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CHRISTIAN VIEWPOINT: 'Where is God during the coronavirus pandemic?'


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'God is active in the pandemic, prompting creativity, enquiry, compassion, courage. God’s work is seen in a trillion kindnesses where people have shown love and care'.
'God is active in the pandemic, prompting creativity, enquiry, compassion, courage. God’s work is seen in a trillion kindnesses where people have shown love and care'.

A reader told me it would be helpful if this column dealt with more with topical items, and suggested I tackle the question ‘why God hasn’t intervened in the pandemic?,’ writes John Dempster. Here goes!

This question assumes God has been inactive. I see God as an immense spiritual presence bigger by far than the universe but active in every molecule of creation, the life-force linking all things.

In these terms, God is active in the pandemic, prompting creativity, enquiry, compassion, courage. God’s work is seen in a trillion kindnesses where people have shown love and care. The technical skills deployed in vaccine development are, I believe, God-given.

But if God is so closely involved in creation, how are viruses and plagues even possible? How could an omnipotent, infinitely loving God permit this?

My personal view is that just as human beings have some degree of freedom of choice, so God sets the universe free to develop, to fulfil possibilities both good and evil. God generally limits miraculous interventions to preserve this freedom – though I believe too in events for which the only appropriate word is ‘miracle’.

But I’m convinced that when we suffer, God suffers too. God suffers when creative possibilities are bent towards darkness rather than light. God suffers with the widow, the victim, the person with mental health issues, the patient struggling to breath in ICU.

Jesus Christ who shows us what God is like suffered – scorn, opposition, and finally an agonising death. That is where we find God in the pandemic – sharing our pain.

We may come closer to understanding God in suffering than in theorising from a place of comfort. I remember once sitting in church in Glasgow, profoundly anxious and depressed. The minister quoted the words of Job, a biblical character whose life was in ruins despite his God-loving nature: “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him.”

Those words pierced my darkness. I knew that despite pain and unanswered questions, I could tell the God whose immense love I had previously glimpsed “I will trust you, whatever”.

There are no easy answers. But having glimpsed the love of God it’s possible for us to live with the questions, entrusting ourselves to the Great Love and to the promised future when as a consequence of Jesus’s resurrection “all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”.

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