Who's to Blame for COVID-19?

2 Chronicles 6:18–21 ESV

“But will God indeed dwell with man on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, how much less this house that I have built! Yet have regard to the prayer of your servant and to his plea, O Lord my God, listening to the cry and to the prayer that your servant prays before you, that your eyes may be open day and night toward this house, the place where you have promised to set your name, that you may listen to the prayer that your servant offers toward this place. And listen to the pleas of your servant and of your people Israel, when they pray toward this place. And listen from heaven your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive.

2 Chronicles 6:28–31 ESV

“If there is famine in the land, if there is pestilence or blight or mildew or locust or caterpillar, if their enemies besiege them in the land at their gates, whatever plague, whatever sickness there is, whatever prayer, whatever plea is made by any man or by all your people Israel, each knowing his own affliction and his own sorrow and stretching out his hands toward this house, then hear from heaven your dwelling place and forgive and render to each whose heart you know, according to all his ways, for you, you only, know the hearts of the children of mankind, that they may fear you and walk in your ways all the days that they live in the land that you gave to our fathers.

2 Chronicles 7:11–22 ESV

Thus Solomon finished the house of the Lord and the king’s house. All that Solomon had planned to do in the house of the Lord and in his own house he successfully accomplished. Then the Lord appeared to Solomon in the night and said to him: “I have heard your prayer and have chosen this place for myself as a house of sacrifice. When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land. Now my eyes will be open and my ears attentive to the prayer that is made in this place. For now I have chosen and consecrated this house that my name may be there forever. My eyes and my heart will be there for all time. And as for you, if you will walk before me as David your father walked, doing according to all that I have commanded you and keeping my statutes and my rules, then I will establish your royal throne, as I covenanted with David your father, saying, ‘You shall not lack a man to rule Israel.’ “But if you turn aside and forsake my statutes and my commandments that I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will pluck you up from my land that I have given you, and this house that I have consecrated for my name, I will cast out of my sight, and I will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples. And at this house, which was exalted, everyone passing by will be astonished and say, ‘Why has the Lord done thus to this land and to this house?’ Then they will say, ‘Because they abandoned the Lord, the God of their fathers who brought them out of the land of Egypt, and laid hold on other gods and worshiped them and served them. Therefore he has brought all this disaster on them.’ ”

           With the Council’s encouragement, I’m starting a short topical sermon series to try and help us address coronavirus disease 2019, or COVID-19, from a biblical perspective. Let me first say, boys and girls, I don’t have a children’s message today, but I want you to listen and ask your parents questions about what’s going on in the world right now. Some of you I know have had conversations about the sickness, but maybe you haven’t talked much about it. We’re in kind of a strange time, and that’s true for adults, too. Most of us haven’t been through anything like this with all the limitations in place. Maybe there are parts of life that you really like right now and others that you don’t. But as Christians, we aren’t just looking for medical answers and how to handle life, but we want to look at what hope and truth we find with our Christian faith. So don’t be afraid to ask your parents questions, and we’ll try to help you as best we can.

As I’ve talked to members in our congregation, especially those of you who are retired and living at home or who tend to be introverted or homebodies, I’ve heard it doesn’t feel like much has changed. All of us, though, have been affected in one way or another by COVID-19. Many have been praying regarding this pandemic. Some of you have relatives or friends who are battling this disease or the effects of it. While some of our routines may not have much change, we have ideas, opinions—many of us had never used the word “coronavirus” until about a month ago.

           This slide is just a glimpse of things that are on peoples’ minds right now. Sometimes we get in our bubbles and assume everyone thinks just like us and about the exact same things as us, but that’s not true. This isn’t an exhaustive list—much more could be added. I haven’t included numbers about positive and negative tests, or recoveries and deaths. But this gives us a mix of things that factual information can be given for, some are opinions, and others spiral into fiction. By no means am I planning to touch on all or even many of these, but this is our reality.

           People, here in the U.S. and around the world—please, keep in mind, this is a global pandemic, there are cases or impacts in every country—people have been wondering about: Where did it come from? What caused it? Who can get it? How does it spread? What does it do? Why does it do? There are conspiracy theories and comments about the deep-state. There’s the impact on stock markets. Opinions have formed around responses being too slow, too little, governments being negligent, while others view the response as too fast, too much, an overreach. Some people have made it out to be you either preserve rights or preserve lives. To varying degrees, people have been forced into quarantine. In Wisconsin, it’s been called, “Safer-At-Home.” This has led to mass closures of businesses, the debate over what work is essential, and then you have unemployment. There are constant needs for supplies: for PPE, masks, shields. There’s the ongoing search for treatments, cures, vaccines. Literally from every direction, including stickers on store floors, we hear and read about social-distancing and staying at least 6 feet apart. It’s been a bit of a joke that with all these people confined to their homes, will we see a baby boom in 9 months? More seriously, can marriages and families use this time to draw together? Some have wondered the opposite, too: will we see a divorce boom? Will tensions and frustrations grow dysfunction in our homes? The term new normal gets used, and we wonder what things will look like when it’s over. On a lighter note, nearly all students are now homeschoolers and all pastors now televangelists.

It’s quite the mix of things. As Christians, though, all this should lead us to the intersection of crisis and faith. At that intersection are some heavy questions, hopefully some of which we can explore and find answers to in God’s word. Maybe at the top of the list is: If God can do something, why hasn’t he? Where is God at? What is he doing? Has he abandoned or is he ignoring us? Is he punishing us? Is God waiting for us to do something, for enough people to pray or believe in him? Is God mad or cruel? These are the kinds of questions on believers’ minds as well as others in times of crisis: whether now or back in the Holocaust or in the days of the Spanish Flu or the bubonic plague or, throughout history, even back to Jacob’s descendants’ slavery in Egypt. When we face crisis as believers in the one true Almighty God, what does our faith say?

           The book of 2 Chronicles, if you’re not super familiar, is a historical narrative. You may know there is a lot of overlap between the books of Chronicles and Kings; this is extremely close to what’s in 1 Kings 8 and 9. We are looking into the reign of Solomon. Solomon was one of David’s sons and the third king over the kingdom of Israel. In 2 Chronicles 1, he took the throne and God said to him, “Ask for whatever you want me to give you,” and Solomon said, “Give me wisdom and knowledge, that I may lead this people, for who is able to govern this great people of yours?” That perspective was an admirable start to his reign, and he went a step further in chapter 2, “Solomon gave orders to build a temple for the Name of the Lord and a royal palace for himself.”

So that building project took place—you can see a rendering of the temple on the screen. If you want to study it a bit more, remember you can pull up all the slides by going to this sermon on the Baldwin CRC website and click slides under the video. When the temple was finished, the dedicated items were placed in the treasuries, a great assembly of Israel’s leaders and God’s people was held, and the glory of the Lord filled the temple by cloud and fire. Then in chapter 6, Solomon prayed a prayer of dedication. That’s where we are. We’ll hear a couple parts of his prayer, and then in chapter 7, the other part of our reading, we find God’s reply.

Brothers and sisters in Christ, I’ll save you the trip to a concordance or googling “Coronavirus Bible verses.” The words, “coronavirus” and “COVID-19” do not show up in either the Hebrew of the Old Testament or the Greek of the New Testament. Shocker, I know! But even though this specific disease may not be mentioned, does not mean the Bible is silent on crisis and that there are things we can learn and apply to our situation.

When we meet Solomon, he had been leading God’s people for some time. According to 1 Kings 6 and 7, it took 7 years to build the temple and possibly another 13 for his palace. Whether this took place when the temple was finished or when everything was done, Solomon had been a king for some time. In his wisdom, he thinks ahead, though. Whether it’d happen in his reign or after him, he knew times of distress were going to come at some point, times of disaster or disease. At some point Israel would face significant problems.

Throughout biblical history, crises have happened or have been warned about. I want to walk us through some of those today. First of all, there were times without rain—lengthy droughts. We’re not talking just a couple weeks or a couple months. 1 Kings 17 tells us of a three-year drought. After Solomon’s reign, the kingdom divided into Israel and Judah. Around 60 years after his reign, a man named Ahab was king over Israel. Because of he and his wife’s wickedness, the prophet Elijah went to them and said, “‘As the Lord, the God of Israel, lives, whom I serve, there will be neither dew nor rain in the next few years except at my word.’” With this drought came severe famine. It lasted until, we read in chapter 18, “After a long time, in the third year, the word of the Lord came to Elijah: ‘Go and present yourself to Ahab, and I will send rain on the land.’”

That might seem strange, but God had told his people back in Deuteronomy 11, when they were preparing to enter the Promised Land, “If you faithfully obey the commands I am giving you today—to love the Lord your God and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul—then I will send rain on your land in its season.” He also told them there, “Be careful, or you will be enticed to turn away and worship other gods and bow down to them. Then the Lord’s anger will burn against you, and he will shut the heavens so that it will not rain and the ground will yield no produce, and you will soon perish from the good land the Lord is giving you.” Ahab had been led away to worship idols, false gods, and God kept his word with the drought and famine.

There were also times when locust swarms came. Exodus 10 brings us to the eighth plague against Egypt. The Egyptian people and their animals had been hurt, they had been through such a combination of things unlike anything before, and now Moses said to Pharaoh, “‘This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, so that they may worship me. If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields. They will fill your houses…’” Pharaoh did not listen, “And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand over Egypt so that the locusts will swarm…’ The Lord made an east wind blow across the land all that day and all that night. By morning the wind had brought the locusts…” They ended up destroying every green, life-bearing plant.

There were also plagues and the potential of plagues. We usually refer to what we find in Exodus as “the ten plagues,” and yet only the fifth plague, in Exodus 9, is the same Hebrew word for plague in 2 Chronicles 6 and 7 used. “‘“…The hand of the Lord will bring a terrible plague on your livestock in the field—on your horses and donkeys and camels and on your cattle and sheep and goats…”’…And the next day the Lord did it: All the livestock of the Egyptians died…” Plagues very well may lead to death.

They weren’t just a threat against enemies of God’s people or animals; God’s people were also warned. In Leviticus 26, God told Israel if they rejected his decrees, abhorred his laws, failed to carry out his commands, and violated his covenant, he’d “‘“bring upon [them] sudden terror, wasting diseases and fever that will destroy your sight and drain away your life…”’” In verse 23, God says, “‘“If in spite of these things you do not accept my correction but continue to be hostile toward me, I myself will be hostile toward you and will afflict you for your sins seven times over. And I will bring the sword upon you to avenge the breaking of the covenant. When you withdraw into your cities, I will send a plague among you, and you will be given into enemy hands…”’”

You might be thinking, “Thanks Pastor Dan. This is exactly what I needed today: more doom and gloom, more devastation, more pain, more death.” But remember why and what Solomon was praying. When these things come or when they happen to God’s people, Solomon was pleading with God to “hear from heaven.” Who and what was God to hear? We read in the first part of 2 Chronicles 6, “your servant’s prayer and his plea for mercy,” “the cry and the prayer that your servant is praying in your presence,” “the supplications of your servant and of your people.” Solomon is asking God to listen to him and to his people—those who do in fact turn to him in the crisis. What did he hope God would do upon hearing? Verse 21 and repeated into verses 30 and 31, “When you hear, forgive…Forgive, and deal with each man according to all he does, since you know his heart…so that they will fear you and walk in your ways…”

The implication of each of these passages isn’t just that crises happen. It’s that crises can be due to sin, due to brokenness in the relationship between God and a group of people. Particularly under the covenant that was in place between God and Israel, if they went after other gods, the one true God may use a plague as a form of punishment or judgment. Being in covenant, Israel had agreed to that. If these things happened to them, they were most likely at fault.

           There’s something else we keep hearing, that we shouldn’t avoid: who sent these crises? They weren’t random, right? When locusts came to Egypt, there was an extraordinary wind that could be charted on radar screens today, but nature wasn’t the authority. No, God sent the crises in these passages. To use the words of Exodus 9:6, “The Lord did it.” Going back to 2 Chronicles 7, God said in verse 13, “When I shut up the heavens and there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people…” Pharaoh’s actions and the Israelites’ actions were to blame for deserving these crises; God had warned them. God sent the disasters, though.

Perhaps throughout our current situation, Job has come to mind at some point. Chapter 1 tells us how Satan came to God asking him to strike everything Job had. “The Lord said to Satan, ‘Very well, then, everything he has is in your hands, but on the man himself do not lay a finger.’” What happened? Groups of people attacked either Job’s servants or his children’s servants and took their livestock, “‘the fire of God fell from the sky and burned up the sheep and the servants,’” and wind collapsed his son’s house killing all his children.

In chapter 2, Satan returns before God, and the Lord says about Job, “‘…He still maintains his integrity, though you incited me against him to ruin him without any reason.’” So Satan asks God, “‘Stretch out your hand and strike his flesh and bones, and he will surely curse you to your face.’ The Lord said to Satan, ‘Very well, then, he is in your hands; but you must spare his life.’ So Satan went out from the presence of the Lord and afflicted Job with painful sores from the soles of his feet to the top of his head.”

It seems that Satan schemed the actual things that would happen to Job, but this was all under God’s watchful eyes. Some people view Job as being allegorical—it’s a made-up story to have us think about a certain message, kind of like a parable—rather than a recording of real historical events. Either way, that truth remains—when what we perceive or view as bad things happening, God is in control, he’s aware of them, and he has control over them.

As we think about our current situation of COVID-19, God is not unaware of us and everyone else in the world that he created and what is happening throughout the world. If we look at the CRC’s Our World Belongs to God, we confess in paragraph 2, “From the beginning, through all the crises of our times, until the kingdom fully comes, God keeps covenant forever,” What does that covenant entail? “Our world belongs to God!” The Bible tells us that for eternity before creation, there was ever only God. When he created the universe and all things, this is his world. He is sovereign over all parts of creation—whether they accept or rebel against him, he is God.

The Heidelberg Catechism Questions and Answers 26 and 27 dig into this a bit more. “…The eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ…still upholds and rules [heaven and earth and everything in them] by his eternal counsel and providence…I trust God so much that I do not doubt he will provide whatever I need for body and soul, and will turn to my good whatever adversity he sends upon me in this sad world. God is able to do this because he is almighty God and desires to do this because he is a faithful Father.” “What do you understand by the providence of God? The almighty and ever present power of God by which God upholds, as with his hand, [all creation], and so rules them that…rain and drought, fruitful and lean years…health and sickness, prosperity and poverty—all things, in fact, come to us not by chance but by his fatherly hand.”

Sometimes people, maybe even among some of us watching, we say “I don’t want a God that would do these things or tolerate these things.” “Why would I believe in Jesus, who Christians say is God, to love me and save, when God did or does all this other stuff?” As I’ve said before though, just because we may not like certain parts about God right now, doesn’t change the fact that God is God. As we hear throughout this passages and confessions, God can use crises and devastating events for our good.

Let’s try and apply this then: What did God do and what should we do? Did God make the first people who contracted COVID-19, apparently in Wuhan, China, sick? Is he the one who carries it from one person to the next? Has the disease spread under his control or has it spiraled out of his control to this point where there have been millions of cases and over 100,000 deaths?

I want to be careful and I want us to be careful. As we think about all we’ve been working through today, just because Israel’s covenant with God involved him sending judgments of disaster and disease does not automatically mean those things apply to the church or the world today. Like with colds, flus, and cancers, I can 100% say this strain of coronavirus and its potentially debilitating, even fatal effects, is present because sin has effects on life and the world. It’s here, because of the fall. I can’t 100% say, though, that coronavirus must be God’s general punishment against any or every group of people or against those individuals who have gotten the disease rather than other people specifically because they in 2019 and 2020 committed precise sins.

We ought to be especially cautious to assume that’s the route we must go because of what we find in John 9. Jesus’ disciples came upon a man born blind and asked Jesus, “‘…Who sinned, this man or his parents,’” They were implying a person or a group’s sin must have caused this “crisis” of blindness. Yet Jesus said, “‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned…but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.’” So, not every crisis or disaster or disease must be understood as going back to the specific sins of a person or a society.

Could God use COVID-19 as judgment against certain people who’ve contracted the disease? Yes, he could. He could use it for their good, for our good. But the spreading of this disease on a worldwide scale may also simply be happening under his gaze. Science tells us that germs travel, that some people are more susceptible to certain diseases than others. There are things that scientists and doctors don’t know about every single disease, including this one, and so the spread may follow the nature of the virus. Does God know who will get it? Yes. Does he know what it will do them? Yes. Can he end it by miraculous divine intervention? Yes. Could he permit or give someone the understanding to produce a remedy? Certainly! Should God be blamed in a negative way for COVID-19 existing? No, it exists due to the effects of sin on us and on creation.

A Christian response, then, is to love God and trust God through all of this and other crises in our lives. It is to care for our neighbors now and at all times. The Christian response can also involve such prayers that do follow 2 Chronicles 7, though. God declared, “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”

God always has authority, but he especially deserves to be revered for that right now. World leaders and politicians on both sides of the aisles are not the authority over this disease. We can listen to them and follow their orders meant to help keep people safe, but humility is meant for God. Humility involves repentance, turning away from sin and turning to God. It’s recognizing that sin has so devastated our world and societies. God made be sending judgment—it is possible. So, let us not neglect seeking him. May our prayers be directed to him on behalf of all people, not just a small part, not just our land thinking of the United States and Americans, but the whole world to be rid of this disease if it be God’s will. Let us recognize that things may change for what life looks like after all this—that may be for our good as well. Amen.