Why a virus?

The entire world has been shut down by a microscopic microbe. Everywhere there is fear, death and suffering, and scientists, as brilliant as they may be, have yet to develop a cure, treatment or reliable therapy. Under these extraordinary circumstances, anyone, and certainly a believer and amateur theologian like myself, could be excused for seeing a crisis of biblical dimensions and searching for an underlying divine message.

I’m not talking about the age-old question of how God could let bad things happen to good people. There are almost daily events which provoke such inquiry, some even more compelling than the novel coronavirus. I struggle often with this question, no more today than in the past. Today I wrestle with a more modest issue: why did God choose a tiny virus to visit such trauma and dislocation upon the world?

As they ponder their relationship with the Creator, people of all faiths (and those who claim no faith) seek to make some sense of this incomprehensible episode. With the unexpected opportunity for deeper reflection and greater study, I humbly offer a few insights that may resonate with you.

You can win a war by staying home. Never before

have such incongruous words been spoken, and yet they are repeatedly uttered by every leader across the globe. But the message is not a new one. In the book of the prophet Zechariah (4:6), God says exactly that: “Not by armies and not by strength, but only through my spirit says the Lord Almighty.” Have we become too reliant on physical power and too dismissive of the spiritual, especially when this victory will only come by strength of spirit? Perhaps this is a lesson brought to us by the virus.

We need more humility. We have artificial intelligence, big data, robotics, organ transplants and gene therapy, but a contagion jumps from an infected animal in Wuhan to a human and it brings the world to a complete stop! Plainly, there’s still a lot that we don’t know – and perhaps we are not putting what we do know to the right use. At the beginning of time, the technologists of the day conceived and began to build a tower to reach and attain the mysteries of the heavens. But they did so “to make themselves a name” (Genesis 11:4). Motivated as they were for personal aggrandisement, God made short work of the builders of the Tower of Babel. Perhaps the virus is teaching us to be more humble and less selfish with regard to our own advancements.

We are the world, but charity begins at home. The tiny virus is showing us, like never before, how interdependent we are across the globe. What happens