We have all been shaken by the tragic events spawned by a  hundred-year flood in the Texas Hill Country this past weekend. We are especially impacted by the death of so many children and by the fact that so many were attending Christian Camps.  How do we reconcile those losses with the love and protection of God?

The enemy will take every opportunity to smear the name of God and his Son Jesus because he “allowed” these events to take place.  Satan will attempt to persuade people that God “took their children” or that he sent the flood. He will do so publicly and also in our hearts.  I can’t answer every question about these losses, but let me share some thoughts about what has happened.

First of all, when questions arise, we must begin with what we do know and believe.  Foundationally, we know that God is good and that he is love.  God so loved this world that he gave his only Son. Scripture does suggest that God sometimes takes the righteous to keep them from a great evil that is coming.  But, by and large, a loving God does not take children from their parents. Because so many died, we put this under the microscope and call such events an “act of God”…at least the insurance companies do.  But is it an act of God?

Our initial response might be that because God is sovereign, he should have stopped the floods, miraculously saved every child from the waters, or at least should have caused something to alert everyone in the path of the torrent. God is sovereign, but in hjis sovereignty he has place limits on his own control.  Remember, he entrusted the earth to man and chose to give man free will. There is clearly a down side to free will.  Man can choose sin and rebellion.  Those choices can hurt the innocent. Adam and Eve’s choice has negatively affected every human since then.

When a man chooses to drink and drive, he may kill the innocent.  When a man chooses to fire a gun into a crowd, he may also kill the innocent.  When a man chooses to molest a child, he leaves lifelong scars on some child who did not deserve that fate.   God does not approve nor support these acts of sin, rebellion, perversion, and violence, but he honors the free will he gave to man.

When the innocent are wounded or die, we need to know it is sin and the rebellion of man that take the innocents away, not God.  Yes, that’s true for men but what about natural disasters -floods, earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, etc.  When Adam and Eve sinned, their sin produced a curse on the ground itself.  In other words, the natural environment would no longer cooperate with man nor operate under his authority.  What once partnered with Adam to produce abundant fruit, suddenly opposed him. Sin damaged the environment so that thorns and thistles grew up and man would have to scratch out a living through painful toil.

When God brought Israel out of Egypt, he declared his covenant to them. Faithful obedience to his commands would bring blessings even related to weather.  The rains would come at just the right times and the temperatures would foster healthy crops. Insects would not devour their produce.  Rebellion, on the other hand, would bring drought and famine and hordes of insects.  The decisions of man to obey or rebel would directly affect the ecosystem – the natural environment. 

You might say that natural disasters are directly proportional to the wickedness of mankind.  The more man sins, the more destruction we will see in the world – both by man and by nature.  When man chooses sin and rebellion, he chooses natural disasters.  Unfortunately, the innocent may be swept away in those situations just as innocents may die at the hands of drunk drivers.  Galatians declares that whatever a man sows, that is what he will reap.  If he sows to the flesh he will reap destruction.  If he sows to the Spirit, he reaps life. In the wake of his decisions, others will also reap what he sowed for good or bad. 

Sin introduced death to the world.  Sin continues to bring death and destruction as its consequence.  God takes no pleasure in that equation but holiness and righteousness demand a consequence for rebellion.  In his love, God provided a solution to sin…the death of his Son. But until the world, by and large, accepts that sacrifice, sin will produce its consequences and many innocents will suffer because if it.

In the end, that curse will be done away with. For now, God carefully watches over the death of his saints and the innocent and the followers of Jesus are not left to suffer but are ushered into Paradise. The God of all comfort works to comfort those who are stung by the consequences of sin and tells us that we will still grieve, but not as others who have no hope.  Those families who follow Jesus will be joined together again.  But for now, we are not always exempt from the struggles and pain of life in a fallen world. 

Why were some saved and others lost?  I don’t know the heavenly calculus for that.  We rejoice with those who are saved and grieve with those who lost loved ones.  In the end, God will make everything new and those who live with Jesus will never face death, wounds, sorrow, betrayal, or violence again.  But in these moments when Satan wants us to blame God, let’s remember who God is and where death and destruction actually come from. In the meantime, we will pray for those who have been devastated by their losses. 

We have just finished a string of funerals and are looking ahead to others soon unless the Father intervenes supernaturally. One was a freak automobile accident in which a woman was killed right in front of our church. One was a baby who lived only a few days after birth. Another died from cancer which had already reached stage four when diagnosed. Another was a very loved man in our church who had been dealing with health issues, who simply laid down for a nap and never woke up. These were all within two weeks of each other. We also have another dear friend who has just been diagnosed with stage four cancer and doctors are giving her about a year to live. This is life in a fallen world.

I have had my own share of pain in this life just as you have. We pray for protection. We pray for healing. Some are protected and others are not. Some are healed and others are not. We could go into a whole theological treatise on the subject of why some are and some aren’t, but that is never fully satisfying. I think the real question for us is how do we deal with pain and loss and even our disappointment with God when we are impacted by tragedy…including child abuse, birth defects, rape, divorce, and injustice.

Most of us, myself included, want to live in a bubble of protection as children of God in which we never lose, we never grieve, we never hurt. But Jesus said to those who follow him, “In this world you will have trouble.” Even on the pages of the New Testament, people were persecuted, arrested, martyred, beaten, shipwrecked, hungry and so forth. Jesus, the very Son of God, found himself as a political refugee in Egypt as a child and as an adult often found himself hiding from Jewish authorities who were trying to kill him. We are certainly promised peace and protection in scripture but it usually doesn’t look like we want it to. We want the absence of struggle and conflict. But most promises are fulfilled in the midst of struggle and conflict.

Think of David. He was anointed to be king of Israel years before he took the throne. In the meantime, he was falsely accused, hunted, betrayed, embattled, hungry at times, and always at risk of being discovered by King Saul. It was in the midst of these trials David declared the faithfulness of God, and in the midst of these trials when the Father prepared a table before him in the midst of his enemies (Ps. 23).. The promise is that God will see us through the trouble rather than preventing all trouble…though I am sure he does much of that as well for all of us. We will all have to navigate troubles in this life. I think there are three things we must do to navigate them well.

(1) Determine that God is good. Confirm that no matter what I experience, he loves me. Jesus died for me. He has given me his Spirit and written my name in heaven. He has been merciful to me and blessed me in so more ways than I can number. I need to settle that in my heart so that when tragedy comes, I do not accuse God of abandoning me. This is always the enemy’s ploy. He always accuses God of being uncaring, unreliable, and even cruel. He wants us to come into agreement with him. We cannot. We stand on the goodness of God.

(2) When loss or tragedy come, we may feel that we prayed God’s will with faith, but our prayer still wasn’t answered. We may be confused as our experience seems to contradict some biblical promises we have stood on. We may face a set of circumstances and outcomes we simply don’t understand. Our response will have to be a willingness to live with some level of mystery while we stand on our belief that no matter what, God is good and his purposes are perfect. There are things in the spiritual realm that we may be totally unaware of that Give Satan access to us and our family. There may be purposes of God that we cannot grasp that will be accomplished through hardships. We must believe that all things work together for good….even the hard things.

(3) We must use our own pain to bless others. Paul wrote, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God. For just as the sufferings of Christ flow over into our lives, so also through Christ our comfort overflows” (2 Cor. 1:3-5). Simply put, you will find God in the midst of troubles and if you hold onto him, he will bring you out and set you on your feet. You will learn invaluable truths in that process and will gain empathy for those coming along behind you. As Christ’s pain worked to bring good about in our lives, our pain will help others survive what we have survived.

Suffering can be endured if is has meaning. Meaningless suffering can destroy us. When we have faith that God will use our pain to minister to others, it gives our suffering meaning and redeems our pain and our loss. After forty years in ministry, I have learned the truth that our healing is only completed when we have used our tragedy, our loss, or our failure, to minister to others. When we have done that, our pain then counts for something, We may still not understand why it happened, but in our willingness to share God’s comfort with others, Satan is defeated. As they old idiom goes, we have snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. When we use what Satan meant for harm to do good, God completes our healing.

We will all suffer pain and loss in this world. God has not lied. The word of God tells us this is true but also that Jesus has overcome the world and we will as well, if we hold onto God in spite of our confusion and the mysteries we face. When we stand on the truths we do know, rather than being side-tracked by experiences we don’t understand and when we use our pain to bless others, healing comes and victory is ours. Ultimately, every promise we long for will be fulfilled when we stand beside Jesus in heaven. In the meantime, hold on to him when the storms come and you will see his goodness once again.