THE WISDOM AND POWER OF GOD PT. 2
Mike Cunningham
October 19,2014

In my devotional, “If You Were God,” I said: “If you and I had God’s power we would change many things, but if we had God’s wisdom we wouldn’t change anything!” (1)

When I ended last Sunday’s sermon, I knew I would have my work cut out for me with this morning’s. How our Heavenly Father, One who is perfect in love and infinite in wisdom and power, how He could allow the horrible events that I’ll be speaking about in this sermon is beyond my comprehension. For instance,

On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 in the afternoon a 9.0 magnitude earthquake shook the east coast of Japan for three to five minutes. Roads buckled, bridges cracked, bookcases toppled, some buildings collapsed. The earthquake had such force that, incredibly, it jolted Japan’s largest island some eight feet closer to North America. All was still for forty-five minutes as residents picked themselves up and surveyed the damage.

Then came the wave.

A wall of water, first taking shape far out in the ocean by the quake’s epicenter, accelerated to 500 mph as it sped toward land. The coastal region of Tohoku had subsided two feet during the quake, opening wide the gate for the onrushing wave, so that the tsunami crashed over protective sea walls like a giant stepping over a curb.

Video’s shot on iPhones by eyewitnesses (some retrieved from corpses) resemble the special-effects scenes from a horror movie: ships, houses, and trucks, tossed around like toys; a modern airport suddenly submerged under water; a nuclear reactor tower exploding in a thick black cloud.

A British high school teacher heard emergency sirens, looked out on the ocean, and saw a towering midst. “This must have been a spray from the tsunami, but it looked so awesome and strange,” he said. “It was as if there had been a massive fire on the ocean, and above it were vast rolling white clouds of smoke. In it, I could see thousands of bits, floating. They must have been buildings, ships, cars-but they looked so tiny. It was all so awesome and strange,” that my brain couldn’t compute.” He led his forty-two students to safety, but more than a hundred others in the school perished that day while dutifully awaiting instructions from their teachers.

A pastor was checking for earthquake damage in his home when he got a frantic text message from his daughter in Tokyo: “Escape! Escape! Escape!” It seemed odd at the time during the forty-five minute interlude of calm, but without electricity he had no local radio source and so decided to follow her advice and evacuate. Swept along the wave in his car like a surfer, he landed in the midst of a debris field where he lived inside his car for two days before rescuers found him.

Another pastor fled with his wife to high ground after the earthquake. A sudden snow squall hit just as the tsunami approached, and for a few minutes they could see nothing from their safe perch. They heard the wave roll in, then surge back out to sea carrying human bodies and tons of debris, the backwash as dangerous as the initial wave. Seventeen times it rolled in and washed back out, like water sloshing in a bathtub. Sixteen of the times they heard frantic cries for help, then at last a loud sucking sound as if from a huge drain, then silence. When the snow cloud passed, they looked out over a neighborhood utterly destroyed, not a building left, only the cross from their church sticking up at an unnatural angle like a broken bone. A few scraggly trees stood by the each, sentinels of what the day before had been a dense forest.

When the giant wave found a sheltered cove tucked among hills, it increased in velocity and force as a huge volume of water poured into the narrow opening. On that flat land the wave measured ten to thirty feet high; in the hilly cove it rose to the unimaginable height of a twelve-story building. Given their history with tsunamis, the Japanese had well organized evacuation sites-schools-hospitals, senior citizens’ centers-and many residents fled to these for shelter when the warning sirens sounded. No one had anticipated a tsunami so colossal, however, and in a cruel irony, many hundreds died in the very buildings meant to save them.

In one senior citizens’ center situated high on a hill, forty-seven seniors died; today a pile of wheelchairs, mattresses, and furniture marks a grim memorial. In the same town scores of people climbed to the roof of a three-story evacuation center, but only a few managed to avoid getting swept away by clinging to railings and a television antenna. In an elementary school seventy-four students died as school officials were sorting out procedures for leading them up a hill just behind the school. Some of the children broke free to scramble upward across snowy ground, only to loose their footing and slip into the wave’s deadly maw.

Exactly one year after the earthquake and tsunami, I spent several days visiting the affected area along with some staff from my Japanese publisher. I had never seen such destruction up close. Even a year later the landscape looked sere, barren, as if from another planet. I asked a few questions of my hosts, but moistly I stared out the window and tried to absorb the immensity of their nation’s tragedy. Others in the van said little, and I could not read their faces. I thought of the line from the poet Emily Dickinson: “After great pain a formal feeling comes.”

My own feelings were far from formal. After touring the devastated peninsula once known for its quaint fishing villages, I was scheduled to speak on “Where is God when it hurts?” to somber gatherings in the Tohoku region and also at a national prayer meeting in Tokyo. What could I say to such people, a visitor from another country touching down in the midst of their pain? Most Japanese do not even believe in God. How could I point them to the God of grace and mercy I have learned to love, who seemed very far away from such a scene?

The industrious Japanese had repaired or replaced many roads, raising several feet above the sunken land. Crews had removed most of the lumber and rubble from the million damaged buildings, only the most durable structures remained standing, ghost buildings with broken windows and mud-splattered, crumbling walls. Artificial mountains of debris sullied the landscape, some of them seventy feet high and the dimensions of a city block.

Other parts of Japan had resisted accepting the twenty-three million tons of debris for incineration from the crippled nuclear power plant. “I wonder how many automobiles were destroyed,” I said aloud as we passed yet another mound of crushed vehicles. Immediately a Japanese colleague pulled out his smart phone and goggled the answer: 410,000.

Driving into one town we turned a corner, there sat a huge freighter, two-thirds the length of a football field, beached on the concrete foundations of what used to be a residential area. No one could figure out how to get it back to the ocean half a mile away. Some seventeen ships and a thousand smaller fishing boats had washed ashore in that town, and many remained where the tsunami had incongruously deposited them-in the middle of a rice paddy, atop a hotel, on the roof of a hospital.

CNN and other news sources gauge disasters by statistics, and by any measure the tsunami of 2011 ranks as one of the most costly in human lives and financial loss. On the ground, though, I saw the disaster as a collection of individual personal stories, not as statistics. The man who watched helplessly from a tall building as his wife and children floated away in their house. Another family, whose house slammed into a bridge, gave all eight family members a chance to leap to safety. Seven employees of a fish-processing plant who jumped into a van and drove toward high ground, only to get stuck in traffic gridlock and have the tsunami churn the van like an object in a washing machine, killing five of them.

I spoke with a man who lived on the coast near Sendai and spent four nights on the roof with his wife. Downstairs all was flooded, and the two resorted to eating dog food in order to stay alive. Several times he tried to leave but found it impossible to wade through the chest-high, frigid water. The first time he stepped into the water he felt a sharp pain in his side: falling debris had broken two of his ribs during the earthquake, an injury he had not even noticed. “Mainly I remember the freezing cold,” he said. “We shivered in wet cloths, with no heat and no food, waiting for rescue from the roof.”

A few heartwarming stories of survival brought hope in the first days after the tsunami. An eighty-year-old grandmother and her teenage grandson survived nine days before being discovered, hypothermic but uninjured. A rescue helicopter spotted a sixty-year-old man floating on the roof of his house ten miles offshore. Of course we only hear the stories from survivors and can barely imagine the details of the nineteen thousand who died. Emergency response crews who had geared up to treat the injured found relatively few; such is the force of a tsunami that most of its victims get swept away.

Even now, enormous problems remain. The government is still debating which towns to rebuild and which to abandon as too vulnerable. A cloud of fear and gloom hangs over the entire area. As one councilor told me, “I’ve learned that PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] is a misnomer. After something like the tsunami, that syndrome is a sign of health, not a disorder. Who wouldn’t feel trauma and stress?” Authorities worry about the Japanese suicide rate, already among the world’s highest.

And then there’s Fukushima, the site of the nuclear power plant that still dominates the news in Japan. As we neared the area, a portable Geiger counter ticked off the amount of micro Sieverts per hour we were receiving. Unlike the scenes of destruction, in that region, houses, shops, temples, and office buildings stand intact, untouched by the wave but void of human inhabitants. Due to radiation and the danger of further meltdown, officials have declared a “no go” area where only stray animals and abandoned pets wander the streets. Within Japan former residents of Fukushima have become pariahs. Some hospitals refuse to treat them, and other regions hesitate to hire employees from that area. A mortician became a local hero when he agreed to prepare the bodies of those who had died, an important ritual in Japan, but a job no one dared accept for fear of contamination. “Don’t have children!” Fukushima survivors tell their own children, because they are fearful of genetic defects.

Stoical and understated by nature, most survivors related their stories to me in flat, unemotional tones. One woman was different. She had driven more than an hour at night over temporary roads to a service in a church that, its sanctuary destroyed, now meets in a printing plant. In a cosmetic style peculiar to Japan, she wore thick white facial makeup, like a china doll. Her piecing dark eyes rarely blinked. “I was buried in a pile of garbage and rubble for two days!” she said. “Then I saw a hand reaching down like this,” and she suddenly seized my hand in a most un-Japanese like gesture. “I grabbed the hand that pulled me out. I lost everything-my family, my friends, my town. No one wants to go back. The town no longer exists. Please don’t forget us! They forget me for days, now they forget my town. I want to know why!” (2)

And you and I would ask the question from my devotional, “If You and I had God’s power we would change many things, but if we had God’s wisdom, we wouldn’t change anything! I don’t know about you folks but if I had God’s power I would have prevented the earthquake and tsunami from happening. I couldn’t do otherwise and retain my sanity.

Concerning God’s Sovereignty and power, A. W. Tozer in his classic “The Knowledge of the Holy” begins with the Book of Revelation and says that,

In the time of his vision John the Revelator heard the voice of many waters and as the voice of mighty thundering sounding throughout the universe, and what the voice proclaimed was the sovereignty and omnipotence of God: “Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigns.”

Sovereignty and omnipotence must go together. One cannot exist without the other. To reign, God must have power, and to reign sovereignly, He must have all power. And that is what omnipotence means, having all power. The word derives from the Latin and is identical in meaning with the more familiar almighty that we have from the Anglo-Saxon. This latter word occurs fifty-six times in our English Bible and is never used of anyone but God. He alone is almighty.

God possesses what no creature can: an incomprehensible abundance of power, a potency that is absolute. This we know by divine revelation, but once known, it is recognized as being in full accord with reason. Grant that God is infinite and self-existent and we see at once that He must be all-powerful as well, and reason kneels to worship before the divine omnipotence. “Power belongs to God,” says the psalmist, and Paul the apostle declares that nature itself gives evidence of the eternal power of the Godhead (Romans 1:20). From this knowledge we reason to the omnipotence of God this way: God has power. Since God is also infinite, whatever He has must be unlimited; therefor God has limitless power. He is omnipotent. We also see that God the self-existent Creator is the source of all the power there is, and since a source must be at least equal to anything that emanates from it, God is of necessity equal to all the power there is, and this is to say that He is omnipotent.

God has delegated power to His creatures, but being self-sufficient, He cannot relinquish anything of His perfections with power being one of them. He has never surrendered the least iota of His power. He gives but He does not give away. All that He gives remains His and returns to Him again. He must always remain what He has forever been, the Lord God omnipotent.

You cannot read the Scriptures sympathetically without noticing the radical disparity between the outlook of the men in the Bible and that of modern man. Today we are suffering from a secularized mentality. Where the sacred writers saw God, we see the laws of nature. Their world was fully populated ours is all but empty. Their world was alive and personal; ours is impersonal and dead. God ruled their world; ours is ruled by the laws of nature and we are always removed from the presence of God.

What are these laws of nature that have displaced God in the minds of millions? Law has two meanings. One is an external rule enforced by authority, such as the common rule against robbery and assault. The word is also used to denote the uniform way things act in the universe, but this second use of the word is erroneous. What we see in nature is simply the paths God’s power and wisdom take through creation. These are actually and not laws, but we call them laws by analogy with the arbitrary laws of society.

Science observes how the power of God operates, discovers a regular pattern somewhere and fixes it as a “law.” The uniformity of God’s activities in His creation enables the scientist to predict the course of natural phenomena. The trustworthiness of God’s behavior in His world is the foundation of all scientific truth. Upon it the scientist rests his faith and from there he goes on to achieve great and useful things in such fields as those of navigation, chemistry, agriculture, and the medical arts.

Religion on the other hand, goes back of nature to God. It is concerned not with the footprints of God along the paths of creation, but with the One who treads the paths. Religion is primarily interested in the One who is the source of all things, the master of every phenomenon.

Omnipotence is not a name given to the sum of all power, but an attribute of a personal God whom we Christians believe to be the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Everyone who believes in Him will obtain eternal life. The worshiping man finds this knowledge to be a source of wonderful strength for his inner life. His faith rises to take the great leap upward into the fellowship of Him who can do what ever He wants to do, for which nothing is hard or difficult because He possesses absolute power.

Since He has at His command all the power in the universe, the Lord God omnipotent can do anything. All of His acts are done without effort. He expends no energy that must be replenished. His self-sufficiency makes it unnecessary for Him to look outside of Himself for a renewal of strength. All the power required for accomplishing everything that He wants to accomplish lies in the undiminished fullness in His own infinite being.

All I can say at this point is that I’m glad that I’m not God. I’m sure I’ll have a lot of questions to ask Him when He brings me home. Until then, I’m going to trust Him with the faith that He so graciously gave me.

Lord willing, next week….

If You Were God, Copyright 2014 by Mike Cunningham, Sr.
The Question That Never Goes Away, Copyright 2013 by Philip Yancey.
The Knowledge Of The Holy, Copyright 1961 by A W. Tozer.