On March 11 2011, Japan was rocked by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and a powerful tsunami. Of what relevance was the gospel?
We were in Shichigahama when the tsunami hit. We had many opportunities to share the gospel afterwards.
Handing out relief supplies and helping people in need gave us an open door to people’s hearts and we hoped that many Japanese would be more open to the gospel.
Japan is the world’s largest unreached people group at 127 million, with just 0.25% being Christians, and the greatest need is still the gospel. As church member Emiko pointed out on the Sunday following the disaster, thousands of people died in the tsunami, but 30,000 have been committing suicide every year. As always in Japan, our initial approach when we tell the gospel is to say that God is Creator. This often resonates with people who have lost everything to the power of nature, because the little local gods or ancestors were quite powerless to protect against such a disaster. Here are some further thoughts.
1. God is sovereign
We should be proud of that fact. I was speaking to a Japanese man in an evacuation centre who claimed to be a Buddhist and he asked me: ‘Why did God send the tsunami?’ Now Buddhists don’t believe in any god, and he agreed with me that he was being inconsistent. But it showed the truth of Romans 1.20: ‘For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse’. It doesn’t do the proclamation of the gospel any favours to be embarrassed about the fact that God sent the tsunami. Even non-Christians know this in their hearts.
2. God is merciful
So we should be urgent. I was asked if God would do the same to England. The questioner expected me to reply: ‘God punished Japan because it is so bad but he wouldn’t do the same to a Christian country like England’. The truth is quite different, I’m sure. God was being merciful to Japan, giving it an urgent summons to repent and return to him. Jesus interprets local disasters as a call to the survivors to repent (Luke 13.1-5). Interestingly, the right-wing Shinto governor of Tokyo, Ishihara, said the disaster was a punishment from heaven. (He is also being inconsistent because Shintoists are not supposed to believe in a personal Creator, or sin.) But if God did pour out his wrath he would have wiped out the whole country, also the NE coastal areas weren’t more sinful than the rest. So it is not a punishment; rather, a severe but loving warning.
While we can be clear about the broad picture we cannot pretend to know why one family escaped while another lost everything. I have often asked myself: ‘Why this person, Lord?’ While God keeps us in the dark about the details, we clearly know that, in love, he is calling the Japanese to himself. Incidentally the man in the evacuation centre agreed with me that Japan needs to repent, but he stopped short of doing it himself!
3. God is acting
So we should be bold. The big prayer request in the early church was for boldness in telling the gospel: ‘Now, Lord ... enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness’ (Acts 4.29). They seem to have been bold up until then but they knew it was still their great need. How often do we hear that prayer in our prayer meetings, even though our need is greater?
The Rev. Takata was surveying the tsunami destruction at Shichigahama and said: ‘This is our last chance’. I said: ‘What do you mean?’ And he replied: ‘If the Japanese church doesn’t use this opportunity, God will give up on us’. Paul calls us co-workers (co-operators, 2 Corinthians 6.1) with God. But we must not be unco-operative co-workers!
4. God wants us to love others
When fellow-Christians suffer we think that God is testing them. That may be true, but he may also be testing us to see how we respond to their need. Let us love Japanese Christians. And even though we have never met them let us pray for them.
5. God is worthy of praise
So let’s be Christ-centred. We got a lot of praise for handing out relief supplies and people thanked us profusely. But let us point people to Christ. It is not enough to say, ‘Jesus died for your sins’, if we don’t immediately add, ‘and I am a sinner too, probably worse than you, and have been forgiven much’. Otherwise we create the false impression that Christians do this relief because it is in their genes, that church is a no-go zone for sinners, that becoming a Christian is out of reach for ordinary people and we steal God’s glory for ourselves.
Rod and Glenda Thomas have been church planting in Japan with OMF since 1987.
