Monday, June 29, 2026

The Briefing with Albert Mohler - R. Albert Mohler, Jr.

A deep dive into the dual earthquakes in Venezuela, their humanitarian and theological implications, followed by analysis of recent Supreme Court rulings on immigration and religious liberty, and a critique of political

Key takeaways

• Earthquakes reveal both natural and moral consequences

Transcript preview

It's Monday, June 29, 2006. I'm Albert Moeller and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. It was last Wednesday night the terror struck in the nation of Venezuela two earthquakes. It was not immediately understood that it was two, pretty quickly it was determined that it was two different earthquakes on two different faults. And we're talking about a tremendous amount of devastation and we're talking about a tremendous amount of devastation and we were are now reaching the end of the stage in which it is likely that survivors can be taken alive out of the wreckage and that is leading to a great deal of grief there in Venezuela and we can understand the scale of the disaster is simply huge we're talking about the government currently acknowledging about 1500 deaths that's documented deaths but there about 50,000 Venezuelans who are missing. You look at the photographs in the video you're looking at major buildings entire complexes that have just fallen in on themselves. And you are looking at the inevitability what happens when massive physical forces unleashed and not just one but two major earthquakes go up against say multi-story concrete buildings. Now there is a lot for us to consider here. The first thing we have to consider is the human grief, the human loss of the human pain going on in this. And we should have our minds and hearts directed toward the nation of Venezuela, toward the people of Venezuela, toward the understanding that there is enormous suffering. and that suffering is compounded by the fact that the government is as you know not a highly efficient and competent government that's the reason why you had a US intervention you now have not a president but an acting president and of course you had Nicholas Maduro taken into custody a lot a lot of headlines out of Venezuela but it's also true that the United States has been trying to establish friendlier relations with Venezuela and that's going to be really important American aid is going to be absolutely crucial People of Venezuela are facing one of the biggest natural disasters in modern times and they simply do not have the wherewithal to deal with it themselves. This is where the United States can do enormous good. This is where the people, the citizens of the United States, understand this kind of need and there is tremendous public support. I'm glad to say that. Tremendous moral support for the nation helping out. It's also true that you have a lot of other nations which are in better shape than Venezuela, including some that are across the ocean, that are showing up with material, showing up with help, showing up with medical experts, showing up with the kind of machinery and engineering to be able to move massive concrete ruins. So the first thing we need to do is respond with prayer and concern for the people of Venezuela. We also need to understand how this fits into human history. Earthquakes have been a long-standing plague against humanity, a longstanding problem. And when you're talking about this series of earthquakes, you're talking about something called a double it. And what makes it all the more frightening is that it wasn't just one fault quaking twice. It wasn't a major earthquake in an aftershock. It apparently was one quake on one fault, setting off a much larger earthquake on a second fault. So just look at this. You had the Caribbean plate moving into the South American plate. That's the tectonic issue that creates all this stress. That's why Venezuela is so vulnerable to this kind of earthquake. You have several fault lines to the fault lines intersect. or at least are extremely close, a matter of as close in proximity is three miles we are told. Either one of these earthquakes on either one of these fault lines taken alone would have been a major earthquake with devastation. Coming together, we're talking about massive devastation. I want to talk for just a moment about how this is factored into human history and into Christian history, into church history, into theological history, into worldview history. I want to think of it in these terms. So obviously earthquakes have been known to human beings long time, although it was not something that was easily explained by the ancients. It was one of those natural phenomena that would come with tremendous devastation, but more or less like the eruption of volcanoes, even though it came with such explosive force, there was very little way that the ancients could predict or even understand some of the basic physics that were involved. And by the way, that is true on earthquakes, even to the point that many of the buildings that basically crumbled in the earthquake there in Venezuela, many of Venezuela, many of them, many of them were built before some of the current knowledge about the physics of earthquakes was available, which is to say in the United States, quite frankly, the time in which a building was built has a great deal to do with what kind of knowledge is built into the engineering and the architecture. Now there's more to it, as we're going to see when it comes to Venezuela. But while we are thinking about how worldview crises have emerged because of earthquakes, we need to understand there's one that looms largest in Western history, the history of Western civilization, the history of Western civilization. horrifying Lisbon earthquake of the year 1755. Okay, it may be that with 50,000 missing, this horrifying series of earthquakes, the two earthquakes, the pair there in Venezuela, may rank along with Lisbon. The death toll from Lisbon in Spain itself was between 30 and 40,000. It was estimated that another 10,000 died in Morocco. There in North Africa, so you're talking about a massive earthquake that had a in more than one nation, but the epicenter was in Portugal, it was in Lisbon, and it really was a horrifying situation. So horrifying that it led to a crisis in Christian theology, at least among some. Some among the intellectual elites, and of course we're now into the Enlightenment, they had to have a rational explanation for all of this. They demanded a rational explanation for not only how the earthquake happened, but why it happened then and there and killed these people. And that led to a theological crisis and quite frankly it also led to some who abandoned Christianity it led to some who basically gave themselves to what would later be defined as theological liberalism. They simply wanted to say God didn't have anything to do with this. This flies in the face of the notion of a good and sovereign God. So I just want to say earthquakes can sometimes come with devastating consequences and some of those consequences are worldview consequences, sometimes even theological consequences and this is our theology not by our experience but by divine revelation by the word of God and this is where we come to understand that in a