Question: With at least three major fires in the Los Angeles area having been observed from space erupting simultaneously; with the path of the fires purportedly coinciding with a proposed a high-speed rail route connecting a future smart city or cities; with firemen reporting that this fire was strangely “resisting” being put out; with blue-roofed houses and other blue objects escaping the fire as in Lahaina, Hawaii; yet with the media blaming these fires on arsonists or electric companies, there have arisen “conspiracy theories” of these fires actually being humanly engineered by means of energy devices beamed from the air.
My question is that if that were indeed the case, would such an unnatural kind of disaster qualify as divine retribution—as upon a society that has largely abandoned God—similar to the natural disasters that are prophesied to increase as we draw nearer to Jesus Christ’s Second Coming?
Answer: Whether in the case of natural disasters—as with the earth’s responding to conditions arising within the laws of nature—or in the case of unnatural disasters, in a prophetic or divine context they are by and large the same. On the one hand, the earth responds to the righteousness or wickedness of its inhabitants, and on the other God permits evils to happen as a consequence of people’s evil actions. Natural or manmade disasters of one kind or another will unfailingly ensue the more a society sinks into corruption.
Ancient Sodom and Gomorrah’s destruction by a hail of fire and brimstone rained from the sky appears to all intents to have been a natural disaster, but one perfectly timed according to the wickedness of those cities. In other instances, as with the Nephites and Lamanites, God empowers his people’s enemies against them when they depart from his ways. In the case of the Jaredites’ extinction, the people and their leaders did this to themselves. There is an inevitability attached these disasters that is a sign of the times.
