As I’ve read the news over the past week or so, I am blown away by the magnitude of just two natural disasters, the cyclone in Myanmar and the recent earthquake in China. Upwards of 100,000 people may have perished in Myanmar, and many more surely will as aid is very slowly being given. Multiple tens of thousands have died in China. In one city alone, over 18,000 people were buried. This is enormous suffering and loss of human life. So many bad things happen in this world. People get diagnosed with cancer every day. Babies die. Children starve to death. It’s not hard to see how the Preacher declared, “Vanity of vanities…all is vanity.”

When I stop to consider these atrocities, I can’t help but ask the question, why? Why should things be this way and not better? Why couldn’t we live in a world without natural disasters, starvation, sickness, and disease? The answer, I think, is astounding and difficult. The answer to the why is sin. Because our first father sinned, the curse of the Almighty fell upon all creation. That which was very good was damned by God. Sin is so awful in the sight of God that He pronounced His divine anathema on created order.

As awful as that sounds, there is great beauty in this pronouncement as well. In Romans 8:20, Paul puts it this way, “For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope…” Our wonderful God didn’t just damn us and leave us be. The curse came that we might see the futility of sin…the emptiness of sin…the horror of sin. It came that we might be directed to God and look to Jesus for our deliverance from the futility of this world.  That is the hope that the curse is to bring about, the hope of deliverance, the hope of Jesus.

John Piper puts it this way in a sermon that I highly recommend that you listen to with 45 minutes of free time: The meaning of all misery in the world is that sin is horrific. All natural evil is a statement about the horror of moral evil. If you see a suffering in the world that is unspeakably horrible, let it make you shudder at how unspeakably horrible sin is and how unspeakably holy God is, which sin falls short of.

So, when we look around and see awful pain and suffering, we ought to be reminded of the vileness of sin, the pain that it brings, the utter futility of it and also have our minds directed to the blessed hope that is in Jesus for all who are believing. No longer is life itself futile, for we have a mighty hope!