IN the NEWS - Helene & Milton

"News reports are filled with grief and horror at what Hurricane Helene did as it traveled north into Georgia, eastern Tennessee and North Carolina. Residents of North Carolina were especially hard hit,

with entire towns flooded and destroyed, all the debris carried off by rivers. Helene ranks with the worst hurricanes ever in terms of damage. Even today the death toll is not known but currently stands at 235. As they run out of body bags, rescue crews are desperately trying to find and help victims who have gotten little aid from the federal government. Hurricane Milton is a record-setting storm aimed right at Tampa Bay, Florida, and will almost certainly cause catastrophic damage to much of the state.

Theologians wrestle with questions about whether, and how, directly God intervenes with nature. 

---Bible-believing theologians do not deny God can intervene, but debate whether He does intervene, and if so, how often and for what purposes. 

They call direct intervention primary causation, and call nature left to run on divinely ordained natural laws secondary causation. Given that the world has fallen into sin and is under a curse, we know not to expect a Garden of Eden any more in this age.

Genesis 8:22 (“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease”) and Matthew 5:45 (“For He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust”). Indeed, it would be hard to conceive of a world without regularity. That’s what gives us science, and allows us to have some measure of confidence about what to expect in our daily lives.

Regularity offers a measure of fairness to people. 

If the trees crowded around a man to give him shade, as C.S. Lewis quipped, his neighbor would be left under the beating sun. Regularity is what makes miracles surprising.

The opposite view of determinism is more pernicious. 

Materialists and evolutionists have no other choices but (1) chance or (2) the determinism of natural law and genetics. Every event, some think, was determined at the big bang. This would include the track of Hurricane Milton.

Some theological views, particularly those of certain hyper-

calvinists, fall into this trap as well, asserting that every event, including every location of every raindrop that falls, was decreed by God at the foundation of the world. The well-meaning attempt to exalt God’s sovereignty, however, makes God the author of evil, which is clearly denied by Scriptures such as Jeremiah 7:31. Sovereignty can refer to kingly authority instead of meticulous micromanagement of every event.

In the present age, it is appointed unto man once to die, and after that the judgment. Given that fact, we don’t know when or how we will meet our end: of so-called “natural causes” or at the hands of evildoers. 

The certainty of death keeps us alert to danger and should put the fear of God into everyone who ponders their own mortality. 

Natural disasters have been with us since Genesis 3."
David Coppedge/CEH