The Haiti Earthquake - The Challenge for Teachers

By Mr George Glanville

Posted on 20 January 2010

How could He do this to us? There is no God! This was the gut-wrenching cry of Remi Polevard, resident of Haiti, as his five children lay dead beneath the rubble of their home.

Teachers will be returning to school after the Christmas break to face the real and aching questions of students like - Where is God in all this? In 2004 it was the tsunami; in 2009 it was the Victorian bushfires; now it's Haiti.

At the time of the fires in Victoria twelve months ago, I wrote a short piece for this website and quoted John Blanchard's ‘Where is God when things go wrong?' (Evangelical Press 2005)

Soon after the events of 11 September 2001 I was asked, ‘Where was God when religious fanatics killed 2,800 people?' I replied, ‘Exactly where He was when religious fanatics killed his Son, Jesus Christ - in complete control of everything that happened.' Natural disasters and headline-making atrocities are wake-up calls, warning us that evil and suffering are real, life is brief and fragile, and death is certain. Even more loudly they urge us to prepare for a final day of reckoning.

A final day of reckoning. A day of judgment. Our media has taken up this theme. It is reported that the US evangelist, Pat Robinson said last week that Haiti had been cursed by a pact he said its slave founders made with the devil two centuries ago to overthrow their French rulers and become the world's first black republic, while some Voodoo followers see God's judgment on Haiti because of corruption among the country's mostly light-skinned elite.

So, is the devastation of Haiti the judgment of God? How does a Christian educator assist students to wrestle with such huge questions? Perhaps the temptation is to avoid the issue by  focusing on geology - the fractures in the earth's crust, and the deep tragedy that has unfolded. But this is not good enough. Christian educators must unpack God's point of view on such immense concerns. Christian educators must be biblically literate as well as deeply compassionate.

The whole world and all of us, including our students and their parents, are under God's judgment. We must not shut our eyes to this reality. Yet God in His mercy, in the person of His Son, has taken upon Himself the full force of that judgment (which we deserve) in the horrifying agony of His death on the cross. And because He died and rose again, we who believe in Him can have confidence that God's judgment means the day is coming when suffering and evil will be thoroughly and finally disposed of.

When we think of the suffering of the Haitian people we must point our students in the direction of the suffering Son of God.