Why does God allow the coronavirus to exist, to spread, to kill? Fundamentally, there is a truth that lies at the root of the answer to that question: Our relationship with nature is broken.
NATURE… WE SEEK SOLACE IN WHAT STALKS US NOW
There are natural consequences in nature that nurtures one moment and harms the next.
I wrote this once about my husband Mike’s death from falling into a glacial crevasse…
Nature is a monster lying in wait. We marveled at nature’s beauty that day and tiptoed on its surface until it proved that it is wild and waiting to snatch the life from anyone who comes near. Its gaping jaw opened and swallowed my husband that day.
Nature is not our friend. Regardless of its beauty and wonder and the revelation of who God is in its very fiber, creation is writhing under the curse of humanity’s sin.
We stand in awe of something that is decaying. Jagged cliffs were once beautiful mountains that have suffered under the constant deluge of rainwater. Erosion is the shadow of the world that was to be.
And we do not understand that just as we are fallen and in need of grace, nature is fallen. It is brutal. It stalks the unwary.
Animals attack. Boats capsize. Thorns pierce. Gravity hungrily drags people to their death.
We who are living in a broken world are called to be caretakers of a once-perfect environment that now cannot be approached with the naivety and ignorance we exhibited that fateful day.
The coronavirus is nature run amok.
It feels like nature is not our friend right now. It is the unnatural crossing forbidden barriers. It is a dish eaten with consequences for all humanity. It is an enemy that oozed through a permeable wall.
And now it stalks the weak, the infirm, the aged.
Just as the weak, the infirm, the aged deer cannot keep up with the herd when an enemy attacks…the virus pounces on the edges of our society.
It is nature run amok. Nature was forever cursed in the Garden of Eden.
I read yesterday in Genesis about when Cain killed Abel that the earth cried out. The perfect world that once was harmless and holy…cried out to its creator: “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to Me from the ground.” It is as if nature is compelled to tell the truth, even when mankind is not.
It is in Genesis that the enmity between humanity and nature progressed from transgression to transgression.
Adam’s curse was “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. Both thorns and thistles it shall grow for you…
Until you return to the ground;
Because from it you were taken;
For you are dust,
And to dust you shall return.”
We were once ONE with nature. But now we are cursed enemies.
It’s amazing to me that Eve is blamed for the curse. And well she should be. But Adam’s sin cost us the oneness with the earth. Cost us safety in the garden. Made the earth produce thorns, thistles, bacterias, viruses, poisons, enmity.
And when Cain killed his brother, the curse deepened.
God said to Cain, “Now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand.
When you cultivate the ground, it will no longer yield its strength to you.”
Creator, Reveal Your Secrets
As harmful as nature seems right now, the only way out of this morass of death and disease and destruction is if God opens the secrets of creation to the minds of scientists. For a cure.
For a vaccine. For a treatment.
We broke nature with our sin.
Nature is the thing that will fix us.
God is the only one who can unlock the secrets.
Open wide your doors of mercy, God. Open our scientists’ eyes so they can see.
