Texas could be facing a “one-in-1,000-years type of event” after Hurricane Harvey struck the Texas Gulf Coast this weekend, making landfall on Friday and deluging cities on the coast with 15 to 30 inches of rain. The National Hurricane Center estimates that water levels in Houston could reach 50 inches in total, warning of “catastrophic flooding” over the next few days. The National Weather Service has predicted that parts of Texas will be left “uninhabitable for months, if not years.”

Hurricane Harvey is already being compared to Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans in 2005 and was one of the top five worst natural disasters in American history. The National Weather Service has called Harvey “unprecedented” and warned that “all impacts are unknown and beyond anything experienced.”

Yet this is just the latest in a whole series of “unprecedented” natural disasters. Why?

This is a subject we address in our free book Why ‘Natural’ Disasters?Here are some excerpts from the first chapter:

Anyone who has been paying attention will note that large-scale nature-related disasters are increasing.

Every few weeks it seems, Earth unleashes devastating violence of some sort or other. An earthquake—a tornado—a tsunami—a massive storm—a flood—a drought—a rash of wildfires. It levels property, destroys homes, decimates crops, claims lives. And another constellation of survivors are left breathless in its wake, tasked with trying to piece their shattered lives back together.

It is a dreadful reminder of an awesome and important reality.

In our modern world, industrialization has done much to insulate a great many of us from the elements. We have paved over our land. We have abandoned our farms in favor of climate-controlled homes, offices and malls. Concrete, steel and glass shield us from routine rain, hail, sleet, snow, heat, chill. These former crop-killers, for most of us, are now mere inconveniences.

It’s only when nature gets really nasty—when rains turn to floods, when snows stop our planes, when droughts demand water restrictions, when a temblor topples infrastructure—that we even think to acknowledge the power it still holds over us. It dwarfs us. Impressive as our tower of Babel society is, it remains awkwardly vulnerable to the sheer elemental power of the planet in its fury.

History shows, in fact, that whole societies have risen or fallen because of favorable or foul forces of nature.

And in recent times, violent outbursts of those forces have been speeding up in tempo. …

On and on the list goes. “Unprecedented” and “record” disasters are happening at a quickening pace. “History making” events are becoming commonplace!

We need to be concerned!

What is wrong with the weather? …

There was a time when people, “intellectuals” even, would look at nature and see God.

“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 George Washington Carver, the distinguished 20th-century scientist. Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that “the glory of the omnipresent God bursts through everywhere” in nature. …

These days, any person bold enough to consider nature God’s “unlimited broadcasting station” is mocked as a religious crackpot. This is too bad. Because the Bible actually claims to pinpoint the causes of weather cataclysms and to forecast long-term weather trends!

Could it be that God is indeed employing nature as His “unlimited broadcasting station”? That He is cursing our weather patterns and increasing the destructiveness of natural circumstances in an attempt to communicate with us? The Bible shows that this is exactly what He is doing. It shows that He is currently delivering a message via nature that we all desperately need to hear and respond to!

The disasters we see increasing are in fact a tool that the Creator of the natural world has reserved for Himself, to use at His pleasure—in order to speak with us! After all, we don’t tend to listen very well. But severe natural phenomena are impossible to ignore.

Yet for most people, even as our planet is coming apart, the message is still not resonating.

The question is, are you prepared to listen?

Many people certainly have questions in the aftermath of these type of crises: Where was God? Why did He allow this? Is there hope? The answers to these questions are revealed in your Bible, for those willing to hear God’s voice. Why ‘Natural’ Disasters? will help you find these answers. You can order your free copy or read it free online, here.