God did not send Harvey to destroy - but does inspire us to help in the healing

I’m sure everyone is saddened by the devastating effects of Hurricane Harvey. It caused the heaviest rains in the history of the continental United States. Thousands of people are still living in shelters. People have drowned in the flood waters. Countless homes have been severely damaged. It may be weeks and months before the flood waters dry up.

The Bible seems to take the view that God uses natural disasters to punish people for disobeying God’s will. In the story of Noah, because people have become evil, God brings on a flood to wipe out all of humanity, except for Noah and his family and selected males and females of every species. Also in the Bible, God promises the Israelites abundant crops if they obey God’s commandments and natural disasters if they don’t.

But is everyone who has suffered because of Hurricane Harvey evil?

The opening verse of the Bible tells us, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." So God's first act in the Creation narrative is to create nature. Nature is not moral or immoral. It’s morally neutral. Nature operates according to its own laws, which means sometimes we’ll have great weather, but at other times, there will be natural calamities.

But there is another dimension to God that calls upon us to transform nature to make it more hospitable to life and also calls upon us to show concern and compassion toward our fellow human beings.

God provides the earth, but it is for humans to farm, to build homes, to generate energy, to supply materials and medicines to improve the human condition. God gave human beings the intelligence to achieve these goals.

And since the Bible tells us that human beings are created in the divine image, every life is precious. We have an obligation to reach out to treat other human beings with compassion and love.

When it comes to Harvey, God is the inspiration of all those who risked their lives to save others from drowning, who opened the shelters, who made donations to the hurricane relief effort. God is the force which inspires us to reach out to our fellow human beings. And God is the crutch which inspires victims of the hurricane not to give up.

So we humans have a choice. We can sit back and allow one natural disaster after another to have severely negative effects on humanity or we can allow God to inspire us to seek ways to limit the harmful effects of natural disasters on human activity.

Why was the world created in a way which results in the occurrence of natural disasters? I can’t answer that question. But the aspect of God we have to try to connect with is the the aspect of God which inspires us to be moral, ethical and compassionate human beings.There is a divine spark within each of us. We just have to be willing to activate it.

This story was originally published September 29, 2017 at 5:34 PM with the headline "God did not send Harvey to destroy - but does inspire us to help in the healing."