In January 2025, fire roared down Eaton Canyon and consumed Altadena, California. Nineteen people died. More than 6,000 homes and 9,400 structures were demolished. Fourteen thousand acres were charred, and the fire burned for twenty-four days, driven by Santa Ana winds before it would be contained.
Who was responsible? Electrical arcing on an out-of-service Southern California Edison tower, two arcs in quick succession, and burning debris dropped onto dry brush. Seconds later the grass was ablaze, and within hours much of Altadena was destroyed.
Nobody meant for it to happen.
Over to the East Coast.
On a January evening in Duxbury, Massachusetts, Lindsay Clancy sent her husband for takeout, then strangled their three small children: Cora, five; Dawson, three; and Callan, eight months old. She has never contested doing it.
Her trial ended in September 2026 with a hung jury. Eleven of the twelve jurors were prepared to exonerate her.
Where did the blame land? Postpartum depression. Her medications. The psychiatrists who prescribed them. The one juror who refused to acquit her.
Blame was everywhere. It simply never landed on the mother who took the lives of her own children.
Two tragedies, with one question beneath both of them.
How could God allow this?
The Two Usual Defenses
Most people have an answer ready, and it generally comes in one of two forms.
The first defense says God is not strong enough.
I have written about this topic previously. In 1981, Rabbi Harold Kushner buried his son and wrote the best-seller When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
His conclusion: God is all-loving, but not all-powerful. He would stop your suffering if He could. But, He can’t.
Kushner’s grief was genuine, and the question honest. But recognize what his answer costs. A God who wants to stop your suffering but is unable, is a God who can’t guarantee anything else either, including the comfort Kushner was offering.
The second defense says God is strong enough, but he allows it.
This is where many Christians land. He sees it. He’s powerful enough to stop it. He just chooses not to.
We use the term “allow” and pause there, because the next question is insufferable. Why?
Does God have a purpose or not?
No purpose means indifference, and no one would say that of a loving God. A town destroyed, and three children are dead. Both must have meant something to Him.
So He must have had a purpose. Scripture says He appointed what both would accomplish. That is ordination, and it is the doctrine this defense was built to avoid.
Isaiah 46:10: “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.”
Both defenses are rescue attempts. Kushner gives up God’s power so He couldn’t be blamed. Christians give up God’s involvement so He wouldn’t be implicated. Both defend one attribute by sacrificing another.
God requires no such trade.
Ephesians 1:11 says He “works all things according to the counsel of his will.”
All things. And this part is critical: He does not merely allow history to take place; He orchestrates history. All of it.
Which puts the question back where it started. If God governs a wildfire and a murder alike, what is His responsibility for each?
That cannot be answered until two words are defined: evil and calamity.
Evil Is Corrupted Good
Evil is not a substance. Evil is parasitic. It has no life of its own; it survives by corrupting something good that God has made.
Adultery requires marriage. Theft requires property. A lie requires the truth it distorts. Nothing evil is original. Every instance is a “good gift” subverted from God's intended use.
When corruption happens in a man, Scripture calls it sin.
1 John 3:4: “sin is lawlessness.” The law comes first; sin breaks it.
So sin, evil in its moral form, requires three things. A law. A will capable of obeying or disobeying. And a man who refuses.
Calamity Is Judgment On Creation
Now apply that definition to the Altadena fire.
Fire has no will. It is under no command. It cannot obey, nor can it rebel. A flame consumes dry brush because that’s the nature of fire, and dry brush is no more guilty of being dry than a desert is guilty of being hot.
The Bible’s category for this is calamity. Disaster and suffering with no guilty party.
Isaiah 45:7: “I make well-being and create calamity.”
The Hebrew word, ra’, means harm or ruin. Calamity exists because the creation itself is under judgment.
Genesis 3:17: “cursed is the ground because of you.” Romans 8:20: “the creation was subjected to futility,” by the One who subjected it.
Thorns that pierce. Droughts that sear. Winds that turn a California hillside into kindling. Fault lines, floodwater, cancer cells, the shark in the shallows. None of it is rebellion. All of it is a cursed creation, being true to its nature. None of this existed before the fall.
And God sends it directly.
Amos 3:6: “Does disaster come to a city, unless the LORD has done it?”
In Hebrew, that is a rhetorical question built on a negative, which demands the answer: yes. Altadena was a city. The Lord orchestrated it.
One caution. That God sends disaster does not mean those in its path were worse sinners than anyone else. Christ shut that door, and we will come to His words. Calamity is the standing sentence on a world cursed through Adam, not a verdict on the people it lands on.
Sin Is Conceived In Us
James 1:13 rules out one source: “God cannot be tempted with evil, and He himself tempts no one.”
James 1:14-15 names the actual offender. A man is tempted “when he is lured and enticed by his own desire.” Then, “desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin.”
James is depicting a pregnancy, and notice what is missing. No one outside the man fathers this. His own lust conceives, and sin is what he gives birth to.
This is a distinction everything turns on. To ordain is to determine that something will happen and appoint what it will accomplish. To initiate is to conceive the desire and commit the evil. God does the first but never the second.
Isaiah 46:10: “My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose.”
So Who Is To Blame?
For calamity, no one is guilty, and that is not the same as saying nobody did it. God sends disaster on a world already under judgment, and He has never denied doing it.
Blame requires a wrong, and there is no wrong here. He owes no excuse for judging a world that warranted the curse. What He gives instead is a warning.
Luke 13:5, after a tower fell on eighteen men: “unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”
For evil, blame the one whose desire conceived it. Every time. No diagnosis, no prescription, and no sympathetic jury moves that verdict.
Ezekiel 18:20: "The wickedness of the wicked shall be upon himself."
2 Corinthians 5:10 — "each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil."
Notice that both roads end in the same place. The fire killed nineteen. The mother killed three. Different categories, different verdicts, same result.
That is because death is not specific to either. It is the sentence due to the sin of Adam being carried out throughout history.
Romans 6:23: “the wages of sin is death.”
Ephesians 2:1 describes the unconverted as “dead in their trespasses and sins” while they are still walking around.
Before salvation, spiritual death is already in force. Physical death arrives on a day God alone sets.
Job 14:5: “his days are determined... you have appointed his limits that he cannot pass.”
Scripture does not tell us what God accomplished in any particular death, and we are never invited to speculate. However, He tells us why He ordained a world containing both evil and calamity.
Proverbs 16:4: “The LORD has made everything for its purpose, even the wicked for the day of trouble.”
Romans 9:23: “to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy.”
A world with no sin in it would be a world where His wrath was never seen and His mercy had no one to save.
He ordained a world where both His wrath and His mercy would be displayed. Then He poured the wrath out on His own Son so that mercy could reach us.
God does not need your defense. He commands your repentance.
Summary
A deadly wildfire and a mother who murders her children raise the same question: how could God allow this?
Both standard defenses fail. One surrenders God’s power, the other His involvement. He asks for neither.
Evil is corrupted good and requires a guilty will. Calamity is judgment on a cursed creation and has no guilty party.
God ordains without initiating. He appointed the cross; Judas supplied the greed.
Blame the sinner for evil. For calamity, God did it yet owes no apology.
Death is Adam's judgment, paid out on a day already appointed.
He ordained a world where both His wrath and His mercy would be displayed. Then He poured the wrath on His own Son so that mercy could reach us.
Romans 11:36: “For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever.”
To His Glory,
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Love this!! So timely....
Excellent biblical summary of all this. Thank you for the clarity that is so often lacking when people attempt to explain these things.