Tokyo’s governor didn’t win many friends this week. At a press conference on Monday, he said God sent the devastating tsunami last week in order to “wash away” the greedy mentality of the Japanese people. Later, after his offhanded remarks set off an uproar of angry response, the governor apologized profusely.

Here in America, a talk radio personality was also pressured to clarify a statement he made earlier in the week—that the earthquake was a message from God. His controversial comment brought to mind a similar dustup from last year after the earthquake in Haiti. That was when a well-known televangelist said the disaster was God’s way of punishing a culture steeped in voodooism. His network also issued a clarification in response to the outrage.

The cycle seems to repeat itself every few months. First, the world is pounded by an epic-scale disaster. Then a few lone voices suggest it was divine retribution. And that triggers a firestorm of rebuke.

On the one hand, you have the it’s-a-message-from-God camp—a group that, ironically, rarely quotes from the message of God—the Holy Bible. On the other hand, you have the anti-God crowd that generally ridicules God’s Word as being childish or untrue.

“Don’t give me that Jesus stuff,” said one radio commentator in response to a caller who had the nerve to quote from Matthew 24 on his show. “Let’s talk like adults,” he said—as if Jesus was an ignorant child for suggesting there would be an increase in the frequency and intensity of earthquakes in the latter days.

In a Washington Times editorial, the mayor of London mocked the notion that the earthquake mentioned in Amos 1:1 and Zechariah 14:5 might have been related to the sin of Uzziah, king of Judah (see 2 Chronicles 26). Actually, the Bible does not specifically say the earthquake was connected to Uzziah’s sin.

But there are numerous scriptural references in both the Old and New Testaments that show how God often uses “natural” phenomena—hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, floods, fires and droughts—to communicate with mankind (Genesis 6:17; 19:24-25; Leviticus 26:3-5, 19; Job 1:16-19; 37:11-13; Isaiah 29:6; Amos 4:7-9; Matthew 24:7, 29; Revelation 6:12; 11:13).

It wasn’t that long ago that even the most intellectual among us fully accepted that it was God who controlled the weather. “I love to think of nature as an unlimited broadcasting station, through which God speaks to us every hour, if we will only tune in,” wrote the noted 20th-century African-American scientist and educator, George Washington Carver.

But ask any scholar today about the increase in natural disasters and he will undoubtedly insist that it has absolutely nothing to do with human behavior.

“The most important lesson from the Japan earthquake is that there are no lessons for human behavior” (emphasis mine). So says the mayor of London.

Meanwhile, the divine retribution crowd exposes its own bias and ignorance by narrowly attributing the cause of such catastrophes to greedy gain in the case of Japan or practicing voodoo in the case of Haiti.

God says the problem is so much worse than that! And the good news is He reveals why this world is the way it is—and why He allows human beings to suffer.

In Galatians 1:4, the Apostle Paul refers to the age in which we live as “this present evil world.” Elsewhere, he identifies Satan the devil as the “god of this world” (2 Corinthians 4:4). In Revelation 12:9, the Apostle John says this adversarial being actually deceives the whole world.

How did it happen? How did we arrive at where we are today? The Holy Bible reveals the answers.

At the very beginning of human civilization, by eating from the forbidden tree, Adam cut off mankind from God and His Spirit. Because of Adam’s decision, God drove him and his wife out of the Garden of Eden and prevented them from reentering.

They were not allowed to take from the tree of life, which symbolized God’s Spirit and His way of give.

When Adam made that fateful decision, as Herbert W. Armstrong explained in Mystery of the Ages, God pronounced sentence. He told man, You have made your decision, you have gone your own way—according to the self-centered way of get. Go, now, and raise your own institutions of learning, of government, commerce, industry and religion—and base it all on the Satan-inspired way of vanity, competition and strife—of rebellion against God and His law of love.

Mr. Armstrong continued by paraphrasing God’s response in the Garden of Eden,

After the world of your descendants has written the lesson in 6,000 years of human suffering, anguish, frustration, defeat and death—after the world that shall spring from you shall have been brought to confess the utter hopelessness of the way of life you have chosen—I will supernaturally intervene.

Mr. Armstrong called this 6,000-year civilization of man a lesson in aversion therapy. Except for the small number of servants God called out of this world to help prepare for His soon-coming family government, mankind in general has chosen to go it alone—without God.

And God has allowed it.

He has allowed mankind to fill up on the ways of this sinful world—and to experience along with it the agonizingly painful effects of going Satan’s way. God is allowing man to go his own way so that he might see the rotten fruits of living contrary to the law of love.

This explains why Satan’s present world is becoming more and more evil and violent every day (2 Timothy 3:1-5).

And this is why there has been such an upsurge in “natural” disasters in recent years. Last year, for example, more people were killed by natural disasters than any other year on record. The Associated Press called it the year the Earth struck back!

In the United States, the Federal Emergency Management Agency declared more disasters than ever before. Over the last 20 years, the average number of disasters declared annually was 51. In 2010, it was 81.

Everything is happening exactly the way Jesus said it would in Matthew 24! In verse 3 of that chapter, His disciples asked Him what would be the sign of His Second Coming and the end of this present evil world.

Notice how Christ responded in verse 7: “For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.”

And what makes this particular age any different from the weather-ravaged, war-torn ages of years gone by? Jesus answers in verse 22. All these events, He said, would intensify at a time when technological advances would enable man to annihilate himself from off the face of this Earth!

Only in the last half century has that even been possible.

All these events in Matthew 24—universal religious deception, wars and rumors of wars, nation rising against nation, famines, pestilences and earthquakes—will culminate in the worst time of suffering and violence ever to strike this Earth, the Great Tribulation.

Only after all of this will man finally accept the results of his own experiment. Only then will the lesson of aversion therapy sink deeply into the innermost regions of man’s heart.

Finally, when man is sickened to death of going his own way—the way of Satan—will God then intervene to save mankind. As Mr. Armstrong explained in Mystery of the Ages, again paraphrasing God’s response to Adam after he ate from the forbidden tree: “By supernatural divine power I shall then take over the government of the whole world. With reeducation, I will produce a happy world of peace. And on repentance, I shall then offer eternal salvation to all.”

That is the most inspiring, hope-filled message there is! It’s the only logical explanation for the chaotic and brutally violent events we see intensifying all over the Earth.

All of this is thoroughly outlined in the pages of your own Bible. To better understand what is plainly revealed in the Word of God, request your free copy of Mystery of the Ages.