Much of the world is reeling. A virus, microscopic yet with global proportions, is racing across borders and grocery store aisles, spurring a communal anxiety even more contagious than the respiratory disease it causes.
The outbreak has highlighted a growing community of helpers. Doctors and nurses, scientists and reporters, officials and clergy, and everyone doing their part to constrain the virus’ spread.
John Piper is a helper. And with prodigious speed and joyful seriousness, he has already released a book to help us through this fearful moment. “Coronavirus and Christ” (Crossway) is a simple treatise, summing up so much of Piper’s theology: the sweet and solid rock of God, God’s supreme sovereignty, and God’s unstoppable mission to work all things for his own glory and the good of those who love him.
In “Coronavirus and Christ,” Piper tackles believers’ fears and the world’s existential dread as so much that once seemed stable has now been shown liable to crumble. He proceeds in two parts: (1) reminding us of the sweetness and the solidity of the God who reigns over the coronavirus and (2) enlightening us to what our holy, glorious God is doing through the coronavirus.
For Piper fans, the broader Reformed audience, and Christians across of many stripes, the book is a balm. For those unwilling to cede that a pandemic like COVID-19 is really part of God’s glory-maximizing plan for the world, they will far more appreciate the second half of the book—what God is doing through the pandemic—than the first half. And yet, in a world with such fragile, fleeting hope, “Coronavirus and Christ” may help us all once again reconcile, in real time, a broken world with a good God, a raging disease with the mission of a divine kingdom.
The God Who Reigns Over the Coronavirus
We are foolish to put our hope in the odds. If our hope is in our calculated chance of survival, whether that be 1 percent or 99 percent, we have little to be hopeful about. For chance is neither faithful nor trustworthy. But if our hope is in God, an unshakable Rock, who is all-powerful and all-knowing and good, that is good news, says Piper. While some criticize this Christian hope as an obsession with a presumed afterlife at the expense of the here and now, Piper reminds us that such a hope—though entirely reasonable (for why shouldn’t our focus be on an eternal afterlife above our temporal life on earth?)—actually has enormous implications for our lives on this mortal coil.
The Rock I am talking about is under my feet now. I could say that the Rock is under my feet now just because hope beyond the grave is present hope. The object of hope is future. The experience of hope is present. And that present experience is powerful.
Hope is power. Present power. Hope keeps people from killing themselves—now. It helps people get out of bed and go to work—now. It gives meaning to daily life, even locked-down, quarantined, stay-at-home life—now. It liberates from the selfishness of fear and greed—now. It empowers love and risk taking and sacrifice—now (15).
In a very real sense, despite the good gift of medicine and the felt presence of community (now largely virtual), we cannot comfort ourselves sufficiently in this crisis. Only God can do that. God, whose comfort we can “taste and see,” is our Rock of comfort. He is holy, righteous, and good.
But the ever-present question arises once again: What about the problem of evil? How do we reconcile suffering in the world with an omnipotent, omniscient, good God?
Theologians and philosophers have done plenty of work on this question and there are many good answers–and still a hefty dose of mystery. Not everyone accepts Piper’s theology of suffering, or God’s ultimate sovereignty over it. But Piper does well by all believers to emphasize that human suffering, however it comes above, does not point to unholiness or unrighteousness in God, but to the fact that we are “by nature children of wrath” (Ephesians 2:3).
And here Piper lays out his largest point of the book’s first half, hearkened to across several chapters. Here is his topline: “The same sovereignty that could stop the coronavirus, yet doesn’t, is the very sovereignty that sustains the soul in it.”
The point is that the same power that is strong enough to create and sustain the cosmos—and, for Piper, to permit or even cause the virus—is just as powerful to create, sustain, and save the souls of human beings. It’s the same power that rise Christ from the dead! God’s meticulous sovereignty is aligned with his holy and perfect nature (“he cannot deny himself,” says 2 Timothy 2:13) and ultimately works for good, though we cannot always see it (Daniel 4:35, Ephesians 1:11). And his sovereignty, even now, is unbelievably good. Piper says we should rejoice in his sovereignty: “If we try to rescue God from his sovereignty over suffering, we sacrifice his sovereignty to turn all things for good…. The very sovereignty that rules in sickness is the sovereignty that sustains in loss. The very sovereignty that takes life is the sovereignty that conquered death and brings believers home to heaven and Christ.”
And “What does it look like when God’s infinite, blood-certified commitment to give us ‘all things’ meets the coronavirus? Here’s what [Paul] says:
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword [or the coronavirus]? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us (Romans 8:35–37).
Don’t miss these painful and amazing words: “We are being killed all the day long.” That means that the “all things” God will give to us, because he did not spare his Son, includes bringing us safely through death. Or as he says in Romans 8:38–39, “I am sure that neither death nor life . . . will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Satan has a role in evil, of course. Piper doesn’t deny that. But the Enemy is on a “divine leash” and has no power apart from God’s permission and limitation. “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Gen. 50:20).
Our confidence in the sovereignty of God, in both suffering and salvation, over our days and our eternities, can supernaturally empower Christians. “That kind of rock-solid confidence in the face of death has emboldened Christ’s people for two thousand years,” says Piper. “The truth of God’s wise and good sovereignty has been the stabilizing power for thousands of Christians in the sacrifices of love.”
What is perhaps most difficult for Piper’s critics to accept, and for his compatriots to live out, is that even the world’s bad news, in the end—and therefore even here and now—becomes good news. For all of it–suffering, lament, grief, pain, and all the rest–will is meant for and will be turned into the good of the believer and the glory of God.
What Is God Doing Through the Coronavirus?
Part of me wishes Piper had reversed the order of his book. Too many will be turned off by his theology of sovereignty and suffering, and won’t make it to the gems he gets to in describing how God can use this pandemic for good. He acknowledges there are a billion things God is doing now (and always) that we can’t see, but he notes six that he says Scripture makes clear God is doing.
Piper says (1) the pandemic is a “physical picture of the moral horror and spiritual ugliness of God-belittling sin.” Basically, sin is why all physical misery exists, and because we are more prone to pay attention to physical suffering and material hardship than spiritual toil—a thing largely ignored or repressed in our day—the horror of the coronavirus is a sort of felt parable for our horrific rebellion against God. Importantly, for Christians, the pain “is purifying, not punitive.” And for all people, such suffering can point us to the ugliness of sin and our need to “wake up” to God.
While much suffering is general and a broad result of sin, some suffering is (2) specific judgment of specific sins. This won’t be popular, but the Bible is pretty clear that divine discipline happens, that divine judgment is not a joke. Again, if we are in Christ, we know if we get COVID it’s not punitive (there is “no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus,” says Paul in Romans 8:1). We must be enormously, almost prohibitively cautious, to judge anyone else as suffering a specific ailment because of a specific sin, but any suffering in the world, especially on such a massive scale as we see today, is an opportunity to examine ourselves and confront and repent of sin—not because my sin caused a pandemic, but because all sin is worthy of death. And how much richer then is God’s free gift of mercy and grace!
God can also use a global health crisis as (3) a “wake-up call to be ready for the second coming of Christ.” Piper is the first to say we can’t predict when the second coming will happen and that much mental and emotional strain has been wasted on that endeavor. Yet, even as we don’t see coronavirus as the sign of an imminent apocalypse, our current pains truly are “birth pains” (Matthew 24:8) and “groanings” (Romans 8:22) as we await the return of Jesus. Such pains are reminders to stay alert and be ready (Matthew 24:44). As Piper says, “The way to be ready is to come to Jesus Christ, receive forgiveness for sins, and walk in his light.”
In typical Piper fashion, he sees our hard moment as a channel for God to (4) realign us with the infinite worth of Christ. Basically, this means the current crisis, like all disasters, is a sign and call for everyone to repent, lest we perish (not in the disaster, but in the eschaton).
What is repentance? It is turning to treasure Jesus.
Recently I posted an excerpt from Mark Sayers’ “Reappearing Church” in which, in 2019, he asks with prophetic insight how earth-shaking events will affect our lives and our faith.
The secularist life script, in which humans attempt to live without having to confront the great questions of life, creates insulation against faith. However, this insulation is not as secure as it may seem….
If we endured a global flu pandemic, like the one in the early part of the twentieth century that killed millions of people across the world, how we view and process our personal potentials and possibilities would be deeply shaken….
Your lifestyle, your freedom, your approach to faith and meaning are shaped by large-scale factors. Factors out of our control, which we assume to be stable and secure, but which in reality can change suddenly.
Piper provides a helpful response. He says:
What God is doing in the coronavirus is showing us—graphically, painfully—that nothing in this world gives the security and satisfaction that we find in the infinite greatness and worth of Jesus. This global pandemic takes away our freedom of movement, our business activity, and our face-to-face relations. It takes away our security and our comfort. And, in the end, it may take away our lives.
The reason God exposes us to such losses is to rouse us to rely on Christ. Or to put it another way, the reason he makes calamity the occasion for offering Christ to the world is that the supreme, all-satisfying greatness of Christ shines more brightly when Christ sustains joy in suffering” (82).
The message is the same message given to Paul, to stop relying on ourselves, to stop us from being prideful and conceited (as with Paul’s thorn), and because in loss we see more fully the gain of Christ.
As I hope we have all been privileged to see around us, the pandemic is also (5) a moment of divine calling, encouraging believers “to overcome self-pity and fear, and with courageous joy, to do the good works of love that glorify God.” For many of us, there may be no opportunity like this one to show the glories of Christ in doing good deeds. Such deeds are heightened and point more vividly to Christ when done in times of danger. “Deeds of love in the context of danger, whether disease or persecution, point more clearly to the fact that these deeds are sustained by hope in God.” Piper goes further, saying “One of God’s purposes in the coronavirus is that his people put to death self-pity and fear, and give themselves to good deeds in the presence of danger. Christians lean toward need, not comfort. Toward love, not safety. That’s what our Savior is like. That is what he died for” (91).
Finally, and strangely enough, the outbreak of COVID-19 is (6) a divine platform for evangelism. We know throughout history, and in God’s economy on earth, suffering, especially persecution, spurs missions. “The global scope and seriousness of the coronavirus is too great for God to waste,” says Piper. “It will serve his invincible global purpose of world evangelization” (98). Let us pray many come to Christ, the Rock, who holds firm when everything else is revealed to be sinking sand.
Piper himself is not wasting this moment. He must have written his whole book in a matter of a couple of weeks. He knows the urgency of the hour. And even where well-meaning Christians disagree with him on finer theological points, we all must recognize the urgency of this season. The time is now. There is a call upon us. Let nothing now be wasted.
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