A friend shared this with me today. (For those who might be reading this after Spring, 2020, look up info on COVID-19.) The whole Coronavirus pandemic has many of us freaking out. Gyms are closed. Restaurants have gone carry out only. Some states are taking extreme measures to keep people from gathering together and potentially spreading a virus that currently has no cure, but had caused thousands of deaths worldwide in less than 6 months.
People are scared.
I'm scared of what some of these people are doing.
This image for me thinking, though. When I go to work, people are rushing to the gym. People want to go to the beach (yeah, Florida problems). New York City, the "city that never sleeps," just went into lockdown, so they all want to come to relatively unaffected Florida. Gee, thanks.
Back to the content of the image, though. While I'm not fond of the reference to the plagues of Egypt (we are still in Heaven compared to them), the point remains that the First World is spoiled rotten.
I'd add to the last line. We don't want to worship God in spirit and truth, but in either legalistic rituals that carry no substance or exciting rock concerts with fog, loud music, and incessant babbling that we claim is "tongues," regardless of how many violations of 1 Corinthians 14 there are. We want to think we are in charge, and that God must honor what we think He promised me (everybody else must be a heathen).
He had taken all that away, too. Many churches are meeting online rather in person. Of course some think that is blasphemy. I seem to recall similar accusations made against a Jewish carpenter a couple of millennia ago.
Is God punishing the world? Is He pouring out His wrath? Have the End Times begun? I don't think so, especially since this one truly good guy named Job went through worse, and it really wasn't his fault.
I do think we all need to wake up and examine what we've considered important for so long. Then we need to ask ourselves the same thing the Israelites had to face during their journey as documented in Exodus: do we really want to go back to all that, and be vulnerable again? Or maybe it's time to move on.
By the way, in case you're not as ancient as I, the title comes from a great song by the late Keith Green.
