Are Natural Disasters a Fulfillment of Bible Prophecy?

Are natural disasters, like earthquakes and plagues, a fulfillment of Bible prophecy? The Old Testament word for plague (nega‘ ) originally referred to the physical blow a ruler would deliver as punishment. Most of the time in the Old Testament it was used to refer to God sending a physical judgment or disease. The plagues God sent against Egypt included physical sufferings, like boils or the death of the firstborn son; but most were external judgments like frogs, lice, locusts, hail, or intense darkness. In Ezekiel 5:12 and 6:12 the prophet connected the word “plague” with physical disease that would kill those inside Jerusalem. “A third of you will die by plague or perish by famine among you, a third will fall by the sword around you, and a third I will scatter to every wind, and I will unsheathe a sword behind them” (Ezek. 5:12).

The English word “plague” comes from the Greek word plēgē, which describes a plague, blow, or wound. In the book of Revelation the plagues associated with the seven trumpets and seven bowls include earthquakes and other physical destruction on parts of the earth, demonic attacks, physical diseases, and intense heat and darkness (Rev. 9; 16).

Apart from God raising up a prophet to announce it in advance, we have no way of knowing if such a natural disaster was sent from God as judgment.

God did send both earthquakes and physical disease as judgment for sin, though these weren’t the only kinds of plagues He used to punish individuals. This leads to an important question. How do we know if an earthquake or plague is actually intended as a divine judgment to fulfill Bible prophecy? Job experienced loss of property and intense physical illness. His three friends were convinced Job was experiencing all this distress as judgment from the hand of God, but the reader is taken behind the scenes in chapters 1–2 to discover this was not the case. The friends were wrong!

Apart from God raising up a prophet to announce it in advance, we have no way of knowing if such a natural disaster was sent from God as judgment. Amos was sent to announce God’s judgment “two years before the earthquake” (Amos 1:1). But in the absence of a direct, divine prediction, anyone assuming a specific disaster was sent as divine judgment is actually presuming on God, just as Job’s friends had done. Jesus used the illustration of a catastrophic tower collapse that killed eighteen people in Jerusalem to make a similar point in His day. “Or do you think that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse offenders than all the other people who live in Jerusalem? No, I tell you” (Luke 13:4–5).

In theory someone could come forward claiming to be a prophet of God and announce that a coming natural disaster is God’s divine judgment. But that individual had better be sure he or she is indeed a true prophet being sent by God, because God set a very high standard for those claiming to speak in His name. “When the prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, and the thing does not happen or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously” (Deut. 18:22). And two verses earlier God explained what was to be done to someone speaking “presumptuously” in His name. “But the prophet who speaks a word presumptuously in My name, a word which I have not commanded him to speak . . . shall die” (Deut. 18:20).