COVID-19 and God: All Things Serve Him

Just over a year ago, my wife and I lost our 32-year old son to malaria he contracted on a mission trip to Africa. In the aftermath of that tragedy, our world collapsed under the weight of a still-too-painful grief. Yet, from within the midst of the excruciating pain and despair, God has been actively and lovingly cultivating healing and hope. He is creating a garden of goodness around the ugly crevasse of heartbreak and loss our son’s death left upon the landscape of our lives. These days I see God doing the very same thing in the disastrous wake that follows COVID-19 as it spreads across the planet like a modern-day, all-consuming flood.

Importantly, Christians should understand that God is not the author of the COVID-19 pandemic or its destructive impact. God is all about promoting life and creatively fashioning life out of death and destruction. His redemptive handiwork is most clearly seen in the resurrection of Jesus, when God turned utter defeat into resplendent triumph. Through that singular act, the redemption of all things got underway – an absolutely certain, if still-unfolding process. Death, disease, and every kind of evil are simply part of the package of living in a fallen world still subject to the ever-fading sway of a defeated foe. Yet in the midst of life’s worst travails, “all things serve him” (Psalm 199:19). At our Savior’s second coming we shall receive in full measure all that was purchased at the cross – eternal life, the end of death and disease, and authentic shalom between God, man, and nature. Every evil occurrence along the way is a necessary – if at times incomprehensible – part of a divinely directed progression to finally and forever put all things right.

Meanwhile, the curse and sin’s deleterious impact upon both man and nature have conspired to throw a huge binge party - a gruesome hurrah causing fear and death to sweep over the planet. At times fallen nature is “red in tooth and claw,” in Tennyson’s words. Now it’s unredeemed side has manifest as a viral pestilence the likes of which the modern world has never seen. Yet believers know it to be temporary and absolutely limited by our sovereign God, who rules all things and directs every outcome on all levels of existence. The virus’ worst horrors are but fertile ground for the wondrous goodness and grace of God to blossom. That is what a Redeemer does – takes every bruised and broken thing and makes it whole. For all its malevolence, the coronavirus is a divine opportunity for God to reconfigure its destructive power to align perfectly with his kingdom purposes. He is busily unleashing a tsunami of redemptive responses as he sovereignly and lovingly redirects the waves of fear and turmoil now washing over humanity.

From the inward places of individual hearts to the largest of governmental structures, good is emerging from evil and destruction. The Master’s unmistakable fingerprints are all over the situation. Many are turning to him in the uncertainty of these days as the sands of our man-made security have shifted so markedly underneath us. When the world rocks, we seek the One who changes not – our Rock, our refuge, and our strength (Psalms 18:2; 46:1). When human resources prove insufficient, as they have with stopping the virus’ advance across every border and barrier put in its way, it is to God we rightly turn for help.

Through the health threat it poses, the isolation it entails, and the economic uncertainty the virus has generated, all of humankind can more clearly gauge the sacred value of health, family, community, and the abundance we so easily take for granted. It is when things are taken away that we come to realize their true worth and respond with thankfulness to the Giver of every good gift (James 1:17; Matthew 5:45). Among the growing list of things for which all of humanity is grateful are the incredibly selfless acts of the front line responders to the virus’ devastation. Their actions emulate those of our sacrificially loving God who freely offered the world his life-giving Son (John 3:16).

Within every nation and walk of life, people are heroically serving others in this time of dire need. Doctors, nurses, government officials, and citizen volunteers are risking their lives (and sometimes losing them) to fight the virus and tend to the afflicted. These are divinely inspired efforts that declare we are one and all made in the ineffable image of our Creator, and worth every gift of sacrificial service. Each doctor, health-care worker, or first-responder who loses their life treating victims loudly declares to world deeply mired in self-aggrandizement that love, sacrifice, and service are sacred avenues we are called to travel (John 15:12-13). So too with Don Giuseppe Berardelli, the 72-year old Italian priest who willingly gave up his ventilator and died from COVID-19 so a younger victim might live. Every sacrifice of life, every gloved medical intervention, and every neighborly call to encourage an isolated senior declares that we are indeed our brother’s keeper and given the high calling to love God in and through those in need (Matthew 25:34-36).

Young people, initially blinded to the overall threat the virus poses to life as we know it, now seem to be coming on board with orders to practice social distancing. They’re grasping that not only are they more vulnerable than at first thought, if enough people succumb to the virus, the hefty price paid by society as a whole will negatively impact their own lives. This is what community is all about; Christ's call to love our neighbor as ourselves (Mark 12:31) carries with it a collective blessing. One local church billboard I drove past recently simply said “Pray.” Everyone in the community knew what the message meant and that it was for us all. Believer and atheist, rich and poor, black and white are all in this thing together. This truth is evident around the globe. Israeli and Palestinian animosity has improved, each side recognizing the virus as a common foe that unites them in a singular life-promoting cause: Israelis need Palestinian workers to keep their economy from collapsing, even as Palestinians need Israeli medical expertise to keep the virus from devastating their own people. The proximity and their now-interwoven social and economic life of the two factions means they rise or fall together. Isaac and Esau have found common cause - God redemptively at work in the crisis.

UN officials have called for a world-wide cease-fire in all conflicts, citing the need to collectively address the life-annulling virus that indiscriminately afflicts one and all. Figuratively speaking, swords are being beaten into plowshares in the form of redirected resources shifted from self-serving to life-giving endeavors. Distilleries and cosmetics companies are producing hand-sanitizers while car manufacturers have begun production of ventilators and apparel companies protective medical equipment. Although far from the biblical model of the kingdom of God, every such measure represents a small but definitive indication that God is actively and redemptively present in the midst of the pandemic’s destruction.

All of these changes reflect the fact that through this virulent pandemic, humankind has been nudged a bit closer to the kingdom of heaven. God, who often stands in stark contrast to the circumstances surrounding us, is offering an alternative to the dog-eat-dog world we live in through the virus' destructive impact. Using it like a tennis racket, he has smacked the ball into our court. We are all but forced to look beyond ourselves in response. We’d we fools not to now realize that what affects a poor farmer in Uganda ultimately impacts those of us in the American suburbs. Poverty anywhere in the world makes us all poorer. We inhabit a moral universe with a spiritual “butterfly effect” that links together the fates of one and all. Moral choices know no borders or boundaries. It is a lesson the world is learning the hard way on a biological, social, political, and economic level. To complete the lesson, it's time to grasp that a dynamic spiritual dimension encompasses them all, and that it is responsive to our every choice in life.

The pandemic has given the church a voice to declare that the worst life can throw our way is the very raw material God deftly employs to call people to faith and to lovingly and sacrificially devote our lives in service to one another. He is commandeering the virus to serve his express purposes in the earth. Each and every wickedness of man or nature are but props upon the stage of God’s magnificent drama of redemption. The deaths of so many in this terrible pandemic - and the death of our son from a disease that regularly takes the lives of too many in developing countries - are but tragic scenes within the larger story of God's masterfully designed plan for a new heaven and new earth. We can rest assured that he is skillfully redirecting every sickness and sorrow toward that joyous and glorious finale.

Though the immediate may at times seems impossibly grim, the Bible assures us that in the end all will be well for those who journey alongside God through the passing vicissitudes of life (Isaiah 3:10; Romans 8:28). Knowing the end – the redemption of all things (Acts 3:19-21; Col 1:20) – makes all the difference in dealing with the present. So however distressing the moment may look, our comfort comes from the abiding presence of the One who himself is the Beginning and End of all things (Matt 28:20; Rev 22:13). He is our comfort, our consolation, and our reward - both now and beyond the ravages of disease and death. Ultimately, all things serve him - willingly or not. To come into alignment with God and his purposes provides us the means to overcome every manner of threat and to joyfully thrive beyond the reach of any and all circumstance.