by Roland Wrinkle
1. Where Are We In History? Where do we stand as people of God? Let me start with a simple historical observation. This little church on Newhall Ave. (and many of its members), have weathered and persevered through World War I, the 1918 influenza pandemic, the Great Depression, World War II, the San Francisquito Dam Breach, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the 1993 Earthquake, 9/11, the 2008 Great Recession, the HIV crisis, the recent catastrophic fires and floods and much more. Now, it’s coronavirus. God proved to be bigger than all of them. Only my one-year old granddaughter can credibly cry, “This is unprecedented!”
2. Will Things Change? Greatly. After each of the cataclysmic disruptions I just mentioned, either the world greatly changed, America greatly changed, California greatly changed, or all three. This should not cause followers of Jesus to tremble in fear. Great change is what Jesus’ first coming was all about. And change is what is promised when He returns. Change in creation, change in the way we do things and see things, change in our priorities, change in how we treat each other. Change in cultures, relationships, economic systems, healthcare schemes, political governance, power structures.
3. Does God Insulate and Protect Us from Change? No! It’s just the opposite. Jesus warned us, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt 18.3) When we are all bodily resurrected at the Second Coming, Paul famously said, “We will all be changed.” (1 Cor 15.51) And, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” (Rom 12.2) We were “buried with Him in baptism, in which [we] also were raised with Him through faith in the working of God, who raised Him from the dead.” (Col 2.12) To the Galatians: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” (Gal 2.20)
Look at Jesus’ apostles…a fisherman, a tax collector, a rowdy zealot and a bunch of excruciatingly ordinary and undistinguished men…and He changed them. He took a persecutor of Christians, Paul, and he changed him. He asked each one to “follow me” and each was massively changed by doing so. We are baptized into a radically changed life… eternal life. How can we expect to go from ordinary to eternal life without radical change?
As bible-believing Christians, we have no right to anxiously ask, “When will things get back to normal?” When has anything ever been, or supposed to have been, normal for the followers of Jesus? For Christians, the ordinary has always been obliterated by the extraordinary. Eternal life with God is anything but normal or ordinary. When did Christians “get it easy?” When were we ever promised that? “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body…” (Matt 10.28)
4. What Are We Supposed To Do? In such times, we are called to respond as followers of Jesus and to act, not out of fear, but out of love for others and with the responsibilities that come with acting out of God’s Love. As demonstrated throughout history, scripture calls us to do whatever we can to help those who are most severely affected by this crisis. That is a yoke Christians have always taken upon themselves and the people of God invariably have acquitted themselves to the glory of God. “God has not given us a spirit of fear and timidity, but of power, love, and self– discipline” (2 Timothy 1:7). This all comes under the category of living out the faith we profess.
5. What Are All These Past, Present And Future Raw Upheavals All About? Paul responds, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” (Rom 8.22) Jesus said the same thing: “All these are the beginning of birth pains.” (Matt 24.8) and confirmed by Mark at 13.8. Get it? New Creation has to be birthed. And from what my wife told me (four times) it tends to involve a lot of pain.
Read the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5). In no uncertain terms, Jesus announced that the world was being set to rights, that the world was going to be turned right side up, that the status quo (favoring the privileged and powerful over the weak and disadvantaged) was going to be smashed to pieces, just like the Temple. When the Son of God was mercilessly executed, there was an earthquake. (Matt 27.51) When Jesus, dead to life, walked out of his own tomb, there was an earthquake. (Matt 28.2) When God finally restores all of creation to intended perfection and brings His Kingdom to earth, it will be heralded by a whole bunch of earthquakes and then, a final earthquake described as “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on earth, so tremendous was the quake.”
6. Is The World Coming To An End? No! This fallen, broken and battered world is never coming to an end. It is going to get renewed. God will declare, “I am making everything new!” (Rev 21) Not, “I am making all new things,” but “I am making all things new.” “God’s dwelling place [will be] among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
7. If Not, Then What The Heck Is Going On? In light of the future God has planned for us (and which began to permeate reality the moment Jesus defeated all evil on the Cross in anticipation of the inevitable final victory of God over evil), we have no business using a virus pandemic as an excuse to hoard toilet paper and hand sanitizer before our “neighbors” do it to us first. In Psalm 73, beaten and battered Israel had just returned from exile to a beaten and battered Jerusalem. The psalmist switches from complaining about how others are doing so much better – to remembering God’s promises (which are eternal and unbreakable). Listen to how the psalm starts out: “Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches [i.e. You let them hoard all the toilet paper and hand sanitizer]. All in vain I have kept my heart clean [without any toilet paper] and washed my hands in innocence [but not with hand sanitizer].” But then he thinks back to the promises of God and remembers what God has promised. And this is how it ends, “God is the strength of my heart and my portion for ever. [F]or me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge, to tell of all your works.”
8. Is God Behind All Of This, i.e. Making A Rather Strong Point? God is not in this pandemic. He didn’t launch it to teach us a lesson. (“When tested [“peirazo” means “tested”], no one should say, ‘God is testing me.’ For God cannot be tested by evil, nor does he test anyone.” James 1.13) 2900 years ago, the great prophet Elijah was in deep crap; Israel was trying to do to him what we always did to prophets, i.e. hunt them down and kill them. Was God behind or in that catastrophe? As the story goes in 1 Kings 19:
The Lord said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.
There actually was a whirlwind…but God wasn’t in it. Elijah really did experience an earthquake…but God wasn’t in that either. The land suffered a great fire. Again, not God’s doing. So, when God passes by and there’s a whirlwind, an earthquake or a conflagration, is that God speaking to us? No. Here’s how that story ends:
And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave. Then a voice said to him, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” [And God then gave Elijah a whole bunch of specific instructions about what to do.]
God doesn’t use whirlwinds, earthquakes, fires or pandemics to get our attention. Rather, He speaks to us in a still small voice.
Nothing has changed since then. God was bigger than all of the calamities, plagues, wars and troubles of history. He is bigger than history. He is bigger than the current coronavirus. We just need to “Be still and know that [He is] God.” (Ps 46).
9. If This Isn’t God Unleashing A Covid–19 Whirlwind, Then What Is He Actually Doing? God is not in the whirlwind. But He will redeem all of the damage and suffering caused by the virus. He will use this evil, as He has used every evil throughout history, to serve His good purposes.
10. How Will He Go About Doing That?
As the Beach Boys once said, “God Only Knows.”