As I’ve listened to pastors, church members, family members and neighbors talk about the horrific Tsunami, I have a couple of thoughts.
1. It’s clear that if you are a believer, part of the process of growing in faith is struggling with what experience teaches. God is good but he is not tailored to our personal convenience or our personal desires.
2. God and Satan are real. God, the creator and sustainer of the universe, controls the world. He is sovereign.
3. If Satan caused the earthquake in the Indian Ocean, as one person suggested to me, he is not the decisive cause of 150,000 deaths, God is. Is the Jesus who kept the disciples’ boat from capsizing and drowning them, the same God today? Of course he is. So if Satan caused the earthquake, God could have stopped the Tsunami. Claiming power of Tsunamis, God once asked Job rhetorically, "Who shut up the sea behind doors when it burst forth from the womb?"
4. Destructive calamities always mingle both judgment and mercy. Job’s miseries were not God’s doing (Job 1:1,8). In the end, the pain Job experienced purified not punished. (Job 42:6). Suffering, and even death, can be one or the other. Consider the death of Jesus. It was both judgment and mercy. It was judgment on Jesus because he bore our sins (not his own), and it was mercy toward us who trust him to bear our punishment.
5. A heart-wrenching calamity should cause us to realize that we are in the 11th hour. Even though these kind of awful disasters are not new, we ought to take stock of our lives. They are not over. And yet, God will continue sustaining the universe until history ends. One day, the trumpet will sound and the world as we know it will come to end.
donfollis.com 
Hmm.I have to wholeheartedly disagree with you on some of this. I know I mostly post here because I disagree with you. Oh well.If God is the decisive cause of the tsunami in S Asia, as you seem to imply, then why do you even bother talking about Satan? Satan would just be the middleman. He is superfluous, like a dummy variable in an equation that falls out at the end. He just wouldn't matter.Frankly, I look at it like this. If I were to, say, train a friend of mine to have some impact in ministry, and then he proceeds to wreak destruction because of his newfound power three months later, does that mean I am responsible for his actions? No. I gave him power, and he used it badly later. But it was still his action and choice.If I could violate his ability to now do these things, I might. But what if I can't? Or won't? What if I don't have the right to do so? What if my taking that power from him would be wrong, violating his free choices, while letting him keep it would not be? Even if there are negative effects? What if the power given is no longer mine, but his? What if the solution is not to take away his power, but to give someone else power to defeat him? To empower his enemies?Gen. 1:28 – "God blessed them and said to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.'"This post is just conjecture, though. Isn't it?
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