TV Program

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When Waters Overwhelm

2006-04-16

PRODUCTION #: 1050

SPEAKER: Shawn Boonstra

It was a beautiful Sunday morning—the day after Christmas—and life couldn't have been be more perfect for Brad and Jillian Searle. The young Australian couple was enjoying a December holiday on the tropical island of Phuket, savoring the warm hospitality of Thai waiters and maids at their luxury hotel.

Suddenly, without warning, a wall of water crashed into the five-star complex, engulfing Jillian and her two boys. Little Blake was just two, and it took everything in her power to hang onto him amid the dark, swirling torrents of ocean water that were roaring through this island paradise. But what about her older child? He was only five, and he couldn't swim. And there was no way she could save them both.

In desperation, she made a decision no parent should ever be forced to make. Clutching the baby, she screamed at a nearby woman to try and hold her 5-year-old. But the surging currents were too overpowering, and the waves swept him out of sight. Up on the balcony of the family's hotel room, the boys' father, Brad, could only sob in helpless frustration as the tsunami threatened to steal his little boy.

If the world heard one story like this one on December 26, 2004, it heard 280,000 of them. Parents losing children. Husbands having their wives snatched from their arms. Whole towns and villages staring through their tears into mass graves where thousands of their fellow citizens were now corpses.

It was a Sunday morning, but for the bereaved it must have felt more like the Friday night of Calvary weekend. A sadistic enemy had ripped away a best friend, but instead of a cross and a Roman spear, it was a killer wave created by a 9.0 earthquake deep in the ocean.

And today, just like the people standing at the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, the cry of the human heart is the same: "God, if You even exist, why in the world did You do this?"

I'm standing on a beach in Southern California near the debris caused by recent torrential rains. The hillside behind me isn't the same as it used to be. Just a little while ago, the forces of nature brought heartbreak and devastation to a small California community.

The Asia tsunami was still on everyone's mind when, just two weeks later, this disaster hit the Golden State. After torrential rain, "in biblical amounts," some newscasts said, there was flooding everywhere. People left their homes to stay in shelters. Cars and mobile homes were washed away.

And here in this little town, a bohemian settlement of 166 homes, the people knew they were living in the shadow of an unstable mountain. You see, back in 1995, another mudslide took out a portion of the community. And now, 10 years later, on January 10, the hillside came roaring into La Conchita again. Thirteen more homes were swallowed up. Americans watched, stunned, as a young father named Jimmie Wallet personally joined rescue teams digging through the mountains of deadly dirt, hoping to find his family. He and his 16-year-old daughter, Jasmine, had gone to get some ice cream for the others. And while they were away, 400,000 tons of earth buried all their dreams. It was two days before the firefighters and county volunteers found the lifeless body of his pretty wife, Mechelle. And then, a few hours later, more sad news. They found his three younger daughters: Hanna, age 10, Raven, six years old, and the baby, Paloma, who had just turned two.

So what does a father say when an "Act of God" takes away his three princesses and the bride of his life? Is it true what Job said after a giant twister killed his three daughters and seven sons? He didn't abandon his faith, but he did assume, along with our friends at Allstate, that God sent the disasters. The Lord gives and the Lord has taken away, (Job 1:21) he said. Was he right? Does God reach down and deliberately shift two tectonic plates deep in the Indian Ocean, displacing trillions of tons of water? Did God want to send an unmistakable message to Sri Lanka, Indonesia and the resort villages of Thailand?

Some people thought so. As they picked up the lifeless body of a child, some looked up to heaven and asked God why. "What did I do?" one man said, "what sin did I commit, that God should do this to me?" Buddhists searched their hearts and past deeds, wondering how they could have deserved such killer karma. Could they now placate the gods by helping others, doing good deeds, sharing enough blankets and bottles of water to earn some "merit" and ensure that their dead relatives might vicariously gain favor as a positive force in their next life?

This is Easter weekend. It's a time that most Christians associate, not with an angry God, but with a victorious one. This is when the stone is rolled away and our Savior emerges in victory. But at the same time, this weekend, which begins in Friday darkness, raises the same questions as the floods of Asia and the California coast. Does this kind of thing happen because an angry God is anxious to see some suffering? Did God pick the Indian Ocean because prostitution and transvestite hangouts are common in places like Phuket, Thailand?

Along the beachfront resorts where casual surfers enjoy their carefree, secular holidays, and where sincere Thai Buddhists made up their beds and brought them martinis by the pool, a keen observer would see an ornate little house on a pedestal. It's a "spirit house," and inside, you might find an offering of food or a few baht, the local currency. Why the gifts? It's to keep the gods happy. The belief is that the gods need to be appeased. They need to have their tempers cooled down because of all the sins of Siam. It's almost like people are buying off their gods to save themselves.

And that raises an important question. Is the cross of Calvary like that? Is it just an attempt to cool down God's temper? Is the Father just an angry God who needs to be appeased by His loving Son? And are the natural disasters that are becoming so common place just God's way of getting even with us?

The Bible makes it plain that God in heaven surely does have the power to send thunder and rain. Clear back in Genesis chapter seven, the human race was so sinful, so corrupt, that a grieving God had no choice but to wash the world clean with a flood. Mankind could kill itself in a brutal, self-inflicted suicide of sin, or God could act in powerful kindness to give the faithful few a fresh start.

Let's ask a few questions. Who did the tsunami in Noah's day wash away? Who was it that God punished? It was only those who rebelled against heaven, those who folded their arms across their chest and defiantly said, "We will not have this God to rule over us." It was those who persistently refused the offer of salvation for 120 years. It wasn't that God wanted them dead, but He did allow them to choose it.

The point is this, sometimes God does intervene. But in the Flood, it was plainly directed at a particular group of people. The innocent didn't perish, only the guilty.

Maybe you remember the 10 plagues of Egypt. There were hailstones and darkness and frogs, flies and locusts. Where did they come from? The Bible says that God sent them. If there had been a Mutual of Omaha located in downtown Egypt, the claims adjustors would have been perfectly justified in calling them "acts of God". But who did they affect? Only the rebellious and stubborn people of that pagan land, beginning with a defiant Pharaoh and then down to the slave owners and evil people of that particular time and place.

But when a tsunami randomly strikes down 280,000 innocent people, the majority of them children, it's dangerous to assume that God did it. God is not like ancient pagan deities that strike out randomly in vengeance. And in spite of what some people might have said, God didn't guide airplanes into the World Trade Center on September 11th, either.

You know there were a lot of articles and editorials after the December 26 mudslide in California. "Where Is God?" they asked. Kenneth Woodward, the religion writer for Newsweek, put it succinctly with this headline: "Countless Souls Cry Out to God."

The assumption seems to be this: somehow, God caused the landslide. And the tsunami; and the hurricanes in Florida; and all the horrible disasters we have been living with.

But one lonely voice, a Jewish rabbi, wrote something that was in the Los Angeles Times. Was God in that earthquake? Did God pile up those 500-mile-an-hour waves? No. But we are living in a sinful world, he wrote. Storms happen here. Tectonic plates do shift. Waves do roll in, and death is a reality. So where is God? You can see Him in the rescue. You can see Him in the generosity of those who rally to help. You can see Him in the hands of doctors who fly to the ravaged locations to serve. You can see Him in the selfless acts of the heroes who aid in the healing process. That's where God is.

Just two weeks after Southern California's killer mudslide, another wrenching, seemingly random tragedy screeched into the headlines. A distraught and suicidal 25-year-old man ran his Jeep Grand Cherokee onto the railroad tracks near Glendale. At the very last moment, he darted free and escaped the collision, but 11 innocent Metrolink passengers lost their lives in a three-train pile-up. More than 120 passengers were injured. And people are asking,where is the justice in that?

But that is the reality of sin in our world today. A man in a drug-induced state is bent on self-destruction, but innocent commuters are the ones who perished.

So where was God? Again, you can find Him in those who helped strangers from the wreckage, in the prayers and heroism of nearby Costco employees who dropped everything and rushed to the scene. That's where you can still see God in moments of horror.

Back to that dark Friday afternoon 2,000 years ago in the scarred hills outside Jerusalem. A fallen angel had parked himself on the rails of rebellion, and the whole human race was jeopardized. The Son of God was carrying the weight of all this world's sins on His shoulders. And at first glance, somebody might think that salvation was Christ's idea, and the Father is interested in nothing but punishment.

I like the way James Packer puts it in his book, Knowing God. "What is this wrath of God?", he asks. Have the sins of the world made Him so angry that He wants to see villages laid to waste? Does He want to see blood on the ground at the foot of the cross?

The answer is no. "[This wrath]," he writes, "is NOT the capricious, arbitrary, bad-tempered and conceited anger which pagans attribute to their gods. It is not the sinful, resentful, malicious, infantile anger which we find among humans. It is a function of that holiness which is expressed in the demands of God's moral law."

The plain fact is that we are a fallen, lost race. Would it be right for God to simply sweep all sinners into heaven and ignore the reality that we are unholy? No, that would be wrong. It would be deceptive. It would deny the reality that sin is a deadly killer.

Another alternative is for God to simply bend our wills and force us to obey. But that would violate freedom of human will, which is one of God's most precious gifts and prized principles.

The story of Job is one of the clearest pictures we have of what goes on when terrible things happen. In that story, we discover that God wasn't ultimately responsible for the troubles that fell on Job. The Bible says—point blank—that Satan did it. Quite contrary to modern opinion, there really is such a thing as a devil, and he is the one who is ultimately responsible for the problems we face on planet earth. He has challenged the authority of God, and his entire game is based on discrediting the character of the Creator.

That is the reason he likes to wreak havoc on human beings. He loves to pick and needle at us, but his ultimate target is God Himself. When things go wrong, he wants us to blame God. And when we cave into temptation, he dares God to treat us as pampered favorites, so he can accuse heaven of rigging the game. "No fair,"he says. "I have been trying to prove that nobody will ever love or serve God out of their own free will, but God is unfairly stacking the odds against me."

And so sometimes, God lets the devil play out his strategy. It is part of His eternal plan to eliminate sin and suffering forever. One way of looking at it is that God is going to give the devil just enough rope to hang himself. He is going to demonstrate, once and for all, to the entire onlooking universe, exactly what a life of rebellion will achieve.

But that doesn't mean that God doesn't care about what happens to us in the meantime. Bible records indicate, time after time, that God is angry about sin the way parents are angry when their children do something wrong and have to suffer as a result. He grieves like a parent who loses a child to a mudslide.

I believe that very few of us really understand the kind of suffering that Christ had to endure on the cross of Calvary. Jesus had always said that He would die and then live again on the third day. But when He was at the edge of the tomb, the mudslide of the grave, it actually came to the point where the hope, the confidence, the security of His mission, were all taken away from Him. The presence of God was withdrawn. The knowledge of reunion was obliterated. And there, on the cross, in one horrifying moment, Jesus accepted and carried the reality of separation. For the sacrifice to be complete, Jesus had to go through the experience of a lost sinner who would never go home again, who would never again feel the love of His family. And in the agony of that moment, He cried out to a seemingly empty universe: "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"(Matthew 27:46).

Because Jesus took this sacrifice to the limit, experiencing the darkest, blackest midnight of eternal separation, we don't have to face life's worst prospect anymore. In the face of natural disasters, we can cling to the hope that it's not going to get any worse than this. As awful as it is, it's still only death, and the Bible says that on the resurrection morning, Jesus conquered death. The grave doesn't have to be a thing of fear anymore.

If you look at the whole picture, it becomes obvious that the cross of Christ is God's loving response to the problem of sin. The Father doesn't stand aloof from the problem while His Son takes all the suffering. Never forget that God sent His own Son! He didn't demand the death of Jesus, He offered it! It was His gift to a dying world. Listen again to what James Packer writes: "In paganism, man propitiates his gods, and religion becomes a form of commercialism and, indeed, of bribery. In Christianity, however, God propitiates His wrath by His own action… The idea that the kind Son changed the mind of His unkind Father by offering Himself in place of sinful man is no part of the gospel message, it is a sub-Christian, indeed an anti-Christian, idea, for it denies the unity of will in the Father and the Son and so in reality falls back into polytheism, asking us to believe in two different gods. But the Bible rules this out absolutely by insisting that it was God Himself who took the initiative."

In John 16:27, Jesus reminds us that "the Father himself loveth you." And that's the message behind the resurrection. As dark as Friday was, Sunday morning was the ray of eternal hope. It was the moment when death itself was defeated.

The young mother watched in horror as her little 5-year-old was swallowed up by the tsunami. But then, two hours later…a miracle. A courageous security guard, clinging to a door for his own life, trying to keep his head above water, managed to grab the boy as he floated by. And amazingly, he was able to keep the child alive and hand him over to his parents, unharmed. Now try to imagine the kind of joy those parents felt. Was it anything like the joy that God the Father felt when His Son came back from the clutches of the grave? And what kind of joy will heaven feel when millions of believers come back from the grave on the resurrection morning?

I know that life offers tough things sometimes, but the promise of God is this, found in Nahum 1:9: "affliction shall not rise up the second time." The resurrection of Christ is God's pledge that life will not always have mudslides and tsunamis. Heaven has a plan to put a permanent end to pain and suffering, and to wipe away all tears for all time. Death is not a permanent part of human existence.

Listen to something that the apostle Paul wrote almost 2,000 years ago. (1 Corinthians 15:20, 22 KJV)

"Now Christ is risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept…For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."

Over in verse 54 is the news that I hope will echo through the beaches of Asia and the streets of La Conchita: (1 Corinthians 15:54 KJV)

"Death is swallowed up in victory."

The empty tomb of Christ demonstrates the power of God over pain, suffering and death. One of my favorite Christian writers said this: "To the believer, death is but a small matter." Christ speaks of it as if it were of little moment. "If a man keep My saying, he shall never see death, he shall never taste of death" (John 8:51, 52 KJV). To the Christian, death is but a sleep, a moment of silence and darkness. The life is hid with Christ, and "when Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with Him in glory." (Colossians 3:4 KJV).

This weekend, as you stand at the empty tomb of Christ, maybe you have suffered a great deal in life. Maybe, this weekend, your marriage is lying in tatters. Maybe you have had to stand at the graveside of a son or daughter, amazed by the vicious cruelty of life. Or maybe you have been the victim of someone else's godlessness, and you are aching for a better world, a better life. As you peer into the tomb of Christ, you discover that it's empty, and you are starting to sense that it's the work of a God of love.

Jesus took the full brunt of the worst that life has to offer, and He promises that He is going to put an end to your pain. The only question is this: have you chosen to be a part of the coming kingdom, where this kind of thing will never happen again? In your life, have you chosen to exhibit the same kind of compassion as Christ to see a world restored to its original glory?

Today, when you are weak and tired, God is reaching out and offering to wipe away your tears and carry you for a while. He is promising that this kind of suffering won't go on forever, and that there is a bright new day coming. Wouldn't you like to be a part of that

PRAYER:
Lord Jesus, our mighty Savior, thank you for what you and Your Father have done for us. Thank you for your victory over death, which you offer as an eternal gift to each one of us today. As the floodwaters rise about us, Lord, help us to see your loving hand in the healing and not in the hurts that come our way. Use us to bless this broken world as we wait for you to come and make all things new. In your saving name we pray, Amen.

Scriptures Used in “When Waters Overwhelm”

"And said, naked came I out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither: the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."
—Job 1:21 KJV

"And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani. That is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"
—Matthew 27:46 KJV

"For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God."
—John 16:27 KJV

"What do ye imagine against the LORD? He will make an utter end: affliction shall not rise up the second time."
—Nahum 1:9 KJV

"But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept, as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive."
—1 Corinthians 15:20, 22 KJV

"So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory."
—1 Corinthians 15:54 KJV

"Verily, verily, I say unto you, If a man keep my saying, he shall never see death."
—John 8:51 KJV

"When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then shall ye also appear with him in glory."
—Colossians 3:4 KJV