By Here is a summary of a little book worth reading. It is entitled Coronavirus and Christ and is written by John Piper. You can access it here:
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“What is God doing through the coronavirus?” While John Piper does not claim these answers to be exhaustive, it is a reminder to us that God is at work in this moment in history.
Through the coronavirus God is …
1. Picturing Moral Horror
2. Sending Specific Divine Judgments
3. Awakening Us for the Second Coming
The coronavirus is a God-given wake-up call to be ready for the second coming of Christ.
Even though the history of the Christian church is littered with failed predictions of the end of the world, it remains true that Jesus Christ is coming back. Stay awake!
The way to be ready is to come to Jesus Christ, receive forgiveness for sins, and walk in his light. Then you will be among those who …
are not in darkness for that day to surprise you like a thief. For you are all children of light. . . . So then . . . let us keep awake. . . . For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us so that whether we are awake or asleep we might live with him.1 Thessalonians 5:4–10
4. Realigning Us with the Infinite Worth of Christ
The coronavirus is God’s thunderclap call for all of us to repent and realign our lives with the infinite worth of Christ.
The coronavirus is not unique as a call to repentance. In fact, all natural disasters—whether floods, famines, locusts, tsunamis, or diseases—are God’s painful and merciful summons to repent.
We see this from the way Jesus responds to disaster in Luke 13:1–5. Why would Jesus threaten us with perishing? The reason Jesus said that we all likewise would perish if we don’t repent is that we all have exchanged the treasure that God is for lesser things we love more (Rom. 1:22–23), and we all have treated Jesus as less desirable than money and entertainment and friends and family. The reason all of us deserve to perish is not a list of rules we have broken, but an infinite value we have scorned—the infinite value of all that God is for us in Jesus Christ.
Repentance means waking up from the suicidal preference of tin over gold, foundations of sand over solid rock, games in the gutter over a holiday at the sea. What God is doing in the coronavirus is showing us—graphically, painfully—that nothing in this world gives the security and satisfaction that we find in the infinite greatness and worth of Jesus. This is what it means to repent: to experience a change of heart and mind that treasures God in Christ more than life.
The coronavirus pandemic is the experience of loss—from the smallest loss of convenience to the greatest loss of life. And if we know the secret of Paul’s joy, we may experience the loss as gain. That is what God is saying to the world. Repent and realign your life with the infinite worth of Christ.
The last two things that God is doing through the coronavirus will be here tomorrow. God be with you.