Ask Pastor Mike Live

Guest (Male): How are we supposed to view natural disasters? Hurricanes in Florida, wildfires in California, COVID? These are natural disasters and they seem like a plague from God, or are they simply outcomes based on the geography of those regions?

Focal Point Ministries: Here is the thing: nothing, as Amos 3 says, disaster does not come to a city unless the Lord has commanded it. Like Job said, "Do we receive good from the hand of God and not evil?" Obviously, God is in charge. And though God is not the direct agency of terrifying events or evil events, certainly they are not happening without His allowance of these events. Therefore, God is going to be credited with the reality of even the hard times.

As Job rightly says, and even after Job makes that statement to his frustrated wife, the Bible says Job did not sin even in all this. Job did not sin with his words, with his mouth. So we know that this is a true way to look at reality. The Lord has given and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Shall we receive good things from His hand and not evil? God is not going to let the wildfires take your house in Pacific Palisades or Altadena, or your home in Omaha in a tornado if this is not God's path and purpose.

Many are the plans in the mind of a man, Proverbs 19:21 says, but it is the purpose of the Lord which will stand. We know that if your house burns down, God is not like, "Oops, didn't know that was going to happen." Just like with Job, ten of his kids died in one day and you could say it was because of a storm in the land of Uz. Or is this God? Of course, this is all worked into God's plan.

The intermediate cause may be meteorological issues of storms that are prone to happen in that area where Job lived. But we know there is satanic involvement. Satan is there trying to push buttons to make this happen to a particular man and cause a particular kind of damage. As Jesus says in John 8, he is a murderer and he is out to murder a few more that God allows in that particular story. It is a sad story, but here is Job responding rightly to it. Ultimately, it wouldn't happen unless God gave him permission to do that.

God is utilizing everything that happens in your life. If you're a Christian, Romans 8:28, maybe it is overquoted in the midst of bad times and people need to hear more than just this verse, but God is working all things together for good to those who love God and are called according to His purpose. Even the evil and the bad that comes into our lives. There are several reasons there may be bad things that God has commissioned and purposed to come into your life.

In the end, Jack, it is not just while you happen to live in this city and it happens. None of it is going to happen without God saying it is going to happen. Lamentations 3: none of this is going to happen. The alarm is not going to sound in the city or the trumpet is not going to be blown in the city unless the Lord is behind it all. I can look at the individuals and say God has orchestrated all of that.

Then again, we live in a sinful world and I go back to Genesis 3 and I know that God cursed the ground. Because the ground is cursed, it is indiscriminate, at least humanly speaking, that the thorns and thistles are going into everyone's garden. They go into the garden of the evil and the good, just like the sun is going to rise on the crops of the evil and the good and the rains are going to fall on the evil and the good. Here is common grace and common evil. There is specific grace and there is specific evil, and we just need to understand the difference.

That is why I can't say this is clear. At the Golden Globes, they're going to mock God, so God's going to burn and singe the Hollywood Hills. Maybe there is a direct response there; I don't know. But I can't say one or the other because I don't know what's going on in the invisible realm. I don't know the kinds of debates that are going on there. I can say this: earthquakes happen in California, Kansas has tornadoes, Florida has hurricanes, and there are monsoons in the Pacific.

Natural evil is just a part of being in this world. It is like death. Death is going to happen to us all because that's part of what was commissioned in Genesis 3. To put it in the words of Romans 8:20, the whole creation was subjected to futility. Futility means I'll build a house and I thought it was going to be great and stand until my grandkids stood in the living room, but then here's the futility of it all. I built it for me to live in, but now it's in rubble because it was burned in the Santa Ana winds and fire, assuming that those fires were all natural causes. We're not sure, of course, because there have been people arrested with blowtorches in their hands.

The point is the evil that comes upon us can be general evil, natural evil, and generally done, or specific natural evil that is specifically done for a particular reason that God has allowed. All of it is part of God's purpose. That is where people stumble over that truth, but I can't get around it. If God is omniscient and He is all-powerful and He is all-good, then I know He's got a good plan for even utilizing the evil in this world. Suffering is just part of what being a human being is about post-Genesis 3.

The good news is, though we live between Genesis 3 and Revelation 19, one day Revelation 21 and 22 are going to be here. The eternal state is going to get us back to a much better paradise than the one we had in Genesis 1 and 2. In Revelation, we have the hope that all of this, this big chunk of Scripture between Genesis 3 and Revelation 19, is all going to be over. We won't be in a place anymore where we have all this.

Some of it is based on geography. I'm more likely to have my home destroyed in an earthquake because of plate tectonics than I am a tornado because of the meteorological issues of weather and pressure and storms in Southern California. I know that. That is why I can't afford earthquake insurance, because they know. The underwriters in the insurance say there's no way we're going to give you insurance in an earthquake-prone area.

When the disaster comes to a city, does it affect the righteous and the evil? Yes, absolutely. Does God have a different purpose for the evil than He does for the righteous? Yes, and we trust God in all of that. Let's think of the Towers. Here is some moral evil we would call it, going back to 9/11, and here are some men who wanted to make a point by killing Americans and so they go after our tallest buildings in New York. All those people died, thousands of people died. Were there righteous and unrighteous? Yes.

Were there people that were living lives that death was like, "Why hasn't this come sooner?" Yes. Were there those that are righteous and living for the Lord and we want them to live until they're 500 years old? They died that day. Disaster that God is allowing, He has got a plan for each individual person and we know that all of this should be for all of us. We should all have our lives cut short and eventually we all will. The point is the wages of sin is death. We live among a sinful people because we are sinful people in a sinful world where even the laws of nature itself have been cursed. We're going to encounter all of this.

We are going to have to endure this, but it is not as though it is all random. I guess that is really what you're getting at, Jack, this question of are all these natural disasters random. I am going to say none of them are random and the purpose that God has for each individual on this planet right now, and all of them that have died up into this point and all that haven't been born yet, is all specifically laid out as it says in Acts 17. People aren't being randomly born. He's determined the times and the dwelling places of every human being.

We live out through our volitional decision-making, but in the end, it somehow comports and harmonizes with God's plan. In that, we're stuck with that hard doctrine. All of us get really apoplectic about someone who doesn't explain the problem the same way we do, but it is a problem because we struggle as finite beings to know how God can be so involved to have a master plan for all these little decisions that are made, all the way down to what I'm going to have for lunch today. Yet God is a God who does that. He works everything after the counsel of His will, every small detail.

The bird does not fall from the nest, Jesus said, apart from my Father. God says it's time for that bird to die and that's how this works. Psalm 139: every day of my life has been written in a book before there was yet one of them. I was born way back in the olden days and all of my days God had determined how long I was going to live. If I die in a fire, an earthquake, or if I die in a nursing home at 92 gripping the edge of a gurney, whatever it is, this is my determination.

We would like it to be different. We would like to be so self-actualized and so autonomous that we're going to decide all these things. But we really can't. At the end of the day, I didn't decide when I was born, who my parents would be, or what city I'd be born in. All of this, I'm a victim of this in a sense, and then I come into the world and I start making decisions and I feel like, no, I'm the captain of my own soul, the master of my own fate.

In time, I get hit with the grace of God, which God was involved the whole time, but I then say I want to give my life to Christ. That want didn't get there, even the decision didn't get there without God's gracious work to pull me out of my despair of being stuck as a sinful person in a sinful world headed to a sinful destruction. God says, "No, I'm going to write your name in the Lamb's Book of Life and now I want you to live for Me." As imperfectly as I'm trying to do that, and you're trying to do that, here we are on this planet making decisions every day, and God is working out His plan through all of that.