The United States Geological Survey estimated that some 10.5 million people experienced strong to very strong shaking. At least 21 aftershocks followed within hours, including one measuring magnitude 5.0. In Cali, the pediatric and neonatal wards of a hospital collapsed, and buildings came down across a swath of cities that included Pereira, Quibdó, and Manizales. The Colombian government declared a national disaster and sent soldiers into the stricken zone to assist with search and rescue.
Rescue crews spent the day pulling survivors and the dead from rubble as aftershocks continued to rattle already-damaged structures. Evangelical churches across Colombia began working through the night and into Tuesday to account for their members and assess how badly their buildings and neighborhoods had been struck, even as the death toll climbed through the day.
Numbers like 132 dead and 570 injured are not abstractions. Every one of them was somebody's child, somebody's mother, somebody's neighbor down the street, alive on Sunday night and gone or broken by Monday noon. That is the plain, hard truth an earthquake teaches quicker than any preacher can: this earth is not steady ground. It rolls under our feet the moment we forget it can.
The Ground Was Never the Promise
Now here is where the newspaper account has to give way to something older and truer. Colombia's mountains did not shift because God was careless, and they did not shift because He was punishing anybody in particular. The Lord Jesus was asked once about a tower that fell in Siloam and killed eighteen people, and He would not let His hearers turn it into a morality tale about who deserved it. He turned it instead into a summons: repent, for you are not promised tomorrow either.
That is the plain word this earthquake carries to every reader sitting comfortably tonight in a house that did not fall. The ground under Cali felt solid on Sunday. It felt solid right up until it wasn't. Job said it plain enough three thousand years ago: He removeth the mountains, and they know not; He overturneth them in His anger. Nobody in San José del Palmar woke up Monday morning planning to lose a home, a hospital ward, a child. Neither did anybody who ever died of anything. That is not fatalism, my friend, that is fact, and the fact ought to wake a man up.
But the same God who shakes the mountains is the God who does not shake. That is the whole of the good news standing behind the rubble.
"God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." (Psalm 46:1)
Not a refuge somewhere off in the sweet by and by only, but a present help, right now, in Cali and in whatever trouble is sitting on your own chest tonight. The psalm goes on to say the earth may be removed, the mountains carried into the midst of the sea — and still the man who has taken hold of God has a refuge that does not move, because it was never built on Colombian soil or American soil or any soil at all. It was built on Christ crucified and risen, and a grave that opened once and could not hold Him.
Jesus said it Himself, that there would be earthquakes in divers places, and He said it not to frighten men into despair but to turn their eyes upward before the last one comes. Rescue workers in Colombia are digging through concrete tonight looking for the living. God is not hard to find. He has already dug through the hardest ground there is — sin and death — and He is standing in the open, present help.