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Don’t miss this. Please don’t miss this, because it is so common for sinners like you and me, in the face of natural moral disasters, to start treating God like whipping boy. People start posting, tweeting, commenting, blogging, crying out, How could God be good and allow this? Maybe God is weak and doesn’t have power to stop this. I don’t even think there is a God.
All along we fail to realize that the only reason we have breath in this gathering right now is because of the grace and mercy of Almighty God. The only reason. So don’t miss this. This is such a different way to think. It’s not the way the world thinks; it’s such a different way to think.
The only reason we as sinners are not cast away from God’s holy presence right now into eternal suffering is because His great mercy is keeping us. God, help us to realize the universal seriousness of all of our sin. And be careful, ladies and gentlemen, be very careful. Do not for an instant think that any person who has lost their life in this or that disaster, that any person who has had to flee their country as a refugee is a worse sinner than you.
We have this subtle, yet oh so sinful, tendency to look at what happens in the Middle East, or in this or that part of the world, and think we’re not as bad of a sinner as them, when the reality is, we are all sinners at the core. I urge you, do not let world events cause you to think of others as sinful and yourself as righteous. For that self–righteousness is, in and of itself, dreadfully sinful. Moral natural disasters remind us that we live in a world of sin, and we’re all sinners and we all deserve death . . . which means we all need the grace of Almighty God.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
