Coronavirus – How Could God Let This Happen?

The news has been dominated by the Coronavirus and what we should do about it, how the economy will be affected and even how much toilet paper we should buy.

Comparisons are being made with the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1919, or even the plague of the middle ages.

Quite rightly, people are pointing out what advances have been made in medicine since then – after all in the plague, they didn’t even have the concept of where this was coming from and how it was being transmitted. That was even true of the flu epidemic of world war one.

But despite how far we have come in medicine, viruses like this still show us the world is not in our control.

Our self-confidence and man-centred view of the world can be severely shaken by pandemics such as this. It will cause some people to think of God – and to question ‘how could God let this happen’.

Don’t let this moment pass without trying to find out an answer to that question. A good place to start is with a modern translation of the Bible.

I’m Russell Powell for the NSW Council of Churches.