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.

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.

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