Ansley Zecckine – The Corsair
With all the recent natural disasters occurring all around us, some people begin to question what God has been doing, and others quickly proclaim these disasters as being nothing other than God’s judgment on sinful nations that deserved what they had coming.
The time has come, however, that we should quit pointing the finger and stop putting words in God’s mouth. Perhaps we should consider an earthquake to be an earthquake, and a hurricane to be a hurricane, and a tsunami to be a tsunami; consider them natural disasters, not necessarily acts of God. Instead of pointing fingers in condemnation, we should lend hands in compassion out of love for our fellow man.
This involves Christians living as Christians, not acting as divine judges or prosecutors. It’s nowhere near our place to say a nation has been judged by God or that they should have their lives destroyed because of their sinful lifestyle. The only one qualified to make such a judgment would be someone who was perfect and had done no wrongdoing. Incidentally, the only person ever to meet that qualification saw it fit to lay down His life for the rest of us, and He said we should do the same.
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“This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers. If anyone has material possessions and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him?”—1 John 3:16-17.
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There’s a story in the Book of Luke about a group of people that refused to receive Jesus into their village as He was passing by. Upon this rejection, two of the disciples wanted to destroy that village, so they asked Jesus, “Lord, do You want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Jesus, on the other hand, actually rebuked His disciples and said, “You do not know what kind of spirit you are of; for the Son of Man did not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.”
We’re no better than the people of Haiti, Chile, New Orleans, or any of the hundreds of thousands killed by tsunamis and other disasters. Death is only a heartbeat away for each of us, and I would rather die spreading compassion in a place like Haiti than live as one who’d prefer to sit back and hurl judgments from the United States.
