Coronavirus – A Christian’s Response

How should Christians respond to Coronavirus?

Nothing happens to us by accident – nothing at all. God is in complete control of our lives. And for something as global and as deadly as this, what is He wanting us to know? How is He trying to change us? Could it be this:

1. To realise in a new way, our weakness and our fragility as human beings. Our society lives as though it is master of all it surveys and is this a warning not to take life for granted? The psalmist in the Bible says ‘teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom.’
2. As we’ve been told, the virus is no respecter of national or ethnic boundaries. It’s not a Chinese virus, it has already hit well over a hundred countries; they are rich and poor; they are Muslim and Christian; they are dictatorships and democracies. In our global suffering, we are all of us absolutely equal – weak and in need of answers.
3. It is so easy to be fearful and to sense danger everywhere – on the metal handle of your supermarket trolley or as you click your pin number on the credit card machine; in the queue in the pharmacy. And you begin to wonder, is it lurking there, waiting to infect me? And yes, it is obviously good to be sensible and to be careful. But are we being challenged to react not with fear but with faith? Faith in Jesus Christ, the Resurrection and the Life. And are these times a call to trust and to believe – to have that faith and not to fear?
4. Are we being reminded of what really is important in life? Perhaps the six nations fixtures, that cancelled business meeting, the spring holiday that we had planned, perhaps they are not essential to survival after all? And are we at last learning the difference between the urgent and the vital?
5. Romans chapter 6 in the Bible warns us of a virus far more lethal, far, far more widespread than the corona kind. It’s one that has struck every man, woman and child ever born and this one ends, not in possible death but in a death that is certain and eternal. That virus is called sin and we all live in its deadly grip. Jesus came to a world infected by that virus. And with no protective clothing, he lived among unclean people contaminated by it. And He died, so as to give our sick world an antidote, the only possible antidote; we can be dead to sin, but alive in Christ.