Gospel Hall wrote "Why God fail to save 30,000 lives in Asian
countries?"

The Pacific Ocean usually gets the tsunamis due to earthquake activity
around the "Ring of Fire".  Japan gets them regularly, to my
knowledge, but is a hilly country, with relatively small coastal
plains.

This time however the earthquake occurred in the Indian Ocean.  As for
the cause one may as well ask "Why do we get earthquakes?"  We know
the answers to that.

On the case of low lying islands, I often wondered, after seeing
pictures of holiday units in some places, literally perched a few feet
above the sea, why they had not been wiped out long ago.  At any time,
a low lying island is in danger of such an event, especially in an
earthquake zone.

In 1893 Krakatoa blew up, and the resulting wave went around the world
four times, probably rather small after the first once or twice. 
Again it was in the Indonesian area.  One could ask, why do people
live on low lying islands?  In Australia one could ask why people
build houses in fire prone bushland, or in low lying flood prone
areas.  In America one could ask why do people build in twister prone
areas, or the Mississippi delta.  Why did Afro-Americans live in
Harlem (I don't know if it still has the same reputation).

Why do people live in Siberia?  Or trek through the Sahara on camel? 
Or on dumps in the Phillippines?

All these places are hazardous in some way.

The answers of course are probably similar in each respect.  Often
they had no economic choice.  They were born there and that is their
home.  The rich had the better, higher land.  They had jobs there, and
where else could they go?

Sometimes it is choice.  An Australian may seek to escape the rat race
by building on acreage, and in a sense bring the rat race with him. 
He puts himself at the risk of bushfire then by his own choice.

But quite often people don't have a lot of choice.  Sometimes we do. 
For example near Brisbane in Queensland is an area called Redlands,
with rich volcanic soil.  For quite some time it was a market garden
area, but is now mainly covered in suburbia, being a pleasant place to
live.  This means of course that a large area of productive farmland
has been lost to concrete and bitumen.

If the human race had a collective brain however, the rich fertile
farm land would have been banned to developers.

But the human race is often stupid.  So at least part of the problem
is human stupidity.  If we choose to live in dangerous places, or
don't the wisdom or foresight to plan for future generations, then we
can only blame ourselves.

However in the case of the Tsunami, should the question have been "Why
did God not save 30,000 people?"  That they were "Asians" is in one
sense incidental, since an equally severe catastrophe elsewhere would
simply have altered the demographic casualty list.

The real problem is one of suffering, and death.  Since this is a
Christian group, then the ultimate questions of humanity are suffering
and death, the two unavoidables of our existence.  Christianity claims
that God, who engineered the who creation, including allowing for sin,
death and evil, and the existence of the devil as well as humanity,
Himself suffered death at the hands of men, and the world.  However it
also claims that God, as Christ, rose again, a symbol that represents
that we are all eternal, regardless of the fact we must die
physically.  How we die is in one sense immaterial - a person who dies
of old age is just as dead as a Tsunami victim.

It is the scale of the disaster that is overwhelming, and the immense
grief of the bereaved, and the lack of warning seems callous.  If God
thus allows something like this to happen, since Christ stated that
"not a sparrow falls without your Father's consent", then He is not
soft.  He has just allowed over 100,000 people to be "written off", if
Christ's statement is correct.  Yet Christ also said "The very hairs
of your head are numbered".  And on another occasion, told us that
earthquakes and wars and other tragedies were to be expected, as
necessary for God's plan.  Such things "must happen", He said.

I don't know the reason for this particular tragedy.  It seems callous
and unfair.  It could have happened on Australia's east coast, for
example, which has popular beach resorts.  Bribie Island, near the
Sunshine Coast, is only 30 feet high at its highest.  Moreton Island,
on the other hand, has sandhills in parts nearly 300 feet high, which
would, if such a terrible event did ever happen, serve to protect
Brisbane to quite some extent.

It could have happened to Pacific Islands, New Zealand, Japan or the
eastern shores of Indonesia or Malaysia or Singapore.

But it didn't.  However in such a tragedy we are confronted by that
most perplexing and mysterious of human dilemnas - what is our
purpose?

For the suffering, we can only help by, in most cases, giving a few
dollars or whatever to help.  For the dead, we can only pray.  For
ourselves, we can ask again, "What is the purpose of human existence?"

Christ's resurrection, and comments on judgement, heaven and hell,
seem to indicate we are just passing through in the case of this life.


Bob Crowley.
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