Where is God during COVID-19?
COVID-19 is all anyone is talking about right now. Rightly so—it has dramatically altered our way of life. It’s impossible to ignore and I know people are thinking about it from every angle. One angle I’m sure many believers and unbelievers alike are turning over in their minds is the question, "Where is God in all of this?"Maybe you find yourself asking, "If God is all powerful, why doesn’t he stop this?" Maybe you’re asking, "Why would a loving God allow so many people to die?" Maybe you just wonder, "Is God even real?"
If you’ve thought or asked any of these things or something else of a similar vein, I appreciate your honesty. These are hard questions to wrestle through in a time like this, but they are worth wrestling through. The fact of the matter is that God is real, he is loving, and he is all powerful. Therefore, we should try to understand the COVID-19 situation in light of these truths.
I think the problem for many Christians and unbelievers alike is that they start at the wrong place. Often, when we ask these questions and seek to understand God, we don’t start with him—we start with ourselves. We think about what we would do in this situation if we were God. We think about what fairness looks like from the human vantage point.
The proper starting point for us is God. We have to understand as best we can who God is to make sense of how he is acting in our world. We have to realize that God is holy and perfect. In his holiness, he hates sin (our world has a lot of it). In his perfection, he needs nothing (including us). God is totally self sufficient.
When we start there, we can begin to understand who we are. We are breakers of God’s law. Because we break God’s law, he owes us nothing. In fact, we deserve his punishment and judgment. R.C. Sproul says in his book The Holiness of God something along the lines of "We may face injustice from men, but we have never once faced injustice from God" (my paraphrase as I don’t have the book with me). We may be wrongly thrown in prison for the rest of our lives and it is a sever injustice on the part of the courts of our land, but God does not owe us anything. In fact, he is far more merciful and gracious to us than we deserve.
To understand this we only have to look at the stories of Job and Joseph. God allowed Satan to take everything from Job except his wife and his life. Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers, wrongly accused by his master’s wife and thrown into prison, and forgotten there for two years by men who said they would put in a good word for him. Neither of them faced injustice from God.
So how do we make sense of COVID-19? Is God judging the world? I don’t know. Is he trying to teach us something? I’m sure of it. Would he be unjust to not ever give us a cure? Not at all.
What I do know is that if you have been saved by Jesus, God has good planned for you. We trust that because he has given us everything by sending his only Son to make atonement sinners when we didn’t deserve it. Ephesians 1 says he’s given us every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places. Romans 8:28 says he’s working all things together for the good of those who love him and are called according to his purpose.
Where is God during COVID-19? Where he always is. He is sitting on his throne. He is leading his sheep. He is calling more sheep into his fold. He is executing the plan he had for the world before the world ever existed. And that plan is good—just like God.
For more reading on this subject, I highly recommend The Holiness of God by R.C. Sproul. Pick it up on Amazon. (affiliate)
