God and a Virus

The Coronavirus has taken us all by surprise. January and February seem like a lifetime ago, and who could have predicted then how drastically our world would change in just a matter of weeks?

We are in the midst of national lockdown; we’re doing our best at sheltering in place; we’re facing a significant economic collapse as a result of it; those of us who are Christians are mourning the loss of in-person church gatherings; and many of us are dealing with the sickness and/or death of friends, family, and neighbours.

And the question that I think is on everybody’s mind to one degree or another, at some point or another, is: Why? Why is this happening? What lessons are we supposed to learn from this? What is God saying to us by shutting down the entire world with this Coronavirus?

So to answer that question, particularly addressing those readers who do not yet believe in Christ, you who have not placed your trust in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus for your righteousness before God. And I want to do that because the Word of God answers this “Why?” question with a special focus on you who yet remain a stranger to the grace of Christ.

And that answer comes in the opening verses of Luke chapter 13, as Jesus Himself responds to tragedy:

“Now on the same occasion there were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. And Jesus said to them, ‘Do you suppose that these Galileans were greater sinners than all other Galileans because they suffered this fate? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. Or do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them were worse culprits than all the men who live in Jerusalem? I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” Luke 13:1-4

The crowds came to Jesus expecting Him to speak about the sins of the people who died. But Jesus seizes on the occasions of these tragedies to talk about the sins of the living. That teaches us that the message of disasters—whether a tower killing eighteen people or the Coronavirus killing 300,000—the message of disasters is for everyone. And that message is: You need to repent, or you will all likewise perish.

What is God saying to the world through the Coronavirus crisis?

He’s calling us to repentance. He is calling you, my dear unbelieving friend, to repentance. There are at least four lessons God is teaching us through all of us, and today we’ll cover the first.

The One Thing Certain

First, through the Coronavirus, God is awakening in our consciences the reality that death is certain. The crowds come to Jesus for an explanation of these two tragedies. But He turns to the crowds, and, as it were, He turns to us and says, in effect, “These have already died. Time is up for them. What about you? Don’t you realize that your death is certain? Are you ready to face it?”

Some of you will have had the privilege of seeing your child be born.
After months of happy anticipation—Boy or girl? My eyes? Your smile?—finally the day arrives. And after hours of labour and the emotional turmoil of the birth, you hear that first cry, and you breathe that sigh of relief.

And as you hold him you wonder, “What’s he going to be like?

What will his voice sound like? How tall will he be? Will he be analytical and logical? Artistic and creative? What will his interests be? What job might he eventually want to do?” So many unanswered questions! So much uncertainty about what’s in store for this little life that has just been welcomed into the world.

But amidst all that uncertainty—some of it wonderful, some of it unsettling—one thing is certain about that little life that you hold in your hands: there is coming a day when it will be over. The one thing certain in life is that life will come to an end in death. We will all likewise perish.

Face the Facts

We don’t like thinking about that. Our society does everything we can possibly do to shut out the reality of death from our consciousness. We pile up endless distractions to divert our attention from the one reality that we’re certain to face but which we can’t bear to think about. Endless entertainment! Anything to keep our minds occupied, so we don’t have to ponder what waits for us for eternity after these 80 short years are over. We’ve stuck our heads in the proverbial sand.

But will you dispute it? Will you not die? 

Is your death not certain? Is anyone so deluded—is anyone out there possessed by such delirious conceit—to suppose that you will cheat death? You may want to stuff it and put it out of your mind and refuse to consider it. But face the facts: you will all likewise perish. Hebrews 9:27 says, “It is appointed for men to die, and after this comes judgment.” We all have an inevitable appointment with death.

I wonder if you’ll indulge me.

Hold up your right hand and place it over your heart. Feel your heart beating. Now take your left hand and press it up against your carotid artery, just under your jaw, and feel your pulse. Friend, there is coming a day—a day which in the grand scheme of things is not very far off from today—when that heart will stop beating. There is coming a day, soon, when someone will come to your bedside and press their fingers to your neck, and they’ll feel no pulse. And they’ll look up and say in a hushed tone, “He’s gone.” “She’s gone.” That day is coming for each one of us. And what miserable fools we would be to not face the facts: that death is certain.

Why Death? 

Now some of you say, “I get it. I’m not so deluded as to think that I’ll somehow cheat death. I’ve been to enough funerals. I’ve stood at enough bedsides. I’ve lost enough grandparents and parents, and relatives to know that death is certain. But why, if there is a good God—a loving, all-powerful God who created the world—why is there sickness and disease? Why are there worldwide pandemics? Why is death inevitable?”

And the answer to that is that the world did not start out this way.

God did not create the world with decay and disease and death. Genesis 1:31 tells us that “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” God designed for human beings to live in perfect fellowship with Him without ever experiencing death.

So what happened?

The answer is that sin happened. God gave the first man, Adam, a command. He told Adam to eat freely from every tree in the bountiful, lush Garden that God had placed him in. But as his Creator and Lord, God reserved one solitary tree in the Garden and told Adam he was not to eat from that tree. And God promised that disobedience to that command—man’s rebellion against God, man’s saying no to God—would bring alienation between God and man. And that alienation would be expressed first of all in death. God said in Genesis 2:17, “In the day that you eat from it you will surely die.”

And that’s exactly what happened. The serpent deceived Eve, she ate from the tree that God had commanded them not to eat from, she gave the fruit to Adam, and he ate as well.

And in that moment, just as God promised, they both died, spiritually. They were separated from the God they were created to know and enjoy. As Paul says, “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered into the world, and death through sin, so death spread to all men because all sinned” (Rom 5:12). Death has come into the world through sin. Death is a divine punishment for sin.

And it’s not just that we’re all guilty of Adam’s sin—though that’s true.

Adam was our representative in the Garden, and humanity became sinners by nature as a result of His disobedience. But we’re also sinners by choice. We’ve all followed in the footsteps of Adam. We’ve all broken God’s law. None of you would be so deluded as to regard yourselves as a perfect person. No, you’re a sinner like the rest of us. We have all sinned. And therefore, we all die. “The soul who sins will die” (Ezek 18:4). “The wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23). God is so holy that disobedience to His law—rebellion against Him—is so severe an infraction that it merits death.

No Special Sinners

And so decay, disease, death are intrusions upon God’s good world as a result of human sin. You say, “Wait a minute. I thought Jesus said that it wasn’t because they were worse sinners than everyone else that the Galileans were murdered by Pilate, or that the men in Jerusalem were killed by the tower.”

And that’s true.

It wasn’t as if those people were more especially sinful than the rest of humanity. Their tragic death was not necessarily an immediate result of personal sin. Sometimes God does bring judgment in response to personal sin (e.g., Acts 12:22–23; Rom 1:27). But we don’t need to be a special sort of sinner to be rightly deserving of sickness and death. We deserve sickness and death and even eternal punishment for the sins we commit every day.

But none of us wants to hear that.

As I said, we fill our lives with distractions and diversions and endless entertainment to snuff out the testimony of our conscience that we are accountable to God as our Creator, that we have rebelled against Him, that we deserve to die, and that we will die.

And the Coronavirus is, in part, God shaking us out of our stupor and saying: death is certain. It’s a picture of how heinous and horrible sin against God is.

And we need these pictures because our sin blinds us to the dreadfulness and ugliness of sin. Here’s how John Piper put it:

“Hardly anyone in the world feels the horror of preferring other things over God. Who loses any sleep over our daily belittling of God by neglect and defiance? But, oh, how we feel our physical pain! How indignant we can become if God touches our bodies! We may not grieve over the way we demean God every day in our hearts. 

But let the coronavirus come and threaten our bodies, and he has our attention. Or does he? Physical pain is God’s trumpet blast to tell us that something is dreadfully wrong in the world.

Disease and deformity are God’s pictures in the physical realm of what sin is like in the spiritual realm. … Calamities are God’s previews of what sin deserves and will one day receive in judgment thousand times worse.

They are warnings. They are wake-up calls to see the moral horror and spiritual ugliness of sin against God. Would that we could all see and feel how repugnant, how offensive, how abominable it is to treat our Maker with contempt, to ignore him and distrust him and demean him and give him less attention in our hearts than we give the style of our hair.”

What is God saying through the Coronavirus? He’s saying that the sin that has cursed the earth is dreadfully disgusting, and the death that it leads to is certain. Are you ready?

Author: Cripplegate