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According to the insurance industry, earthquakes and gigantic waves that kill thousands of people are ‘acts of god’ that may – or may not - be covered by a policy. But many people find it easier to discover what ‘cover’ they have for such disasters than to hold on to faith in a God who apparently lets such terrible things happen.

Science can now explain why earthquakes and tsunamis happen. But from the time of Aristotle, intelligent people have struggled to make some sense of earthquakes, which challenge human beings to explain the world order in which such apparently indiscriminate acts can occur. The recent tsunami in Asia killed believers and non-believers alike, of all faiths, nationalities and ages.

For most of human history people have tried to explain such disasters as acts of divine intervention and displeasure. Back in 1755, for example, Lisbon’s priests insisted on salvaging crucifixes and religious icons with which to ward off the catastrophe that even so resulted in the death of 50,000 people. The impact of that disaster prompted Voltaire to ask what kind of God could permit such a thing to occur. So questioning the basis for faith in a ‘God of love’ is part of what usually follows a natural disaster, even in this scientific age.

Recent news headlines have concentrated less on civilisation’s potential to destroy the world and have illustrated all too vividly that this planet has the untamed ability to destroy civilization itself. As a commentator in The Guardian newspaper pointed out, “whatever else it has achieved, the Indian Ocean tsunami has at least reminded mankind of its enduring vulnerability in the face of nature”.

In an age that, for the most part, glories in its own power and ability, such natural disasters are a very humbling experience. Nothing mankind can devise can do anything to prevent such things happening, even if early-warning systems help to reduce the death-toll when they occur. Much less has anyone found a way of avoiding a natural disaster that strikes us all eventually - death itself.

Each day far more people in the world die of natural or accidental causes than died around the Indian Ocean on Boxing Day, or in any of the ‘acts of god’ that have ever occurred. But for obvious reasons, few of those deaths hit the headlines and most of them occur without anyone questioning the existence of a loving God. If any questions are asked, they are more likely to be focused on mankind’s inability to avoid the futile loss of life in places like Aids-ridden Africa or the war-torn Middle East.

When, as the Bible records, Job faced the loss of all his possessions and most of his family, he naturally asked himself why God had let it happen. As a righteous, God-fearing man, that seemed like a reasonable question. But the answer that came was not what he expected. Such seemingly unjust events as Job suffered are there to teach us about our own weakness and God’s infinite strength to bring about our ultimate salvation.

So for an answer to the spiritual doubts in everyone’s mind in the aftermath of disasters like Kobe in Japan, the Asian tsunami (or even Bhopal), what this world actually needs is not a lack of faith in a God of love, but more of it. Because right from the start, when this planet was still in its infancy, God saw the need to provide a way for mankind to escape from “the wages of sin”, which is death itself. Whatever causes our lives to end, God’s love for each of us is seen in the sacrifice he made of his own Son, so that death for us might not be the end of all hope that it seems:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16)

An entirely understandable reaction to events like the Asian tsunami is to doubt the existence of a loving God and question the true Christian hope of everlasting life. But as someone put it, “the strength of religion is not that it provides the unquestionable answer, but the unanswerable question.”

Finding meaningful answers to those questions so often asked after natural disasters relies more on a faith based on a correct understanding of God’s word than it does on purely human reasoning. Ultimately, all of us must ask ourselves just why it is that we die and whether there is anything we can do to survive this natural but very personal disaster. With the Bible giving clear answers to such questions, to continue saying we don’t know the answer just cannot be right.