Katrina: God meant it for good

[made_alive]

God is so merciful to spare us in Katrina so that we might know a smigget of His infinate glory. piper was the first person i really heard tell me that God does not cause suffering without design. so i hope you guys will read this. There is no injustice with God, and even in all this He is loving and worthy of the magnification of His glory that is

Comments

[essius]

"For the sake of My name I delay My wrath, And for My praise I restrain it for you, In order not to cut you off."-isaiah 48:9

This verse is not germane to my claim. What purpose is there in citing it?

of course theres a special intrinsic purpose for all things, and the purpose for all things is His glory. for Gods glory He pours out His wrath and for His glory He has mercy on us and restrains His wrath.

God could be glorified in infinitely many ways, so giving a general purpose to all existence doesn't nail down the specific purpose for one thing being the case and not the other. Furthermore, not everything is intrinsically valuable. What intrinsic value does Satan have? None that I can tell. All his value is instrumental. Also, there may be events that God does not will as instrumentally valuable in themselves, but which are nevertheless an inevitable byproduct of something else that serves as a means to an end.

it isnt superstion to recognize Gods hand in all things even disaster, it is a biblical response.

Yes, but thinking that God's hand is in all things in a certain way, thinking that he wills something as intrinsically valuable when it may just be a necessary byproduct of some means to an actually intrinsically valuable good, that is superstitious.

"If a trumpet is blown in a city will not the people tremble? If a calamity occurs in a city has not the Lord done it?"-amos 3:6

God is the existential Cause of all substance and the Cause of all movement (and thus by those two facts he is the ultimate Cause of all events-though not always the immediate cause). I do not deny any of this. I do deny that everything God actualizes is an intrinsic good.

i believe the world is how it is because of how glorious it will be once we are set free from corruption. and that is why i say God means Katrina for good because His glory is revealed. it is revealed in this present time as we see the mighty hand of God displayed in outrageous disasters. and it will be seen when He we are finally free from corruption.

God could reveal his glory in other ways. There are infinitely many ways for him to reveal his glory. Why he has actuated this world and not another is a mystery. But Katrina is not an intrinsic good. It is, if anything, only instrumentally valuable, and possibly not even that-possibly it is a byproduct of some means to an instrumental good. We may say that God intends all things for good, but that doesn't mean we know what specifically is good about a certain state of affairs.

if the ultimate good is that God be glorified, His obligation to perform good state of affairs means that He glorifies Himself in all things, whether it be in His mercy or in His justice.

I have no evidence that the divine motivation behind Katrina was to mete out judgment on the New Orleaners.

[made_alive]

hmm. either im not smart or that didnt make sense, im willing to give you the benefit of the doubt. my only point in citing that scripture ["For the sake of My name I delay My wrath, And for My praise I restrain it for you, In order not to cut you off."-isaiah 48:9 ] was to say that there is purpose in katrina.

For His names sake. This is not a piper thing. scripture declares it. that the true reason behind disaster is that we would look to God realizing that He is worthy of the glory that His actions bring Him.

"For My own sake, for My own sake, I will act; For how can My name be profaned? And My glory I will not give to another."-isaiah 48:11

im not saying katrinas purpose is that New Orleans is being judged for there peoples actions, i am saying that we as in the human race are enslaved to corruption and while God does not find pleasure in the death of any, He acts for His own names sake, for the sake of His glory being revealed.

[essius]

there is purpose in katrina.

But this isn't clearly the case. Not everything that happens has purpose. Let me use a human analogy. I create a fridge to keep my apples cool. I use certain matter, give it a certain form, and design it according to my purpose for it. But there are certain things that are not specified in the design plan that are nevertheless a function of the way it is designed. E.g., it serves as an excellent paper weight, though that is not its purpose. It will kill a person if it falls on them, though I didn't create it with that purpose in mind. Etc.

So possibly God created the universe with a certain purpose, without specifying the purpose of certain elements of the universe. If I create a wrench, do all the parts of the wrench have purpose, or is it the wrench it self, as a whole, that has purpose? Some things only have purpose when conjoined with other things, it would appear.

The fact of the matter is this: if there is purpose to Katrina, we don't know that it is the case-and if we did know that there was purpose to Katrina, we wouldn't necessarily know what that purpose would be. (If you're really superstitious, you think that the way you blink your eyes gives glory to God, whereas in fact God could have created a world in which you blink your eyes one less or one more time than you do in this one, without changing his glory.)