While the Coronavirus may seem a plague of Biblical proportions, remember that in Moses’ time, the tenth plague killed the firstborn of every Egyptian family in one night. The Bubonic plague in the Middle Ages killed between 25% and 60% of the population of Europe in the 14th century, with a mortality rate between 1% and 90% of those infected. More recently, the Spanish flu killed a significant fraction of the earth’s population (between 1 and 6%) in the early 20th century, with a 3-20% mortality rate. (Between 17 and 100 million died, 500 million infected, total population of approximately 1.8 billion.) Estimates of the mortality rate of the corona virus are unreliable because of the varying reporting standards of various countries, bureaucratic and political gamesmanship, and the limits on testing volumetrics, but seems lower.
Revelation 6:6 describes the ministry of the third horseman of the apocalypse. Following the horse trail of people killing each other, he unleashes famine, but is commanded not to harm the oil or the wine. While Russia and Saudi Arabia are flooding the world with cheap oil, and every grocery store offers at least one full aisle of wine and related alcoholic beverages, stores struggle to stock basic necessities such as toilet paper(?). Are we already to the third seal judgment? The first was war, conquest, which has been a miserable staple of human existence for all of human history. The second, mass killing, is certainly no stranger to humankind. (Whether in war or in random acts of indiscriminate violence isn’t specified, but we have seen both through recorded history.) What comes next?
[A quick side note: the oil and wine in Rev. 6:6 could be interpreted symbolically as representing the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and the Passover Seder wine representing the shed blood of Christ. The admonition in that metaphor would be that the horseman is not to touch believers, consistent with Revelation 9:4. The present abundance of petroleum and cheap wine is then simply the devil’s offering of a worldly counterfeit.]
The fourth horseman will be given power to kill one fourth of the earth’s population, through a variety of mechanisms. We haven’t reached this level of morbidity yet, although yersinia pestis came close in the Middle Ages.
Edgar Allen Poe offered a literary perspective of response to the plague in The Masque of the Red Death, published in 1842. There are many implicit messages. I believe that the primary is that partying while the world is perishing will be judged with the severest consequence, experiencing without possibility of repentance the disaster befalling a lost world. Poe made no explicit reference to God, but the supernatural poetic justice inflicted on the partiers signals an underlying standard of Biblical roots. Nero fiddled while Rome burned, and so forth. One can scarcely say this describes modern governments’ response. Although many cite chaos and overreaction as the dominant characteristics, only a few political leaders have called for repentance, for fasting and prayer, to acknowledge God as sovereign in our current circumstances.
The question ought not be ‘where is God’. Rather, His question to us is “Adam, where are you?” The Good News of redemption through Christ ought to elicit a heartfelt reception from us. If we have not received His gift, it is hard to see how we can ask where He is and expect anything other than the horsemen He releases.
A quote from C. S. Lewis’ sermon “Learning in Wartime” drives the point home. Replace references to war with Coronavirus and the point is clear.
But there is no question of death or life for any of us; only a question of this death or of that -- of a machine gun bullet now or a cancer forty years later. What does war do to death? It certainly does not make it more frequent; 100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. It puts several deaths earlier; but I hardly suppose that that is what we fear.... Does it decrease our chances of dying at peace with God? I cannot believe it. If active service does not persuade a man to prepare for death, what conceivable concatenation of circumstance would? Yet war does do something to death. It forces us to remember it. The only reason why the cancer at sixty or the paralysis at seventy-five do not bother us is that we forget them.
The issue we cannot now avoid is our readiness to stand before, or walk with God. He calls us, pleads with us. What is our response?
