“God may be telling us something,” a friend said in an alarmingly frightful voice when Corona Virus (Covid-19) started ravaging the world. “Everything points to His mode of operation where He could use the weak to weaken the strong. For how come this small virus could cause such damage to life?”
My response was maybe we are going too fast, believing in ourselves without putting God in the picture. Because as man began to invent things to better his life, as man began to change the natural order of things to suit his comfort for fame and wealth, he began to believe more and more in himself and decided to put God out of the picture. And so in came our problems.
The late Catholic bishop of Sekondi-Takoradi, Most Rev. Martin Darko used to say that, “God created the world and saw it was good; man thought he could make it better, and now we have all these mess.”
We forgot so soon that we do not own the earth, but we are just co-tenants with all other living beings, plants and animals. So anything we do, we must have recourse to the Landlord, God. We must involve God in everything and seek His guidance, because the solutions to our problems are from God, through nature.
How do we treat God? We have literally scorned Him, especially as great nations like the USA and Western Europe have decided to distance Him from children by removing His Name from textbooks and classrooms. Today what God put in all humans as His laws are been abused, so we have LGBTs coming with this abomination of perverse sex which is not in the order of things God planned. Only God knows why He wants us to conduct our sexuality and sex lives in the way He decreed and that is surely the best for us. But the world is turning towards how Satan wants things to be. And God always has a way of correcting and checking such disobedience, and whenever He makes such moves, even the Elect shiver with fear.
Our God is a God of Justice and Mercy and both virtues flow from Him with the same potency and only He can decide which one to use, even as we beg for His mercy. His problem now I believe is with Christianity. More and more Christians are bastardizing Him in many ways very much unacceptable to Him.
Today as the USA flies high the motto, “In God We Trust,” she at the same time has turned to reduce God and His influence in the lives of Americans. Today, the nation that claims to stand for rights of all; forces some people to accept the rights of others against their own rights and beliefs and will even punish them if they do not. In America today, woe betides you a strong believer in God, to turn away from the demands of homosexuals. Pastors have been fined and jailed for refusing to officiate the marriages of same-sex partners. Their rights and beliefs do not matter under such circumstances, only the rights of those who violate God’s Supreme Laws, matter.
And going on, these days most of the so-called men and women of God use His Holy Name in vain and make mockery what is Sacred and must be regarded as such. Christianity is now measured in pride and arrogance not in meekness and humility and in show of might and power, where these so-called men and women of God compete with each other over who is wealthier. Then obscenity entered the sanctuary of the Lord God of Host as virtually practical sex is taught the church members and in healing sessions, women’s genitals are touched and “blessed” to open the fruit of the womb. The Lord God is put to the test as church members are made to chew grass, drink bleach and petrol to gain the Holy Spirit’s power and open blessings upon them.
Then come, the self-proclaimed prophets who come out with conflicting messages alleged to have come from God, which makes one wonder whether God cannot make up His mind.
And in all this, the Holy Name of God has been bastardized as these men and women of God use the Church to earn material things and compete with top class celebrities. Today Christianity stands out to look like a religion for jokers and not for people seriously seeking and worshiping the Lord.
We do have faithful Christians and Christian churches, who worship God in Spirit and in Truth. We have the mainline Churches: Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist and Anglican, who are very conservative in their way of worship, putting aside self-interest and relying solely on God as the Almighty.
God speaks through them and yet they do not regard themselves as so much favoured by God to go about boasting. They also get prophecies and can prophesy, yes, they know who God has appointed to be the next president, the next Member of Parliament, but they will not reveal and rather ask their church members to pray for a peaceful election and for God to choose who would serve the country better. They will not veer into politics since their flock is made up of members of different political leanings and theirs is to unite the flock not to divide it by stating whom they prefer. They will only come out with it when they enter into the ballot box alone and pick one of the candidates as their choice.
Some other members of the New Religious Groups worship in Spirit and in Truth and regard themselves as servants of God. The problem is from those who make the loudest noise and want to equate themselves as equal to God. Fighting and daring each other as to who is more powerful and wealthier than the other.
Certainly, God must be annoyed and He could have thrown this Covid-19 upon us to remind us that He is the boss. Even though He gave us the power to subdue the earth, He did not expect us to have over grown egos and believe that without us the earth cannot revolve around the sun. In fact He wants to remind us that we are only co-tenants and He can wipe us out in one breath and raise another race of people to honour, worship and adore Him in a more fitting manner.
It is completely lost on us that religion in the true worshiping of God, existed before science and science only discovers what religion has placed there thousands of years earlier. For example, it was not until 1650 that scientists discovered that the earth hangs on nothing, whereas we were told this 3,000 earlier in Job 26:7 and it was in this same book that we were told about light and radio waves (Job 38:35) while this was only discovered by science in 1864. In Job 40: 15-24 we were told about dinosaurs, something which science discovered, ever existed, some thousands of years later.
In Leviticus and Numbers, we are informed that to drive away germs, we must wash under running water (Lev. 15:13 and Numbers 19: 11-12), something which science only got to know in 1845/47 after it had to find out the hard way, why healthy patients died after being handled by doctors who came to treat them, after doing autopsy, without first properly washing their hands. Also in Lev 17:11, religion talks about information in the blood which science only discovered thousands of years later and this helped in diagnosing diseases. The importance of quarantine was stated in Lev. 13: 46, but it took science thousands of years to discover that this can save lives in situations of plagues and pandemics.
Psalm 8:8 tells us that there are ocean currents and it was only in the 19th Century that science got to know this and enhance oceanography. And in Genesis 6: 15, religion tells us about the best dimensions to use in building ships and it was in 1993 that science finally confirmed that this was true.
Science believes it knows and it has it all, pushing God into the background, however as Man sits on planet Earth and views the expanse of the universe through super telescopes, he encounters planets which defy scientific logic, like a dark planet that reflects only 1% of the light from its sun; a planet completely covered with water; a planet where it rains glass, planet where it rains diamonds and a planet where ice burns. And these discoveries are insignificant compared to the size of the Observable universe with billions of billions of wonders yet to be unearthed.
If it can take over 228 years to travel non-stop on the fastest jet plane to the edge of the Solar System, then Man must stop rushing and think about how massive and awesome the Creator of all these will be.
We need to acknowledge God in all things we do, making Him an important part of our lives. He should call all the shots, because He created us, He gave us life and He can choose to take it away and no-one can drag Him to court for violation of human rights.
God has demonstrated many times in the Sacred Scriptures that when He gets fed-up with Man, He knows how to deal with him. In Ezekiel 14, He decided to send down four cruel punishments, namely the sword, famine, wild beasts and pestilence. Covid-19 is pestilence and God might be gently drawing our attention to something with it. If we turn to Him, in Spirit and in Truth we might be saved, however if we continue to mock Him, we will not know what will follow next. It could be wars, it could be famine or it could be wild animals. Any of these will not be a welcome visitor at all, considering what Covid-19 is doing to us.
We have very powerful telescopes watching the big and wide skies for any asteroid or meteors coming our way, but our powerful telescopes could not see that minute virus called Covid-19 coming. It clearly shows that we are not as powerful as we think and we are not in control of anything, after all.
The question some people are asking is that where is God in all this? The answer is, He is where we left Him and we can get Him if we abide by His Word, because like a Good Father, He is just waiting for us to come home and into His arms.
After this pandemic departs from us, we must involve God in everything we do and do His will and listen to Him, because He created the world and He alone knows how to make it good at all times. Who is like God? No one, He has no peers.
From Hon Daniel Dugan
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect The Chronicle’s editorial stance.
The post COVID-19 matters and the bright side of darkness (1): “Who Is Like God?” appeared first on The Chronicle Online.
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