Reflection B.7 / Does God Have A Purpose In Coronavirus? / Isaiah’s Oracles Or ‘burdens’, An Environmental Dimension

We’re looking at three questions. Is coronavirus a judgement from God? Are we living in end times? And, what does the Bible say about COVID-19?

In order to answer them I’m looking at prophecies that were made maybe 2700 years ago. Why?

In order to understand an event, we almost always draw on a number of sources of information. Suppose I’m out walking with my young son. I hear the sound of hooves and a moment later a group of horses gallops past. My son gazes at the horses and asks, ‘Is it a race?’

In front of my eyes – in the foreground – I saw horses. If I had only seen horses galloping, I might not have been able to answer. But I also see a background picture. As they passed, I noticed the riders were wearing racing colours. In front of me is a long swathe of turf with white railings on both sides. There are crowds. I hear commentary over the P.A. system. I know we’re in Newmarket. All of these items of information are like pieces of a jigsaw that form a picture. Because I see the background picture, I understand the foreground picture. I know that the horses are racing.

To answer our questions in the first paragraph, we also need to see the background picture. We need to understand what judgement from God looks like, what ‘End Times’ will be like. And to answer questions like these, the prophets is the place to go to! It’s a slow process, because we’re adding pieces of the jigsaw one at a time.

Today, we’re going to add another piece of our jigsaw.

From 1995 to 2012 my wife and I lived in Azerbaijan. A friend – maybe he thought we were a bit cut off – took out a subscription for us for Time Magazine. From about 2000 the magazine gave a lot of coverage to global warming and climate change. It made me think.

In Scripture I understood that God had given mankind responsibility for looking after creation. It was almost the only task God gave to Adam! But I gradually saw that there was another thread running through Scripture. Verses such as these sensitised me to the theme:

Therefore the showers have been withheld, and the spring rain has not come (Jeremiah 3:3)

I also withheld the rain from you when there were yet three months to the harvest (Amos 4:7).

Wikipedia tells us ‘There is currently a strong scientific consensus that the Earth is warming and that this warming is mainly caused by human activities.’ I wouldn’t disagree. But there can be more than one cause for a thing! Verses such as the two above show us that God acts through the environment.

In yesterday’s Reflection I started to look at Isaiah 13-22 and Isaiah’s oracles (or burdens) regarding 11 neighbouring nations. But I didn’t have time to make my third point. My third point is that in most of the cases where God judges these nations, part of God’s action is action in the environment. We noted two examples yesterday. In Assyria trees would largely disappear, and in Egypt the Nile would dry up. We find many more examples in these chapters. Speaking of Babylon, Isaiah says, ‘Behold, the day of the Lord comes, cruel, with wrath and fierce anger, to make the land a desolation’ (13:9). There are similar prophecies related to Israel (land is scorched), Damascus (the harvest will flee away), Moab (the grass is withered, the vegetation fails, the greenery is no more), Philistia (famine).

The world is currently experiencing the greatest environmental problems since the flood. From a Wikipedia perspective, mankind has caused most of them. But the Bible shows that where there is rebellion against God, environmental problems follow. And when God acts in judgement, environmental problems are usually part of the package.

We cannot say for certain that our present environmental problems are a sign of God’s judgement. But we can say that they are consistent with the way God acts in judgement. It’s another piece of the jigsaw. If we see more things that are consistent with God’s judgement, then we are likely to take the view that the world is under God’s judgement. That in turn will help us with our foreground picture, in which we gaze at coronavirus and ask, ‘Is God behind it?’

Have a good day!

Simon