Why Didn’t God Intervene in the Gulf?

In an earlier post I wrote about the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and the coal mine disaster in West Virginia. You might ask, Why didn’t God intervene to prevent these from happening? The answer is, I don’t know. But let me give you a few thoughts on the matter before you go and blame God for these man-made tragedies.

While God is active in the world in many different ways, which I’ll explain in a future post, God does not micromanage the universe. He is involved, but allows bad things to happen. When God does intervene, we call that a “miracle.” Most miracles aren’t even recognized as such because we aren’t aware that something bad might have happened, but it didn’t. For example, God may have prevented many blowouts from happening on oil rigs in the past, but for some reason chose not to prevent this one.

Why to bad things happen? Because we are on earth, not in heaven. The earth is flawed and we are subject to the laws of nature. In heaven, we won’t have these problems. In addition, bad things happen because of sin. People hurt other people, do stupid things, and are prone to do the wrong thing. Even natural disasters (mistakenly called “Acts of God”) are usually made worse by man’s carelessness, stupidity, greed, or sin.

One such example is hurricane Katrina. Building a city below sea level and then having inadequate levees is man’s stupidity. An inept mayor who didn’t have an evacuation plan for the poor and disabled and left school busses parked when they could have been used, is man’s stupidity. An inept mayor and corrupt state government that didn’t provide first responders until too late is man’s stupidity (FEMA is not a first responder – local agencies are). The list goes on, but you get my point.

So let’s not blame God but draw closer to him so that we can call on him in our times of need.