Prophetic Reasoning in Disasters

(This is a prophetcraft post.)
Let’s clarify the biblical understanding of disasters.
The starting point is humanity is fallen. In Adam, we all chose the wrong path; we chose human reason over the direct guidance of the Holy Spirit. We have no native connection to the Holy Spirit, though we are designed for it. Thus, we are spiritually dead. We cannot natively see the moral fabric of the universe; we do not natively understand the divine element in things. The moral fabric includes God’s perspective on things, a raft of divine motivations and expectations. We don’t have that. We are restricted to the human reasoning we chose when we ate the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.
So we don’t have an instinctive understanding of how the world works. Nature is not fallen in itself, but under the Fall because we — God’s chosen management — have no power to manage. We can’t see what nature does from God’s point of view, so we can’t manage it by God’s power. We are blind and powerless. Instead, we stumble along with our damaged human perception and pitiful science.
After the Fall, God granted His Flaming Sword of truth, His revelation. You can’t embrace it unless you embrace the death of your human reasoning. In more clinical terms, you have to embrace obedience to a faculty above reason, a birth of the spirit by the Presence of His Spirit. He alone controls that on a basis He cannot explain because we cannot understand it. All we can understand is the blunt statement nothing in any human resource can affect whom, when and if He chooses to give spiritual life. His Word implies there is an accountability, but the word “choice” does not apply to us in any sense we understand. Stop trying to define that because it is beyond human capabilities. The point is, if you don’t embrace what He has offered, symbolized by the Flaming Sword, you can’t rise above the curse of the Fall in any way. The Sword is the path back to Eden.
What we do have within our grasp is the Laws of God. Those Laws provide a representation of the moral fabric; they are not the moral fabric itself. Rather, they come to us packaged in a different reasoning, a totally different frame of reference from what most people would assume in the absence of any divine guidance. His revelation is not rules and laws as humans would define them, but as God defines them within His revelation. It’s a package; you get the content only when you accept the packaging.
Human reasoning excludes revelation before it even starts building, so it puts us at a disadvantage. Human reasoning assumes there is nothing outside the universe; this is it. It’s everything and we have to understand it by our senses and our logic. Revelation assumes the universe is a piffle, something not that important, a poor shadow of what could be. Revelation assumes you aren’t too worried about what’s here because there is so much more and so much better beyond it. What we have here is temporary, broken and not all that useful. This is just the beginning of explaining the difference. But revelation is within the reach of anyone who chooses to obey it. Obeying it means embracing the underlying intellectual frame of reference.
Revelation comes in the form of imperatives to obey. It’s a call to personal commitment to a Person, God Himself. He alone is truth, and all else is shadowy lies. There is nothing outside Him that matters. There is no objective body of truth possible. Start there and you will begin understanding the world in which you live. Reject that fundamental assumption about reality, and you’ll make mistakes.
So the world in which we live is untamed and unguided because we don’t have the full weight of God’s revelation in our beings. We have only a shadowy representation, but that does help a lot. It does put us in a position to leverage morality to modify the universe and it’s random behavior. If we choose to obey what little of God’s revelation we can understand, we can avoid the worst of natural events that will disrupt our activities. Since our activities will be based on revelation, we would tend avoid trouble. We also gain leverage to ask God to help us in two ways: (1) We will get a clue to His plans and stay out of the way of wrath and (2) He will ameliorate His wrath on our behalf when it passes close to us.
Do you recall the Exodus, where God distinguished between Egyptians and Israel? He can do that every time, but we first have to understand how to be in a position to understand how it works. The particulars of the Passover in Egypt were not the point, but what they say about underlying reality. The entire foundation of Western Civilization is hostile to that kind of understanding. America in particular has fought it tooth and nail, with even those called by the Spirit offering a hostile understanding of His message and perverting His revelation. That is, Christians and their organizations typically misrepresent what God’s revelation says to humans because they have embraced certain fundamental lies. They reject the Hebrew intellectual approach God mandated for understanding the Bible, using an alternative epistemology. This is the sin of trying to hold God accountable to an alien standard. It doesn’t work too well.
So we end up with lots of good Christian people in Moore building their houses, schools and businesses in places where God already planned some tornadoes. Worses, their refusal to embrace Hebrew revelatory reasoning means they can’t effectively ask God to spare them. Instead, they have to rely on the science of meteorology for a brief warning before His planned wrath against sin falls. No, I cannot promise you that the tornado would have taken a different path if that neighborhood had been true believers of the sort I teach, but it would have been the only hope for such a request before God. Western Christian morality is pretty much a failure against God’s standard.
My house received a minor beating from hail. I could explain scientifically how that hail was made worse for us by where the storm collapsed, the same storm cell that chewed up Moore. That’s not important, nor is this house, when it comes down to it. However, God’s Word tells me that if I could have convinced my neighborhood to embrace His revelation, it might not have been so bad. As it was, our minor hail damage represents God’s mercy in stopping the storm there, instead of pushing it farther and entirely too close to us. We got hail instead of wind damage that could have shredded our trailer park. It’s not a simple accounting process, but the fuzzy reasoning of moral truth as revealed in the Bible.
The issue of clarity is not in the results, but in the commitment to His revelation.