by Daniel Harrison
Rickfords Hill Publishing
ISBN 978-1-905044-16-0
www.tabernaclebooks.com
Review by Rev Philip Foster
It was CS Lewis who wrote that pain is God’s megaphone. In this book we are reminded that natural disasters are God’s air raid warnings for the nations.
This book should (I am tempted to write, must) be read by every committed Christian. It is a call to arms for evangelism, but evangelism that is God centred and Bible centred, not the milk and water ‘sharing’ of a far too sweetened Gospel tailored to meet modern sensibilities.
For centuries — perhaps since Milton wrote ‘Paradise Lost’ to ‘justify the ways of God to man’ (as if God needed Milton’s help) — Christians have tended to retreat before the humanist challenge of why God, if there is a God, should allow suffering, in particular through natural disasters. The argument, ‘If God is all powerful, then he can’t be good; if he is good he can’t then be all powerful or he would stop these things happening’ has swept away much shallow evangelism and emptied churches.
This book blows such sophistry out of the water.
The author is no armchair theologian—he is a front line evangelist, so what he writes he has put into practice.
The book’s message is rooted in the biblical revelation of God’s true nature: holy, righteous, just, loving and merciful Creator and Redeemer. He is always and everywhere sustaining his Creation, therefore there are no accidents or weather events, earthquakes or other disasters that are not his will. It is perhaps of interest to remember that such events, in the commercial world, are still called ‘acts of God’.
The book explains that God remains faithful to his covenant people, the Jewish nation, and that when other nations harm his people and their covenant he has acted and will act in judgement on those nations. The book contains a vast array of challenging testimony and information about ‘natural’ disasters acting as judgements on nations, both when they depart from God’s fundamental laws and when they attack his people.
The book is permeated with sound biblical exposition concerning weather events, along with an analysis of God’s judgements throughout history.
It is a call to truly understand who God is, a call to understand his judgements and learn from them.
It is also a call to pray for our nation and its apostate leaders and, above all, a call to proclaim the true Gospel to an increasingly wicked and perverse generation.
Rev Philip Foster is the author of ‘While the Earth Endures: Creation, Cosmology and Climate Change’ obtainable from philip.foster17@ntlworld.com
‘God speaks through hurricanes’ can be ordered through the catalogue enclosed with this newspaper