Haiti And A Loving God: Pat Robertson Answered The Wrong Question
Skeptics, atheists, and agnostics, have every reason to ask me, as a Christian, how my loving God could allow the earthquake in Haiti. And, as a Christian, I must face the fact that God, indeed, could have prevented the quake and spared the Haitian people such agony. And yet He chose to allow it.
Pat Robertson apparently attempted to explain God’s hand in the devastation as the playing out of a curse on Haiti for making a pact with the Devil. If Mr. Robertson is saying that there are consequences for sin, well, I could not agree more. Jesus, Himself, said as much. But that only confronts me with the question of why I was not fully destroyed prior to coming to Christ.
I am – beyond any shadow of a doubt – a sinner. And the Bible clearly states that “the wages of sin is death.” (Romans 6:23a) Yet, here I stand; healthy, happy, and facing no greater challenge than an evening of NFL playoff football and a full refrigerator.
I have no way of knowing whether the Haitian people ever made a pact with the Devil or whether the nation, in so doing, brought a curse upon itself. What I do know – and what Pat Robertson failed to mention – is that the Word of God says that all people are under the curse of sin. Galatians 3:10b, quoting the Old Testament, reads, “Cursed is everyone who does not obey all the things written in the book of the law.” That’s all of us, folks.
So, we Christians face another legitimate confrontation from the non-Christian: “Why did Haiti get hit so hard and not the rest of us.”
Jesus addresses this issue in the gospels and points us in the right direction, but does not give us the full answer. When he was told about the suffering of some people in Galilee, he
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