Repentance and the Judgments of God
On November 1, 1755 a massive earthquake struck Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. The death toll of the quake was perhaps as high as 100,000. As Dewey Roberts records in his biography of colonial Presbyterian pastor Samuel Davies, other quakes related to the shifting of the continental plates that brought about the Lisbon quake occurred in New England a few weeks later. The Lisbon earthquake and related tremors had large emotional impact on many the world over. Dewey writes of how Samuel Davies’ own preaching was influenced by the earthquake for much of the following year. In a sermon entitled “Practical Atheism, in Denying the Agency of Divine Providence, Exposed” Davies warned that since “all our calamities, private and public [are] chastisements of [God’s] hand . . . it is high time for us to acknowledge it” (all sermon quotes are from Roberts’ biography). In another sermon Davies insisted that “it would certainly be an instance of inexcusable stupidity for us to take no notice of so dreadful a dispensation. Such devastations are at once judgments upon the places where they happen and warnings to others.” As Davies understood it, the earthquake and many other earthly disasters (such as increasing attacks by Indians on the American colonists), were signs from God meant to lead the nation to repentance. “You cannot rebel,” Davies preached in another sermon,
against the crucified Jesus with impunity, for he is not now dying on the cross, or lying senseless in the grave. He lives! He lives to avenge the affront. He lives forever, to punish you for ever. He shall prolong his days to prolong your torment. Therefore, you have no alternative, but to submit to him or perish.
To speak in such ways about earthly disasters was once much more common than it is today among Christians. For a variety of reasons, this way of speaking has fallen out of favor. Not least of these reasons is how thoroughly Christians have imbibed the naturalistic thinking of our day that sees earthly disasters as nothing but the impersonal activity of physical forces. The recent fires in the Los Angeles area have been devastating. There are likely many reasons to investigate how governmental failures have made things much worse. But we miss something very important when we neglect the older Christian way of thinking about disasters like these fires.
It is, in fact, a thoroughly biblical way of thinking. Consider, for example, the book of Revelation. While there are many difficult interpretational issues related to making sense of Revelation, some things are clear. For example, the 7 seals, 7 trumpets, and 7 plagues, are judgments from the hand of God. The best way to understand the trumpets, I would argue, is to see them as limited judgments that occur prior to the return of Christ. You can see this is comparing them with the comprehensive judgments that occur in the exact same earthly realms when the 7 plagues are poured out on the world (for a more detailed defense of this claim, see here). One of the many judgments we are to expect in the age before Christ’s return is that of fire: “The first angel blew his trumpet, and there followed hail and fire, mixed with blood, and these were thrown upon the earth. And a third of the earth was burned up, and a third of the trees were burned up, and all green grass was burned up” (Rev 8:7).
The fires in California ultimately come from the hand of God, and they are not random. They are “warnings,” as Davies preached, to alert the nation to its peril outside of Christ. That is the explicit purpose of the earthly judgments in Revelation, though sadly, as Rev 9:20–21 shows us
the rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts.
Christians sometimes are too specific in their attempt to read the meaning of God’s providential desolations. They might suggest that they have a particular insight into exactly who is being judged by God and why. Such excesses have probably done much to make the older way of responding to earthly disasters fall out of favor. One could attempt to suggest that the fires are God’s judgment on California liberals, and so on (was last year’s Hurricane Helene not a judgment, then, because it devastated conservative parts of the country?).
To do so, however, would be the wrong response. This is not because of some sort of moral equivalence where we must say that every place in America is equal, morally speaking. That is clearly not the case. But when Jesus was asked about “those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them,” whether “they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem.” Jesus answered that this was not the case, but even more importantly, that “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:4–5).
The point being, that when disasters befall our nation, our primary focus should not be to engage in minute speculation about who is being judged but to take stock of one’s own spiritual state and the spiritual state of the nation as a whole. In other words, we must be careful not to miss the reason God works his fearsome judgments on the earth in the first place: they are sent by God to wake a nation up to the spiritual and temporal peril it faces. As Davies puts it, such judgments should create a sense of the urgent necessity of repentance among all:
you have . . . delayed your reformation long enough; therefore from this moment commence humble penitents, and let your country and your souls suffer no more by your willful wickedness. Whenever you recollect our past calamities, or whenever you meet with the like in time to come, immediately prostrate yourselves before the Lord; plead guilty, guilty: bewail your own sins: and bewail and mourn over the sins of the land.
Disasters, such as that currently unfolding in L.A., should lead everyone, the church included, as well as the whole nation, to reflect and mourn over their own sins, and to come to renewed repentance. In God’s kindness it may be that he would even be pleased to use such trials to bring about a revival of repentance and faith across the nation, as he has done many times in ages past.
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