Are Typhoons Really Random?

Yahoo! News has reported this tidbit regarding current events.

SHANGHAI, China - "A typhoon expected to be among the most powerful storms to hit China in years churned toward the densely populated coast on Tuesday with 165 mph wind gusts, and the government evacuated 1.8 million people."


In the Bible, God repeatedly takes responsibility for what most call "natural disasters" today, and what insurance companies call "acts of God." Chalk one up for the Insurance industries, who have not forgotten just Who is in charge.

God is sovereign, and he brings negative sanctions to bear upon nations who violate his covenantal mandates. These are neatly summarized in the 10 commandments. God does not celebrate "blessed diversity" in religious traditions like your local colleges and universities. He punishes them, as both a warning of the greater wrath to come (a true kindness), and as a way of pruning the earth from its more wicked elements, to prevent larger hindrances to the Gospel of Christ at a later time.


This teaching corporately one can find plainly spoken in the Proverbs of Kings in the Older Testament. God specifically uses the elements, especially wind, as a place identified with divine judgment -- recall that God spoke to Job "out of the whirlwind," at the books end, and that the Proverbs warn our calamity will overtake us like a whirlwind should we fail to heed his commandments after many rebukes.

Here is a whirlwind which the Lord at one time sent. Exactly where transpired, I have no idea. What I do know is that the tree figured in front of it, is T-O-A-S-T:

http://www.fishindog.com/images/tornado.jpg

Here is another one:

http://www.fishindog.com/images/tornado.jpg

Curiously, God has limited his direct arsenal of elements (or weapons) He uses in the case of imposing negative sanctions against those who transgress his holy law. It does not include, for instance, earthquakes. These are simply a function of the fall more generally, and are not ascribed anywhere in the Word to God as a judgment, unless they attend a volcanic eruption -- the latter of which the Psalms clearly warn God does use from time to time to reprove the wayward among men.

Here is an erupting volcano:

http://www.ericandkeri.net/misc/mt_oyama_eruption.jpg

After a careful reading of the Bible, the "news" isn't just news anymore. It contains reports of God' sovereign acts in history, which He has told us in plain Hebrew and Greek that we are to see as His action against wicked nations -- including our own -- when disaster of this kind strikes. This is a divine call to repentance, not a random occurence, or a merely "statistically probable" event.


The universe simply is not random. And the phrase, "God is watching you," is not a platitude one is to reserve for children to keep them in line. It is good advice that keeps people from dying if (and only if) they heed it. For all the ways of a man are in plain view of the Lord. If you wait until the whirlwind strikes, you have waited far too long. Real people die in these calamities, and they actually do go to hell, if they do not die in the Lord.

Here is what a lava flow looks like (the lake of fire is a very large version of this, probably located in the future somewhere in the Pacific "Ring of Fire"):

https://www.terragalleria.com/parks/np-image.havo3710.html

Hell is not a cartoon schema to make the red-forked devil in red underwear amusing. It is a blast furnance in outer darkness that has no end or reprieve, day or night. This is not a popular message, and it never has been. Neither is the plain teaching of the Bible that God strikes wicked nations with a rod of iron. But it will do no one the least bit of good to pretend otherwise, since this happens to be true.


So today's lesson is the lesson of Shanghai. Repentance is better than monstrous whirlwinds that can tear whole cities into pieces in a matter of minutes. The gargantuan amount of energy expended by such disasters in relatively short time periods is mind-boggling. They come on like a bandit overtakes a man in the night, and plow with a divine hammer.

This is why the whirlwind is used as a synonym for God's judgement repeatedly in the word. The time to "evacuate" -- flee from sin to Christ -- is before the judgment strikes. This is the lesson of Shanghai, and it is the only good news you will find there today.

The rest is carnage and wreckage.

This is a forewarning, as much as the delicious fruit and vegetables at your local farmer's market, grocery store, or (even better) home-grown garden are a sign that God is good to all men, and his goodness, like his wrath, aims to lead men to repentance. We can see both in nature. God has revealed these clearly. And no one objects to the apple pie. Shall we accept only the good from God (with thanksgiving) and not the bad?

God is good. This means 1. He gives good gifts (see your garden for more on this) and 2. He sternly reproves evil (see Shanghai for more on this). Goodness and evil, you may have heard, do not, and cannot just "all get along." So we dare not mistake His patience for tolerance. God does not tolerate evil at all. For "the wicked detest the righteous, and the righteous the wicked" (Proverbs 30). God's Beneficience and mercy abound; so does his justice.

All you have to do is look. Or just watch the news. For the extended version, study history. For the clearest version, study your Bible. Be grateful, and be warned. That is our job. God is doing His just fine, so you don't have to worry about that. When in doubt, read the book of Job.

And if you live in notoriously windy places, you may want to pray a bit more often, and buy insurance. At least they will get it right in explaining what has happened. God acts in human history, and insurance companies, pre-eminently concerned with "the bottom line," ($) do not hesitate to note this.