December 11, 2012 (Tuesday)
Our Sunday School teacher, Johnny Melton, told the class Sunday about an incident that took place in Burnet, his home town. I think he said it happened in 1973. There was a tornado, and afterwards several preachers came to town to tell the suffering people in that town that their sins had brought the tornado upon them. That reminded me of a similar incident when I was pastor in Rockport. A young man came to my office one day to tell me he had been visiting the church and really loved it, but he could not join it because he had promised his parents he would never join a Baptist church. Seems a tornado had devastated their Kansas town when he was younger and a group of Baptist preachers had come to town to tell the people the tornado had hit because of their sins. It was then his parents made him promise that he would never join a Baptist church.
I don’t know who these prophets of judgment were, but they were not doing the work of the Lord. What people need in the wake of disaster is help of every kind, including compassion. On the theological side, there is simply no way a human being can know the inner workings of Divine Providence.
Charles Spurgeon, in 1861, in his great London church, preached a sermon on this subject. After three major accidents had occurred within a brief time period, killing and injuring many, he preached a sermon entitled, “Accidents, Not Punishments.” (Click here to read it). He based his sermon upon the text, Luke 13:1-5, in which Jesus made it clear that it is impossible for human beings to dogmatically declare disasters to be punishments from God because of sin.
The Bible teaches, “Whatever we sow, we reap.” It teaches that the very nature of sin is that it contains its own punishment. But Jesus made it clear that life on earth is characterized by natural disasters, terrible accidents, and such horrible events as war, in which untold numbers of people are made to suffer. To jump immediately to the conclusion that suffering is a punishment from God is to make a tragic mistake.
Jesus said of Himself that He came into this world “to seek and save that which was lost.” He further said, “As the Father has sent me, so send I you.” Whatever else those statements may teach us, they show us a compassionate road upon which to walk all the days of our lives.