Nuclear Disaster Brings Tribulation to Japanese Church
As radioactive water leaks from a quake-damaged power plant off the coast of Japan, a local congregation attempts to make sense of the disaster.
Two weeks ago, the Rev. Akira Sato evacuated his flock from the Fukushima First Baptist Church, three miles away from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. For the tight-knit community, abandoning the church building was a blow because American missionaries had started the church long before the nuclear plant was built in the 1960s.
“Will we ever be able to worship in our church again, or will the town simply be abandoned?” Sato asked in his March 13 diary entry. Since the journey began, Sato kept a day-to-day journal chronicling his church’s day-to-day ordeal, which he likened to the biblical account written in the Book of Exodus.
“Like the Israelites in the desert, all we can do is follow God as He leads us with pillars of fire and clouds,”...
jpw wrote: Christian do not be slothen, sitting on the park bench waiting for your Messiah in the clouds, Christ didn't ask you to commentate the end times but to be a witness in them.
Amen and Amen jp
And I fully agree that if a nuclear bomb lands on my head, it will have no effect whatever on the ability of God to resurrect my body and reassemble it in perfection, even though it be incinerated and blown all over the country.
The church suffers through tribulation with the non-believer.
Nuclear disaster is man-made anyway. I have no doubt God's hand is involved. He is sovereign. I think he reaches out to the lost world through any manner of things, to remind them that they are not autonomous all-powerful little gods---that their need is outside of themselves. "Seek me and you shall find me", he says.
Even the Japanese can repent, bend their hearts to Christ and be saved. Our hope is an eternal one. Even as tribulation comes to your home, in the worst of circumstances you can know that nothing will separate you from the love of Christ, if you indeed are his. That ownership that he has of his children will pull you into eternity, and into the second resurrection, of the body, your body, as described in 1 Cor 15, so that even a believer in a nuclear disaster is not beyond His redemption.
Christian do not be slothen, sitting on the park bench waiting for your Messiah in the clouds, Christ didn't ask you to commentate the end times but to be a witness in them.
I read a sermon on Sabbath from a Scottish Minister of by-gone days from Matthew 3:12 comparing Mal. 3:2. His good points were from my notes
1.God accomplishes his work by means of his Word, it is compared to fire for its searching and purifying tendency, a candle or light that discovers hidden things in the darkness, it cuts two ways to discover the thoughts and intents of the heart and divides between the soul and spirit making a discrimination between states and characters by laying down infallible marks of these and applying them convincingly to individuals. It all starts in each man's heart, and God can work with or without the means. 1. point of 5
As it has been pointed out by others besides myself, a church is more than a building, A church building can help focus people on what they should be doing, to help keep them together, and also be a focal point in a community.
However, the early Christians rarely had permanent church buildings, and congregations should realize that it is the congregation and not the building that is important -- What Do You Treasure?.
Dr. Alan Cairns | 2/2/2009
COMMENTS | 
