Dozens of people dead. Millions without power or gasoline. Billions of dollars in destroyed homes and businesses. Lives ruined. Memories lost. Hurricane Sandy has done its damage.

The questions that arise from such a tragedy are almost universal. “Why? Why does God allow such devastation? Such intolerable suffering? Why does God inflict such carnage on men and women who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

I will listen to almost any explanation for human suffering, but there is one for which I have very little patience. Let me give you an example. After the 9/11 attacks that tore down the World Trade Center, internationally known religious leaders claimed that this was the righteous judgment of God. The United States was being punished for its growing acceptance of homosexuals. I have heard the same thing about Sandy.

The reasoning goes something like this: All events are manifested by God’s design or God’s permission, so human tragedies are obviously examples of God’s judgment. Such reasoning is in my view, faulty at best, and dangerous at worst, as it leads to the charges of arrogance and intolerance that doubters so often throw at Christians, and has been used to justify everything from the Spanish Inquisition to the Salem witch trials. The value of such pronouncements may not be nonexistent, but it is so close that I cannot tell the difference.

It is not surprising that Christians see God’s hand at work in horrific tragedy. We want to see it. It helps us understand. It adds meaning to the event. Suffering without meaning can be too painful to contemplate, so we see meaning or purpose or God’s judgment. But just because we want to see it does not mean it is there. A picture floated around the internet after 9/11 in which many saw the smiling face of Satan rising in the smoke and ashes. We occasionally see the face of Jesus in an oddly shaped potato.

Interpreters of God’s judgment claim to know the meaning of present events with no knowledge of how they will affect the future, because we are not given to know the future. Even our knowledge of the past is limited, viewed through a glass darkly. We strain to see the future through a window painted black, sealed in a locked door. How do purveyors of God’s intentions draw their conclusions from such incomplete information? It is like walking out of an action movie before the final scene. You may guess at the ending, and you may be right, but you cannot really judge the importance of any particular event in the movie until you know who gets blown up at the end. In this mortal life, at least, we don’t know who gets blown up at the end.

If God chooses to exercise his authority, and pass judgment on an unsuspecting crowd, he is most likely to keep that fact to himself. He passed it along to precious few in the Hebrew scriptures, and fewer still in the New Testament record. I suspect that information is even harder to come by in the noisy and distracted twenty-first century.

Anyone who has actually received a divine revelation of God’s purpose may be excused from this part of the discussion. Their knowledge of God’s intentions certainly surpasses mine, if the revelation is real. I am concerned with the modern day seers who are certain they know the will of God simply because they are certain of what God’s will should be. They never seem to realize that their theological logic may be different than God’s. To put it bluntly, without divine revelation, we cannot know God’s purpose with any degree of certainty, and we delude ourselves if we think we do.

Please understand that I do not mean to discount the ability or authority of God to intervene in human lives. I have personally felt the divine touch in my life more than once. Skeptics may chuckle and shake their heads, but I know the divine presence is real. My skepticism extends mainly to those pious folks who feel compelled to tell the rest of us what God is doing at any given moment. They could be right, of course, but the smart money is against it.

Please read more thoughts about God and suffering and faith and joy and various other topics in God and Other Things by clicking on the Buy the Book tab on the home page.  Thanks.