Just hours before President Obama addressed the nation about the Gulf oil spill on Tuesday, BP temporarily suspended its siphoning operations after one of its tankers was struck by lightning. It was yet another setback for a cleanup effort that has been almost as disastrous as the spill itself. “From the beginning,” the New York Times wrote earlier this week, “the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP.”

This is the worst environmental disaster ever to strike the United States of America. Experts now say the gushing leak is spewing 2.5 million gallons of oil per day into the Gulf. It’s like having an Exxon Valdez spill every four days. And this has been going on for two months. And there’s still no end in sight.

This week, President Obama declared war on the disaster. First, he compared the Deepwater Horizon explosion to 9/11. Then, during his Oval Office speech, he unveiled his “battle plan” aimed at the oil he said is “assaulting” America. This is something “we will be fighting for months and even years,” the president said.

In order to win this war, he’s appointed a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to head up a team of engineers working to plug the hole. He has 30,000 people working in four states to help clean up the mess. And he’s deployed 17,000 National Guard members along the coast.

“We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes,” the president said.

Whatever it takes—no matter the cost. By now, that exhausted phrase must have its own function key on the president’s keyboard. Just 18 months into office, President Obama has already promised to do whatever it takes to revive the economy, send Americans back to work, stem the tide of foreclosures, help small businesses survive the recession, eliminate the threat of piracy off the coast of Somalia, stop the spread of swine flu, defeat al Qaeda and rebuild Haiti.

We keep pledging everything we’ve got and the disasters keep right on coming—and intensifying.

Consider this statement, from President Obama: “We’re moving forward with one of the largest relief efforts in our history—to save lives and to deliver relief that averts an even larger catastrophe” (emphasis mine).

What does it say about the state of America today when, at first glance, you can’t tell if a statement like that refers to the oil spill or an earthquake that happened just five months ago? (It’s the latter.)

Two thirds of Americans know full well that their nation is headed in the wrong direction. They sense that something has gone terribly wrong.

And what makes it worse is that in trying to fix these complicated problems, the White House is simultaneously using them to advance the president’s radical agenda. President Obama devoted more than half of his speech on Tuesday to endorse his clean energy initiative, which had been languishing in Congress for months—well before Deepwater Horizon became a household name. He acknowledged that the heavy cost of his cap-and-trade proposal would come at a particularly difficult time. “[T]here are some who believe that we can’t afford those costs right now,” Obama said. “I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy ….”

Whatever it takes. In this case, whatever it takes to expand an already bloated federal government that is addicted to spending and drowning in debt. “No matter the crisis,” the New York Post noted, “Obama can’t resist the temptation to exploit it in his quest to grow the government.”

Talk about a chaotic mess that isn’t being cleaned up! America’s shores are certainly being assaulted—and not only by toxic waters. We are being pounded by waves of unprecedented curses. And the Bible says they will increase and intensify. “[A]ll these curses shall come upon thee, and overtake thee,” God says in Deuteronomy 28:15, before outlining all manner of economic, weather, military and social disasters.

Overtaken by curses. What a world!

But why? Why would God allow it? How could a God of love permit these disasters to persist and to spread like that oil slick in the Gulf?

It’s because of man’s ways! “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your waysmy ways, saith the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8). Man has chosen to go his own way. And for that, we are simply reaping what we sow!

God allows it because in order for Him to reproduce His own holy, righteous character in us, we must voluntarilychoose to follow His ways—to submit to His laws. He will not force us to follow His ways. Think of the howling protests there would be if God actually did force man to accept His laws and go the way that would automatically result in blessings of peaceful co-existence with God and with fellow man, of joyful abundance and contented well-being.

Deuteronomy 30 says we must choose the way of blessings or curses. If we choose to reject God’s laws and go the way of curses, God always sends a warning in love, to plead with man to wake up and to consider his ways and repent (Haggai 1:5-7). If we ignore the warning, then God pleads with man in the form of ever increasing, intensifying curses.

What we are experiencing now is the outer edge of a violent storm that will soon engulf the entire world—called the Great Tribulation (Matthew 24:21-22). Even that—as horrific and widespread as the suffering will be—is God’s last-ditch effort to warn man of the error of his ways.

As Herbert W. Armstrong wrote in The United States and Britain in Prophecy, “God is going to keep multiplying chastening—correction—upon our peoples until they do turn from their evil ways—until they turn to the ways that cause peace, happiness, prosperity, all the good things!”

He won’t force us, but He will do whatever it takes for us to turn to Him in humble submission and obedience.