It seems to me likely that natural disasters, disease, rain, death, hatred, etc, all followed Man’s sin.

It seems that this should be taken into consideration when we attempt to judge God’s purposes. Perhaps we should judge Man’s state instead.

Don

Without natural disasters, life as we know it would never have existed in the first place.

Isn’t the point of many psalms, Luke 13:1-5, the book of Job and indeed the incarnation that we don’t get what we deserve?  This is very confusing to atheists but God’s first priority is not maximizing our level of comfort.

(Ezekiel 18 is interesting.  It seems to foreshadow the new covenant but it does not really address the problem of injustice.)

Amen, John, Jesus did not die on the cross so that we could be comfortable, but to take up our cross and follow Him.

2 Peter chapter 1 tells us what we need to be gaining every day in order to do so.

Don

Yet, let someone like the late Rev. Falwell or Pat Robertson say such a thing and the echo of the cries of outrage can still be heard.

This issue is really very simple. Why the distress and angst? We all must die. Period. Can the Master the Universe make a world in which no one dies? Probably, but there would be no humans in it because death is a vital part of humanity - and for our survival, an absolute necessity.  Does it make any difference whether we die slowly of cancer or suddenly in a plane crash? It does not, nor can God be blamed for any of it, for there can be no fault in necessity. He has made the world and everything in it; this includes Ebola, earthquakes, mudslides, politicians and the like. No one is at fault here, and this absolution includes God Himself. Why is this so hard to grasp?  Larry

As I understand the story of the Fall in Genesis, “What consenting adults do in the privacy of their own paradise” (to paraphrase a common modern argument justifying sexual immorality) is not a private matter between them, but rather has cosmic consequences. We do not live in the perfect world which God created, but one in which sin has corrupted nature. The Hebrew prophets understood that disasters (natural or man made) were the consequence of God’s judgment on human infidelity. Interestingly, the ancient non-Jew had a similar view of such events.