I believe the right answer is that God was on his throne, God was everywhere, God was available to the villager struggling for life, opening his arms to the dying child, and in the midst of the horror, God was in tears.
The questions are understandable because the power was so overwhelming only God could be seen in the waves. But where were the critics every day when the world was a beautiful place, when a child is born, when love is real, when life is good, when there is peace in the land? God is there, too, in the victories, the joys, and the everyday order of life. But our world often sees Him only in the fury.
Sound Familiar?
Why did God allow the tsunami to be so destructive and deadly? A Muslim cleric in the hardest-hit part of Indonesia thinks he knows. In this article, he says:
"God is angry with Aceh people, because most of them do not do what is written in the Koran and the Hadith," the collected sayings and actions of the prophet Muhammad, explained Cut Bukhaini, 35, an imam. "I hope this will lead all Muslims in Aceh to do what is in the Koran and its teachings. If we do so, God will be merciful and compassionate."
Pardon the comparison, but it sounds like Jerry Falwell blaming 9/11 on America’s moral decay.
A World Governed by Physical Laws
I found great wisdom in a post on the subject Where Was God? at Viewpoint. Stay with this one—it’s the best thing I’ve read this week on this subject:
Before going further, we should stipulate that although we hold that God is powerful enough to create universes, we do not hold that His power is unbounded. God's capabilities are constrained by, inter alia, His own nature, and one aspect of that nature is that it is rational and logical. God cannot act irrationally or illogically since to do so would be to put Himself in conflict with Himself. Thus God's power is such that He can do anything that is logically possible to do, i.e. God can do anything that does not entail a contradiction or a logically inconceivable state of affairs. For example, it is not within God's power to create a world in which it would be true to say that God did not create it. Nor is it within God's power today to create a state of affairs in which it would be true to say that the reader of these words never existed.
Perhaps one way to answer the question, then, is to suggest that it may not be possible, even for God, to create a world governed by physical laws in which there is no potential for harm. For example, any world governed by gravity and the law of momentum is going to contain within it the potential for people to fall and suffer injury. Thus the laws of gravity and momentum are not compossible with a world free of the potential for injury. Once God decided to create a world governed by laws, those laws entailed the possibility of harm.
Christian theology says that God created a world regulated by the laws of physics and indwelt that world with man, [God’s] presence suppressing or negating any harmful effects the expression of those laws may have had. Although the potential for harm existed, there was no disease, suffering, accident, or even death.
At some point, however, man betrayed the idyllic relationship that existed between himself and God. In an act of cosmic infidelity, man chose to use his freedom in a way, the only way, apparently, that God had forbidden in order to assert his autonomy and independence from God.
It was as if a good and faithful husband returned home to discover the love of his life in bed with his worst enemy.
From time to time that estrangement has terrible consequences. Usually those consequences are drawn out over months or years, like famines or epidemics of influenza or plague. Once in a while, though, they are compressed into relatively brief intervals of time, and it is human to wonder at such moments, where is God? Perhaps God is right at hand, weeping for a world which rejects and excludes Him one moment while blaming Him for not intervening to prevent our suffering the next.
Things I Do Not Understand
Drew in a Darn Floor piece finds a dearth of answers and takes a hard turn to faith. He writes:
I don't care for the notion that the tsunamis were God's vengeance, though the comparison above is certainly one worth thinking about. But I must not let myself leave God completely out of the picture.The elephant in my mind's living room is this: "Why does God allow these things to happen?" I can't give an answer. In fact, I'd be skeptical about any answer that didn't boil down to Job's response to God. Any response I could make would be speaking of things I do not understand. But I have to believe that God is still in control; that he is not powerless.
A great book if you're in the mood to ponder these things is Philip Yancey's Disappointment With God, in which Yancey delves into the questions raised by the story of Job. Yancey writes that Job is not really a book about suffering, but a book about faith in its starkest form. (It was through reading this book that Job became my favorite book of the Bible.)
Faith is easy in easy times. But faith isn't for the easy times. Faith is for those difficult times when our mere human reasoning throws down the gauntlet and demands answers. I think my only answer is that God is God and I am not. I cannot explain why he allowed this to happen. I cannnot explain why he allows pain and suffering of any kind. Flannery O'Connor once wrote that a God we understood would be less than ourselves. But I know that in this crisis, we are called to be God's hands and feet to the world.
I think that’s right. God will provide his own defense and, in a time of great anquish and suffering, our greatest contribution to the Kingdom is to provide help in his name.
--James Jewell
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