Haiti--Why God Sometimes Doesn't Help

I pointed out yesterday that Pat Robertson was merely citing basic Christian theology when he suggested that Haiti’s rejection of an exclusive relationship with the God of the Christian Bible may have brought her to grief two weeks ago.
I suspect that Mr. Robertson would be quick to agree that we Americans, so near and so rich, have an absolute obligation to help. Just as you would work to save the life of a drunken driver who had wrapped himself around a tree. You’d withhold any suggestion that he was at fault, and you’d work like a dog to keep him alive.
That’s another core tenet of Christianity: you work to retrieve a situation that may have been caused by folly or wickedness without a hint of recrimination. Christ said, “I came to seek and save the lost.” No matter that they had chosen to get themselves lost.
The fact is, as Christianity understands God and his relationship to men, Haiti wasn’t smacked by God for worshipping other deities (Voodoo); Haiti smacked herself. God needed to have nothing to do with it. He caused no hurt, and he was contractually UNABLE to prevent.
An example of God’s inability to help is found in one of the New Testament stories of Christ. We are told he went around healing the sick and the blind. But he came to one town where the people stubbornly refused to believe he could do it.
Christ said himself that he could not do any miraculous healings in that city because of the sheer power of its unbelief. Nothing. They were quite able, as human beings, to exercise their ancient contractual rights and prevent God from acting. That can still be true today.
If our Haitian brothers have chosen to be half Christian (part of the “bride of Christ”) and half something else (Voodoo), they are neither in his eyes. They have committed spiritual adultery. Until they say they are sorry)—and mean it—God will leave them to the mercies of their adulterous partner. He will tie his own hands.
Christians recognize this planet as a hostile place. Since Adam put it under new management—in the hands of someone who hates both God and mankind—it has become dangerous indeed. It is full of unpredictable volcanoes, storms, ice age cycles, earthquakes, viruses, tornadoes, hurricanes, Tsunami’s, poisonous snakes and dangerous beasts. How about disease bearing mosquitoes and other lethal pests?
(The Bible suggests over and over that this present, dangerous world is not the world that God made—it is a world that is now run by spiritual beings totally hostile to humans. This is one reason the Bible suggests man needs the constant protection of God.)
If Haitians truly chose to walk away from the Christian God in order to follow Voodoo, pact or no pact, then they are no longer under his protection. He doesn’t need to punish them—the planet and its new owner will do that all on its own.
This brings up another interesting point. What insurance companies are pleased to call, “Acts of God” are in most cases not his ACTIONS but rather his INACTION. He stands back, bound by his own contractual obligation to give humans free will.
Many Christians don’t like to think about that aspect of their faith. It would require them to have a much more intense and personal relationship with their God than they are comfortable with. Easier to believe he’s just a slightly senile, doting grandpa who defines love as “never having to say you’re sorry”. Or even to say anything at all.
This seems harsh. But it is basic Christianity. It was what Robertson was, however clumsily, trying to get across. (If you choose to walk away from a body guard on your own, bad things may well happen—but don’t blame the guard.) Biblically, Pat Robertson was not entirely wrong about Haiti, even if he got the wrong Napoleon.
God always weeps for those who die; sometimes he cannot help them.