Is COVID-19 a judgment from God?
Every time a disaster takes place, there are certain people who suggest that the latest catastrophic event is a judgment from God on those who are afflicted by it. We saw it with 9/11. We saw it with Hurricane Katrina. And we are seeing it during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Could it be true? Is the COVID-19 pandemic God’s way of punishing America, or the world, for their sins? Or, if not a punishment per se, is God trying to send us a message through the pandemic? Many Christians believe so. A poll from the University of Chicago Divinity School and the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research indicated that 63 percent of Americans who believe in God feel that “God is telling humanity to change the way we are living.”
It’s one thing to say God is sending a message via COVID-19. But a few public figures are taking it a step further and suggesting that COVID-19 may be a judgment from God. But a few have suggested just that.
Recently, an evangelical pastor named John Piper suggested in his free new ebook Coronavirus and Christ: “Some people will be infected with the coronavirus as a specific judgment from God because of their sinful attitudes and actions.” By this, he didn’t mean that everyone who gets COVID-19 is being punished for their sins; he meant that it is possible that God’s judgment may fall on a person in the form of illness. Still, when YouTube removed the audiobook version of that title, some speculated that sentiments like that were the reason. (It was restored after a brief time.)
Even former WWE star Hulk Hogan weighed in on the matter. In an Instagram post that’s been shared by Christians all over social media, he wrote:
In three short months, just like He did with the plagues of Egypt, God has taken away everything we worship. God said, “you want to worship athletes, I will shut down the stadiums. You want to worship musicians, I will shut down Civic Centers. You want to worship actors, I will shut down theaters. You want to worship money, I will shut down the economy and collapse the stock market. You don’t want to go to church and worship Me, I will make it where you can’t go to church” … Maybe we don’t need a vaccine, Maybe we need to take this time of isolation from the distractions of the world and have a personal revival where we focus on the ONLY thing in the world that really matters. Jesus.
Although Hogan’s post got over 73,000 likes, it got extremely negative press from the majority of the public. Many find it distasteful and repulsive that God might judge the world in this way.
Yet anyone who believes the Bible must acknowledge that God has judged people in this very manner in the past. God judged the people of Egypt with plagues. He judged the Canaanites by ordering his people Israel to drive them out of the promised land. He also judged his own people centuries later by sending them into exile. God sometimes judges both individuals and entire nations for their sins by means of affliction. It is not unjust for God to do this. God gave us life, and he has every right to take it away. I would suggest that Christians who are morally repulsed by the idea that God would act in this manner may need to reacquaint themselves with the God of the Bible.
It’s equally clear, though, that there are many bad things that happen that are not direct judgments of God. So how do we tell the difference?
In the Bible, the difference is usually evident, because God sent prophets to his people to warn them of God’s coming judgments and to identify certain afflictions as God’s response to their evil acts. It was quite rare that God judged people in this way, bringing about a disaster in direct response to someone’s evil act. That’s why the few times he did are so memorable.
Far more often in Scripture, we see the anguished and perplexed expressions of those who want to know why God so often does not judge evil people for their sins or reward righteous people for their good deeds. Jeremiah asks, “Why do the wicked prosper?” (Jer 12:2). David has to remind us, “Do not be envious of those who are evil or be envious of those who do wrong” (Psa 37:1). Job asks, “Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power?” (Job 21:7). Jesus himself pointed out how many disasters people believed to be punishments from God were in fact nothing of the sort (e.g. Luke 13:3-5, John 9:1-5). All the frustration and confusion experienced by God’s chosen people, even during the time of Jesus himself, makes one thing very clear: Outside of those rare instances where a prophet proclaims God’s judgment on a person, group, or nation, it is very hard to reliably correlate a righteous act to a divine reward, or an evil act to a divine punishment.
So is COVID-19 a judgment from God? The short answer: We don’t know. And anyone who claims they do know had better be a prophet of God on the level of Moses, Isaiah, or Jesus. In the absence of such a prophetic word pertaining to our specific time and place, we simply don’t have enough information to declare that a given disaster is or is not God’s judgment. Indeed, I would suggest that someone who proclaims that a certain catastrophe is God’s judgment for a particular evil–outside of what we can glean from Scripture–is in danger of playing the role of false prophet.
The current pandemic has brought about an unprecedented time of uncertainty, fear, and anger. Why God would permit or bring about such a thing is beyond our understanding. But in the meantime, we must remember that, rather than judge the whole world for their sins, God judged his Son. When we are angered and frightened at the catastrophes and disasters that afflict us and others, remember that God did not spare his own Son the worst catastrophe of them all. Instead, the Son of God was afflicted so that we might be spared, and as such, he identifies with us in our suffering.
