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When tragedy strikes
This article was first used for a talk at Alverstoke Evangelical Church, Gosport, on Sunday 7th April 2002, by David Couchman. It may be reproduced in print or on web sites, subject to the copyright notice below.
How do we react to news of a disaster? When we hear of man-made disasters like the attack on the World Trade Center, or the Lockerbie bombing, or Chernobyl, or the Holocaust, we wonder how people can be so evil.
When we think of natural disasters like storms and floods and earthquakes and famines, we call them 'acts of God', and we wonder how a good God can allow such horrors.
How do we respond? We are appalled because the 'innocent' have suffered. So we say that the people who died in the World Trade Center were not individually enemies of Osama bin Laden or his people. They had not done anything to deserve his enmity. They were innocent victims.
Not only do we talk up the innocence of those who suffer, but we also blame God. How could he allow it? What was God doing on September 11th? Was he looking the other way? Was he taken by surprise? Perhaps you are not a follower of Christ, because you ask this kind of question. Or perhaps you are a follower of Christ, but you find it difficult to know what to say to your friends and colleagues when they ask questions like these.
How did Jesus respond to news of a disaster? His approach was very different from ours. His response is so 'politically incorrect' that we can find it difficult to get our minds round it. We can read about it in Luke's Gospel, chapter 13, verses 1-5. Please do take the time to read these verses before you go any further, because the rest of this article will make much more sense once you have read what Jesus said.
Here we have two disasters. The first is man-made. The Roman governor Pilate had murdered some Galileans. What made it a particular atrocity was that he murdered them while they were offering sacrifices in the temple. We do not know any more about this particular incident other than what is recorded here, but we do know from other sources that Pilate was a bully and a coward, and this is completely in character.
The other was a natural disaster - a tower that fell on some men in Jerusalem and killed them.
In this passage, Jesus's response is completely different from ours. He does not excuse God, nor does he commiserate with the innocent victims, or condemn Pilate. Instead, he says, 'unless you repent, you too will all perish.' He emphasizes the point by saying it twice.
So Jesus sees disasters, whether they are natural or man-made, as warnings of future judgment. 'Unless you repent, you too will all perish.'
'Repent' is an old-fashioned word, and we may not understand too well what it means. Certainly for me it conjures up the image of someone with a sandwich-board saying 'repent, for the end is nigh.' It's old-fashioned, quaint, and peculiar. But if Jesus thought it was this important, we need to make the effort to understand it, and to unpack what Jesus was saying.
We need to get clear what 'repent' means, otherwise we can either not understand it at all, or misunderstand it with all kinds of 'religious' overtones that it does not really have.
The
basic meaning is: "to change your mind". - to change my mind about God
and myself. In what sense do I need to change my mind?
We live in a world God made
We are rebels in God's world
We don't deserve anything except disaster
God is angry with us
There isn't anything we can do about it
There is surprisingly good news
1 - We live in a world God made
You go out on a clear night and look up at the stars. Aren't they amazing? Recently, our family were looking at some of the pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, of the remotest galaxies. They are awesome! And according to the Bible, the reality is that God made them.
The Bible says:
The heavens tell of the glory of God. The skies display his marvelous craftsmanship. (Psalm 19:1).
God has created a universe that carries his 'signature'. We can see this signature in the wonderful order of creation, whether in stars and galaxies, or in the beauty of an individual flower.
The Cavendish laboratory in Cambridge is a place where many of the key discoveries in atomic physics were made. Over the door of the Old Cavendish laboratory there is carved a quotation from the Bible, from Psalm 111 verse 2
Great are the works of the Lord, sought out by all who delight in them.
The quotation was carved on the instructions of James Clerk Maxwell. The founders of atomic physics saw this quotation as appropriate because the natural world points to the reality and power of God.
This has always been true, as Paul says in his letter to the Romans, chapter 1 verse 20, but we might think that this evidence is not so persuasive these days. Perhaps we are all here because of the Big Bang, or a long process of blind chance? But in recent years scientists have been surprised to discover many unexpected ways that the universe is 'just right' for us to live in.
One author lists more than thirty remarkable 'coincidences' in the way the universe is made. So the universe is very finely balanced in a way that makes our lives possible.
Scientists are struggling to know what to make of it. An article in New Scientist magazine says:
This article goes on to ask,
Well yes, there is some deep significance to it, and no, we are not just lucky. But it is an open secret - it is what the Bible has been saying for thousands of years. We live in a world made by God.
We cannot go into this further now, but it is important to grasp the fact that we are not here by chance. There is a mass of scientific evidence, quite outside the Bible, that we have been intentionally created.
So we live in a world that God has made.
2 - We are rebels in God's world
The Bible says that the reality is that God made us. He owns us. He made us to relate to him. But we are all rebels against him. We do not naturally relate to God. We do not want him running our lives. We do not want him to be the center of everything. We want to run our own lives, and we want the universe to revolve around us
We are guilty of rebellion against God. You do not need me to labor this point, because we all know, deep in our hearts, that we are guilty. What do you think drives the huge modern counseling industry, if not people's vast burdens of unresolved guilt? The way the Bible puts it is that we have all sinned, and fallen short of God's glory (Romans chapter 3 verse 23)
So you see, the Bible's picture of reality is that we are not 'innocent victims' - indeed, no one is 'innocent':
All of us have strayed away like sheep. We have left God's paths to follow our own. (Isaiah chapter 53 verse 6)
This is both the reality, and the problem: yes, we live in the world God has made, but we are rebels in this world. We are not innocent.
3 - We do not deserve anything except disaster
Look carefully at what Jesus says here in these verses in Luke's Gospel:
In those days, people were inclined to see this kind of disaster as a punishment from God on specially wicked people. (So their approach was exactly the opposite of ours). But Jesus does not say: 'Look at these people the tower fell on. They were so unusually wicked that God poured out his anger on them in this special way.' That is what most people in those days would have said. Nor does he say: 'They were innocent, and didn't deserve what happened to them.' That is what people today would say.
Rather he says: 'They were representative. They were just like everyone else.' And just as they came to grief, you all deserve disaster, because you are rebels in the world God made.' The reality of my situation is that if God were to wipe me off the map today, he would only be giving me what I deserve.
This may sound quite strange, so I want to put it in the form of a question: Suppose for a moment that the Bible's account of reality is in fact true. Suppose that there really is a God - not just a psychological crutch to help inadequate people get through the day - but an infinitely great, infinitely powerful being, who created the whole cosmos. And suppose that this God created us for himself. Can you see that if that is the case, we have gone seriously astray when we reject this God and set ourselves up as the center of the universe?
Can you see how this changes things? I said at the beginning that when we face disasters, whether natural or man-made, our response is to proclaim the innocence of the victims, and the guilt of God for allowing it. But the fact is that we are not innocent victims. We are rebels in God's world, and we do not deserve anything except disaster.
4 - God is angry with us
We have seen that we are rebels in the world God has made, and we do not deserve anything except disaster. The Bible is blunt about this. It says that we are under God's judgment, and are by nature 'objects of wrath'. (Ephesians chapter 2 verse 3) In our natural state, God is angry with us.
Of course, today we feel very uncomfortable hearing something like this. We would like to hear about a God of love, but not a God who is angry. It almost sounds as if it is beneath God's dignity. When I get angry I lose my self control, I feel frustrated, I sulk. But God's anger is not like that. God's anger is his settled opposition to everything evil. Don Carson, in 'The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God' says:
Putting it differently, God does not lose his temper. He does not lose his self control. He does not get frustrated. But he is completely, utterly, unalterably, opposed to our rebellion against him. That is what it means to say that God is angry. And God's anger is completely justified.
We all know deep down that we want to see justice done and wrongs righted. When we hear reports like the murder of a little child, we want to see the killer caught and brought to justice. It would be terrible to live in a world where people who do evil things could get away with it for ever, where wrongs would never be put right. The problem comes when we see that we ourselves are also evildoers who will be brought to justice.
The Bible is clear that God will not let us go on living for ever as rebels in the world he has made. There will come a day when he will deal with our rebellion and evil, and he will put right the injustices in the world. There will be a day of reckoning. It will be a day of disaster, that will make the greatest disasters of our time, whether the holocaust or the World Trade Center, look trivial by comparison.
5 - There is nothing we can do about it
So we are rebels in the world God made, we do not deserve anything except disaster, and God is justifiably angry with us. And there is nothing we can do about it.
I do not know whether you are into making new year resolutions. Personally, I have given up making them, because they do not last. Sometimes I promise myself that I will stop shouting abuse at other road users when they drive badly. But the next time someone carves me up, or pulls out without signaling, I am off again. These may be small examples, but they make a serious point. The fact is that we are not able to 'turn over a new leaf'.
The Bible says that our best efforts at making ourselves good are like filthy rags (Isaiah chapter 64 verse 6). We just cannot make ourselves clean. I can no more make myself right with God than I can fly. The Bible says we are by nature 'dead in our trespasses and sins' (Ephesians chapter 2 verse 1). There is nothing a dead person can do about anything.
We need to see how desperate our situation is: we are rebels, and God is justifiably angry with us, and there is nothing we can do about it.
6 - There is surprisingly good news
But - and here is the Good News - what we could not do, God has done. He has done something about it for us. In fact, he has done everything that needs to be done.
Let me take you back for a moment to this question of how we react to disasters. I said that we talk up our innocence as victims, and God's guilt for allowing it to happen. But we have seen that we are not innocent victims; we are rebels in God's world who deserve nothing but disaster, and God is justifiably angry with us.
Yet it is also true that God loves us, in spite of our rebellion. His love for us is unimaginable. It is far greater than we can even begin to grasp. And so, out of his completely undeserved kindness, God has made a way for our rebellion and guilt to be dealt with, and for his own anger to be turned away.
This is the whole point of the life of Jesus, and more particularly of his death. When Jesus died on the cross, this was not just an accident of history, but it was God's way of dealing with our rebellion and guilt. Christ was paying the price that we cannot pay. The Son of God was suffering God's anger in our place.
This was the one time in history when the truly innocent suffered! The Bible says:
He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. (1 Peter chapter 2 verse 24)
It says:
Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. (1 Peter chapter 3 verse 18)
When God raised Jesus from the dead, that was, if you like, God's stamp of approval, that he had accepted all that Jesus had done.
Do you get it? I am a rebel in God's world. I do not deserve anything except disaster. By nature I am an object of God's anger. But Jesus has paid the price. He has suffered the disaster I deserved. He has dealt with my guilt. He has taken God's anger.
So although we are rebels in God's world, and do not deserve anything except disaster, what God actually offers us is completely the opposite of what we deserve: his great kindness, rescue from rebellion and guilt, a restored relationship with him.
There is nothing I can do to earn God's kindness. I am already a rebel. I am already dead. But God offers it, as a free gift. God does not give me what I do deserve, but does give me what I do not deserve. This is grace - and grace is much more than just a girl's name. What is the only thing you can do with a gift? Accept it.
And that is what repentance is: turning to God and accepting his free gift of forgiveness and a restored relationship with him. The Bible talks about God's kindness leading us to repentance (Romans chapter 2 verse 4).
If I am a rebel in the world God made, then repenting means recognizing that I am a rebel and changing my mind about God and myself.
The word also carries the meaning of 'to turn'. That is, to turn back from going my own way to going God's way
When I repent, I am not trying to turn over a new leaf, but I am changing my mind about God and myself. I am turning back from my own way to God's way. It is as if I say 'thank you, Jesus, that you willingly suffered disaster in my place. There was nothing I could do to make myself right with God, but you have done everything that needs to be done. I trust what you have done, and I thank you.'
Do you see why repenting is so important? Jesus says 'Unless you repent, you too will all perish'. Turning it round, 'If you repent, you will not perish.' As one of the other Gospel writers says,
God loved the world so much that he gave his only son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life. (John's Gospel, chapter 3 verse 16)
People today see being a follower of Christ as just a personal lifestyle choice: 'You choose to follow Christ, but I'm into New Age meditation and crystal healing. We all have our own kind of spirituality. I'm glad you've found something that works for you, but it isn't for me.'
But if the Bible's account is true, then the issue is much more important than just a lifestyle choice. If I have left God's paths to go my own way (as the Bible says I have), repenting means turning back from my way to God's way. If I have tried to put myself at the center of the universe, repenting means putting God at the center
And Jesus says unless you do this, unless you change your mind, unless you turn back to God, unless you repent, you will perish. This is a serious warning.
Conclusion
Why do we need to repent? Because we are rebels in God's world, who do not deserve anything except disaster, and God is justifiably angry with us. But because he loves us, he holds out to us a free gift. All we have to do is to accept it. He does not give us what we do deserve. He gives us what we do not deserve.
What does repent mean? It means changing my mind about God and myself. It means turning back from going my own way, to going God's way. It means accepting God's gift.
Why does repenting make any difference? Because when Jesus died, he was dealing with the problem of my guilt. He was paying the price I could not pay. He was suffering the disaster I deserved. And when Jesus rose, that showed that God had accepted his death in my place.
So, in these verses in Luke, when the people come to Jesus with this story about Pilate murdering the Galileans, Jesus does not say that they were worse than anyone else, but neither does he commiserate with them on the 'innocent' victims. Rather, he says, 'when you hear news of a disaster, look at it as a warning of judgment to come, and a reminder of the opportunity you have now to escape from that judgment. Because unless you repent, you too will all perish.'
Next time we hear about a disaster - a terrorist attack (and I am sure there will be more of them, and worse than we have yet seen, in the years ahead), an earthquake, or whatever, rather than saying we are innocent victims, rather than saying God is guilty, the right response is to remind myself that I am not innocent. I am a rebel in the world God made, and I do not deserve anything except disaster. And as Jesus says here, 'unless you repent, you too will perish.' This is a warning of judgment to come, and an opportunity to avoid that judgment by turning to God through trusting Jesus.
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If you'd
like to read more about this, we recommend John Blanchard's booklet
Hard copy available from Evangelical Press |
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