When the Sky Is Falling

After a disaster like Hurricane Harvey, we can't help but ponder the seeming randomness of such events in nature. Those families who have lost loved ones and those whose homes have been ruined are left seeking a reason, struggling to find some explanation as to why this happened to them.

One of the strangest lawsuits in US court history was filed on September 14, 2007. Nebraska Senator Ernie Chambers, seeking to stop evil and injustice in the world, actually filed a lawsuit against God. The lawsuit sought a permanent injunction against God's interference in this world.

Senator Chambers said of God, "[He] has allowed certain harmful activities to exist that [have] caused grave harm to innumerable people in the world." The lawsuit charged God with causing fearsome floods, egregious earthquakes, horrendous hurricanes, tornadoes, plagues, famines, devastating droughts, genocidal wars, birth defects, and the like. Chambers continued in the lawsuit, saying that God has allowed "calamitous catastrophes resulting in wide-spread death, destruction, and the terrorization of millions upon millions of the Earth's inhabitants including innocent babes, infants, children, the aged, the infirm, without mercy or distinction."

Eventually the lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice. The Nebraska court ruled they could not properly notify God because they did not have his address. Senator Chambers disagreed with the ruling, claiming that because God is omniscient, he should have known he was being sued and appeared in court to defend himself.

While we may ridicule Senator Chambers for his ill-reasoned accusations, we can at least respect his honesty. Chambers is not alone in seeking to put God on trial. When life pulls the rug out from under us, when all that's right with the world suddenly goes terribly wrong, we can't help but wonder why God would allow such things to happen. Has God fallen down on the job? Has he lost track of us? Doesn't he remember that we're on his team, we're in his family? Why is the sky falling on us?

Certainly, we are not the first to ask such questions, and probably not the last to puzzle over the harsh inequities of life. There are mysteries that we cannot solve on this side of eternity. So, when the worst of things happens to the best of folks, we would do well to focus on what we can and do know to be unshakable realities.

This world we journey through is a fallen world, broken and plagued by sin and suffering, hardship and heartache, and no one is immune. No one gets a free pass. It rains on the just and the unjust. We are all fragile and frail human beings, susceptible to illness and accident, vulnerable to violence and injustice, prone to trouble and tragedy. We wish it were not so, but such is life in this wayward world.

Gratefully, when the sky is falling we have a Rock on which to stand. God is faithful and his promises are true, more precious and powerful in the storms, in the trials, even in the nightmares of life that seem to block out the sun. God in his grace holds on to us when we can barely hold on to him. Even when we are faithless, he is faithful still. He is our hope and encouragement, our God, a very present help in times of trouble. He lives at the end of our rope.