Peter Barnes
Presbyterian Church of Australia
Dr Samuel Johnson is supposed to have written to a hopeful would-be author: ‘Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.’ One can sympathise with the sentiment. Everyone has written on the coronavirus, and the main points that need to be said from the Christian perspective have already been made. Nevertheless, they will be made again.
All Afflictions Come From God
All disasters come from God (Amos 3:6; Isa.45:7; Lam.3:38). This is a startling truth, especially in today’s age of soft gods, but it is the truth nevertheless. God warned Israel that if the people set their face against Him, He would set His face against them. ‘I will visit you with panic,’ He declares (Lev.26:16).
The terrible Bubonic Plague of the late 1340s wiped out about one-third of Europe. Writing to his brother (who was a monk), the poet, Petrarch, lamented:
Alas! My beloved brother, what shall I say? … On all sides is sorrow; everywhere is fear. I would, my brother, that I had never been born, or, at least, had died before these times … When has any such thing been even heard or seen; in what annals has it ever been read that houses were left vacant, cities deserted, the country neglected, the fields too small for the dead and a fearful and universal solitude over the whole earth?Petrarch, who fathered two children without the benefits of marriage, had no doubt that ‘We have, indeed, deserved these [punishments] and even greater’. Philip Daileader has commented that Petrarch could make receiving a parking ticket sound tragic, but the Black Death remains the most devastating plague in human history. And God sent it.
