plagues

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The plague

Have you ever wondered what happened to the plague? I don’t mean plague in the generic sense of an epidemic or pandemic. I mean, of course, the black death also called the bubonic plague. This is the desease that, after ravaging other continents, arrived by ship in Europe in 1347 and proceeded to killed one third of the population of Europe over the next five years, then periodically crop up in certain towns for another 300 years.

Northern Congo

When I worked in northeastern Congo, I learned that the World Health Organization registers about 2,000 cases of the plague worldwide every year, of which half occur in northeastern Congo. So I worked in plague alley, so to speak. Was I brave or foolhardy to work there? Hardly. The risk was very low. Our contingency plan said that there was a 100% risk of an outbreak of the plague and a zero percent chance it would affect us.

Why? Because the plague is treatable with any of a variety of inexpensive and widely available antibiotics. Virtually the only people at risk are those who contract it but do not seek treatment until the desease is advanced. Those who do seek timely treatment suffer no long term effects and return to health quickly. So we could walk plague alley with little concern.

There are still several regions where rodents carry the plague and sometimes pass it to humans. That includes most of the Western United States. If that’s where you live, and you’re just now learning that it’s a place where the plague is endemic, be assured, your fear of the plague should be the same as before. Rank it with polio.

The desease that struck fear in the hearts of all Europe now gets little attention except to make funny scenes in Monty Python movies. The thing that was furiously fought with the best methods known at the time, is now easily defeated with a simple treatment. Insignificance; that’s what happened to the plague.

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Humans and coronavirus

So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it. Reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.” – Genesis 1:27-28

These verses have great relevance to the coronavirus pandemic. God told us “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it.” Theologians call this the Creation Mandate or the Cultural Mandate. God, of course, has the right to run everything. But he has conferred on us the right and authority to be fruitful and govern the earth.

Some have understood those words as commands. They are more like blessings. The confusion comes because we use the grammatical form of a command, such as “Get the silverware”, in blessings such as “Get well soon”. No mafia type comes to a sick person, points a gun at them, and says “Get well soon or else!”.

In fact, we should think of these words as a mandate, which is a combination of a blessing and a granting of authority. When we elect a public official, we give that person a mandate. By virtue of being chosen by the people they have the authority of the people to carry out the specific responsibilities of the position to which they were elected. That’s their mandate. God has given all of us a mandate regarding creation. It comes with a piece of his authority to enable us to carry it out.

Older translations have “replenish the earth, and subdue it”. We actually have a mandate from God to subdue the coronavirus. This is not a magical mandate, but one that requires hard work, ingenuity and sometimes suffering. The coronavirus is a manifestation of Paul’s observation that:

Against its will, all creation was subjected to God’s curse. But with eager hope,the creation looks forward to the day when it will join God’s children in glorious freedom from death and decay. – Romans 8:20-21

The virus is bad (a curse) but it is also an opportunity for “eager hope”. That hope is most certainly for the new heavens and new earth with no bad viruses. But it is more than that. It is also an eager anticipation of effective treatment and a vaccine on this earth.

The verses also say that we are made in God’s image. God creates. Because we are made in his image, we also create albeit on a lesser scale. We create our children, for example. But the mandate to be fruitful applies to more than children. We are to create good for our families and communities, wealth to share with others and to not be more of a burden to others than is good, and so on. Some of us are scientists who create new knowledge. One piece of new knowledge would be how to make a safe vaccine for the coronavirus.

Because of our creativity and our mandate, the coronavirus doesn’t stand a chance against humanity. God has given us the tools to knock it way down and perhaps even eliminate it. No previous plague has been addressed so quickly or effectively. Many are in some kind of isolation, but because of technology we still talk to each other and even see each other. Furthermore, the technology allows researchers across the world to collaborate better and faster. Our God-given creativity and mandate have shown up big time.

Of course, the virus will cause a lot of pain before that happens so we also need to deploy the compassion God gives us. Instead, some will go around proclaiming loudly that this is God’s judgment. Helping others and praying for medical professionals and researchers would probably be a better use of much of their time. Such people have their secular equivalents who think that humanity is the source of the planet’s problems. They will say that the coronavirus is nature striking back against our evil exploitation of it. They will talk of saving the planet, not humans. I just saw the following in a religious publication.

We have abused Mother Earth. The locust invasion in Kenya was a warning smoke that something was wrong.

There are scientific and historic answers to such claims, but there is also a case to be made against them based on the creative nature and mandate God gave us.

There’s reason to be concerned about our neighbors and ourselves. But let’s not wrap up our minds in a doomsday scenario that will make it even harder for us to help others. Let’s announce good news to those trapped in such scenarios.

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Unprecedented

That’s my new unfavored word. Today, I saw it misused again in a publication that should know better. It should mean something that’s never happened before. In these narcissistic times, it seems to mean something we have never experienced, or perhaps even something the person saying it has not personally experienced.

We don’t need to go back very far in time to find plagues that clearly eclipse even the worst case scenarios for Covid-19. We only need to go back a few years and to a place that is a direct flight from DC and NY (West Africa) to find a much deadlier plague – the Ebola outbreak in Liberia and Guinea. Ebola kills between 40 and 90 percent of its victims including the healthy young.

I personally lived through AIDS spreading in Africa before there was treatment. An acquaintance came to see me. He showed me the thrush in his mouth and told me about his weight loss and constant diarrhea; a constellation of symptoms that presume AIDS according to experts. I could help him a bit, but do nothing to stop the illness. About a week later, he was gone. We knew a couple both diagnosed with AIDS. They had two children who ended up orphans. Colleagues took charge of them.

I lived through a meningitis epidemic that killed multiple thousands all around us. The hospital grounds were strewn with patients laying on the ground, their IVs hung from trees. We had no fear because we were vaccinated. We had helped some friends get vaccinated, but one nevertheless lost a baby too young for vaccination.

I don’t think that I am callous. Instead, I have had a unpleasant truth about life and the world shoved into my view; a truth from which many Americans have been shielded, most thankfully. That shield allows them to believe that events are unprecedented when they were in fact common to human experience throughout history, and they are still part of life in some places even today. Some bibleless peoples experience these “unprecedented” events on a regular basis. Plagues are not events lost in ancient and Bible history.

Does it matter? So what if we think things unprecedented when they aren’t? In a way, it doesn’t matter. But you should reconsider your assessment if it scares you that a situation seems unprecedented. Be assured that God has taken those he loves through problems as bad and worse. In fact, he does so regularly. He’ll be there this time too.

Let me suggest: https://www.christianpost.com/news/jd-greear-god-is-using-coronavirus-to-wake-us-up-to-fragility-of-the-world.html