Satan is not free to wreak havoc. God is in control - not Satan, not sin, and not sinners.
Satan lacks the creative power and authority to manage the forces of nature.
Nature is not self-acting. It totally depends on God to behave the way it does. The opposite would mean everything would cease exist or function.
Satan works through the elements also to garner his harvest of unprepared souls.
He has studied the secrets of the laboratories of nature, and he uses all his power to control the elements as far as God allows.
When he was suffered to afflict Job, how quickly flocks and herds, servants, houses, children, were swept away, one trouble succeeding another as in a moment.
It is God that shields His creatures and hedges them in from the power of the destroyer.
But the Christian world have shown contempt for the law of Jehovah,
and the Lord will do just what He has declared that He would--He will withdraw His blessings from the earth and remove His protecting care from those who are rebelling against His law and teaching and forcing others to do the same.
Satan has control of all whom God does not especially guard. He will favor and prosper some, in order to further his own designs; and he will bring trouble upon others
and lead men to believe that it is God who is afflicting them. {CH 460.2}
While appearing to the children of men as a great physician who can heal all their maladies,
he will bring disease and disaster, until populous cities are reduced to ruin and desolation.
Even now he is at work.
In accidents and calamities by sea and by land,
in great conflagrations,
in fierce tornadoes and terrific hailstorms,
in tempests,
floods,
cyclones,
tidal waves,
and earthquakes,
in every place and in a thousand forms,
Satan is exercising his power.
He sweeps away the ripening harvest, and famine and distress follow.
He imparts to the air a deadly taint, and thousands perish by the pestilence.
These visitations are to become more and more frequent and disastrous.
Destruction will be upon both man and beast. "The earth mourneth and fadeth away," "The haughty people . . . do languish.
The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant." Isaiah 24:4, 5. {CH 461.1}
