It’s so easy to speak of the sovereignty of God in the abstract isn’t it? I remember reading how R.C.Sproul used to ask his first year students to raise their hand if they believed God to be sovereign? At which point he said every hand went up. While their hands were still in the air he asked whether God was sovereign when a hurricane hit?. He said some hands waved and then dropped; so what about when a young child is run down and killed? – more hands dropped and so he continued until most hands were down. He said at that point he’d make this statement “If there is one atom in this cosmos over which God is not absolutely sovereign then that could be the one atom that thwarts His plans and promises and prevents the return of Jesus Christ in glory!” And he was, of course, absolutely right.
So what about Covid-19 or the Coronavirus? Is God really sovereign over that and, if so, what are the implications of that? To prevent this blog turning into a book, I will try and answer these questions over the next day or two.
For today, let’s deal with this: in what sense is God sovereign over this virus?
To answer that we need first to say that the Coronavirus, like any other bad thing is not here because of God’s created design but because of man’s rebellion and sin. At the close of Genesis 1 God has completed all of His creation (in the heavens above and on earth below) and we read (Gen 1:31a)
“And God saw everything He had made, and behold, it was very good”.
No evil, no pain, no death, and certainly no Coronavirus. It is with the curse that God places on creation as a direct result of Adam’s sin that everything changed and death (by many means) entered into creation.
Likewise scripture assures us that one of the main differences we can look forward to in the new heavens and new earth is that death will never enter into it, nor anything damaging, and that certainly means nothing like Coronavirus.
So…Coronavirus is here most simply because man sinned. If man had not sinned, Coronavirus would never exist, indeed, could never exist.
With that said scripture insists that God is in sovereign control over the whole of His creation, good, bad, attractive, ugly, bringing illness, even death – all of it. So e.g. we read:
Num 21:6 Then the LORD sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many people of Israel died.
2Ch 26:20 And Azariah the chief priest and all the priests looked at him, and behold, he was leprous in his forehead! And they rushed him out quickly, and he himself hurried to go out, because the LORD had struck him.
or think of the plagues that God brought on Egypt and the final plague killing the first born male in every house of the Egyptians! Then move into the New Testament and to the very last book of the Bible and what do we find? Chapter 8 and we find angels pouring out all sorts of things onto the earth causing worldwide devastation, and then chapter 15 and we find seven angels pouring out seven plagues on the earth (D.V. we will come back to this chapter in a later blog).
In other words, we must either accept that God is indeed totally sovereign over this virus as indeed He is over everything, or else we stand against God’s Word and try to argue some limitation to His sovereignty which as we will see tomorrow D.V. will leave us in a terrible place!
Friend, as hopefully we shall see – we can, and should, absolutely praise God for His sovereignty over this virus, for in that lies our hope and our confidence.