God intends either discipline or testing by what is suffered, and both produce the good of improved sanctification.[29] We are not allowed to take “natural calamity” out of that package of necessary suffering for the believer. God in His providential care designs the calamity as a blessing in sometimes macabre dress. We are to “consider it all joy . . . when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance.”[30] Suffering is a foundational aspect of sanctification. 

We must acknowledge that the most troubling problem emerging from any large scale natural disaster is not that people die. That is a real human and emotional issue, but not the most significant one. Hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, tornados or floods do not change the statistics on the number of the human race experiencing death by even one digit. A typhoon in Bangladesh swept away between 300,000 and 500,000 lives in 1970,[1] and the worldwide influenza pandemic of 1918 exterminated between 50,000,000 and 100,000,000,[2] but neither of these catastrophic events changes the grim prognosis that every member of the human race will die. We are dying at a hundred percent rate already.
It is also not the overarching dilemma that natural events destroy what we have made—our homes, buildings, roads, etc. No one should be surprised when a house or building is brought to nothing in a mudslide in view of the fact that God declares that decay will eventually destroy all things anyway.[3] We are promised the cataclysmic destruction of the entire earth as we know it in the future.[4] Some have lost these things earlier than they had hoped they would, but that they would be destroyed should never be in debate with evangelicals. So there is nothing new here either.
Furthermore, it should not be a conundrum to us that many people face an alteration of their existence due to catastrophe. A new order will come to everyone eventually; heaven and a new earth will be experienced by some[5], and hell for others. Death alters everything, as will Christ’s return.
We should also remember that there is no meaningful dissimilarity in the horribleness of death in a natural disaster as opposed to normal times. If it were possible to ask a man in the sanitary environment of a hospital what it is like to breathe his last breath when he is drowning in his own fluid, he would tell you it is every bit as horrific as being drowned in a flood. Because God mercifully allows the body to experience shock in times of fright, many will thankfully have some anesthesia when they die, whether natural or narcotic. But death is still a ravaging enemy wherever and however it is encountered. Some may linger in the hospital room for days before they die, while others under the rubble caused by an earthquake painfully expire from dehydration. A woman may die instantly when a hurricane pushes her house down, while her sister may end her two year struggle with an insidious malignancy with screams. Which is easier?
Everyone will die; everyone will lose whatever they have; everyone will face a completely altered existence; everyone will experience the horror of last moments on earth. We have already bought into all of these as theological verities. So what is so arrestingly unique about a natural disaster? Why do we become poetic and communicative about it? Why do we not hear news commentators saying, “Today an earthquake in India did the normal: It took a few thousand lives, destroyed property, took people to another existence and did it in the typically horrible way. The stock market was up today with heavy volume . . .”
We are alarmed because a natural disaster brings dramatic focus to these universal inevitabilities. It paints them in vivid color right before our faces so that we cannot escape them. We see how impotent we are. Our invincibility evaporates; our vulnerability parades in front of us and mocks us. We watch as people just like us, going about their business, lose everything and die in a moment. It grabs us precisely because it is us we are hearing about. Natural disaster is not about something new happening, or even about something unusual happening, but about something that has always happened and is inescapable for each of us—and more precisely, for me.
All death and destruction comes from the most cataclysmic event of history, the fall of man, and from the resulting just judgment of God.e[6] Our natural world groans under the resultant bondage.e[7] Believers, of all people, should learn to reconcile themselves to this fact. One pastor was reminded by God after the loss by flood of all his awards and letters from important people not to be concerned. Reportedly God said to him, “Don’t worry . . . I was going to burn them anyway.” Whether he heard these words directly or not, the sentiment was true.[8]
The certainty that death, decay, and destruction are going to happen anyway to all of us and to all of our things, however, does not eradicate the internal pain that believers may experience. Even Christ, who said, “Let not your heart be troubled,” was “distressed and troubled,” and “deeply grieved, to the point of death” by the weight of sin placed on Him. With perfect knowledge and absolute trust, He still worked out His peace with the cross on Gethsemane. Granted, His was an infinitely bigger burden than ours, but there is surely a lesson here.
Some of the greatest of saints have also been depressed about losses or disruptions (David, Elijah, Spurgeon, and Martin Lloyd Jones, etc.). Ongoing emotional troubles remind us that disaster of any sort is often an immense trial, spinning off secondary disasters, like hurricanes spin off tornadoes, even among believers. If this is so, we more-average saints must have much aid in understanding and coping with natural disaster when it affects us or those we love dearly. What can help?
When disaster occurs, the mental/emotional state of the believer is directly bound to his spiritual perception. Ultimately, and often immediately, believers can overcome a debilitating freefall into anxiety over what has transpired. It becomes the pastoral job to not only empathize, but to lead believers to have a biblical perspective about disaster and loss as soon as possible—preferably prior to the event occurring. It is concerning this perspective that I wish to direct our attention.
Nature Obeys God
The disciples said of Jesus, “. . . even the winds and the sea obey Him?”[9] This verse is often employed apologetically with skeptics for the purpose of proving that Jesus is actually God. The believing world has almost always asserted, in pacific times, that God controls nature. The farmer prays to God for rain for his dry fields, just as the Christian school teacher requests from God clear skies for the class picnic, because we assume that God has everything to do with it. But does this general, almost presupposed evangelical belief extend far enough when times are more difficult?
As an illustration of how God’s oversight of nature may be addressed, the Second London Baptist Confession clarifies the extent of God’s control in its first and second under “Divine Providence.” It is worth a careful reading:

God who, in infinite power and wisdom, has created all things, upholds, directs, controls and governs them, both animate and inanimate, great and small, by a providence supremely wise and holy, and in accordance with His infallible foreknowledge and the free and immutable decisions of His will. He fulfils the purposes for which He created them, so that His wisdom, power and justice, together with His infinite goodness and mercy, might be praised and glorified. (Job 38:11; Ps. 135:6; Isa. 46:10,11; Matt. 10:29-31; Eph. 1:11; Heb. 1:3)
Nothing happens by chance or outside the sphere of God’s providence. As God is the First Cause of all events, they happen immutably and infallibly according to His foreknowledge and decree, to which they stand related. Yet by His providence God so controls them, that second causes, operating either as fixed laws, or freely or in dependence upon other causes, play their part in bringing them about. (Gen. 8:22; Prov. 16:33; Acts 2:23)[10]

This historic confession has not overstated the biblical principle. The Psalmist speaks convincingly concerning the control of God over natural events:
Whatever the Lord pleases He does, in heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deep places. He causes the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth. He makes lightening for the rain; He brings the wind out of His treasuries.[11]
It was God who ordained each of the natural plagues on Egypt, for instance, including turning water to blood, filling the land with frogs, sending hail, and devastating locusts. Even Pharoah recognized this.[12]
Moses stretched out his staff toward the sky, and the Lord sent thunder and hail, and fire ran down to the earth. And the Lord rained hail on the land of Egypt.[13]
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Good deacons are humble, and sacrificial, and creatively constructive—and they’re also deeply happy. Their humility is a happy humility. Their sacrifices are glad sacrifices. Their initiative is not just willing, but cheerful and eager. They have found, like the Servant they follow, that joy not only fuels ministry to others, but blossoms from that ministry.

As surprised as we might be by divisiveness in the church, and as uncomfortable and maddening as it may feel at times, such cracks in the walls have dogged us from the beginning.
The kinds of cracks have varied from age to age and culture to culture, but give any congregation enough time—even the best of them—and cracks will emerge. They’re side effects of making covenants with fellow sinners—as unpleasant as they are unavoidable. It’s just part of keeping a home in a fallen world.
Many have tried hard to diagnose and treat the current cracks in our walls—politics and elections, mask mandates and rebellions, racial disparity and superiority, men’s and women’s roles in the home and beyond, domestic abuse and other moral failures, and so on—but many of them have overlooked or marginalized a missing ingredient to harmony. In fact, I can’t help but wonder if the wildfires in some pews are as fierce and contagious as they are because this piece seems so small in many of our eyes.
When God planted the first churches, he knew the cracks he’d find. He wrote them into our stories, in fact, because he knew that cracked but loving churches served his purposes better than ones with brand-new walls and pristine floors. He had planned the cracks, and he had plans for the cracks, and one of those plans was called deacons.
Strong Enough to Help
We first encounter deacons during a meal (which, as any normal family knows, is when fights often break out). As the early church began to meet and grow, Greek-speaking Jews who had been scattered outside of Israel (“Hellenists”) returned to Jerusalem to join the church and follow Jesus. After a while, though, they came and complained to the Hebrew-speaking apostles because Greek widows were not receiving the food they needed (Acts 6:1).
Urgent needs like this, as any church knows, require time and attention, pastoral sensitivity, and careful follow-through. This meant the leaders would have less time and attention for teaching and prayer, and they knew the church would suffer even more if that were the case (Acts 6:2). So, the apostles called the church to appoint seven men to make sure all were fed well. And because they did, “the word of God continued to increase, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem” (Acts 6:7).
How much or little we think of diaconal ministry today rests, in significant measure, on what problem we think those first proto-deacons were solving. Was this merely a matter of entrées and sides for some lonely and vulnerable women, or was the church facing a deeper, more sensitive threat?
Matt Smethurst, in his introduction to deacons, draws our attention to the greater dangers hiding beneath the dining tables:
How our churches react to conflict can make all the difference in whether our gospel witness is obstructed or accelerated. Acts 6 is a story of church conflict handled well…The seven weren’t merely deployed to solve a food problem. Food was the occasion, sure, but it wasn’t the deepest problem. The deepest problem was a sudden threat to church unity. (Deacons, 44, 52)
Cracks were suddenly surfacing and spreading. How could the church win the war for souls if there were wars within her walls? How could the word run if its people were mired in swamps of bitterness? The church didn’t merely need better waiters; it needed peace and healing. It needed men strong and wise enough to help mend fractures in the family.
Giants Bowing Low
Many might hear deacon and immediately think of dull or menial tasks that few people want to do—building maintaining, budget crunching, nursery cleaning, furnace repairing, meal serving. They might imagine a sort of junior-varsity team that relieves the pastors of lesser work. When the apostles saw those seven men, however, they saw something different in them—a stronger and more vibrant force for good, a noble and vital ministry.
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Hymns are Dominantly God-Centered. Most hymns that have lasted the test of time are God-centered hymns. Even songs about personal sanctification often have the intention to draw your eyes to Christ in the midst of your trials. This is the ultimate point isn’t it? A life experiencing hardship tests the saint’s commitment to resolutely keep God at the center, if it be to our personal pain or sorrow. Hymns wonderfully point me back to Christ.

There is nothing like a great summer BBQ with your friends and family. The laughter, the sun, the conversation, and, of course, the food. Many like me tend to gravitate around the grill in anticipation for the coals to turn white hot in order to perfectly cook their patties, hotdogs, and my personal favorite: a ribeye steak. But it’s not just any ribeye steak, it has to be perfectly seasoned. Whether it’s a store bought seasoning or homemade blend, every steak needs a good seasoning.
Seasoning brings out flavor, it should enhance the experience. Not enough robs you of enjoying the full potential of your steak. Too much seasoning, it detracts and whets the appetite for water and the imbalance of flavor ruins the experience.
In the same way seasoning impacts steak so too does music impact theology. I love it when theology is rich, deep, thorough—meaty. Still, there are temptations in doctrinally rich circles to dwindle down into cold orthodoxy, blandness. That’s why I believe music plays an important role in keeping theology palatable for the saint.
To be clear, music doesn’t change the theology in the same way seasoning doesn’t change the makeup of a steak. It will or can enhance it and draw out its beauty, but it doesn’t change it. Steak is steak with or without seasoning. Similarly, theology is theology with or without music. My point is that there’s a reason why Christians are commanded to sing (Eph 5:18). There’s a reason why God gave a hymnbook in His Word (the Psalms). It’s because music does something.
Personally, I’ve had some dark days in my recent history; not because of the pandemic or political/social unrest, but due to God’s sanctifying hand in bringing me through trials. In the past year or so, I’ve felt a wide range of emotions including doubt, fear, grief, sadness, hopeless, and anxiety. In all of this, I strongly believed in the rich doctrine of the preservation of the saint. I knew that God could not let me, would not let me go, and would lead me through the valley—and He has so far and I anticipate He will till the end. He has taught me a lot during this season.
One of the important things He has taught me is how He preserves His saints. I believe one of those ways has been through the rich seasoning of Christian lyrics and music that draw us back to Him and His word.
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