Sorry for the lateness of this blog – having been down the church AM with Matthew preparing tomorrow’s service, I just wanted to enjoy the sunshine this afternoon! – wasn’t it great for those of us who were able to sit out in it?
So…
Given, as we have seen that God is sovereign over this virus, clearly He must have good reasons for it to spread as it is and to affect as many people as it has, and instinctively we want to know what it is that God is saying through it.
But we must start by emphatically stating that God is under absolutely no requirement to explain to us this, or anything else that He does. The whole of his monologue with Job had this theme running through it – “what do you understand of what I do?” Indeed even if He did fully explain Himself we would not get it for “His thoughts are not our thoughts” our fallen minds cannot grasp the wonder and the height of God’s plans and purposes beyond a very simple level.
However, we can, from what scripture clearly teaches, reason a number of things that God would teach us through this pandemic, and those things fall into two distinct categories – those that He would teach the non-Christian and those He would teach the Christian.
I want to start with the Christian and there are many, many things that we can reason God wants to teach us through this, however I realise the danger of outlining so many things that we retain none, and so will try to strike a sensible balance over the next couple of days before looking at what God would teach the non-Christian.
The challenge as always is to retain these things after everything is back to ‘normal’. I’m sure we will all celebrate when it finally ends, but how easy to then forget the lessons that God has been teaching us and simply let everything go back to how it was before!
So for today (and these are in no particular order) I will mention just two….
The fragility of human life James reminds us “What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes.” Surely this is a wonderful God given opportunity to re-assess what is really important in life as a Christian. What to spend time pursuing, what to spend money on, what goals to pursue and what to let go off. We are so used to reckoning “the years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty ” Psa 90:10 that it takes something like this to remind us that we sin if we even plan on having tomorrow to do with as we choose (James 4:14-16)
The preciousness of human life The total number of cases in the world is well past 1 million, the number of confirmed deaths worldwide now stands at over 60,000 – frightening, terrifying, staggering figures, but for the Christian what makes them infinitely more horrific is that most who have died, have died without Christ and therefore without hope!
And we cannot diminish that tragedy, when we like many other countries have had the gospel for centuries and the Bible in our own language so long, that people should be dying today who have never even heard the name of Jesus as well as many who have heard and stubbornly refused to bow the knee to Him as their Saviour and King.
But, the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations estimate that even without this pandemic, 25,000 people die every day (9.1 million every year) of starvation. In other words when this pandemic is over and everything returns to ‘normal’, that ‘normal’ for 9.1 million people will be that they die in the next 12 months of starvation! Friend, God would certainly have this pandemic teach us, His children, of the preciousness of human life and to have our eyes opened beyond what hits the news headlines as to what is really happening to people made in the image of God in our world today.
Can I please encourage you to take a few minutes to simply reflect on these two things before we go any further and seek God’s forgiveness if you feel that, like me, you have not always considered these aright, and try to remember them throughout these days and then for the rest of your life…however long or short that may be!