Why Did God Let the Mountain Fall_ What Jesus Said About Disasters Like This (No Ads)

Welcome back to the Bible Stories. You may notice there

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keep these Bible Stories going. Let me give you the

answer first, because you may not have time for a

long build-up, and because the question is too heavy to

leave hanging. When a mountain falls and takes lives with it,

the Bible does not tell us that God picked out

those people. It does not tell us that the ones

buried were worse than the ones who lived. Jesus was

asked this exact question, in almost these exact words, and

he answered it plainly. His answer was no. He said

no twice, in two sentences, about two different disasters, and

then he turned the whole conversation around and pointed it

at the people still standing there breathing. That is the answer.

God is not sorting the world by who deserves the flood.

Something deeper and sadder is happening, and God is closer

to it than most of us have ever been told.

I know why this matters to you. You may be

watching this because you saw the videos and could not

sleep afterward, or because something in your own life gave

way this year, and you have been quietly wondering whether

God was angry at you, and this was how he

was saying it. That thought sits in a lot of

hearts and almost never gets said out loud. Let us

take it out and hold it up to Scripture slowly

and carefully and see what is actually there. Begin with

what happened because the details matter for what we are

about to see in the Bible. It was the morning

of the 26th of August. The weather over the Himalayas

was clear. There was no storm. There was no rain.

Anyone standing in the valleys below Langtang Lirung that morning

would have looked up at a bright sky and thought

about breakfast, about the road, about the day ahead. High

above them, at around 5,000 meters, a section of a

glacier gave way. Scientists who studied the satellite images afterward

said it looked as though the ice snapped off in

one clean break. A slab about 600 meters wide fell

more than a kilometer straight down. The impact was so

violent that the ice melted from the force and the

friction of its own fall. What reached the valley floor

was not a snowdrift. It was a moving wall of water, mud,

and rock. It ran for 72 kilometers along the river.

It moved at roughly 180 kilometers an hour. Seven minutes

after the ice broke, a security camera at the border

crossing recorded the water arriving. The crossing, with its offices,

its trucks, its people, was gone. Nepal and China had

built a flood warning system for that valley. Engineers had

worked on it for years. It never sounded, because it

had been built to watch for monsoon floods, and this

was not a monsoon flood. The monitoring stations upstream were

swept away before they could send anything at all. Families

were separated in a moment. Many people are still unaccounted

for as I record this, and the searching goes on

along the riverbanks day after day. Among those caught in

it were travelers from many nations, a great number of

them pilgrims who had set out on a journey toward

a mountain they believed was holy. Schools, bridges, power stations,

whole villages of ordinary life were buried under the silt.

I am not going to put figures on this. Every

number you may have read is somebody's mother, somebody's driver,

somebody's boy who was supposed to come home for a meal.

Let us keep them as people rather than as a total.

And on the morning it happened, the sky was clear.

Hold that picture, because when people ask why God allows

such things, they usually picture a storm, something dark and threatening,

that gives a warning. This gave nothing. It came out

of a blue sky. And that is exactly the kind

of disaster Jesus chose to talk about. There is a

detail in this story that I cannot stop thinking about,

and I want to look at it with you before

we open the Bible. For years, engineers from two countries

had been building a warning system for that valley. They

put monitors in the water, they ran the calculations, they

knew the Himalayas are dangerous, and they did the responsible, intelligent,

human thing. They built something to speak before the water arrived.

On the morning it mattered, the system said nothing. It

had been designed to watch for the floods that come

with heavy rain, and this flood came from a clear sky,

from a piece of ice that had been sitting up

there for longer than any nation involved had existed, and

the stations that might have caught it were the first

things the water destroyed. The warning was carried away before

it could be given. Every generation builds its towers. Ours

are made of sensors and satellites and forecasts, and they

are good things, and I am glad we build them,

but there is a limit written into all of them,

and that valley found the limit in about seven minutes.

Scripture has always known this about us. Do not boast

about tomorrow, for you do not know what a day

may bring. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 1. That is not

Proverbs 27:1

a verse about being afraid. It is a verse about

being honest. We plan as though tomorrow has been promised

to us, and it has not been. The people at

that border crossing had ordinary plans for an ordinary day.

So do you. So do I. There is a way

of hearing that which makes a person anxious, and there

is a way of hearing it which makes a person free.

Held rightly, it loosens your grip. It makes you slower

to waste a day, and quicker to say the thing

you have been meaning to say to someone. It moves

your weight off the things that can be swept away,

and on to the one who cannot. There is something

else about that road that deserves to be said gently.

Many of the travelers on it were pilgrims. They had

come from many nations, and a great number of them

were making their way toward a mountain in the north

that millions of people regard as sacred. They were not

tourists chasing a view. They had saved money and taken

leave and traveled a long way because something in them

was reaching for God. I am not going to stand

over that and lecture. I want you to see it instead,

because it tells you something true about every human being

ever born. People will cross the world to find God.

They will climb, walk fast, and give away what they own.

That hunger is real, and it is everywhere, in every culture,

in every century. Paul stood in the middle of a

city full of altars once and did not mock a

single one of them. He said, God made the nations

and set them in their places for a reason, so

that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for

him and find him, though he is not far from

any one of us. Acts chapter 17 verse 27 Read

Acts 17:27

the last part slowly. He is not far from any

one of us. That is the whole shape of the

Christian message in one line. The reaching is real, and

the distance is not what we assumed. While the world

was climbing, God came down. The mountain we could never

finish climbing, He descended. That is what Bethlehem is. That

is what the cross is. So when I think about

that road full of people who were traveling toward a

holy mountain, I do not feel superior. I feel the

weight of how much the human heart wants God, and

how near He has come, and how many people have

never once been told it plainly. There is a moment

in the Gospel of Luke when a small group of

people come to Jesus with news. They tell him about

some men from Galilee who had gone to the temple

to offer sacrifices, and while they were doing it, the

Roman governor Pilate had them killed. It was a savage thing,

and it was fresh in everyone's mind. Notice that Luke

does not record them asking a question, they just bring

the report. But Jesus answers as if a question had

been asked, because he knows what is underneath the report.

Everybody in that crowd was thinking the same thing, and

none of them wanted to say it. They were thinking,

what did those men do? That was the theology of

the day. Suffering was a receipt. If something terrible happened

to you, people assumed you had earned it and they

went looking for the sin that explained it. It was

a tidy system. It also meant that every grieving family

carried shame on top of grief and every survivor got

to feel a little safer because clearly they were not

that kind of sinner. Jesus refused to play. Do you

think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the

other Galileans because they suffered this way? I tell you, no.

Luke chapter 13, verses 2 & 3 he does not

Luke 13:2

soften it he does not say we cannot know he

says no then he does something no one asked him

to do he brings up a second disaster on his

own Or those eighteen who died when the tower in

Siloam fell on them, do you think they were more

guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? I tell you, no.

Luke chapter 13 verse 4 Nobody had mentioned the tower.

Luke 13:4

Jesus reached back and pulled it into the conversation himself,

and that choice is one of the most quietly important

things in this whole passage. Siloam was on the southeastern

edge of Jerusalem, near the pool that carried the same name.

There was building work in that area, part of the

city's water system. A tower there collapsed, and eighteen people

died underneath it. Think about the difference between the two examples.

The first was murder. Pilot was a cruel man, and

he made a cruel decision, and there was somebody to blame.

You could stand outside that story and point at a

guilty party. The second had no villain. A structure gave way.

Stone moved. Eighteen people who happened to be standing in

one particular place on one particular day did not go home.

There was no one to be angry at. Jesus put

both of them in the same sentence and gave both

of them the same verdict. That second example is the

one that speaks to a glacier. A tower falls, ice falls,

nobody planned it, nobody meant it, and the people underneath

were not selected. Two thousand years ago, before satellites and

seismometers and warning systems, Jesus of Nazareth stood in front

of a crowd that was busy calculating who deserved what,

and he told them their math was wrong. Why did

he care so much about shutting that idea down? because

it does two kinds of damage, and he saw both.

The first damage falls on the grieving. When a village

is buried and the world decides that the village must

have had it coming, you have added a second weight

to people who are already carrying more than they can lift.

Mothers looking for children in the mud do not need

a theology that tells them their family was chosen for this.

The second damage falls on the ones who are safe.

If disaster is a receipt for sin, then surviving is

a receipt for righteousness. The crowd around Jesus was standing

there quietly congratulating itself. Their houses were still up. Their

families were still alive. They were building a religion on

the fact that nothing bad had happened to them yet.

Jesus dismantles both in a breath, and he does it

again later in his ministry. His disciples pass a man

who had been blind from birth, and they ask whose

fault it was, his or his parents. They assume there

must be a fault. They only want to know whose.

Neither this man nor his parents sinned, but this happened

so that the works of God might be displayed in him.

John chapter 9 verse 3 There is no hidden sin

John 9:3

to find. The disciples came looking for a cause, and

Jesus turned them toward a purpose instead. He would not

let them treat a suffering man as a puzzle to

be solved. He healed him. If you have spent years

secretly scanning your own past for the sin that explains

your hardest season, hear this carefully. Jesus was asked to

do that kind of accounting twice, and twice he refused.

He is not standing over your suffering with a ledger.

He is standing much closer than that. So if God

is not aiming disasters at people, where do they come from?

Scripture gives an answer, and it starts very early. In

the third chapter of Genesis, after the first rebellion, God

speaks about the ground itself. Cursed is the ground because

of you. Genesis chapter 3 verse 17 Something happened to

Genesis 3:17

the world, not only to us. The brake went all

the way down into the soil. From that moment, the

Bible describes a creation that no longer works the way

it was made to work. Beautiful, still, full of glory, still,

but strained, unstable, groaning under a weight it was never

designed to carry. Paul says it directly. We know that

the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains

of childbirth right up to the present time. Romans chapter

Romans 8:22

8 verse 22 That word, groaning, is worth sitting with

for a second, because it explains so much. Mountains are

not permanent. Glaciers move. Rock fractures. The ground under the

strongest city in the world is shifting slowly all the time.

We build on a surface that is in motion, and

we have gotten so used to it that we call

it solid. When ice a kilometer above a valley breaks loose,

that is the groan becoming audible. It is the sound

of a world that is not yet what it will be.

Paul does not call it a death rattle. He calls

it childbirth. That is a strange and stubbornly hopeful word

to use for a broken planet, and we will come

back to it before we finish. There is another line

of Jesus that most people have heard without hearing what

it costs. In the Sermon on the Mount, he is

teaching about loving enemies, and he gives a reason. He says,

God is generous to people who have not earned it.

He causes his Son to rise on the evil and

the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

Matthew 5.45 We usually take that as comfort, and it is.

The kindness of God is not a payment for good behavior.

Sunlight lands on the cruel man's field and on the

kind man's field at the same hour. But turn the

sentence over. If the good things of this world fall

on everyone, regardless of merit, so do the hard things.

Weather does not check your faith before it arrives. The

river does not ask who prays. A believer and an unbeliever,

standing on the same bank when the water comes, will

both be standing on the same bank. This is one

of the hardest truths in Scripture for us to hold,

and it is one of the most freeing. It means

that when disaster misses you, you have not been rewarded,

and when it finds you, you have not been singled out.

You have simply been living in a world where the

rain falls on everyone. The people who died on that

mountain road were teachers and drivers and shopkeepers and travellers.

Some were praying as they went. The water did not

sort them. There is a whole book of the Bible

devoted to a man asking why, and the way it

ends surprises almost everyone who reads it for the first time.

Job loses his children, his health, and everything he owns

in a matter of days. His friends arrive and sit

with him in silence for seven days, and that is

the best thing they do. Then they open their mouths.

And for chapter after chapter, they tell him what the

crowd around Jesus would later assume. There must be sin.

There must be a reason. Search yourself, Job. Job will

not accept it because he knows it is not true.

He asks God directly for an explanation. He asks more

than once. He is not gentle about it. And then

God answers,' Out of a storm.' Where were you when

I laid the earth's foundation? Job chapter 38 verse 4.

Job 38:4

What follows is chapter after chapter about wild goats and

ocean depths and the storehouses of snow. God takes Job

on a tour of a universe far too large for

him and never once tells him why his children died.

Read that ending carefully, and you will notice what is missing.

There is no explanation, not one line of it. God

does not open the file and show Job the reasons.

But something else happens. God comes. He speaks. The silence ends,

and the presence arrives, and by the end, Job says

he has seen God with his own eyes, and he

stops asking. That is the shape of the Bible's answer

to why. It is not a diagram. It is a

person who shows up. And if you have ever prayed

for an explanation and received only a strange, steady sense

that you were not alone, you were not being ignored,

you were being answered the way Job was answered... There

is one more thing in that book worth carrying with you.

At the end, God speaks about Job's friends, the ones

who had explained his suffering so confidently, and he tells

them they have not spoken rightly about him. The men

who defended God the loudest were the ones he corrected.

The man who wrestled and questioned and would not accept

a tidy answer was the one he called his servant.

I find that enormously freeing, and I hope you do too.

You are allowed to bring God a hard question. You

are allowed to say that this does not make sense

to you, that you have watched something you cannot square.

with a good God, that you are tired. Job did

all of that at full volume, and God did not

strike him down. He came and stood with him. What

God will not accept is the confident cruelty of people

who use his name to explain away somebody else's grief.

There is one more scene, and it is the one

that settles this question for me. Jesus comes to Bethany

four days after his friend Lazarus has died. He already

knows what he is about to do. He has told

his disciples plainly that Lazarus will rise. Within the hour,

that tomb will be open, and a dead man will

walk out into the sunlight. And on the way there,

standing among people who are crying, Jesus cries. Jesus wept.

John chapter 11 verse 35 Two words, and they change

John 11:35

how you read every disaster. He was not weeping in ignorance.

He knew the ending. He could see past the grief

in front of him to the joy ten minutes away.

And he wept anyway, because death is an outrage, because

the world is not supposed to be like this, because

the people he loved were in pain, and he entered

that pain instead of standing outside it and explaining it.

If you want to know what God feels about a

valley full of mud and missing families, look at the

shortest verse in the Bible and stop looking for something

more complicated. God is not indifferent to what happened in

those mountains. The Bible shows us a God who stands

at the grave of a man he is about to

raise and cries. Now we can go where the Psalms

have been waiting for us this whole time. There is

a song in the middle of the book of Psalms

that reads as though someone wrote it after watching that flood.

God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble.

Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way

and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea.

Psalm chapter 46 verses 1 and 2. The writer is

Psalms 46:1

not describing a small trouble. He is describing the biggest,

most unthinkable collapse he can imagine. The ground itself opening,

mountains going down into the water. In the ancient world,

the mountains were the picture of everything that could never move.

To say the mountains are falling was to say that

the last stable thing has failed. And in the middle

of that, he says, we will not fear. He does

not say we will not grieve. He does not say

we will not be shaken. He says we will not

be ruled by fear, because our refuge was never the mountain.

Isaiah says the same thing with even more tenderness, speaking

for God to a people who had lost nearly everything.

Isaiah 54.10 There it is. The mountain and the love

are set side by side, and only one of them

is capable of moving. We have just watched in real footage,

on real cameras, a mountain give way in seven minutes.

We have watched the last stable thing fail, and the

promise that stands over that footage is that the love

of God did not move because it was never resting

on the mountain in the first place. The writer of

Hebrews take this further. He says, God has promised one

more shaking, one that will test everything that can be tested,

and he explains the purpose of it. So that what

cannot be shaken may remain. Hebrews chapter 12 verse 27

Hebrews 12:27

Every earthquake, every flood, every collapse is a small preview

of that sorting. Each one tells us the truth about

what we have been leaning on. The road can be

swept away. The power station can be swept away. The

border and the bridge and the house can all be

gone in an afternoon. What remains is the kingdom of

God and the people who belong to him. We have

to go back to Luke, because Jesus was not finished.

After he says no twice, he adds a line that

has puzzled readers for centuries. But unless you repent, you

too will all perish. Luke chapter 13, verse 5. At first,

Luke 13:5

it sounds severe, as though he is scolding the wrong people.

Look closer at what he is doing. The crowd came

to him holding a question about other people. What did

those Galileans do? What was wrong with those 18? They

were standing at a safe distance, sorting the dead into categories.

Jesus takes the question out of their hands and puts

it back in their chest. Stop asking about them. You

are the one who is still alive, and you will

not always be.' He is not saying, repent, or God

will drop a tower on you.' He has just spent

two sentences denying exactly that.' He is saying something simpler

and far more urgent.' Every one of you is going

to die.' You do not know the day.' That tower

fell on an ordinary afternoon,' and eighteen people had no

time to prepare for anything.' So do not waste the

life you still have,' arguing about who deserved what.'' Come

home while the door is open.' That is a warning

spoken by a man' who was walking toward his own

cross' to make the coming home possible.' Read it in

his voice, and it is not a threat.' It is

someone pulling you back from the edge of a road.'

The people in that flood had seven minutes. Most of

them had no warning at all, because the system meant

to speak for them was silent. Jesus is the warning

that has already sounded. It has been sounding for two

thousand years. His invitation is on the table right now,

in this ordinary hour, while your sky is clear.' Most

of us will never stand in the path of a

glacial flood.' Almost all of us will stand in the

path of something.' You know what it is for you,

the letter from the hospital,' the empty side of the bed,

the job that ended without warning,' the child who stopped calling,'

the slow disappearance of the body you used to trust,

'so that stairs became a decision and driving became a memory.'

The friends who died one by one until the phones

stopped ringing, those are your falling mountains. They arrived out

of a clear sky, too, and afterward you looked around

at a landscape you did not recognize and wondered where

God was in it. Here is what Scripture gives you,

and it is not thin. The Lord is close to

the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

Psalm 34, verse 18. Read where he is, not observing

Psalms 34:18

from the ridge above the valley. Close. The Hebrew picture

is of someone kneeling down beside you. When your heart broke,

God moved toward you, and if you did not feel

it at the time, that does not mean it did

not happen. Job did not feel it for 37 chapters.

And there is a second thing which is one of

the strangest gifts in the New Testament. Paul says that

God comforts us in our troubles so that we can

comfort other people with the same comfort we received. The

care you get in your worst season is not meant

to stop with you. It becomes something you can hand

to somebody else who is where you have been. Which

means the woman who lost her husband three years ago

is the one person on her street who can sit

with the woman who lost hers last week and not

say anything stupid. Your suffering, held in God's hands, becomes

the reason you are useful to someone who is drowning.

That is not a small thing to be given. In

a world of falling mountains, it may be the most

useful thing you own. There is a third thing, and

it is the quietest of them. Grief does not run

on a schedule, and the church has often been impatient

with people who are still sad after everyone else has

moved on. Scripture is not impatient. It gives us an

entire book called Lamentations. It gives us psalm after psalm,

written by people who are not finished being heartbroken. The

Bible makes room for a long sorrow, and so does God.

If you are somewhere in a long sorrow tonight, you

have not fallen behind. You are being carried at the

pace God knows you can be carried. Right now, there

are families in Nepal walking riverbanks and looking at every

dark shape in the water. There are people in many

countries waiting by a phone for news about someone they love.

You cannot reach them with your hands. You can reach

them with prayer, and prayer is not a consolation prize

handed out to people who cannot do anything real. It

is bringing a name before the God who kneels beside

the crushed in spirit. Let me take you to the

end of the Bible, because the end is where this

question finally closes. John sees a new heaven and a

new earth. He sees the sea, which in the imagination

of his people was the home of everything wild and destroying,

and he notes that it is gone. Then he hears

a voice. He will wipe every tear from their eyes.

There will be no more death or mourning or crying

or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.

Revelation chapter 21 verse 4 Look at how personal that is.

Revelation 21:4

It does not say the tears will simply dry. It

says a hand comes and wipes them, which means God

will be close enough to reach your face. Every person

who ever wept in a valley, in a hospital corridor,

in a quiet house at three in the morning, will

be met one by one. This is why Paul could

call the groaning of creation the pain of childbirth. Something

is coming out of it. The world is not falling

apart toward nothing. It is straining toward a morning when

the ground stops moving forever and the mountains stay where

they are put and nobody stands on a riverbank looking

for a body. So why did God let the mountain fall?

Not because Nepal was marked. Not because those pilgrims and

drivers and children were weighed and found wanting. Jesus answered

that question directly, and he answered it no, and he

answered it no again, about a tower that fell on

eighteen people in his own city. Anyone who tells you

otherwise is teaching something the Lord himself refused to teach.

The mountain fell because we live in a world that groans,

on ground that shifts, under ice that has been holding

for millennia and does not hold forever. The rain falls

on everyone. So does the flood. And into that world

God did not send an explanation. He came himself. He

stood at a grave and wept with people who were weeping.

He walked toward a cross and let the worst that

a broken world can do land on his own body,

and he came out the other side of it alive

so that death would have an exit. If you are

watching this with a shaken heart tonight, whether because of

what you saw in the news or because of what

is happening quietly in your own house, hear the promise

one more time. Though the mountains be shaken and the

hills be removed, his unfailing love for you will not

be shaken. The mountain moved. He did not. Stay close

to him. He is nearer than you think, and he

is not finished. If this video helped you grow deeper

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