In this special episode of The Denison Forum Podcast, Dr. Jim Denison and Dr. Mark Turman respond to the devastating floods in Kerrville, Texas, and the surrounding area. Offering both pastoral wisdom and biblical insight, they wrestle with the hard questions that arise in moments of suffering: Why does God allow disasters like this? How can we respond with faith, compassion, and hope?
Whether you’re grieving personally or looking for ways to support others, this conversation offers clarity, comfort, and encouragement rooted in God’s word. Join us as we reflect, pray, and consider how to be the presence of Christ in the midst of crisis.
Topics
- (03:00): Personal reflections and theological questions
- (03:55): Stories of heroism and personal loss
- (09:35): The challenge of compassion fatigue
- (11:20): Spiritual guidance and coping mechanisms
- (17:52): The mystery of sharing in Christ’s sufferings
- (22:02): Biblical stories for comfort and understanding
- (29:23): Reconciling tragedy and heroic salvation
- (31:46): The mystery of God’s will
- (35:51): Faith amidst suffering
- (44:49): Loving God and others in times of grief
- (49:50): Concluding thoughts and encouragement
Resources
- Ask Us Anything: [email protected]
- How has Denison Forum impacted your faith?
- Subscribe to The Daily Article by Dr. Jim Denison
- Texas Flood Hero, Camp Mystic Director Makes Ultimate Sacrifice: ‘Just Who He Was’
- Camp Mystic director dies trying to save kids during flood
- Why does God allow innocent suffering? • Denison Forum
- Making Sense of Suffering
- An honest approach to the mystery of suffering • Denison Forum
- Why a good God must allow even innocent suffering to exist
- What does the Bible say about suffering? • Denison Forum
- When you’re disappointed by God
About Dr. Jim Denison
Jim Denison, PhD, is a cultural theologian and the founder and CEO of Denison Ministries. He speaks biblically into significant cultural issues at Denison Forum. He is the chief author of The Daily Article and has written more than 30 books, including The Coming Tsunami, the Biblical Insight to Tough Questions series, and The Fifth Great Awakening.
About Dr. Mark Turman
Mark Turman, DMin, serves as the Executive Director of Denison Forum, where he leads with a passion for equipping believers to navigate today’s complex culture with biblical truth. He is best known as the host of The Denison Forum Podcast and the lead pastor of the Possum Kingdom Chapel, the in-person congregation of Denison Ministries.
Dr. Turman is the coauthor of Sacred Sexuality: Reclaiming God’s Design and Who Am I? What the Bible Says About Identity and Why it Matters. He earned his undergraduate degree from Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas, and received his Master of Divinity from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. He later completed his Doctor of Ministry at George W. Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University in Waco.
Before joining Denison Forum, Mark served as a pastor for 35 years, including 25 years as the founding pastor of Crosspoint Church in McKinney, Texas.
Mark and his high school sweetheart, Judi, married in 1986. They are proud parents of two adult children and grandparents to three grandchildren.
About Denison Forum
Denison Forum exists to thoughtfully engage the issues of the day from a biblical perspective through The Daily Article email newsletter and podcast, The Denison Forum Podcast, as well as many books and additional resources.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
NOTE: This transcript was AI-generated and has not been fully edited.
Dr. Mark Turman: [00:00:00] This is the Denison Forum podcast. I’m Mark Turman, executive director of Denison Forum, and today we’re coming to you with a special edition podcast as we talk about and grieve together. And think together and pray together about the recent tragedy of the Hill Country floods in Kerrville, Texas and Kerr County in the surrounding area.
As you undoubtedly probably know with all of the news the last few days, starting on July 4th, if you were to draw a line from San Angelo, Texas out in West Texas, to San Antonio to the south, up through Austin, all the way to Waco, and then back over to San Angelo, there has been a wide widespread disaster of flooding along, not only the Guadalupe River, but several other rivers in that same area, including Colorado.
And at this point as we are having this conversation the numbers are just continuing to rise. [00:01:00] 82 people who have lost their lives, including 27 campers and counselors from what we have now all come to know as Camp Mystic just outside of Kerrville. And so Dr. Jim Denison and I wanted to sit down and talk and have a conversation that we hope will be.
Comforting and strengthening to you in a pastoral way. We’ll talk about some practical issues as well as some theological questions that all of us as Christians and even those who are not Christians, are wrestling with and struggling with in many ways, and we hope today that we can be useful to you.
Our goal, our desire, our passion, is to bring you biblical understanding and resources that encourage and equip and disciple you so that you can also be salt and light to the people around you. And we hope that in some way this conversation will be helpful to you and quite honestly helpful to us as [00:02:00] we talk together.
And we just wanna thank you for being a part of the conversation. We’ll be talking more about. What’s going on in all of these efforts of rescuing and restoring people through this tragedy now and down the road? This is one of those stories that will continue to unfold not only for days, but weeks and even years to come.
And know, we know as followers of our ministry that you’re very much prayerful with us and that you are grieving along with us. But many of you know that we are a Texas based ministry. And that obviously impacts our proximity and our awareness to that. We’re gonna talk about that a little bit as well.
So those are just some comments to kind of set up the conversation. Dr. Jim, thank you for all that you’ve already been doing to minister and to write and to encourage and to help. You’ve been on the radio and other media sources writing with your own article. Give us some initial thoughts as we begin our conversation.
Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: Thank you [00:03:00] Mark. The two initial things that just since Friday have just been just really grieving my soul, are on the one side relative to the issue of evil and suffering, this is as bad as it gets. I. You know, as you and I have said all suffering grieves the Lord. He loves us. He’s our father, he loves his children.
He loves us more than we can love our own kids and grandkids. And there’s never a, a tragedy in the news that isn’t grievous to the Lord and shouldn’t be grievous to us as well. But when you’re talking about children in a natural disaster at a children’s camp and the kind of devastation that we’re hearing about.
Just theologically, from a faith point of view, that’s as bad as it gets. If you really do believe that God is all knowing, all loving and all powerful, then it just raises that issue of evil and suffering on a level that really couldn’t be, I think, more difficult for us from a faith point of view. But the other side of it for me is deeply personal.
The camp directors have been to Israel with me twice over the years. You know them. They’re [00:04:00] just wonderful people. Dick Eastland was that guy that would always be at the bus first and help people get their luggage on and help ’em get it off, and he just was this gracious grandfather type person. He and his wife had run Camp Mystics since 1974.
It had been in their family for generations. When I learned that he lost his life trying to save campers, trying to rescue kids, I wasn’t at all surprised. That would be him. That’s just is who he was. He was that unique person that when everybody runs from the fire, he runs to the fire. He, he just that way, there’ve been so many tributes.
I wrote about him in my daily article from Monday about the grandfather. He was the father figure. He was the, the person of compassion and grace. And so it just makes it deeply personal to know the person. Who lost his life trying to rescue kids in the midst of this. Since that time, you and I have discovered that we have close friends who have lost who have, who themselves have friends, who have lost children.
One of my favorite pastors in the world, pastor, a church in Dallas, where four children, I. Have died. He’s now [00:05:00] retired. He lives in San Antonio, but as we speak, he’s driving to Kerr County to just try to be there, to try to be helpful if he can be. Seems with every passing hour, we’re learning more personally about people directly affected by this people whose children and grandchildren survived and those that didn’t.
It’s in tomorrow’s article, mark, but there’s this these two girls, ages 13 and 11 that were swept away by the floods and their body was found. Bodies were found 15 miles away. They were holding hands. When their bodies were discovered.
Dr. Mark Turman: Wow.
Dr. Jim Denison: There’s a father who lost his wife and his children in the Wimberley floods back in 2015, who’s now one of the volunteers in these floods trying to find victims and survivors and doing what he can.
I mean, of course he is. You know, it just goes on and on. It’s just on a level of a gut wrenching, just personal just. Anguish, you know, that, that we’re just all living in and walking through on some level. Part of it’s proximity being in Dallas, and part of it is just the depth of this. It just doesn’t [00:06:00] get any worse than this.
And boy, if we ever needed the hope of the gospel, we need it right now. Yeah,
Dr. Mark Turman: yeah, yeah. And the promise, just the, you know, the other thing that’s just somewhat come flooding into my own mind in some ways just pardon the pun is, but just the promises of God of. A new heaven and a new earth in a, in a new life, in the promises of resurrection and the promises of eternal life that are uniquely expressed in the Christian faith and that are the things that we need to clinging to.
And I just, you know, when you, you shared that story about the, the two sisters who, you know, just trying to, trying to phenomenally think through that, that amidst all of the raging water and whatever it is that they must have endured, that they clung to each other. And held onto each other in that way.
It just, I just don’t even know how to think about that. And, but kinda like you on Friday we were enjoying and relaxing on the July 4th holiday and we had made it several hours into the morning [00:07:00] and my wife said, have you seen any of this news? She pulled up her phone and she was looking at a couple of websites and she’s like what news?
And she starts telling me about it. And you start having that initial reaction. You and I are old enough to remember previous floods in this area. One of the areas, one of the cities in this area is called Wimberley. Mm-hmm. They had a very tragic flood back in 2015. Go back all the way to 1987 when some other campers from a camp called the Pot of Gold Camp.
Their bus was swept away and several of those children were lost. That flood. So those, those kinds of memories started to come back. But you talk about the proximity issue, and this is something I, I wonder, Jim, if you can give us some, just some help with that this, this issue of proximity brings these things either closer or further away.
A few hours later into the mid-afternoon of Friday, one of our mutual friends calls [00:08:00] and says, Hey, want you to know my grandkids have been caught up in this story? They’re fortunately safe, but they were at these camps. And then he went on to tell me that he was a college friend of D Eland, and told me so much of the story and all of the sudden.
The, the, the disaster and the tragedy and the grief and the loss all of a sudden becomes so much more personal because names start to become associated with the numbers. I and I, and I, and I got, I’ve always struggled with this. As you wrote about, as you said on Monday, we know that there are disasters happening in all kinds of places.
There are fires in California, there are wars in Ukraine, and the devastating events going on in the Middle East, in Gaza and in Iran and in Israel. And other things that we could talk about in places like China and Africa. We know this because we, [00:09:00] we can now know about things going on all over the world.
What is this? Is this just simply a human phenomenon of our proximity to a situation, to a disaster, to a tragedy, changes it for us? Is it, is it, is it something that there’s spiritual immaturity in us in some way? That some of these things affect us more than others? What’s, what’s a good. Theological biblical way to think about that.
Dr. Jim Denison: That’s a great question Mark. And it’s one I’ve not seen come up in the other conversations that have been happening around all of this. And I’ll think out loud with you about that. On two or three levels one level, there’s this kind of compassion fatigue, you know, that comes to mind where you just can’t filter everything that’s happening in the world on the same level of personal engagement and make it through the day.
You know, there’s a lot of study out now about, because we’re so much more aware of the world because digital technology is 24 7 and the world’s in our pocket and all of that. It’s no longer the evening news. You and I are both old enough to [00:10:00] remember the day when the evening news was half an hour. I. On the television and you might read the morning paper and put it to the side and might watch the news at six or 10, and that was pretty much all you needed to interact or could interact with.
What was happening in the larger world out there. Lots of studies now about the anxiety that’s rising, the depression rates, the the struggles, the relational issues as people are just overwhelmed. By all that’s happening in the world that’s now on their front doorstep, as it were. So compassion fe fatigue sets in and on some, all Olivia just, you have to filter this stuff.
You just almost, I think it’s almost a psychological, sort of reactive, kind of, almost a self preservation move to decide I’m only gonna care deeply about the stuff that affects me most personally. You know, that could be selfish, but it could also be a self preservation kind of a thing. Like I said, some of it is just a way that we have to process the world.
You can’t respond to every threat equally, so you have to respond to the threats that are closest to you, kind of the fight and flight sort of response. It’s kind of built into our nature, into our physiology, as it were, [00:11:00] kind of the lumbar lumbar brain and the kind of what they call the primal brain and all that’s inside that.
So I think all of that goes together. I think part of it’s is how we’re made to be able to respond to the world and the fight or flight part of it is filtering the massive stuff that’s out there. But then on the other side of this, I think there’s a way in which we can look at this spiritually that maybe we often don’t.
My wife’s been encouraging her friends as they’ve been talking through all this to pray through the news. That when you see this, it doesn’t have to either be at something in my back door, so I have to care intensely or it’s not in my backyard, so I’m gonna choose just to ignore it. It really can be a third option where we pray about what we do see, and we ask the Lord to put on our hearts that for which we should care more deeply.
It’s almost like a concentric circle sort of a thing where we can pray about what’s happening in the Ukraine or happening in California or whatnot and trust God with that. And if he puts that on our heart more deeply, then we take that next step and, and really ask him to direct our hearts to those places where we’re supposed to be the most deeply [00:12:00] engaged.
Most often it is that which is closer to us in proximity or in relationships or whatever, but we can ask the Lord. To help us with what we’re talking about, to help us filter the events of, of our lives so that we know where it is that we’re to be invested most fully and wasted honor him.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Oh, I think that’s really helpful.
It may, it kind of reminds me of a conversation that that you and I were having a couple of years ago with one of our friends, Carmen LaBerge, who is a Christian commentator up in the north and. We were stepping into a radio interview just at the time that there had been a mass shooting on a college campus and several college students had been injured and lost their lives.
And I just was feeling so overwhelmed by that. And I remember I was talking with her and with you about it, and she said, you and I are not equipped to carry this. These, this kind of pain, this kind of tragedy and suffering are far beyond our human abilities to be able to, [00:13:00] to fully comprehend and certainly well beyond our ability to cope with.
And, and so we’re not, we’re not equipped or capable of carrying it. Mm-hmm. Only God could carry this kind of grief, this kind of pains. And so I wonder, Jim, you think it would be right for us as we just kind of think through this together to kind of give ourselves and our listeners permission?
Hey, you don’t, you’re not equipped, you’re not designed to engage in a 24 7. Constant experience of hearing how broken the world is because as we all know, media is usually driven by what is negative, not what’s positive. And that it can, it can be crushing to your soul and really deeply injurious to your psyche, to your mind if you, in, if you take on too much of this because you think you just have to know I.
You [00:14:00] think it’s right for us to kind of give each other permission? Mm-hmm. To slow down our media diet, I guess is what I’m asking, which is a strange, I think Absolutely. Which is a strange thing to say for a ministry that is, that that does most of what it does in a media driven kind of environment, right?
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Jim Denison: It is, and I think that again, that’s part of how God’s wired us at this moment in time and our circumstances in our calling, the place to which he’s called us, and the things to which he’s, he’s, he is designed us to be most invested. We all have times in our lives, you know, where, what’s going on in our personal lives.
Gives us less emotional margin for caring about things outside of us. It’s almost like something you’re carrying physically. The more you put in your backpack, the less you can carry in your hands, right? And the more you’ve got in your hands, the less you can put in your backpack. You can only carry so much weight.
There’s only physically so much that a physical body and you may be stronger than I am probably, and I might be stronger than somebody else. And so no two of us are exactly the same in answering that question. That’s again why we ask the Lord, Lord, what do you intend me to carry today? And it’s with you.
I can’t do any of them by myself. There’s [00:15:00] no burden I can carry as though I’m God. That’s that, you know, kind of that will to power move where we try to be our own God even by being as compassionate as God is and some issue and self-congratulatory as a result. So any of them we need to carry with him.
Jesus says, take my yoke upon you and learn of me. It’s his yoke, not mine. And all I’m to do is my part of it. But I think again, we can be praying about that. Lord, you know how my day’s going? You know what’s going on with my kids or my job or my health or whatever. And Lord, I’m asking you to place on my heart that burden which you intend me to carry with you and pray through and, and live under.
And the rest of it, I’m gonna give back to you. The body of Christ is 2 billion people. There are a lot of hands and feet and eyes and ears out there. You know, I like that old sentence where the Lord you wake up and there’s an old kind of a saying where somebody, where the Lord says to somebody, I am God, I’ll be handling your problems today.
You know, you, you can trust me, sort of thing, don’t try to be me. You know? Yeah. There’s just some truth in that. One of the temptations is to [00:16:00] try to manage the crises of the world so as to delude ourselves into believing that we can manage to a better future than would otherwise happen. And so we carry guilt about these things.
We worry about these things. We carry an emotional burden as though somehow we’re managing the world to an outcome that wouldn’t happen if we weren’t doing this.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. Jim Denison: All that’s fallacious if we give ourselves just a moment to think about it. All the burden I’m feeling walking around in Tyler, Texas today is not on any tangible level touching any life in Kerrville.
Nobody out there is on any level aware of how depressed I’ve been about this. All I’m doing is discouraging myself
Dr. Mark Turman: if
Dr. Jim Denison: that’s what I’m trying to do here. It’s in no sense going to manage anything about tomorrow. That I feel the pain and the grief and the angst of this today on some level, that’s unhealthy.
And so really there is, I think this sense, Lord, help me to know what I’m to carry and to trust the rest of it to you and to the rest of the body of Christ. Be faithful to that [00:17:00] one. It’s like NE’s Walls, they were all giving gates, you know? Yeah. I’ll do my gate, I’ll try to rebuild my gate here and I’ll trust everybody else to do their gate.
And the accumulative total will be so much better than any individual could accomplish.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. Yeah, it really, really helpful. And like I said, just need to depend on the spirit. Ask him to give us clarity and understanding, you know? And maybe there’s some room in there so that if we. If we are feeling bad about what we don’t feel bad about mm-hmm.
Or we are overly owning sometimes some things that we should be feeling concerned about and peripheral about all of that, we need the Holy Spirit’s guidance and wisdom. Where should we pay attention? Where should we not pay as much attention, perhaps? And that’s just a part of what it’s like to be in this broken world.
Jim, I, I was sharing with our chapel yesterday. That it, it seemed to me that what we’re experiencing in our part of the world right now is a part of the [00:18:00] shared grief of what the Bible talks about when it says that we share in the sufferings of Christ. Do you think I’m on the right track there?
Mm-hmm. I, I don’t know that we’ll ever really fully understand what it means to share in the sufferings of Christ or in the what the letter of Philippians calls the fellowship of his sufferings. Is our sense of grief over the brokenness of the world. Is that part of what’s being indicated there?
Dr. Jim Denison: I think so, yeah. And, and I’m with you. There’s a lot more to that phrase than probably any of us will fully understand. It’s one of those kind of mysterious sort of ideas, but I think in the very least there is that idea. First of all, we’re the body of Christ and my body feels what my hand feels. You know, if my foot hurts, my body hurts.
And so it is with the entirety of the body of Christ that we’re to care for each other and feel that with each other, and feel that with Jesus, who is the head, if my head hurts, my body hurts again. So when Jesus is grieving, there’s a sense in which we grieve along with him, we weep with him. You know, we’re told to weep with those who weep.
At [00:19:00] John, in John 11, Jesus weeps at the grave of Lazarus.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. Jim Denison: So when we’re weeping, for those who weep, I think we’re weeping with Jesus. Yeah, we’re carrying his grief as he carries our grief. We’re grieving together. That’s this mystery of the union and the unity that we have because the very Holy Spirit of God a member of the Trinity of God dwells in us.
It’s beyond our ability to comprehend. But the very spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, the very spirit who led Jesus in his ministry in so many ways, and empowered him now lives in us. So in that mysterious sense, we’re participating in the Godhead of which Jesus is a part, as it were. So we’re weeping with Jesus.
We’re praying as Jesus weeps. We’re praying to the very one who is himself praying. The Bible says in Romans eight that Jesus is interceding for us. And so as we pray without ceasing, we’re praying to the one who is praying and we’re therefore praying with him as well. You [00:20:00] know, so there’s a solidarity with Christ and a solidarity with his sufferings.
Paul makes this remarkable statement to the Philippians, as you know, that he wants to share, he wants to join in the fellowship sharing his sufferings so as to be able to rejoice in the fellowship of his resurrection as well. You have to go through Friday to get to Sunday. Yeah. You gotta go through the tomb to get to the, to get to the empty tomb and go through calvary to get to the triumph of the resurrection and so that all goes together.
And I think that’s again, a uniqueness about the Christian faith. No other world religion as you know, would ever even think to offer that kind of solidarity with God, that we can suffer with him along with him as part of his family, as part of the body of that would be blasphemous to other world religions.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. But
Dr. Jim Denison: it’s at the heart of the mystery. Being the child of God in whom is what the very spirit of God.
Dr. Mark Turman: And so it’s so helpful, you know, like it is, it is a mystery. Certain yes, certain things of it [00:21:00] according to the Bible are revealed to us now, but there are still other places that are mysterious and not yet revealed and will be revealed over time.
We’ll, we’ll be learning and grasping and celebrating in heaven things that we simply cannot and are not equipped to understand right now. And but just that idea that, you know, we, we often as Christians probably think about yes, Jesus is the head of the church, but we don’t fully appreciate the connection of him as the head of the church to us as the body.
And that oneness that he prayed for even just hours before he went to the cross mm-hmm. That he was praying for this unity and this oneness and this intimacy of us with him and him with us, and that. If you put that into the, into the idea of being the body of Christ that yes, you know, we, we feel what he feels and he feels what we feel.
Mm-hmm. And that’s just, that’s just mind boggling. It’s comforting in some ways, but it’s also shared [00:22:00] sadness in moments like this. Jim, let’s, let’s, let’s talk a little bit around this, around the ideas of biblical truth and some of the. Things that we need to try to reclaim and have clarity on in a moment like this.
And maybe we could, can start this way, just trying to, you know, when this came up. I just run, we run back to scripture as we rightly should in a spirit of prayer and, and deep grief. Trying to think about those passages that might be most helpful. I found myself the last few days running to the story of job and the loss of job’s, children.
But that didn’t really seem to fit as much as I would want it to. Maybe I ran to the story of people who came to Jesus when there was this tower that fell and took the lives of some people, and they kind of came to him apparently wanting him to explain this, and yet that story didn’t really seem to fit as well.
And then. The Lord kind of took me back [00:23:00] to something around the story of Naomi and Ruth. We, we commonly, you know, the Bible calls it the Book of Ruth. I think it might’ve been better called the Book of Naomi. Mm-hmm. But to the tragic losses that Naomi and then Ruth experienced in the loss of husbands and being destitute and all of those kinds of things.
I kind of really started thinking more on that story. Good places, good stories that will help us biblically perhaps to, to think well in this moment,
Dr. Jim Denison: those are great ways to go. And you know, we talk a lot about thinking biblically. Yeah. So that we can respond in ways that are redemptive and thinking those thoughts, you know, having the mind of Christ and thinking in those ways.
As you know, the Bible is prescriptive as well as descriptive. And a lot of the descriptions, a lot of the stories I. Are there because they are relevant to our story. They’re all there because they’re relevant to our story, but a lot of them can be relevant to a specific moment if ask for the discernment of the spirit.
That will guide us to the [00:24:00] place in which we in fact can embrace that, which could be perhaps most helpful to us. As I’m thinking through this and I’m kind of walking through this with them and, and just feeling this overwhelming grief, I’m thinking about my granddaughter who is exactly the same age as some of these little girls that died.
You know, she just got back from camp. The, their camp wasn’t near a river necessarily, but there could have been a tornado, there could have been some other natural disaster. Who knows what could have happened. I mean, this could be any of us, you know? Could be all of us, could be any of us. In the midst of all of this, I, I, myself, thought about that father who has this demon possessed son, and he is brought him to the disciples, and the disciples can’t cast the demon out, and they bring him to Jesus.
And he says, Lord, if you can do anything, please help us. And Jesus says, if I can, all things are possible to himm, he believes. And then the Father offers my favorite prayer in the Bible when he says, Lord, I believe, help my unbelief. I love that we get to pray that.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: I love that. In Isaiah one, the Lord says, come let us reason [00:25:00] together, but the Hebrew says, come, let us argue it out.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. Jim Denison: I love that. Of all the things Jesus said that wasn’t recorded, it says, at the end of John’s gospel, if everything Jesus did had been written down, the world couldn’t contain all the books. I’m glad that the Spirit did lead them to record his cry from the cross. My God, my God. Why have you forsaken me?
I’m glad that the Lord inspired David to write those words in Psalm 22, a thousand years earlier, and then for Jesus to quote them in that moment because all of that says to me, we can pray for faith to have faith.
Dr. Mark Turman: Hmm.
Dr. Jim Denison: We can be honest about the agony of the moment when we don’t understand how an all knowing, all loving, all powerful God.
Could allow this if he would calm the storm. Is he o glee? Why didn’t he call him that storm in the Guadalupe, right? Yeah. If he, if, and if, if humans are doing everything they can to rescue these, these these victims, why isn’t God doing what his omnipotence could do? Yeah. Then rather than assume that he’s not all loving or he is not all knowing or he is not all powerful, as so many people do, [00:26:00] because that’s an easy answer, that is the exact wrong answer, that you lose all the hope of the gospel if you do that.
Rather than do that, let’s go into this, let’s run into this question. Let’s say, Lord, I don’t understand. He already knows that. Of course, in our hearts, we can say that. We can say, Lord, I’m disappointed, Lord, I’m grieving I love Philip Yancy’s book Disappointment with God.
Dr. Mark Turman: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Jim Denison: We can say He already knows our heart.
Lord, I’m disappointed.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. That
Dr. Jim Denison: you didn’t respond the way I wish you had here. Lord, I, I don’t understand. I’m asking you to help me with this Lord, I believe. Help my unbelief. Help me argue this out. Lord, help me reason through this as you would wish me to, but Lord, help me to do it with humility. That father had that says, Lord, I know your ways are higher than mine.
I know your thoughts are higher than mine. I know I’m a first grader trying to understand calculus here. Lord, help me not to be blasphemous here. Help me not to ask for what I shouldn’t be asking for. God, help me to understand as I can and then help me to trust you where I don’t. Hmm. Help me to have [00:27:00] faith where I meet faith the most because it’s in the hardest places where we least understand God that we most need God.
You know, it’s when we’re sickest and most wish the doctor could have helped us, that we most need the doctor’s help. And it’s at those times where we’re tempted to turn from God as that we’re punishing God, when actually what we’re doing is punishing ourselves by limiting what God can do in and through our lives.
I’ve known so many people over the years who had a grief in their lives and turned from God because they were angry with God. They grieved God by doing that, but they cut themselves off from all that God could have done in their lives. So that’s that Father’s prayer I. That’s been in my heart, Lord, I believe I do believe Lord, but help my unbelief.
Hmm. Help me to wrestle and struggle and, and, and not understand, and yet somehow trust you. Anyway, help me, father to trust you anyway. Yeah, I think that’s a prayer we can all pray.
Dr. Mark Turman: A good word. Such a helpful Yeah. I love that prayer. And it once, once you learn that story and once you learn that prayer, it, it’s it just keeps coming back [00:28:00] around almost every day.
You’re just glad it’s there. Yeah. It’s just, yeah. It’s just all the time. Just, Lord, help my unbelief. I think you know, Jim, and as you and I as young Christians and then as pastors, we, we’ve, we’ve probably spent more than our fair share of time in camp settings. And one of the things that, that’s just come more vividly around to me the last few days is just this, what, what I would call the the.
The spiritual ecosystem of what God has built in many ways in the form of local churches and beautiful, wonderful Christian camps like Camp Mystic and others that you and I know about. And and then digital ministries like ours and then other things that we’ll talk about as well, about how God has just put all of these different pieces in place and in many ways becomes to me an expression of how he is redeeming.
All things. The last, I, I think one of the last, if not the last Christian camp setting that I [00:29:00] was in as a counselor had a theme and every time there was a gathering for worship or teaching or anything else at this camp we were repeating over and over again across a week long, full of camp. God is good all the time.
All the time. God is good. Mm-hmm. And it just became the mantra of that summer camp that I was at. Tell tell us a little bit, if you can, a few thoughts about how do we reconcile these unbelievably painful stories of loss in these floods. And at the same time as you’ve written about, and I think you’ll probably continue to write about these amazing stories of heroic salvation where.
This child was assumed lost and then found this person was missing for 12 or 24 or 48 hours and they were found. We don’t know how much of that, how much more of that may happen, but in every one of these large [00:30:00] tragedies, we always seem to have both of those kinds of stories. How as believers do we reconcile that?
How do we think about that?
Dr. Jim Denison: Yeah. That’s one of the great challenges, isn’t it? Because we’re prone, at least I’m prone and I hear other people say this as well, every time there’s a remarkable story. There was a a person that I heard about yesterday that was found in a tree mm-hmm. Who had hung onto that tree for hours and hours and then was discovered there.
She was crying for help and somebody looked up and saw her up in the no idea. Obviously the flood was so high that it actually blew her up into the street. And you know, when we see that, our reaction is to thank God for that. And app. Praise the Lord for that. And just say, God, thank you for saving her.
Thank you for preserving her life. And, and I think we have every right to say that and should say that, and should be grateful for the goodness of that. Every good and perfect gift is from the Lord. And so Lord, we’re thankful to you for that. Okay? I hear that now. What do we do with those that weren’t spared?
Yeah.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: What do we do with the bodies that haven’t yet been recovered? Mark, what if some aren’t recovered? [00:31:00]
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: When things like this happen, I know stories like this with drownings and with floods and with bodies that sometimes are never found. How if, if we credit God for this, do we have to blame God for that?
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: If it were a human, that would be the case. I. You know, if I have the ability to pay your debt and not pay Judy’s debt, Judy’s have a right to say why’d you pay his debt and not pay my debt if I had the money to do both, you know? She’d have every Right. And you could be thanking me for my benevolence, but she’d be coming along and asking me why I wasn’t benevolent in her, in her case.
Of course, I’d pay her debt before yours. Of course I would. Yes. But, you know, sure. We’d have, you know, we, we wonder, we have every right to wonder that.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: Lord, if, if I’m gonna credit you for this, do I blame you for that? Again, the easy answers I think are the wrong answers. The easy answer is that everything that happens, God does.
And yes, God caused that death just as God caused this person to be spared. That’s one [00:32:00] way to do this, and we know theologians who would do that, who would push in that direction, even though the Bible says that God is not the author of evil and can’t be tempted by evil, and I think the death of an innocent child is evil.
Yeah. And so I can’t go there. I can’t get that done. The other direction is to say God’s not involved with any of that. It’s Harold Kushner in his, it’s a very wise book in many ways when bad things happen to good people. The rabbi wrote that after the death of his own child to advanced aging, his, his child had that horrible disease, progeria, I think it’s called, where that at a young age, it died of advanced aging.
And he wrote this book out of that. And in his book he says, God can’t do everything, but he can do some things. He takes a position that God doesn’t intervene in the natural affairs of life. And so now we don’t have to blame God for the death in the flood, but neither do we credit God for the person spirit in the tree.
Those are the easy, logical, I don’t mean easy in an emotional sense, but those are the logical answers. God does all of it, and we have to live with the fact that God sometimes [00:33:00] chooses to cause the death. Some just as God causes the sparing of others or God doesn’t do any of that, in which case we don’t pray for miracles.
We don’t pray in the storm, even though Jesus says, ask and will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be open. We don’t do that. Those are the logical answers, and again, to me, that’s the easy answer and the wrong answer. The right answer is the mystery. That says, Lord, I don’t understand.
I do know we live in a fallen world. I do believe that there are natural laws that govern the affairs of this world. I don’t think every person that falls to the ground was, was pushed to the ground by God. I believe the law of gravity is a natural law,
Dr. Mark Turman: right?
Dr. Jim Denison: See, JV Langley Caley, about whom I wrote my dissertation, said the person that jumps from the 10th story window doesn’t break.
The law of gravity illustrates it.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah,
Dr. Jim Denison: I do think that there are natural diseases and disasters that God does not cause that are part of a broken [00:34:00] world. This is not the world God intended. When Adam and Eve sinned, the Ro Romans eight says, the whole whole creation groans in travail. Now we live in a broken world because of the fallenness that starts in the Garden of Eden, and I do believe there are natural disastrous.
God doesn’t cause I do believe God can intervene. He does intervene. The great mystery is why he sometimes does and doesn’t others. That’s what I don’t understand.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: I, I don’t understand. I, I can say that God doesn’t prevent the consequences of misused freedom. And that’s why so often the Hitlers of the world and the EIA means can do the horrible things they do because God doesn’t prevent the, if he did, they wouldn’t have freedom.
If God always stopped the consequence of freedom, we wouldn’t be free. But on the other hand, in Acts 12, when James was beheaded, God didn’t prevent that. But God did prevent Peter’s death. God intervenes and sends the angels and freeze Peter from Heritage’s jail, but he didn’t do that for James. I don’t understand that.
Dr. Mark Turman: No.
Dr. Jim Denison: I really don’t know why God does and does in others, but I don’t [00:35:00] believe I. Everything that happens in the natural world, God caused, nor do I believe every person found in the tree was necessarily an angelic miracle. There are times when humans are able to, or things happen in the world that don’t have to have a divine explanation.
Now, last thing I’ll say about that, I do believe God redeems. Ali allows, I say that a lot. I believe God does redeem natural disasters and the law of gravity, and I think God does redeem what seems to be miraculous that maybe wasn’t miraculous, and he works behind all that and uses it all for a larger, greater purpose.
I do believe that, but I myself don’t think everything that happens God had to cause either for bad or for good. So we thank him where we can, we trust him where we can’t, and at the end of the day, we know we’ll understand what we can’t understand today.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And it’s just a part of that experience that we all have had a, I’ve had a couple of conversations even today with just this reality that [00:36:00] we’re not capable, at least not yet in our present state to understand all that is in play here and listening to you talk about it, just the reality that that sin and the consequences of sin are bigger and deeper and wider than.
We ever really think to, to understand or to appreciate that sin is a bigger deal than we realize or want to think about, and it has affected our lives and our world in massively profound ways that required the death of Jesus on the cross. To be restored and redeemed and that, that process is ongoing.
And so there’s, we, we get to the point, and I
Dr. Jim Denison: would add, I would add real quickly, mark that Satan is real. Yeah. You know? Exactly. It comes to steal and kill and destroy. If you look at the book of job, you see so-called natural disaster that Satan is behind. Yeah. And so there’s that factor in this as well.
There are, there are natural disasters that God causes, such as the Exodus and some [00:37:00] of the plagues in Revelation, there are natural disasters. God allows. Like the stormy sea of Galilee, that Jesus then calm. But we have no evidence in scripture that God calls that caused that storm, rather that Jesus intervened.
And then again, if he did this, why not this? You know? So we have the Lord acting and we have the Lord allowing by his providence. We have Satan at work. We have human freedom. I. At work, we have a fallen world that operates by natural laws and principles without which we couldn’t have a natural world.
CS Lewis says again, if every time somebody was given a chance to change the laws of, of chess, you couldn’t have a game. You know, there’s some laws that are have to be allowed in order to be an effect in order for the world to work. Hmm. So it all goes together. In a way that’s beyond my ability to comprehend.
So I try to understand what I can and then trust God where I can’t.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And have to, we have to get to the point in our faith where we have a certain level of comfort being uncomfortable with things that we can’t grasp. And we at the very least
Dr. Jim Denison: [00:38:00] don’t settle for easy answers that don’t get us where we need to go.
Dr. Mark Turman: Give, push away from the trite and get to the place where we have to trust God with things that if, if we could understand them. Then either we would be God or he wouldn’t be God or he wouldn’t be. That’s right. And and we all know that we’re not there yet. Sometimes we find ourselves, and Jim, this is part of the thought process I’ve had today, is we do find ourselves kind of being like Peter and those disciples who, when the crowds got frustrated with Jesus and couldn’t understand what he was doing.
Why he wouldn’t feed thousands of people every day like he did on a few occasions. At, at some point they started in significant numbers walking away and turning away from him. And Jesus looks at Peter and his closest friends and says, are you also going away? And they said, Lord, where do we go? Where would we go?
And it, you have the words of eternal life there. There’s, there’s this place in our faith at times [00:39:00] where. We believe because we want to believe and because it, it’s seemingly just wise and smart and logical and easy to believe. And then there’s those times kind of like this moment where we believe because we have to, yeah, because there any other alternative is so thin and frail and, and unhelpful that we find ourselves kind of.
Having to believe. Is that, does that resonate
Dr. Jim Denison: with you at all? It really does and then it’s in those places you, I used to say when I taught apologetics that if I must account for evil in the world, then the skeptic must account for good.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yes.
Dr. Jim Denison: This isn’t as simple as to say, as Sam Harris would say, that the suffering of a single innocent child anywhere in the universe proves that, that God doesn’t exist.
He, he essentially tries to make that argument what about all of the healthy children in the world? What about all of the, of the happy children in the world? What does that say about it? The existence of a God in a world that operates according to random, chaotic [00:40:00] evolutionary chance. You know? And so no one’s got the, the simple answer here is my point.
The skeptic wants to come along and say I’m obviously smarter than these Christians because something like this proves to me that God can’t be all knowing, all loving and all powerful. What about somebody like Dick who would give his life for these children? Explain that by evolutionary chance.
Explain that by chaotic coincidence, the heroism that we’re seeing here on every hand in the midst of this tragedy. Think about all the good that comes from evil in the midst of human history, human experience here. And so at the end of the day, we’re all choosing to believe something. We all bring our faith presuppositions into something.
John Lennox had a marvelous address recently at the House of Westminster, in which he said, there’s no such thing as a faithless society. We all have faith in something. Our faith might be in humans, might be in the rule of law, might be in the state, might be in science, whatever that means. Science isn’t a single thing.
That’s a lot of stuff. We all have faith in something. The only question [00:41:00] is, is our faith properly placed? Is the object of the faith able to support the faith right in which we’re investing it? I can sincerely believe I’m taking what turns out to be the wrong medicine and die. I can die. Sincerely, I can sincerely, sincerely believe I’m taking the wrong road and wind up lost.
Sincerity is no test here. Having faith is no test here. What’s the object of the faith? At the end of the day, we serve a risen savior who’s in the world today, as the text says. And because he rose from the dead, we know that he defeats death and he lives victoriously. And whatever happens in this broken world is only a means to the end of the eternity that’s here on the other side for all of us.
Mark, as hard as it is for me to grieve for these precious children, I do think. I hesitate to say this because I didn’t lose a child here. I didn’t lose a grandchild here. I, I can’t imagine that I could say this if I did, but one moment on the other side of eternity where we’re in the [00:42:00] perfect presence of the Lord, we’re home and we’re well, we speak of losing these children, but we don’t lose them.
God doesn’t lose them.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: I wouldn’t for a moment speak against the unspeakable grief that parents and grandparents and siblings are going to feel the rest of their lives. The emptiness at the table, the emptiness in the heart, the emptiness in society. There was a, a counselor who had just graduated from high school.
She was going to be, she was a rising freshman at ut. Who died? One of the counselors at Camp Mystic who died in this, I’m talking about her story. She had found it in high school, a club to care for senior adults. Wow. It’s one of the things she did with her time.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: The world will be forever impoverished by her death.
So I’m not for a moment wanting to disparage or, or belittle that, but I am here to say there’s a bigger story even than we can see [00:43:00] on this side. On this side of reality, you know, I remember one time snorkeling and and being down underwater and seeing the beauty of the fish there and all of that, and realizing there’s a whole world above the water here that the fish have no idea even exists.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: Just as when I’m above the water, I can’t see them below, you know? That veil on days like today, between time and eternity, that veil between this world and the, and that world feels thinner and more, more permeable maybe than it did a week ago. There’s just so much more to this. And one day we will know what we don’t know, and one day we will see what we don’t see.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: And one day there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain for the old order of things has passed away and he was seated on the throne. Instead, I’m making all things new and on that day, when we take our last breath here, we take our first breath there. We step from this broken world into God’s perfect paradise, and we are home.
And we are well. [00:44:00] Yeah. And that’s the day for which we all live.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And an even an even bigger day that we will all be gathered up with him. And with
Dr. Jim Denison: these precious children.
Dr. Mark Turman: And With these children, yeah. Yeah. That they, they are lost to us for a moment, but they are not really lost. That’s right. In any, in any ultimate and permanent way.
And we’re so grateful for that. I, I don’t know if it was actually said by him, but was attributed to him a quote I heard even yesterday that Albert Einstein supposedly said that we have a choice to make, that we either look around us and say, nothing is miraculous, nothing is amazing. Or everything is miraculous.
And everything is amazing. Yeah. And we all come to that point of having to decide. Which way we will see the world. Jim, as we just take a few minutes to wrap up here, this has really been helpful to me. I know, and I know to our listeners as well here on Monday as we’re recording this, at the end of the day, you wrote today about how to think through when Jesus was asked what the [00:45:00] greatest commandment was, and he said, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.
I thought that you really did a, a great service to us. Kind of applying that to this situation of what does it mean to love God and others with your heart, with your soul, with your mind and strength. Could you walk us through that briefly again, that starts off with loving God with all your heart means sharing in this grief, which we’ve already touched upon.
Talk a little bit more about that and, and the other ideas that you have in this article that you wrote this morning.
Dr. Jim Denison: Thank you. I’d never put it together like that either until I was writing the article. I hadn’t thought of it quite in those terms at all, and I just kind of felt led and prompted in that way To love God in my neighbor with all my heart, you know, is as we’ve been saying, to give my heart to this, to seek the compassion of God.
It’s the missionary’s prayer. Lord, break my heart for what breaks your heart. And Lord, help me to share your heart for these suffering families and for all that’s in this. And to grieve as you grieve and weep, as you [00:46:00] weep for them. And help me to love you and them with my heart. To love with my soul, I think is at the very least, to pray without seizing.
It’s to pray to the one who’s praying for them. It’s to pray for from, from our hearts, from our, from the depth of our, of of our understanding, and even beyond our understanding. And to when we say, Lord, I don’t know what to pray for. We can say that.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah,
Dr. Jim Denison: Lord, I’m just bringing them into your presence.
Lord, I’m just offering them to you. I don’t even know how to pray. I don’t even know what to ask, but I know the spirit prays through me with groanings that cannot be uttered. And if I’m in your presence and you’ve got your hands on me and you can make me more like Christ, and you can mold me and use me just in the very proximity of my soul to yours as I’m praying, and so I’m gonna keep on praying.
And that’s gonna be part of my soul to love God with my mind, is to kind of think through this biblically as we’ve been trying to do today, to try to separate biblical truth from that which isn’t, and to refuse the easy answers that take us away from the hope of God and to, and to try to love God with my mind and ask him to help me to, to understand what I don’t [00:47:00] understand, and then to believe what I still can’t.
Thomas Aquinas talked about reasoning until I could get to the place where I could that my reason can’t go, and then I trust God beyond that. It’s not a God of the gaps. It’s just trusting God with what my finite brain can’t understand. And so I’m gonna try to love God and my neighbor with my mind in that way.
And then my strength is how to, how to respond practically. Hmm. That’s giving to organizations, Texans on mission and others that are actually on the ground here actually doing the good work that needs to be done and need our help and financial support. It’s praying for others. It’s praying for pastors.
I’m gonna have to talk about that this week at some point. Mark.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah.
Dr. Jim Denison: What it is to be praying for the pastors who are so much on the front lines,
Dr. Mark Turman: right. Of
Dr. Jim Denison: this, not only there, but back at their home churches, a dear friend of mine that his, his church lost four children and he’s now retired, but he’s driving as we speak down to this place, just to be there, just to be with these families and just to be with those that are grieving.
And so these pastors that are carrying this grief themselves that have all the same questions we do. That have all the [00:48:00] same human doubts and struggles that any of us does. As you know, when you go to seminary, you don’t leave your free will at the back door. You don’t leave your human nature behind. We feel all of the same questions and doubts and struggles that others do, and yet at the same time, we’re trying to be helpful to those who are under our our charge.
Pastors, and so I’m praying for them and I’m, I’m asking for ways to be of service to them. And I’m also saying, Lord, this is something my wife wrote, wife wrote on this week because a friend of hers really encouraged her in this direction. Everybody that lost a child is processing this grief in a way the rest of us can’t understand.
It makes this real for them. Again, it rushes it all back for them again. One of the ways, whether we don’t live in Texas or not, or whether we’re anywhere close to this in proximity or not, we can be asking God, who are the people in our lives that are suffering in ways we’re not right now? Who’s lost children in the past and need our companionship?
And as they go through the grief again, where are, where Are there [00:49:00] places that we can be helping other hurting people? Even if it’s not these hurting people. Yeah. And let that be our Jerusalem Judaism area ends of the earth. What are the practical ways I can love with my strength would be the idea And they all go together.
Remember Jesus was asked, what’s the great commandment? And he said, love God with your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and your neighbor as your, those aren’t five commandments. Those are five ways of doing the same thing, right? Those are five ways. Those are five sides of the same house. Those are five facets of the same diamond.
Those are five ways of loving God and loving others. And we love God to love others, and we love others to love God. And it all kind of goes together, and we can, again, ask God to help us to do all of that, to do it better than we could do it ourselves.
Dr. Mark Turman: Yeah. And so much for us to think about and to ask the Holy Spirit to just teach us and guide us and apply in our lives.
You know, I was, I, I, I appreciate you bringing up, you know, that this, this kind of serves as a trigger and brings anybody that has ever lost a child back [00:50:00] into that moment and into that, that lifelong experience of grief and sadness that never goes away no matter how much time passes. And it just kind of formed up in my mind yesterday afternoon that, you know, in one way to think about this, the heaviest casket that is ever lifted is the casket of a child.
Oh. It just said that, that it is just that, that, you know, I haven’t, I haven’t had. You know, hundreds. But I have walked with some families through the loss of a child, either at birth or through tragedy. And it just, it, it is unfathomable. And and, and yet at the same time, God knows what it is to, to give up a child.
He knows the grief of giving up his child for us. And and, and because of him giving up his child, we have life. We have hope. We have promise. And so all of these ways, sharing with our hearts, interceding with our soul thinking that [00:51:00] God really will redeem all that he allows in his way at his time.
And we can, and we must trust him for that. And in the meantime, he is showing up. He is showing up in and through our prayers. He’s showing up through the first responders. He’s showing up when we give and down the road. It’s, it’s not being asked for right now, but we should understand that this is a, this is a story as many tragedies are that will take not just months, but years and even decades to, to work through.
And so look, look for your church to offer mission trip opportunities and mm-hmm. Other kinds of things that you can be a part of that express in very tangible ways. The very presence of God as the body of Christ responds together to care not only for Christians, but to care for all. And we wanna be a part of that.
We’ll continue to be a part of that and to try to speak and encourage and equip people to do that through our [00:52:00] ministry as well. And Jim, I just wanna thank you for spending some time talking about this today and the writing that you’re continuing to do. I wanna thank our audience and please know.
That we are praying with you. We are praying for you, and we appreciate you spending some time with us today in this podcast. If this has been helpful to you, please share it with others and we will walk together as the body of Christ. And we will, we will share together our river of tears. And God God will see us through.
Thank you for being with us today. We’ll see you soon on the Denon Forum Podcast.
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