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Advice to young pastors: When someone with a major media platform like Pat Roberston asserts that Haiti’s founders made a pact with the devil, we’re not supposed to just swallow the assertion whole.  It’s an extraordinary assertion, composed of four extraordinary necessities:  1.) that such a pact was actually made;  2.)  that those who made it were authorized to act on behalf of the entire nation;  3.) that it’s being made by those authorized to enter into such a pact actually bound Haiti spiritually for the next 200 years (at least); 4.) that it had anything whatsoever to do with the recent earthquake.   So far as I know, there’s no historical evidence that such a pact was made in the first place.  A Haitian pastor with the Church of God, Jean R. Gelin, Ph.D, did his homework and could  not come up with any credible historical source for the claim.  And that’s just the first first of the four necessities.   Why do we fall for these things?  
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You’ve already heard what he said: the earthquake in Haiti is the outworking of a spiritual, not a geologic history.  A supposed pact made with the devil around the time of Haiti’s birth as an independent nation. The wrong thing to say at the wrong time for so many reasons.  But let me just point out one of those reasons: laziness.  Robertson was cherry picking historical factoids.
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Been studying the sibling relationships in Genesis lately–Cain & Abel, Issac & Ishmael, Jacob & Esau, Jospeph & his brothers, all of ‘em wracked with rivalry.  And the women in Genesis are no better, like Sarah & Hagar, Rachel & Leah.  In fact, the twelve tribes were born in a riot of jealousy among and between Jacobs wives. The Bible is trying to tell us something here.  Envy, rivalry between brothers-sisters-peers is running riot in the human condition.  And God seems to inflame it with his willingness to prefer, to favor, to choose.
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