We have witnessed an unprecedented natural disaster this week. There have always been wildfires, but never have they destroyed such a large swath of a large city. This comes on the “heels” of a wildfire that destroyed Lahaina, Hawaii and Paradise, California. The death toll continues to rise, and the fire isn’t out yet.
Is there a spiritual element to this or is this just poor land management or bad luck? Though the intensity of the fire has been described as “biblical” and “wrath of God” type stuff, I hesitate to call it the later. The wrath of God comes with specific pre-event prophesy. The people whose homes were destroyed were not being punished. But you could call the fire “biblical”.
When God brought forth creation, it was not a self-managing thing. First, God had to “hold all things together”. The laws of physics are what they are by design. Then there was a small place left for the stewardship of humans. For Adam and Eve this was a small, understandable, and easily accomplished thing–at first. When Adam and Eve crossed the only line they had, don’t eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, things became much more unmanageable.
First, their transgression altered them and, via the process of genetics, all of us. We became sinful beings who are inclined from birth to resist God, act contrary to His laws, and are naturally unable to communicate to Him and believe Him. We call that sinful nature. Some use the label “original sin”, but that can have an incorrect connotation so I avoid it. It is easy to understand how such a simple act can impact us all. The Tree must have been a malignant, biological agent that could modify DNA. Reproduction does the rest.
If the Los Angeles wildfires prove to be arson, then sinful nature has played a role. Sinful nature, too, is hard to contain.
Harder to understand is how this act of disobedience could impact the rest of creation, but it does. This we call “the curse”. The term isn’t used often, but you find it in Genesis 3 and elsewhere in the Bible. Now creation is not so manageable. God still holds it together, but it is much more free-wheeling and we don’t understand our role very well at all. We don’t control the weather and consequently the Southern California drought and the Santa Ana winds. Maybe we have ignorantly made them worse by carbon dioxide and methane emissions. Should we be shaving the hills around LA bald every year or every few years? Maybe that is our stewardship now. Maybe we need different land management as we see areas stricken with drought. Maui seems to need different land management to preserve natural plants and push out invasive, combustible grasses. Our stewardship and the understanding of our stewardship is a work in progress.
This need for complicated stewardship of the Earth is all part of the “curse”. God gave a simple explanation of it to Adam in this way:
And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
18 thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”Genesis 3:17-19 (ESV)
That sounds bad but it is such an understatement. We will struggle with this planet until God remakes it, curse-free. Until then, we need to learn, repent, and act. Larger and larger now-natural disasters could befall us, and society can only absorb so much.
Giving Christ 