Much of Christendom has gotten our Christian Covid response entirely upside down and back to front. How wrong we’ve gotten it is not only incredibly unhelpful, but also frighteningly dangerous and hazardous to our spiritual health.
How did we get here you ask? The reason is simple—we’ve completely misunderstood ‘why’ Covid is here. We have no idea ‘what’ God is doing.
A sobering reason
3 months before Covid started, I had a dream which showed God was rising up to judge the earth. The sight was terrifying, and I knew this was a storm before which no one would survive, because GOD HIMSELF was the storm! At the same time, it was shown to me that if people repent of their sins and call out to God, they could escape this storm.
After Covid quickly followed this dream, I understood what Covid was: not just a virus, but God Himself dealing with and judging the earth! The Bible also supports this idea: “If a calamity occurs in a city has not the LORD done it?” (Amos 3:16). This happens when wickedness reaches peak levels and humanity ignores and even openly rejects God and His grace.
God is a God of justice. He is at work in the earth to right wrongs, punish evil doers, protect what is good, and uphold lawfulness. How God does this varies, but with Covid he is doing an unmistakable thing: crying out to mankind to turn to him and ‘be saved’, not just from virus but from sin and eternal judgment in Hell!
Revolutionary error
After Covid came, I thought to myself that ‘maybe’, just maybe, the world and Christians would ‘get it’; turn to God and turn away from rebellion against Him, and thus would be safe from Covid, and more importantly the ‘judge’ behind Covid.
Unfortunately, quite the opposite happened.
Instead of seeing our spiritual need, the world is up in arms over its ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’, and some Christians are just as bad! In fact, there is now a growing consensus amongst some in Christianity that it is high time we ‘take a stand’ and ‘fight back’! The language used in association with those terms evokes wartime imagery and history to construct an elaborate clarion call to ‘take a stand for God!’
Missing the spiritual cause of Covid, we’ve assumed our problem is physical; namely the governments of our day and the fact that our ‘rights’ are being taken away. When in fact the problem is ‘us’; the sin that has provoked God, and His protest against us for ignoring our spiritual sickness.
Our erroneous response is not only further damaging our sin problem, but now creating another issue; instead of fighting the problem ‘within’, we’re creating another problem ‘without’. This issue is an obvious and glaring one: that revolutionary language and actions, if continued long enough with enough support behind them, ultimately lead to how revolution is achieved; by war.
Warfare on any scale is obviously not a game and revolutions are no laughing matter. Those that participate in them rarely understand what they’re doing, and inevitably destroy themselves and others in the process. That is why Jesus didn’t call Christians to fight their enemies, but instead, “Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”
Many who read this article may scoff at the idea that revolution could possibly happen in a place like Australia or anywhere elsewhere in the West. The seeds of revolution however are already being planted, and in an age of social media this is exacerbated 10-fold because ideology can spread far and wide with a simple ‘click’ of a finger.
The startling way Christianity got to this place is mind-blowing. In just over a year, we have got to a place which would’ve seemed full-blown crazy-bananas just before Covid spread worldwide. Nevertheless, we are here now, so a full recalibration of our own Covid response is vitally urgent for us to grasp.
Time to Recalibrate
The recalibration is a simple one: first we need to recognise that Governments are not our enemies, and neither are vaccines and those who are ‘for’ or ‘against’ them. The issues are not whether lockdowns are wrong or not, or whether masks or social distancing is needed.
Then we need to realise what should already be a Christian 101 truth: God did not call us to ‘fight’ government or ‘fight’ each other. He called us to repent and believe in him, love our neighbours, and even love our enemies (Matt.5v44).
The most important feature of our recalibration is that must we turn to God with our whole heart and lives. We should also tell others to do likewise, whether they’re already saved or not. God is not concerned with how we respond to the Covid virus, he is concerned with how we will respond to our ‘sin’ virus; and ultimately how we will respond to him.