Blaming God? When Major Donna Bryan Ventured to the Philippines in Early 2014,It Was In

Blaming God?
When Major Donna Bryan ventured to The Philippines in early 2014,it was in the wake of that country’s worst recorded natural disaster, Typhoon Haiyan, known as TyphoonYolanda by Filipinos.

Donna says some of the local women she met believed the storm was a punishment; that they ‘felt it was God warning the people of The Philippines about the vast corruption and ineptitude of the governments… They prayed for justice.’
Did God send a storm that killed thousands and impacted millions? Was it a case of allowing nature to literally take its course? Were prayers for deliverance misplaced or missed?
How we view God, through the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, forms the answers to these questions for Christians.
Control of the elements has long been understood to be a divine prerogative; in Jewish theology and story, God’s word calms every storm (psalm 43), and God provides an escape from storms and tempests (psalm 55). Job’s dissertations praise God’s mastery and regulation of creation.
In one of the most vivid picture portraits in scripture (psalm 18), a psalmist describes God as making ‘darkness his covering around him, his canopy thick clouds dark with water. Out of the brightness before him there broke through his clouds hailstones and coals of fire. The LORD also thundered in the heavens, and the Most High uttered his voice. And he sent out his arrows, and scattered them; he flashed forth lightnings, and routed them.

‘Then the channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare at your rebuke, O LORD, at the blast of the breath of your nostrils. He reached down from on high, he took me; he drew me out of mighty waters.’
For thousands of years, prior to our current scientific understandings of climate, people of different cultures and religions have looked for meaning behind meteorology. People sacrificed animals, prayed and undertook vows and voyages to ensure the harvest, bring about rain, bargain with deities and avert celestial wrath.

The Greeks pictured Zeus (whom the Romans dubbed Jupiter) hurling down bolts of lightning to make a point. The Vikings felt storms were the purview of Odin’s son, Thor, the ‘thunder god’ immortalised in Marvel comic books, films and witty Douglas Adams books.
The traumatised women Donna spoke to, people who had survived the typhoon and are now struggling to survive its aftermath, blamed God indirectly, and government corruption directly, for the disaster that befell them.

Language captures our grasping for truth. The word typhoon translates from a Chinese phrase,‘tai fung’, meaning ‘divine winds’ or ‘great winds’.Europeans used the word ‘tiphon’ (a ‘violent storm, whirlwind, tornado’) from the 1500s, based on the Greek word ‘typhon’(‘whirlwind’).

The Portuguese term was based on ‘tufan’, an Arabic, Persian and Hindi word meaning ‘big cyclonic storm’, while the Koran uses ‘Al-tufan’ for ‘a flood or storm’ and ‘Noah's Flood’. Even today, apparently, ‘toofan’still translates as‘big storm’ in India. (I am indebted to:

What does it mean for believers, when we can view developing cataclysms from satellites orbiting the planet? When we understand how high and low pressure systems vie for supremacy? When clever people develop early warning systems, communication networks and evacuation protocols to save lives, in the full knowledge that not every nation will be able to deploy them successfully (or be able to afford to do so)?

The very same Jesus who is recorded as having calmed the storm, also taught ‘the multitude’ that followed him, and his apostles,that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike (Matthew 5:45). Jesus said that victims of cruelties, accidents and tragedies (Luke 13) weren’t singled out because they were any worse than anyone else, but that we’ll all outlive our bodies.
Old Testament wisdom teaches that ‘time and chance happen to all’ (Ecclesiastes 9:11). Contrastingly, if good men and women do fall (even if they do perish?), we are told they will not be cast down, because the Lord holds them in his hand (psalm 37).
The ultimate ‘no’ to the idea of divine protection from pain, sickness, death etc. comes from the torture and death of God’s son, Jesus. It is balanced by the promise that nothing will ever separate us from God’s love and presence (Romans 8).
Salvationists believe that the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments were divinely inspired ‘and that they only constitute the Divine rule of Christian faith and practice’. Inspiration doesn’t mean scriptures can be read as straightforward scientific treatises or governance manuals.
It does mean, however, that we can connect with a God who loved us so much that Christ died for us – a God who suffers in solidarity with us, whatever the weather or challenge we face.– Barry Gittins

April 2014