God's World on Fire (originally published September, 2020)
An essay I wrote nearly four years ago, when other sets of wildfires were blazing on the West Coast, is unfortunately relevant as fires continue to rage in Southern California.
I wrote the following essay in September 2020 after catastrophic wildfires blazed through Northern California and Oregon. I make proper disclaimers at the top, but I desire to help people of faith navigate the difficult question: how can I stay full of faith in God when his world is on fire? Here’s my answer from four years ago that I hope can help you today.
It must be noted right now, before you go any further, that you should stop reading this essay if you or anyone close to you is suffering first hand from the fires that are raging throughout the west coast of America. To continue to read this might prove to see me as a kind of callous, outside observer of what can only be labeled a disaster. Disasters they are, which is why it troubles me to write while simultaneously recognizing what those closest to the pain need right now is not words or theologies, but comfort, help, companionship, and mercy. Considering this essay does not provide such essential things, it is, however, meant for those of us who exist at a kind of distance from the suffering, participating in the 21st century’s version of “spending time”: endlessly scrolling, watching pain from a long way off and, unfortunately, trying to understand it.
You are not imagining this. The fires happening across the west coast are far worse than anything in recent history. The devastation is catastrophic, including 26 dead in Oregon alone at the time of this writing and around 500,000 evacuated. Thousands will lose their homes, livestock, and sense of living. My hometown of Portland had the worst air quality in the world yesterday. It is difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, we cannot help but try to make sense of it. We find ourselves saying to each other, “This is crazy,” while trailing off into some other kind of conversation only to lay awake that night or zone out in our cars as we contemplate how we can actually make sense of such a terrible occurrence. But we can’t.
And nearly every time a natural disaster occurs, I see Christians making some of the most asinine comments on social media. Most likely stricken with grief and as confused as you and me, these well-meaning brothers and sisters over-reach in their theology and use a faux-confidence that perfectly disguises their own interior terror (never forget: we’re all afraid). I need not repeat their phrases; you’ve read them too—those brazened, overly-simplified statements find their way into your feed no matter how you finesse the “mute” button. I see these posts not just after fires, but after hurricanes, tsunamis, and other devastating movements of nature.
What is the right way to think about such horrors? I often find myself cribbing my thoughts on this from two particular resources I would point you to without hesitation: David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea (this book is based off of his shorter treatment, which can be found in the magazine First Things) and Gregory Boyd’s Satan and the Problem of Evil. Both of these are heavy, but when did theodicy become light reading? Probably when evangelicals tried to simplify it. I think Christians would be better off reading difficult texts, but also affirming three important Biblical realities that surround natural disasters and also happen to come from the aforementioned books:
1. Our responsibility of dominion
Most Christians understand planet earth to be something they cannot control and something God is constantly involved in making work properly. They view God as anti-deists would: God is not the watchmaker who makes the device, sets it, and lets it run its course. This is a great start. However, swinging the pendulum too far, these same Christians now see God not as the distant watchmaker, but the over-bearing helicopter parent, unable to leave his kids alone on the play structure. In their minds, there’s nothing God is not involved in and everything is his “plan” (the annoying Christian’s word), which also means everything is his “fault” (the annoying ex-Christian’s word).
Missing in this is a proper biblical anthropology, which shows human beings as responsible for the planet on which God has placed them. In the first chapter of the Bible, this theological anthropology is set when God gives man “dominion” over the planet — the seas, the animals, the ground (Genesis 1:26–31). Humans are designed to co-rule the planet with God, stewarding the earth under the shepherding presence of his wisdom. When we read about the obvious and inarguable connection between global warming and the increase of wildfires, hurricanes, and tsunamis, we need not call them “natural” disasters or “God’s wrath,” but instead, at some level, consequences of our own poor stewardship.
This is not to say God has no role in potentially stopping such events (perhaps he’s “stopping” them each time they’re not happening? We all live more days without such horrors than with them, is one, problematic but interesting argument), but it is to include human beings in the equation of what can often be described as solely God’s responsibility. He gave us “dominion.”
2. Our minimization of the scale of sin
Secondly, it is helpful to remember the biblical scale of sin. Sin is not moral misdeeds. It is not just sexual immorality and lying. Sin is often reduced to behaviors about which you feel shame. But that’s not all of what sin is: sin is the tears in the fabric of existence, the unruly temperament of nature, the void inside every heart, the terrible experience of loneliness, the undying ache of living, the chaos within creation. The Bible understands sin as a sickness or bent-ness experienced at the depths of the created world. It describes the earth “groaning” — the trees and seas rage for want of a benevolent God’s active justice (Romans 8:22–26). Sin is the “vandalization of shalom,” according to Cornelius Plantinga. This means the peace on earth has been dismantled by a rebellion against God both at the human and the angelic level. Things are not the way they’re supposed to be.
Because of sin, we do not live in a world where everything that happens is God’s will. Terrible things happen that have no inherent meaning; awful destruction occurs without any moral; destructive acts fly through our experience without any “purpose.” Things happen that simply prove the incongruity of the world we inhabit — not everything stacks up.
Nevertheless, God, in his remarkable power and untouchable majesty, is able to take these meaningless terrors and re-work them into his good purposes. This is the entire point of Genesis, summarized with poetic flare by Joseph in the book’s final chapter: “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today” (Genesis 50:20, emphasis mine). This means God will take the ashes of these fires and decide there is redeeming to be done. He will make a way where there is no way (this means, for a time, there is no way). Be careful with this theology: this does not mean that fires, tsunamis, and hurricanes are good. No. They’re awful—the display of sin on earth. God’s remaking of an evil event does not make the event “good.” Instead, God’s activity of redeeming wicked things only affirms their inherent wickedness. It’s not like Christians think crucifixion is a good thing after Jesus. Apart from the activity of God, suffering is pointless; with it, anything is possible.
3. Our forgotten enemy
It is preposterous and erroneous for Christians to view wildfires and other natural disasters and think they are always seeing God’s work. When you watch death, decay, and the destruction of life, make no mistake: you are not automatically watching the work of God, but often the work of his enemy. God can cause storms, but often (probably more often than you think) storms just happen. In his essay on the tsunami in Myanmar in 2008 that killed thousands, David Bentley Hart wrote, “I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see the death of a child I do not see the face of God, but the face of His enemy.” This is not a world of God’s actions and ours only, but a world of God’s actions, our actions, and the actions of what the New Testament referred to as, “the powers and principalities” and those of “the prince of the power of the air.”
Jesus tells a parable that I can never avoid thinking about when terrible things happen. It’s a simple one told in Matthew 13:24–30, about a man who sowed good seed in good soil, but whose crops were attacked with weeds planted by his enemy. His workers are alarmed: how does this good soil and seed now have weeds? The master’s reply is haunting: “an enemy has done this” (Matthew 13:28). His servants ask if they can pluck out the weeds, but the master’s wisdom goes contrary to their request:
“But he said, ‘No, lest in gathering the weeds you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest, and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, “Gather the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”
— Matthew 13:29–20
This is one of the few parables Jesus actually explains, which I find fascinating. He did not want us to miss the point nor leave us to speculation and endless terrible takes and boring sermons. He spares us. Instead, Jesus tells us the plain meaning: this is a story about God and Satan, about good and evil, and about our experience of this complicated world that includes both (Matthew 13:36–43).
Jesus affirms for us what Western secular people have a very difficult time understanding: the terrors of this world have spiritual components that are so closely threaded with the good you experience that you will hardly know how to tease the two apart. A beautiful plant is strangled by a terrorizing weed; the same sea you stare at for inspiration also drowns a child; the picturesque landscape may also be the home of nightmarish flames. The world you live in is both beautiful and terrible.
And what is Jesus’ consolation? How does he interpret the end of this parable?
40 Just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. 41 The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will gather out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all law-breakers, 42 and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.
— Matthew 13:40–43
Plainly spoken, in the midst of a parable about the confusing reality of this world, is the consolation that God will, one day, make right what the enemy has made wrong. “An enemy has done this,” but justice is coming. Christians understand that the great hope of God is not that he changes the meaning of every terrible thing in this world — showing us his “plan” in all of it or whatever garbage you may have heard. No. God will not reinterpret evil; he will judge evil. Whoever causes wickedness, whoever vandalizes his world—whether Satan or us—God will reckon. Victory is his. Perhaps it is best to end with David Bentley Hart’s close to his masterful essay:
We can rejoice that we are saved not through the immanent mechanisms of history and nature, but by grace; that God will not unite all of history’s many strands in one great synthesis, but will judge much of history false and damnable; that He will not simply reveal the sublime logic of fallen nature, but will strike off the fetters in which creation languishes; and that, rather than showing us how the tears of a small girl suffering in the dark were necessary for the building of the Kingdom, He will instead raise her up and wipe away all tears from her eyes — and there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying, nor any more pain, for the former things will have passed away, and He that sits upon the throne will say, “Behold, I make all things new.”