Coronavirus #1: The Big Picture
CORONAVIRUS #1: the big picture Trinity
Job 1:6-22 29.3.2020
In last weekend’s magazine in The Australian, Bernard Salt, one of its regular contributors ran a feature article “Who Do we Turn to Now?” – now, in the time of a deadly pandemic?
Not to our politicians. No prime minister has served a full term since before the 2008 global financial crisis, which may mean that we don’t trust them.
Not to institutions in our society like traditional religion, or big business or banks, or to those which care for our elderly. After so many royal commissions, we know we can’t trust them anymore.
We more or less got through a long drought and a bad bushfire season, but despite all out talk of getting to the other side of this pandemic, we’re not really sure who we can trust to get us there.
Who do we turn to now? To make sense of the biggest challenge in at least 70 years. Or who do we turn to now when Covid19 closes in us personally – infecting us or those we love, spoiling our plans, impacting our income, sending us into isolation?
When it all comes up close and personal is the subject for next Sunday, but for today it’s the bigger question: can we make sense of and live with something as big and as bad and as destructive as this?
Bernard Salt believes we haven’t got much chance of handling either the personal or the big question. “It remains to be seen how a generation of dismantling religious faith has prepared Australia for managing genuine adversity.” he writes. Having removed God from our national life and culture, he is doubtful we’ll handle either the big or the personal questions.
Maybe, he says “Navigating the current crisis could prompt people to rethink their godlessness.” … their life which has no room for “god”.
We haven’t got a chance in the world of answering the big question, or living with the personal impact, if this world is all there is, but there is a God who alone makes sense of this world. Today I want to say two things about him, as we look at the big picture.
- LIVING GOD IS BEHIND IT ALL
Job was very rich and very happy. Until a raiding party stole his 500 donkeys and 1000 oxen and killed the farmhands grazing them. Until a bolt out of heaven killed all 7,000 of his sheep and the farmhands with them. Until, on another of his farms, his 3,000 camels were stolen, and the farmhands with them killed.
Then, worst of all, a tornado has smashed the home of his eldest son, where all his seven sons and three daughters were having a party. They were all killed.
In his agony of grief and ruin, he was struck with a foul disease that meant he had sores from the top of his head to the soles of his feet.
To ask Bernard Salt’s question “To whom will Job turn?” Is there an answer in this world that is big enough for such huge trauma, one chapter after another after another?
Some people are pointing us to nature. They are saying that Covid19 is just Mother Earth’s way of healing herself. She is taking matters into her own hands, and clearing the oceans, stopping us flying and reducing air pollution. Mother Earth is not just taking care of the planet, but telling us to slow down, spend time with people we love, and learn that life isn’t all about work. We just need to stop and listen to her.
There you are, Job. Your trauma is just life levelling out a bit. It’s all part of the ebb and flow of wealth. It’s just nature telling you to slow down a bit. Some help as in his grief and agony he buried his face in his pillow each night!
Some preachers will say: No, we explain it in terms of what Satan, the devil is doing. Didn’t God told Satan that Job’s family and wealth were in Satan’s hand in 1:12. And then, in 2:6, that Job’s own body was in Satan’s hand.
That’s no help. That means the coronavirus is from an evil hand, and meant only for evil. If Satan is its author, that doesn’t help one little bit.
Satan is a player in the story and so are the hordes of rustlers, and the lightning strike. As too are the tornado, the germ that has found its way through Job’s body. All are players, but not decisive or ultimate players.
Nature is not sovereign. Disease is not sovereign. Satan is not sovereign. In God’s world, Jesus alone is sovereign.
That is why Job can say in 1:21. “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.” And in 2:10 “Shall we receive good from God and shall we not receive evil?”
It’s what another Bible man, Amos said: “Does disaster come to a city unless the Lord has done it?” (3:6)
There are some choices right now. You can turn to men for answers and help. You can turn to fate, and just shrug your shoulders – “it is what it is”. You can try Allah, who is impersonal and uncaring.
You can opt for a sentimental version of the Bible’s God – the soft and fluffy version – the God who has nothing to do with the bad or painful things, and who would stop them if he could.
Or you can turn to the real God of the Bible who is really, really big, and behind all things, deliberately and purposefully … who is big enough for tough and uncertain times.
If you think that gives you a good enough reason to walk away from the God of the Bible, please listen in to the second thing I must say. The first was that the Living God is behind it all.
- THE LIVING GOD IS IN IT ALL
God isn’t sitting in a distant universe indiscriminately hurling lightning bolts and bushfires and droughts and germs willy-nilly into this world. He is so much better than that.
For starters, he feels. He has experienced what it’s like to be isolated, hated, betrayed, and to die painfully. More on that next Sunday, when we come to the personal questions that Covid19 poses.
What I mean right now is that God is in all that he is doing with purpose. There has never been anything willy-nilly about what he does. Not at the level of a pandemic or anywhere else.
Do I know his precise purpose in sending this pandemic? I would if he had told me, but he hasn’t, so I don’t know, and nor does anyone else. People who want to tell you that it is God’s judgment on this world for our evil abortion laws, or our selfish materialism are at best only guessing.
While I cannot tell you God’s precise reason for the pandemic, I can tell you what his general purpose is in all that he does.
- He is warning us.
Apart from a drought or bushfires, we sail fairly comfortably in Australia. We might conclude that if there is a God, we don’t need to take him seriously, or change anything we’re doing.
Right now, God has our attention. Things aren’t right. We’re in a mess we can’t fix.
One day everyone in Jerusalem was talking about the Jews Governor Pilate had murdered while they were in church. Or the story of the 18 workmen killed on a local building site. “Are you listening?” Jesus asked people. Those deaths are a warning: “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.” (Luke 13:5)
Bad things now are a warning of bigger and worse things at the end. On the day when God calls us all in to settle our accounts.
We all know the story. Now more than 650,000 people world-wide have covid19, and 30,000 have died. Who doesn’t think it’s going to get worse, much worse, before it gets better?
It’s such a gracious warning. Are you listening?
Bernard Salt wrote “the current crisis could prompt people to rethink their godlessness”. He’s dead right. That is exactly what Covid19 is meant to do. So that we stop pretending that it doesn’t matter to sideline Jesus out of our lives. That we stop pretending that everything’s okay just as it is.
It isn’t. It never was. How kind of God to tell us that before it is too late – before we perish ultimately.
God is in this thing, warning us – warning all of us.
- He is weaning us
When a nursing mother weans a new-born baby, she takes him away from dependence on her milk, and onto other food.
Some of us have been thinking for a long time that there are just some things we cannot live without. A favourite food, seeing a football match on TV, or playing basketball out at the Sportsdome. This standard of living or those holidays. The healthcare we receive. Our favourite craft or hobby, or being a big shot at work or school.
So many of those things are going, going, gone. What a mercy that is, because we have made things like that into idols … as though they can give us the life and the meaning that Jesus alone can. Right now, we are being weaned off our idols, because they are being removed one by one.
Where are you at? Resenting the loss, and just bunkering down until your favourite team plays again? Are you missing the rich opportunity that has been given to us to live a different kind of life? One without the idols that have never been able to give life?
God speaks in Hebrews 12 about tough times that he sends to us. He says that for the moment it “all seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” (v11)
Are you going to come out of this being no different from what you were at the start of 2020? Looking no more like Jesus after it than before it? Being no more for him than now?
Then you will have wasted the pandemic. Is that what you really want? Or will you make this an opportunity to be really weaned, and grow up?
God is in this thing: Warning us Weaning us
- He is Wooing us
You and I are not the centre of the universe. Jesus is. God the Father is determined to make that plain, so that his Son receives the honour that is due to him. His plan is about that.
In Ephesians 1:11 we read that God “works all things according to the counsel of his will”. What is that will? 1:10 “to unite all things in Jesus, things in heaven, and things on earth.”
So right here and now, he is wooing men and woman, and boys and girls, just as a guy woos and wins a girl he loves. He is getting our attention by warning us. He is weaning us away from our idols so we will be only for Jesus. He is bringing to Jesus people from all over this world.
At the end, his bride will be wooed and won.
Will our economy ever recover from Covid19? Maybe, maybe not. Will our usual way of life ever be restored? Maybe, maybe not. Will all of us who make up the family of Trinity Church be alive after it is finished? Maybe, maybe not.
What is certain however, is that the bride of Jesus will be warned, weaned and wooed … and won, safe and secure forever.
Is there grief now? Of course. Are there thanks now for those good political leaders and frontline health workers? Yes. Are we careful now, with hygiene and social distancing? Naturally.
Brothers and sisters, the last thing that those who belong to Jesus need to do is to be afraid, because Jesus is in charge, right now. When Covid19 first took hold in the Chinese city of Wuhan, a pastor there wrote “Christ has already given us peace, but his peace is not to remove us from disaster and death, but rather to have peace in the midst of disaster and death, because Christ has already overcome these things.”
Bernard Salt asked the really big question: “Who do we turn to now?” To mere men? To new idols? To a small god?
Or to the God of the Bible, the Lord Jesus? Great in power, and so good and gracious in purpose.
The Jesus of the Bible answers Bernard Salt: “Turn to me all the nations of the earth” … “Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.”
Where else would it be safe for you to turn?