Did the Lord Do This?

"Shall a trumpet be blown in the city, and the people not be afraid? shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done [it]?" (Am 3:6 AV)

RealClearPolitics: "Instead of turning the tragedy of Hurricane Katrina into a new opportunity for partisan finger-pointing, Congress ought to be working to make sure that government agencies can handle the next disaster, possibly a major terrorist attack. This may have been the worst natural disaster in American history, but it might not be the worst that al Qaeda could unleash if it got its hands on nuclear or biological weapons. " [M. Kondracke]

The government was tardy, confused, and disorganized on every level, city, state, and federal in the aftermath of Katrina. Or so it seems. Of course, when there is widespread disaster it is right and proper to look to government, for this is one of the reasons that God has ordained government, to co-ordinate our united efforts. These thoughts are not aimed at the proper role of government.

But self-government is the foundation of all effective government. The police are to protect us from lawbreakers, but what if the police are lawbreakers? Government may protect us from looters, but what if the government is the chief looter of all, piling beaurocracy upon beaurocracy in order to "eat out the substance of our people," as the Declaration of Independence puts it.

Why the massive beaurocracies in the United States, the ones that got in the way of each other, stumbling around after Katrina, jockying for power, and pointing the finger at each other?

Maybe we as a people need to take a look at our basic value system. In New Orleans, the people who suffered the most were the poor: the same people that government has spent billions and billions of dollars in various relentless wars on poverty and disadvantage since Roosevelt's New Deal. Have these wars on poverty had anything to do with the massive increase in beauocracies that have been built at every level of government in the last 70 years or so?

In the days of trouble people throw their idols to the moles and the bats. [Isaiah 2:20] One of the chief idols of the American people is government itself, for we have learned to look to government to save us from every imaginable evil. We have built a veritable Babylon of government, most of it designed to make a "Great Society" where people never have to be uncomfortable, suffer any indignity, or be without any desire. We have pretended that all religions are the same, all life-styles of equal moral worth, that choices have nothing to do with outcomes, and that every person should be protected against the results of breaking any one of God's commandments. In sowing to the wind, men reap the whirlwind, and Katrina will be nothing compared what might be. This is not a Democratic or a Republican issue, nor a conservative or liberal one. The worship of idols bring bipartisan wrath, for God is no respecter of persons. A vote for George Bush does not bring indulgence in the day of judgment [nor does a vote against him].

Are we now beginning to pay the price for a turning away from trust in God to the idols of Babylon? A Savior must be all-wise, all-powerful, and all-intrusive. Those who would make the Babylon the savior must make her all-wise, all-powerful, and all-intrusive--in other words, she must be made divine.

Even Christians have been a party to this idolatry: those who read their Bible and presume to speak for God, but who insist that God has nothing to do with anything that takes place on the earth, as if God were blind, deaf, and without values, that He is not present in the fall of the sparrow or does not number the hairs of our head. If God is not involved in the earth, where shall men turn in the day of trouble but to government and government's idols? If God cannot or will not do everything, then to whom shall we turn? We should expect such response from the atheist who believes in no God, but should not those who believe in the Lord Jesus have the faith of David, "Ps 27:13 I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living"? Why should we serve dead gods who can do neither good nor evil, nor deliver us at all.

God is not like the idols described by Jeremiah, "They are upright as the palm tree, but speak not: they must needs be borne, because they cannot go. Be not afraid of them; for they cannot do evil, neither also is it in them to do good." [Jer. 10:5] Those who would deprive God of activity in the world are as blind, deaf, and ignorant as the gods they serve [Psalm 115].

“For the eyes of the Lord [are] over the righteous, and his ears [are open] unto their prayers: but the face of the Lord [is] against them that do evil.” (1Pe 3:12 AV)

The Lord certainly does have eyes, and they wander to and fro throughout the earth to show himself strong in the behalf of them whose heart is perfect toward him. [2Ch 16:9] It is practical atheism to believe otherwise.

As an example of an inflated trust in government read the article in the Washington Post, praising Newt Gingrich for his solution to the problem: a new massive super-beaurocracy, as big as the disaster!! The Post calls it "thinking outside the box," would you believe? It is really the same box we have been in for many years, and the box is feeling the strain. To really think outside the box, we should dismantle the Welfare State. Go figure. Click here