Covid-19 is back and with a vengeance, despite our greatest attempts to defeat it with isolation and vaccination. The “19” in its name stands for 2019, the year it first emerged in China. For the rest of the world, it has been our daily obsession since February 2020, and was declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020.
We are now in August 2021 and new cases are on the rise again, along with renewed talks of mandatory measures and lockdowns. After peaks in new cases and deaths earlier this year, life has almost gone back to normal, and people are clearly not emotionally prepared to live in fear and under lockdown once again.
The quick solution being offered is a third shot of vaccine. The vaccine apparently wears off in a matter of months, and so long as the virus continues to spread, particularly its new variants, booster shots will be needed. What this means is that we are not being offered a cure for coronavirus, only a temporary solution. Inevitably, or so it seems, most people will need to get the virus before their immune systems learn to deal with it.
Leaving the medical issues aside, many people have tried to make sense of the coronavirus and what it means for the world. Some have claimed it to be a man-made virus, either spread intentionally by China or leaked unintentionally from the Wuhan lab. Others have blamed the Chinese for eating bats, mice, and other vermin, allowing their viruses to spread to us due to prolonged contact with them.
While there may be truth in these theories, for the purpose of making sense of things, I prefer to treat coronavirus as something that was meant to be in the natural order of things, something that fits into God’s greater plan for mankind, otherwise He would not have allowed it to be.
In consequence of our response to coronavirus, there are also additional theories. One theory is that governments are intentionally taking advantage of the virus to forever limit our freedoms or to make us dependent upon them for all our needs. Another theory is that governments are taking advantage of the virus to test methods of population control or even population dwindling.
This ties in with similar sinister theories related to the vaccines, which are based on a new mRNA technology, and which essentially infect people with a genetically modified virus that causes their cells to produce a spike protein found on the coronavirus. Even if the virus itself was not man-made, the vaccine was clearly genetically engineered, which has led to fear and distrust of the medicine and those who administer it.
Possibly, many are more afraid of the vaccine than they are of the virus. Which makes it harder to make sense of things and of their deeper meanings.
Bible readers are presented with a very clear narrative relative to the reported plagues. Plagues and pandemics are presented as punishments from God, or at least as painful lessons. The previously mentioned theories do not take this view into account.
Whether or not coronavirus was man-made, and whether or not its vaccine may be harmful or even ineffective in the long run, I think most people are missing the bigger picture here. Most people are projecting their own fears and contempt upon the realities of this pandemic and are looking for others to blame, without considering that it could be a message from God.
This global pandemic has been around for a year and a half, with dire consequences for the whole world and with deadly effects, and we haven’t been able to get rid of it yet. Even the vaccines have been proven to have their shortcomings, while all the while Covid-19 continues to mutate and unleash new variants upon us, with new waves of infection.
What are we to make of this? First, I think it elucidates the shortcomings of human knowledge, of science, and particularly of medicine, and we need to admit as humans that we don’t have clear answers or solutions. This pandemic will end when God wants it to.
Second, and I think this point is critical, is that our attempts as nations and as governments to control the spread of this virus have either failed or have come at an extremely high price. The costs to our economies and to our financial systems, in consequence of our attempts to stop the virus, could prove in the future to be more destructive than the virus itself. The goals of governments to control and micromanage the flow of coronavirus and their potential human carriers, could prove to be the undoing of our entire way of life.
In the past, perhaps more people would have died from a similar virus, and we as people would have felt more desperate and hopeless in the face of forces beyond our control, but we would have done a lot more soul searching and would have had God’s Name on the top our minds, instead of Dr. Fauci, President Trump, or anyone else. That is a major fault of our current times, one that will not allow us to recover so easily in my opinion.
Which leads to the third and final point: We have failed to make sense of this pandemic without taking God into consideration. With an atheistic or scientific worldview, we are faced with a pandemic that is either a natural occurrence or a human manipulation, but whose origin remains uncertain. Either way, there is no making sense of it, because it is not our fault as its victims, so there is no need for us to improve ourselves.
That type of thinking is the heart of the problem in my opinion, and perhaps the very reason for this globally endemic pandemic. I think we have a lot to improve as people, and as governments, who are powerless before God, but who think we can control everything and achieve anything we want. We cannot, and we must accept this fact and humble ourselves before God.
This will happen either way, in my opinion, whether we want it or not.