while selectively allowing Satan to do evil things. Satan knew he didn’t have the authority to incite humans to do evil, to bring down lightning to cause fires, or to send the wind to blow down a building and take lives without God’s explicit permission. We should know this too.

Since God identified Job as the most righteous of men (see Job 1:1, 8; 2:3), the book of Job forever refutes the notion that every tragedy that befalls people is a judgment on their sin. While no one is sinless, and bad things do not happen to morally perfect people (because there are no morally perfect people), they can and sometimes do happen to the best people.

God is free in our lives, as he was in Job’s, to permit personal or natural disasters for his own sovereign purposes without ever being an evildoer.

End of Randy Alcorn article

Our Heavenly Father always is good and in His sovereignty uses all situations, including disasters, for His glory. We are comforted by what God promises us in Romans 8:28, “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”

“When you look around and wonder whether God cares, you must always hurry to the cross and you must see Him there.” - Martin Luther