For Wilshire Baptist Church
It’s a question I’ve been asked several times in recent days: Did God cause the pandemic – to punish us or to test us?
My knee-jerk answer is, “No, God doesn’t hurt God’s people.” However, I definitely believe God could test or even punish us, as we read about many times in the Bible. And I even contend God should test us sometimes just to shake us out of our complacency and corruption.
Yes, God can do all that, but does God do that? A friend with seminary credentials and I talked about it recently, and we agreed that we can never know the answer for certain. It’s on my short list of questions I’ll be asking some day in the sweet by and by. Meanwhile, I believe a more relevant question we should be asking right now is: What will we do with this? And more pointedly, what would God have us do with this?
Those are questions I’ve turned to many times in my own life to try to cope with personal disasters. I’ve never blamed God for my troubles, because if I back trace my actions, it’s often my own free will that has gotten me into trouble. If not that, then it’s the result of natural cause and effect set into motion at the creation of the world — whether it be gravity that turns a stupid stunt into an injury, or chemical reactions inside the body that create harmful results. Regardless, I’ve always believed that God was there and ready to help me get through the storms and make the most of the future. And often that starts with that question: What will I do with this?
That’s hard enough for one person, but add everyone on the planet to the mix and we get what we’re getting right now: chaos, confusion, distrust, misinformation. If this is a test, then we are failing. Too many of us are focusing on our individual interests rather than our interconnected existence. We’re sickening each other with our dogged desire to be the center of our own precious world. Some are doing it for political gain and some for personal pleasure. We need to put politics and our personal interests aside for a while and work together toward the public good. Only when we are healthy again as a people can we go back to our personal fun and games. And when we’re all healthy again, we can take off our masks and put on our blue and red political uniforms and go back to scrimmaging over other issues.
But, you know, my hope — and maybe God’s hope too — was that we might learn how to work together on COVID-19 and then perhaps we could pivot together to tackle other issues that have been plaguing us since long before the pandemic: poverty, hunger, equality, justice, health, education and fairness to name a few.
Like I said, we’re not doing so well. If this is a test, we’re failing.