Receiving Evil from God: Christ & COVID-19

“Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” - Job 2:10

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At the beginning of Amos 3, God asks a series of rhetorical questions meant to elicit from the people hearing the message an emphatic and obvious, “No.” Verse 6 contains the final question meant to drive home the point He wants all Israel to grasp: “Does disaster come to a city, unless the Lord has done it?”

The answer, of course, is still no.

Isaiah 45 contains some of the Bible’s most poignant statements about God’s sovereignty, delivered to us from His own mouth: “I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God… I form light and create darkness; I make well-being and create calamity; I am the Lord, who does all these things.” (Isaiah 45:5, 7)

Speaking just as emphatically and clearly in Deuteronomy 32:39, the Lord declares: “See now that I, even I, am He, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand.”

God cedes His sovereignty to no one. Ever. Your life and mine and the lives of every human being throughout history rest in His hand (Job 12:10). We live according to His will (Acts 17:28). Every breath we take is only by His permission (Isaiah 42:5). If we lay down to sleep and wake up in the morning, it is only because He has decided that we do so (Psalm 3:5).

The Bible has gone to great lengths and spent a lot of ink to make sure we get the point: God is sovereign over every single aspect of our lives.

It has become fashionable on social media in the last couple of weeks for Christians to make sure that everyone knows that this recent coronavirus/COVID-19 epidemic is most definitely not the work of God. We must never blame the Lord for disaster or death, they claim. God is about beauty and life and love and goodness, so we must never attribute to Him what can only be the work of Satan or the effects of our fallen, sinful world.

When Job was besieged by Satan and had his entire life devastated, it was God who took ultimate responsibility for it: “And the Lord said to Satan, ‘Have you considered my servant Job, that there is none like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil? He still holds fast his integrity, although you incited me against him to destroy him without reason.’” (Job 2:3)

But, God doesn’t create viruses, they indignantly insist. After all, Jesus never made anyone sick while He was here on earth. And He never turned someone away who desired healing.

First of all, “God… made the world and everything in it,” (Acts 17:24, see also Psalm 146:6). That includes coronavirus. That includes the teeth and claws of predators that kill in order to eat. It includes poisonous plants. It includes the winds that create tornadoes. It includes the oceans that create tsunamis. It includes the storms that create lightning. When God says that He created everything, He means exactly that.

And second, the healing miracles Christ performed had a very specific purpose attached to them. Christ did not heal for healing’s sake alone or to establish a precedent that people’s lives were meant to be painless once they came into contact with Him, but to prove the validity of His claims as Messiah and to testify to His authority as God (see Acts 2:22, Hebrews 2:4 and John 10:38). His power was displayed so that people might believe that He was exactly who He said He was. If, as so many claim these days, the healing miracles were meant as a sign of what our lives were meant to be like in the here-and-now - that is, completely free of pain, sickness, disease, poverty and hardship - then nothing He said regarded suffering, persecution and tribulation in this life makes any sense and the lives of the Apostles after Him become not much more than examples of what not to do.

The fact is that you cannot read the Bible at face value and come away with the ideas that God has nothing to do with the current epidemic coursing through the world or that He never has anything at all to do with the difficulties that come into our lives. Only a Bible read through dense, thick lenses of wishful thinking and insistence on our own definitions of love and goodness can be made to reach that conclusion.

God has made it clear: He is not Santa Claus and He is not a genie, here to give us only the things we want in just the ways that we want them. His love is bigger than our preferences. His wisdom isn’t even beginning where ours has long ended. His goodness is more intense than we can comprehend and His purposes are His own.

We are hypocrites to maintain such a contrary and senseless position. Those who claim that God would never use difficult, negative things to accomplish His purposes in the world still discipline their children, workout at gyms, and in all kinds of other ways subject themselves to difficulty in order to activate growth, instill maturity and build strength. We all inherently understand that difficult things are what make us into better people. We understand because it is how the world works. It is how the world works because it is God who made the world.

After God took responsibility for wrecking Job, Job himself acknowledged that it was God who was at work, as well. He responded to his wife who was telling him to curse God and die with, “Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” (Job 2:10). Job did not have a problem understanding what Solomon wrote in Ecclesiastes 7:14: “In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other.”

God does not need to be defended from what He has already declared to be true: that it is He who controls every dynamic of our lives, terrible and joyous, destructive and pleasurable. He does not ask us to understand every facet of why He does what He does, but He does require that we remain faithful to Him through all of it.

If this world and society have any hope of returning to God, it will be, at least in part, because they see Christians holding fast to Him in the midst of hard times. But if the God that Christians claim to believe in is not actually the God of the Bible, but instead some pale, weak facsimile conjured up in our own frail imaginations, then we will leave a watching world floundering and uninterested in a God both disconnected from the harsh realities of life and easily rejected once things get difficult.

God does not need us to get Him off the hook. He does not need our spineless defenses or our happy, smiley insistence that the Christian life equates to a never-ending day at Disneyland. He does not need anything from us, in fact. What He wants, however, is a dogged dedication to what He has revealed in His Word.

The God of the Bible is in complete control of the coronavirus and COVID-19. It can only do what He permits and directs it to do. If you do not believe this, then you do not believe the Bible.

Calling your idol Jesus does not make your idol Jesus. Let God be God and worship Him for who He is, not who you would prefer Him to be.

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