The Wickedest City in the World

Hurricane Beryl rampaged over the Caribbean island of Jamaica this week, and I promised myself to pray for and ask others to pray for those who were devastated by the storm.

As someone who has been through hurricanes before, I can assure you, everyone needs prayer. So please keep the victims in mind and heart as they go through their long recovery process.

Nature’s Workings or God’s Revenge?

On that subject, I don’t generally see natural disasters as God’s revenge on sinful behavior. If that where the case, Washington DC should have been wiped off the face of the earth long ago.

At the same time, there are certain instances of a kind of “natural justice” if you will, on places of human wickedness that have an undeniable ring of divine retribution. It’s easy to see why people of a religious mindset might interpret them as God’s wrath coming down on sinners.

I can name a few of them off the top of my head, starting with the paradigm of all catastrophic judgment stories: Sodom and Gomorrah. We know it well from Genesis 19:1-28, so it doesn’t need repeating.

In our own day, I recall the story of an earthquake in Los Angeles (I believe it was the La Habra Quake in 2014) which directly struck the heart of the district in LA where a high percentage of the world’s porn films are made.

An act of divine justice? Perhaps. Even if it was, the unrepentant purveyors of moral death rebuilt their sector within a month and didn’t seem to get the message.

Likewise, the devastating tsunami that wiped out portions of Thailand the day after Christmas in 2004 was interpreted by many as divine retribution for their heinous sex trafficking industry. 300,000 people died in that disaster, but the industry continues.

God does at times intervene in history to warn people about sin, but He doesn’t force anyone not to sin because that would deprive us of His greatest gift of free will.

In an often overlooked passage in the Book of Genesis, God tried to warn Cain about the drastic consequences of sin before Cain killed his brother: “If you act rightly, you will be accepted; but if not, sin lies in wait at the door: its urge is for you, yet you can rule over it” (Gen 4:7).

Can slew Abel anyway.

The Real Message

When disasters of this kind strike, they do catastrophic damage to a whole society’s physical wellbeing and surroundings. People die, people are injured and lost, property is damaged and destroyed.

But whether they were divine judgment or not, we may see a deeper, symbolic meaning to them. Through them, we are made more acutely aware of the unmitigated disaster of human sinfulness.

If these events are able to teach us anything, they can teach us that unrepentant sin has devastating spiritual consequences, which are much more serious than even the loss of physical life.

The loss of a soul through sin is literally the loss of everything.

An Utter Catastrophe

Port Royal, Jamaica had the reputation of being “the most wicked and sinful city in the world”, at least according to commentator Edmund Heath who witnessed the city’s colossal destruction on the morning of June 7, 1692.

Heath was on a ship in Port Royal Harbor when he watched a massive earthquake open up a gigantic hole under the tiny parcel of land on which the city sat. Scientists estimate the quake would have registered 7.5 on the modern Richter Scale.

See the red circle on the map above? The epicenter of the monster earthquake struck right there.

In the space of a few minutes, the entire city sunk under the water and disappeared from view, dragging five forts, dozens of roads and buildings on 33 acres of land, numerous ships, and 2000 inhabitants forty feet down into Davy Jones’ Locker. Imagine!

Those who didn’t get sucked down by the sinking city were subsequently washed out to sea by the massive waves that rushed into the hole where the land had been and the tsunami waves that radiated outward from it.

Science tells us that the earthquake liquefied the sandy foundations of the city which could not remain solid against such a force of nature. From a spiritual point of view, it looked a lot like divine retribution.

The contemporary publication below carries this caption:

A true and perfect relation of the most sad and terrible EARTHQUAKE at Port-Royal in JAMAICA, which happened on Tuesday, the 7^th of June, 1692. Where in two minutes time the town was sunk under ground and 2000 souls perished.

Being a dreadful warning to the sleepy world; or God’s heavy judgment shewed upon a sinful people, as a forerunner of the terrible Day of the Lord.

Was It the Wickedest City in the World?

The pirate city of Port Royal may have been the wickedest place on earth at that time—who knows?—but assuredly it wasn’t the only place where human sin was practiced on a large scale.

However, its free-flowing and highly potent Jamaican rum devastated lives, families, marriages, and souls. It was a hub for slave trafficking and a principle haven for pirates throughout the Caribbean. And, largely due to the clientele who came and went, one of the city’s main forms of revenue was prostitution.

One thing is for sure: whether Port Royal, Jamaica was the wickedest and most sinful city in the world in 1692, it certainly needed conversion. So, in that sense it can serve as a symbol of all other human communities.

Here are some of the ruins that can be seen in the depths today.

A Message for Us

Perhaps we can see the Port Royal incident as a sort of reverse Sacred Window.

What I mean is that God’s beauty, truth, and goodness seep through the wonders of creation and give us a glimpse of the eternal values of heaven. (If you’ve ever been to Jamaica, you’d know that God’s beauty is on full display there at all times.)

Yet, His truth and His goodness also need endorsement in the human community. These can only be acknowledged by the human mind and will and expressed in human behavior.

But when truth and charity are so utterly rejected—unrepentantly—for long periods of time, there will inevitably come a moral reckoning.

Need for Self-Reflection and Prayer

We have to ask if the wickedness of Port Royal in 1692 could even hold a candle to the wickedness of a technologically-sophisticated sinful world like ours?

Today, the sins of men have not only grown exponentially greater but have also taken on a predatory character leaving countless victims in their wake. Virtually no person or sanctuary remains untainted from the modern industries of sin.

As we pray for the people of Jamaica, let us also pray for conversion of heart for our own county and world—and perhaps our prayers will avert the spiritual reckoning that cannot be far away.

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Photo Credits: Via Wikimedia; Feature: Paradise (Carl Kho); Engraving (Jan Luyken); Kingston (Axelspace Corporation/Hodoyoshi).