Are recent natural disasters signs?
Question:
What about the sign that is happening in recent times where natural disasters become such a frequent thing? What is your view toward it?
Answer:
There is built within your question an assumption that frequent natural disasters are a sign. A sign of what, I'm not told, but it obviously must be a sign about something.
The answer is that I'm not privy to God's plans, outside of what He has chosen to reveal in His word. The problem is that we have a tendency to assume that there must be meaning to every event that happens in life. But the Bible states that this is not necessarily so. There is such a thing as random events. "I returned and saw under the sun that - the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, nor favor to men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all" (Ecclesiastes 9:11).
People of Jesus' day made the same false assumption. A tower fell in Jerusalem, killing a number of people. "Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them, do you think that they were worse sinners than all other men who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, no ..." (Luke 13:4-5). The falsehood is assuming that bad things only happen to bad people. The entire book of Job was written to dispel this notion. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and those bad things are even allowed by God as a test.
Could a natural disaster be a divine punishment from God? Yes. Such has occurred in the past. But are all natural disasters divine punishments? Here the answer is clearly "no." But without God telling us, we are only left to guess which is which; and given mankind's history of accuracy, I would say that most often people guess wrong.
