by Royalene Doyle

Created on: May 20, 2011   Last Updated: May 21, 2011

Close your eyes.  Turn yourself in circles as fast as you can.  Will you lose your balance and fall to the ground?  Most likely; thus you have created your own mini-natural disaster.  Was that God’s judgment against you?  No.  It is merely the consequence of your choice and action.

It is a wake-up call; an educational experience that has taught you not to repeat that specific action or you will most likely fall again, and it may hurt more the second time. 

Should you chose to search the Web, you’ll find thousands (possibly hundreds-of-thousands) of natural disaster reports reaching far back into recorded history.  Some are small events such as grassland fires started by lightning or the loss of cattle due to localized viral outbreak.  Others reach the scope of the recent Mississippi river flooding or the earthquakes in Japan followed by tsunamis that stretched half-way around the globe.  Always, there is someone asking the questions, “Why?”  “Is it God?”  “Is man being judged?” 

These serious questions, like the disasters themselves, have been consistently repeated throughout the same historical records.  There is simply some inherent element within the human mind that is expecting God’s judgment whether any one individual is guilty of something or not.  And we will keep repeating that question until The End. 

Every day we can look around us and see the beauty of our environment, the complexity of its existence, and know that only God could have created this.  Only God could be keeping our planet in its place in our solar system.  Only God could be keeping our solar system in its place in the universe.  So it seems only logical that “only God” could be causing (or allowing?) these disasters.  When we feel the effects of a natural disaster, we wonder.  Could this be a Big Flood-type judgment?  (Yes, we all wonder that, even if we don’t really believe that ever happened.)  Has the human race become so decadent that the stench is unbearable even for God? 

Many warnings appear in God’s Word.  The Bible is freely available for most of us to read and consider at our leisure.  There are sections that tell of “wars, rumors of war,” “earthquakes and natural disasters.”  And there is quite a depiction of the Earth’s, and mankind’s final days.  Yet, it all seems to come down to one question.  Will I accept God’s best for me?  Will I accept His eternal protection?  Or, not?  He asks us to make a choice or experience the consequence.

Lists of what we must do and not do in order to earn God’s protection have been made by religious groups and/or sects since the first scribes began to write.  I leave it to you to consider whether any of them make sense.  For me, I’ve accepted God’s personal invitation to follow His Son, Jesus, and “fear not.”  For whether my time of “judgment” comes tomorrow with a totally unexpected heart attack, or in the midst of a “natural disaster,” I have made the choice to hear God’s Word and follow His ways, and to reside in confidence in His promise of Eternal Life in His Presence where there is perfect peace, perfect beauty and no “natural disasters.”

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