God; powerful and loving, really?

Surely COVID 19 has proved one thing beyond doubt: God is not all powerful AND all loving.

If he is powerful, he can´t be loving because he has not stopped the virus. By the same logic, if he is loving his power is limited.

Yet the Bible maintains he is both.

He is loving: Psalm 86:15 tells us that he is ‘a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.’

He is also powerful: Psalm 147:5 states ‘Great is our Lord and abundant in power.’

How so? Let me ask you to suppose for a moment that what the bible says about eternity is actually true; that we are not limited by the life expectancy of our earthly existence, but are in fact what the author CS Lewis called ‘immortal beings’. Not immortal in the sense that God is immortal, for unlike God, we all had a beginning; but immortal in the sense that our lives are not limited by the frailty of our earthly bodies. Suppose this life is NOT all there is. If the bible is true, this sense of eternity is not so hard to imagine. It tells us ‘God has put eternity into the human heart’.

Now, imagine that what the bible says about sin is also true, it is in essence a rejection of our creator, and has brought not only separation from him in this life and the inevitable consequence of physical death, but also eternal separation from him.

Suppose too that this creator God allowed us to go through life blissfully unaware of the eternal consequences of our actions, arriving at an unexpected and unprepared for death? Would he be loving by any measure, to allow his creatures to enter eternity unaware they would be separated from him for ever?

Let me turn again to the pen of CS Lewis: ‘There is kindness in love: but love and kindness are not the same thing, kindness alone cares not whether its object becomes either good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms, but with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is love, he is by definition something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though he has often rebuked us and condemned us, he has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.’

For our powerful Creator has indeed ‘so loved the world that he gave his only Son’; to wear a Corona: a crown of thorns, to die in suffocating agony, to bear the penalty for sin, to make a way for his enemies to have eternal joy. No virus can jeopardise that death defeating love.

As CS Lewis observed: ‘God whispers in our pleasures, but he shouts to us in our pain’. Are we ready to hear?