July 18, 2025 Show with Scott Christensen on “Updates on the Aftermath of the Flood in Kerrville, Texas & How to Trust in God’s Sovereignty in the Midst of Misery”

The Flood in Kerrville and the Church’s Relief Efforts

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 18th day of July 2025.

Before I introduce my guest and our topic today, I got off the phone earlier this afternoon with my longtime friend, Phil Johnson, the executive director of the media ministry for the late John MacArthur, and he gave me an update because I have been getting inquiries from our listeners in even other parts of the world like Australia and South Africa and other places, but people are asking me about the funeral plans for Dr. MacArthur and if it's going to be live streamed.

And I have been informed by Phil Johnson that it will be live streamed, and they are announcing the exact date and time this Monday, and you can find out more about that at gracechurch .org, which is the website for Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, where Dr. MacArthur served so faithfully as pastor for so many years.

That's gracechurch .org. If you go to that site this Monday, they will eventually have the exact date and time that the live streaming of the funeral will occur. Today I am thrilled to have a returning guest.

I'm thrilled to have him back on the program, but the reason is rather tragic. I'm sure all of you who have any access to news media in any realm or venue, television, radio, the internet, are aware that there was a horrific flood in the Texas Hill Country that began early on the 4th of July.

As far as I know, the latest death toll has reached 134 people, and the number of missing persons stands at 101. One of the primary areas of this flood that had been devastated by the flood is a town known as Kerrville, Texas.

I'm sure you heard that name repeated a lot on the news, whatever news outlets you watch or listen to. We have the honor and privilege of having a returning guest today, Pastor Scott Christensen, who is Associate Pastor of Kerrville Bible Church in Kerrville, Texas.

He's the author of several books, including his latest book, Defeating Evil, How God Glorifies Himself in a Dark World. Today we're going to be addressing updates on the aftermath of the devastating flood in Kerrville, Texas from a local pastor and how to trust in God's sovereignty in the midst of the misery.

It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Pastor Scott Christensen.

Thank you. It's my pleasure to be with you today.

And if you could, give our listeners a little description of Kerrville Bible Church.

Yeah, Kerrville Bible Church was started in the late 80s and has had a variety of pastors—actually, three pastors. Our current senior lead pastor is Chris McKnight, a graduate of the Master's Seminary.

And this July, in fact, the same weekend that the floods took place, we had long planned a celebration of his 25th anniversary as the pastor of our church. And so it was a difficult decision to go on with that celebration in the wake of the devastation of the floods.

But anyway, he's a faithful expositor, and I've been at the church for close to six years and came from pastoring a small church, a rural church in southwest Colorado, for 16 years. And I serve now as the associate pastor, and it's a wonderful church.

God has blessed us tremendously. We have seen a lot of people come to faith in Christ, and God is moving in our town. And in spite of this recent tragedy, we see him at work in a variety of ways.

Well, I'm going to give a website right now in the event that there are people listening who can't listen to the entire broadcast, but it's a very important link I want to give for any of you whose hearts have been touched and whose wallets and pocketbooks have been blessed for you to be led to donate any funds that you are able to to help the flood relief efforts going on there at Kerrville Bible Church.

The website is kerrvillebiblechurch .org forward slash flood-relief. That's kerrvillebiblechurch .org forward slash flood-relief, K-E-R-R-V-I-L-L-E biblechurch .org forward slash flood-relief.

And we'll be announcing that website toward the end of the program. So, tell us about the earliest awareness that you had on the 4th of July of what was happening, and when did you begin to become truly alarmed that this may be a worse situation for you than you had originally realized?

Well, the night before the 4th, we had several storm warnings and indications of potential flash flooding in the area, but no one had any notion of what would take place. This region is not immune to flash flooding.

In the six years that I've lived here, we've had three or four flash floods that generally isolate people in various areas because they cover the roads and prevent you from being able to travel, but nothing like this.

There has not been a flood like this since I believe it was 1927, so nearly 100 years ago. They had a similar flood, but only a handful of people died in that flood in 27, because it was during the day.

This was in the middle of the night. I actually did not sleep well that night because the thunder and lightning was so intense that it kept me awake a good part of the night. I had really not realized how much it was raining until we got up in the morning, and then we lost power.

Probably around six in the morning, we had lost power in our home, and so we didn't even have internet access initially, so we weren't really aware of what was going on. And so about nine o 'clock in the morning or so, we were able to get on social media and see what was happening, and then we decided we didn't have any power, so we decided to go out and grab a cup of coffee.

Well, I live about 500 yards from the river, and one of the major bridges that crosses that river is just a couple blocks from my house. So we crossed that bridge, and that bridge sits about 35 feet above the normal surface of the water.

As we crossed that bridge, I think it was about 9 .30 or 10 o 'clock, the water was about five feet below the bridge.

Wow.

And so at that point, it was not very easy to see the sort of devastation that the flooding had created because everything was underwater. And over the course of the day, as I traveled back and forth across that bridge, the devastation was unbelievable.

As the waters receded, I saw several homes and trailers that were smashed against trees, saw about three or four cars overturned and falling into the river, all kinds of debris. The trees were completely wiped out in major portions of the river.

It was horrific and never seen anything like it in my life. So yeah, the devastation is hard to fathom unless you've actually—pictures don't do it justice, the videos that you're seeing just simply don't do it justice.

When you're on the ground and you can see it firsthand, it's quite devastating.

And first of all, has there been any structural damage to the Kerrville Bible Church or to your home or to the homes of folks in your congregation?

No, our house, as I said, is about 500 yards from the river, but we sat maybe about 10 to 15 feet above where the waters rose. Some parts of our subdivision did get—some homes in our subdivision did get flooded, but we sit up high enough where we did not.

The church sits up high, so it did not get any flooding. It's quite a ways from the river. All of the flooding is along the river basin, the Guadalupe River, that its headwaters are up above a town called Hunt, which is about 12 miles upriver from Kerrville, and it splits into two forks.

There's a south fork and a north fork, and they're both spring-fed waters, and so those springs feed those waters, and then they form the river. But the storm that caused the flooding, I believe it was two storms that came together and they just sat there.

Typically, these storms move from one location to another. Well, they sat there for about four hours. And so in the Hunt area, which has received the greatest devastation, they received about 12 inches of total rain in some places between midnight and four o 'clock in the morning.

And so that amount of water rushing through the canyons plus bedrock is not very far below the surface. The water just had nowhere to go except into the river. So in our church, we've had two people directly affected.

One family whose home sits on the river, and some of the structures on their property were wiped out, were swept away into the river, and their home was flooded all the way up to the ceiling. And the damage is pretty severe.

And so they are currently staying with another family in our church, and we're seeking to see how we can help them. We have another man in our church who actually recently found out that he has esophagus cancer and was in the hospital when the flood took place.

He lives in an apartment building near the river, and that apartment building was flooded and condemned. And so he's not even been back home yet to see what sort of destruction to his home and belongings are.

But other than that, we've had a number of people in our church that are connected, extended family that have had homes destroyed and even extended family that have had deaths as a result of the flood.

But have had deaths?

Yes. One of the members of our church, his brother owns a house along the river, and he had a sister-in-law and her husband and their daughter staying at their home. The river took the house out and swept it into the river.

Prior to that, as they saw as they were awakened by the flooding, the mother was in a location where he couldn't get to her. The daughter broke out a window and was swept away in the flood as she tried to escape the house from the window.

The husband was able to escape okay and get to the side of the shore fairly quickly, but the house, you know, ripped off its foundations, headed down the river, and then immediately collapsed on the mother.

They just two days ago found the mother, found her remains. I don't know what condition she was found in, and they still have not found the daughter.

Oh, no.

So, yeah, this has been devastating. It's really very devastating.

Yeah, I understand. Out of the 134 deaths, 36 of those were children.

Yes. We have a police officer in our church who, last week, was assigned to a team to help identify bodies and then connect those bodies to family members, and he examined 74 bodies, and he told me 26 of those were children.

Wow.

So, he had the majority of those children who died identified?

Yes. Wow. Most of those children were found within the first week.

And a lot of these children were involved in a summer camp there in the area, I believe.

Yeah.

There's a girls camp that everyone's probably heard by now called Camp Mystic, and it actually has two separate campuses, a newer campus and the older campus, and it was the older campus that was closest to the river and received the most damage and where most of the missing girls were from.

I believe there's about 300 girls altogether in that camp, but another 200 to 300 in the newer location of the camp. Kerr County, which is where all this flooding took place, has actually 18 different camps, various camps.

Some are Christian, some are not really Christian camps, but it's a very popular area for camps. And the Mystic camp was not the only camp that was impacted where children died. There are several other camps along the river where children got swept away as well, but they have not received as much attention as the Mystic camp because the casualties were not as great.

Actually, the greatest number of casualties was in an RV park right outside of Kerrville as you come into the town from the Upper Riverside. And a lot of those people were elderly folks that just were not able to escape the raging waters.

And so that's where I think that was the case up until recently. I think it still is that that's where the majority of casualties took place in terms of a single area where the river took out people.

It's hard to fathom. Yeah. My friend, Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries does most of his traveling these days in an RV. And right after the flood reports were coming in, he was almost convinced as he was trying to search through his memory banks that he had stayed in one of those nearby RV parks.

So it was very providential that he wasn't traveling during that period of time in that area.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I have an inflatable kayak, and I have been up and down this river in no precise locations where certain tragic deaths took place because I've been there. I've seen the descriptions and the pictures.

I've been in all those locations. There was another home that collapsed, and all of the family—there was several couples and a five-year-old girl and a 20-month-year-old boy—they all survived by clinging to trees, but the 20-month-old boy got swept away.

A couple days after the flooding—I believe it was on the 6th of July—I came to a movie theater that's just down the road from where I live, and I went behind that movie theater just to look at the damage of the river.

And it was only later that day that I realized that's where they found this 20-month-old.

Boy.

It was right where I was standing in the river. I had not realized that at the time. So that was—yeah, it was devastating to just know where this all happened and then to be in that location where that little one-and-a-half-year-old boy was found.

Yeah, it's unfathomable. And, you know, we have another family in our church who has a couple of older brothers—it's a large family—that were first responders, and they were some of the first people to help a number of people up in the Hunt region.

Again, that's a town that's about 12 miles up from Kerrville, warning people. They were aware that the flood was happening, and they were trying to get as many people out of their homes as they could.

And unfortunately, they could not reach everyone, and they witnessed a number of RVs floating down the river with people in them as they were screaming, and then watched them get swallowed up in the waters.

And the trauma that they have experienced is just hard to fathom. And that's just one of multiple stories like that. Many people tried to help people, and just the river rose so quickly and moved so fast that it just took everyone by complete surprise.

Wow.

I mentioned, as you know, in the outset of the program, the website for those wanting to be involved in supporting Kerrville Bible Church's flood relief efforts, kerrvillebiblechurch .org forward slash flood dash relief.

Can you tell us what exactly those relief efforts are, and what are they looking like.

Now?

Well, our church has responded in two ways. We are actually the host church for Samaritan's Purse. And shortly after the flood took place, we contacted them, and we agreed to host them on our campus. And so, our campus is full of Samaritan's Purse personnel and vehicles and equipment.

And we have about 50 people of their team that's staying in our church for several weeks. We still got a few more weeks they plan to be here. So, a number of our own church members are kind of volunteering as a support team to them.

They send out teams of about 150 people a day to various homes that have been flooded, and their main objective is what they call muck and gut. And so, they go into these places, homes that have been flooded, and they remove all the furniture.

They remove all the belongings. They clean up the place as best they can, and then they take out sheetrock and other things that would cause mold and basically leave the structure in a condition where contractors can come in and determine whether or not the building is salvageable and can be rebuilt.

And in most cases, that's true. And in probably a handful of cases, the buildings just need to be condemned and torn down. So, that's mainly what they're doing, and we're kind of supporting them. I have to say that everyone—a lot of people have heard of Samaritan's Purse.

It's Franklin Graham's ministry. They have been fantastic, and the work that they do and the professionalism and the Christian witness that they maintain has been phenomenal. And I would encourage listeners to consider supporting Samaritan's Purse as well.

I don't always agree with their theology in some ways, but when it comes to disaster relief, I don't think there's a better organization out there.

Yeah, there can be people, in my opinion, who act like complete idiots who want to micromanage the theological views of people doing heroic work physically during a calamity of some kind, some kind of a mind-boggling tragedy.

And they would dare to say that they weren't going to be involved in supporting a group like Samaritan's Purse because of serious theological differences on humanism and other things, but they would be the first ones to receive help from them if they needed it.

So we have to really seriously consider before we open our mouths or start typing moronic things on our computer keypads, we have to really consider what we would do if our home was flooded or destroyed, if we had lost loved ones, if we had missing loved ones, if we had lost our ability for income and providing for our family and all these things.

We have to be very careful as to when and how and the manner with which we publicly disagree with those of different theological persuasions.

Yes. It's interesting that Samaritan's Purse partners with another organization, the Billy Graham kind of ministries. It's called the Billy Graham Rapid Response Team, and it's basically a group of chaplains.

They're kind of their own organization, but they work in tandem with Samaritan's Purse to try to counsel with people and share the gospel as best they can. So we met with some of their chaplains, myself and our lead pastor, and as they share the gospel with various people, they write down names, and then they give those to the host church.

And so we've received a list of names of victims that have had some kind of spiritual counsel or gospel shared with them, and I have already contacted a number of those people, some who have agreed to come to church this coming Sunday.

So hopefully that will happen, and I've had opportunities to bear witness to Christ to some of those folks and to help them process some of the trauma of this tragedy. So there's been some good that's coming out of all this, and there are already pretty amazing stories of how God is working in our own church and even in other churches in the area.

Trusting God’s Sovereignty in Natural Evil

Well, we have to go to our first commercial break, and when we come back, we're going to be addressing this tragedy from a theological point of view. My guest today, Scott Christensen, is a Reformed Baptist, and as I announced at the beginning of the program, he is the author of several books, and his writing, although not precisely the exact same theme, is not far afield from the theme of what we're dealing with today.

He has written his latest book, Defeating Evil, How God Glorifies Himself in a Dark World. And obviously, although a flood is morally neutral, it's not an evil thing, but it's still something that the populace has to cope with, especially if they have lost loved ones or they know many people who have lost loved ones and they wonder how a loving God could actually exist in the midst of such misery and such tragedy, and that is a very common thing that goes through the minds not only of unbelievers, but even the minds of believers.

And very often, sadly, very sadly, you'll have professing Christians and even well-known Christian leaders, so-called well-known folks who are authors and so on, giving horrible counsel publicly in the media and false theology, acting as if God was not involved in this at all, as if he was just a witness to it, but not in any way involved in it.

And so, these are the kinds of things we have to grapple with, and we're going to have Scott Christensen address this. It's known theologically as a theodicy, the defense of the goodness of God in the midst of tragedy and evil.

But if you have any questions, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. Give us your first name, at least your city and state, and your country of residence. You may remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter.

Don't go away. We're going to be right back after these messages.

James White here of Alpha Omega Ministries announcing that this September, I'm heading out to Pennsylvania to speak at two events that my longtime friend Chris Arnzen has lined up for me. On Thursday, September 18th at 11 a .m., I'm speaking to men in ministry leadership at Chris's Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Free Pastor's Luncheon at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville.

Then, on Sunday, September 21st at 1 30 p .m., I'm speaking at Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle on the theme, Can We Trust the Bible is the Authentic and Inerrant Word of God? I hope you can join Chris and me for both events.

For more details on the Free Pastor's Luncheon, visit ironsharpensironradio .com. That's ironsharpensironradio .com. For more details on Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle, visit trbccarlisle .org.

That's trbccarlisle .org. God willing, I'll see you in September in Pennsylvania for these exciting events.

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That's royaldiadem .com. Visit that site today and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We are now back with Scott Christensen, associate pastor of Kerrville Bible Church in Kerrville, Texas, the area of Texas that was devastated on 4th of July and the following days due to that horrific flood.

And the death toll, as we mentioned before, is up to 134 souls, and many of those were children, I believe 36. And if you have any questions of your own about our subject today, trusting in God's sovereignty in the midst of the misery, you may submit a question to chrisarnsen at gmail .com and give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

And you may remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Well, it's very providential, Scott, obviously, that you just recently moved from Colorado to Kerrville. And I'm sure it must have entered your mind as being somebody that truly trusts in the sovereignty of God, that all things that come to pass are things that have been divinely orchestrated and ordained by Him.

You must have thought, well, God has me here for a reason. Now that this flood has happened, I know that He's going to want to use me in some important way. And so tell us about that. Am I correct that that has entered your mind?

Absolutely. My book, Defeating Evil, which is a smaller, kind of condensed version of a larger work called What About Evil, addresses these kinds of matters head on, just trying to give a broad biblical perspective on why we see things like natural disasters and moral evil just permeate our world.

And incidentally, we had a member of our church that purchased quite a number of copies of my book and distributed them to a local Salvation Army community center that's in our town. And so hopefully people are reading that.

But yeah, it's precisely the kinds of things that I wanted to address in my book. And when you see the horrific nature of this particular tragedy and the deaths of children and the devastation that it has caused, it's overwhelming.

It's interesting to think about this particular flood. The percentage of people who have died versus the percentage of property damage is extraordinarily high. In most disasters in the history of the United States, there's far more property damage than there is loss of life.

And in this particular tragedy, there's an extraordinarily high percentage or proportion of loss to life to loss of property. And so that adds a certain weightiness to this particular tragedy. Well, there are obviously many people.

Who use these kinds of occurrences to mock God, to say that there's no way that a loving God could possibly exist if he is supposed to be all-powerful and all-knowing. There's nothing he allegedly cannot do.

He could have stopped this. He didn't. And you could go on and on with the ways that skeptics and unbelievers mock God and mock those who believe and trust in God during something like this. And then, of course, just as we said before, there are Christians who don't know their Bible very well.

Even if they've memorized great portions of it, they don't seem to understand it very well because they sometimes come up with very heretical and even sometimes ridiculous notions of how God functions and operates in our midst.

So if you could, lay down some thoughts for us all to remember that helps us to continue trusting in the sovereignty of God in the.

Midst of the misery. Sure. Well, I would like to preface that whole matter with more of a kind of pastoral approach and concern when you have to confront tragedies like this head-on. My books are written to address a theological problem, an apologetic kind of problem that people bring up with regard to the existence of God, and the description of God as all-powerful and all-good.

And yet, when you're addressing somebody who is going through a tragedy like this—as we have people in our church that have been directly affected—the first thing that you do is not to give them a theological lecture on God's sovereignty and the problem of evil.

That's not what people need in the wake of a tragedy like this. They need compassion. They need to know that you love them, that you care for them, that you were there for them, that you will help meet their needs, that you will minister to their hurting souls.

And that's a very important pastoral wisdom, I believe, that everyone needs to be aware of. Sometimes you don't say anything to the person who's gone through a traumatic experience like this. Sometimes it's just crying with them.

We weep with those who weep. The Bible says, and so there's a time to be silent like Job's friends, and then there's a time to speak. Certainly not like Job's friends spoke. The best thing Job's friends did in the midst of his tragedy was not to say a thing for the first week that they sat with him.

But at some point, the thinking Christian, the Christian who wants to grow in their knowledge and understanding of who God is and what God is doing in this world, they want answers to some of these deep questions.

And so that's what I attempt to do in my book. Essentially, it is dealing with the problem of evil, and the problem of evil can be simply stated like this. If God is all good, he has all goodness present within him as an omnibenevolent being, and God is also all-powerful in which he has all the requisite powers to do anything in this universe, having expressed those powers in the very creation of the universe.

Then the question is, if you combine those two attributes of God, then how could such a God possibly allow, permit evil to take place? Some people use that language of permit or allow, or as good Calvinists, we would say God actually ordains everything, including evil itself.

This makes the burden in some ways even greater for those of us who take a strong view of God's sovereign grace, even harder than someone who does not. The most common response to the problem of evil, in terms of trying to exonerate God from the charge that he is the author of evil, is to employ what's called the free will defense, in which the idea is that God grants his creatures this unfettered freedom of will, and he does not interfere with that free will.

Therefore, if those creatures use that free will to choose evil, God is not responsible because he can't interfere with their freedom. That is the most common response that Christians give to try to get God off the hook and to cast all responsibility upon human beings.

The question is, if God, in fact, ordains evil, then how can he be exonerated from being the instigator and responsible, morally culpable for evil itself? It's important for us to recognize there is a distinction here as well.

We make a distinction between what we might call natural evil and moral evil. Moral evil concerns the immoral actions, the good or evil actions of morally responsible creatures, such as human beings and even angels could be put in that category.

God himself could be in that category because God is a moral being, as a holy and righteous God. Whereas natural evil, things like natural disasters, disease, epidemics, even accidents that take place not necessarily as a result of natural catastrophes.