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Why is God Striking the Deep South?
Sermon by Brother
Harry Hardwick
 Every
time we think we have the Lord figured out, He throws us a curve ball.
That is why it is essential that we follow all of His edicts, no matter
how incomprehensible or downright unjust they may appear. There is
seemingly no rhyme or reason to His decisions to kill. God adored some
of the most heinous people in history and slaughtered those guilty of
the most mundane of miscues. By way of example only, God spared Noah and
his family from the Great Flood. And what was one of the first things
Noah did thereafter? He got rip-roaring drunk, stripped naked and passed
out so that one of his sons saw his (apparently sizable) tallywhacker.
Yet, it was the son who was punished,
being
turned black and becoming the world’s first slave (Genesis 9:20-25).
Lot, the only man the Lord allowed to escape the fire and brimstone of
Sodom and Gomorrah, offered his daughters to be gang-raped by a mob to
avoid letting the mob members have sex with other men (Genesis 19:4-8).
And then, as if to one-up Noah, Lot not only got drunk and showed his
tallywhacker to his daughters, he inserted it in and impregnated them
both. Yet, the New Testament describes Lot as a “righteous
man” (2 Peter 2:7). By contrast, the Lord turned Lot’s
wife into a pillar of salt just for being the world’s first rubbernecker
(Genesis 19:16).
In recent years, there actually appeared to be a
method to the Almighty’s mayhem. In 2004,
after SARS had failed to do the trick,
God wiped out tens of thousands of heathens in Asia, with
an earthquake and tsunami, then
repeated the feat seven years later in Japan, when the people continued
to reject The Christ. He did the same to Haiti for making
a pact with the devil, as Godly Pat Robertson
told us. The earthquake in Chile, like the swine flu in
Mexico, was designed to punish those
idol-worshippers who annoy the
Lord as much as anyone, even when they’re not boinking boys. And New
Orleans with Katrina? Take your pick of the debauchery he chose to
punish there. You might think it was the
rampant homosexuality scheduled to occur a week later
(though surely the omnipotent Lord wouldn’t have gotten his weeks mixed
up). Or perhaps you agree with several fundamentalist groups that God
was punishing the city for endorsing abortion, given that satellite
images of the storm looked just
like a fetus on radar. Of
course, if the latter were true, one would have to wonder why God hasn’t
offed 99 percent of the country by now. But I digress.
We all know that God is flooding the Mississippi river to punish
states that allow river boat gambling. That's not what I'm here to talk
about today because I'd just be stating the obvious. What I'm here to
talk about is the twirling fingers of the Lord! Tornadoes are God’s
preferred method of inflicting death and suffering on sinners when He’s
looking for a quick result. Jeremiah, chapter 30, verse 23 tells us:
"Behold, the whirlwind of the Lord goeth forth with fury, a
continuing whirlwind: it shall fall with pain upon the head of the
wicked." And chapter 40, verse 24 of Isaiah notes:
"Yea, they shall not be planted; yea, they shall not be sown: yea,
their stock shall not take root in the earth: and he shall also blow
upon them, and they shall wither, and the whirlwind shall take them away
as stubble."
This makes the tornadoes that recently ravaged the Deep South,
inexplicable. The South contains the most Christians per square mile
than anywhere else on earth, present company excluded. And yet, Alabama
was the hardest hit state. Alabama has managed to maintain its
evangelical roots and avoid the temptation to be progressive,
enlightened or all-embracing, or even to enter the 21st century, for
ages. The state still lives in the 1950s when times were simpler and
people were separate. A statue of the Confederate president continues to
grace the state capitol. Different people live in their own sections of
town, eat at their own restaurants and have their own barbers, doctors
and bus seats. The former chief justice of the state supreme court, Roy
Moore, loves the Lord so much that he violated God’s commandment against
idolatry to place a granite mausoleum of the Ten Commandments in the
courthouse building – a graven image so big it puts the monolithic sound
bytes in Exxon commercials to shame.
Perhaps Judge Moore’s greatest achievement was his concurring opinion
in a lesbian custody case in which Alabama’s high court predictably
granted all parental rights to the biological mother and told the lover
that she is worthless dung. But Judge Moore went even further,
suggesting homos should be executed.
“The State carries the power of the sword, that is, the
power to prohibit conduct with physical penalties, such as
confinement and even execution. It must use that power to
prevent the subversion of children toward this lifestyle, to not
encourage a criminal lifestyle.”1
And how did the state respond to this Godly man? By one of its
sitting federal judges removing the Ten Commandments from the supreme
court building without replacing the monument with anything comparable,
like a tower imprinted with the Book of Leviticus. And more
significantly, by the Alabama citizenry refusing even to let Judge Moore
be the GOP (God’s Own Party) nominee for governor. The apparently
“reforming” Republicans picked someone else. The vengeful Lord is
obviously not impressed. I hope Alabama (along with Mississippi,
Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia and the other Godly Southern states) have
learned their lesson and will stop so-called “progressing” like the rest
of this God-forsaken country is doing.
And, of course, once again, the Almighty expressed his disdain for
the very poor – those people so unintelligent, so talentless and so
lacking in ambition that they feel satisfied living in trailer parks.
There won’t be many used single-wides for sale in the Cotton State
(which has very few cotton stalks left).
Every last one of you had better remember that we are all disgusting,
despicable sinners who are born and even conceived into sin, and it is
only by the grace of God that we have been allowed to live this long.
God’s rather fickle grace for any of us could end at any time. There is
no predictability to His killing sprees. The best among us are even more
likely to suffer His wrath than the worst. It’s a shame the Deep South
failed to heed the words of the great Jonathan Edwards.
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