What Coronavirus might help cure!

Long before Coronavirus, a pandemic has been sweeping across the world, infecting particularly our western societies, and destroying and effectively killing them – even while outwardly we have seemed to prosper and flourish. Now, at long last, as terrible as it is, Coronavirus might help to cure our society of this deadly disease. 

There are at least three terrible symptoms of the pandemic I am referring to: materialism, individualism and atheism. Let me explain how Coronavirus might be part of the cure. 

Materialism

I don’t think anyone can deny that we live in a materialistic society. Amassing money and all that money can buy has become the ideology (and to use the Bible’s language, the idol) of our age. We put our trust, find our meaning and worship and adore money and material possessions. This is despite Jesus saying in Matthew 6:24: ‘ No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon’ (materialism). 

With the coming of Coronavirus, materialism is under threat. Shops are shut, businesses are collapsing, jobs and our wages are being lost. Everything we held dear is being stripped away from us. As painful as that is, it is making people realise that there is more to life than money and material possessions. As Jesus says ‘Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God’ (Matthew 4:4)

Individualism

Alongside materialism, our society has been plagued by individualism. So many of us are just out for ourselves and put ‘number one’ at the centre of our world. Community has crumbled; families have disintegrated; even marriages are entered and left for selfish reasons, with an attitude of: ‘what’s in this for me’.

Again few can deny how individualistic our society has become. It is not just physical isolation that Coronavirus has brought – when we need help we have discovered that our society is fragmented and discontented. I don’t know my neighbours and am struggling to know how to reach out to them and show love and offer help. I want to live according to the most basic laws that God has set down: to love God and love my neighbour (Matthew 22:36-40). But when we live such distant, disconnected, individualistic lives, that is hard, even during natural disasters like this.

I am glad that Coronavirus is bringing the best out of people and there is that understanding that we all have to work together to combat this disease and do everything we possibly can to preserve life, particularly for the most needy and vulnerable. That is how God set society up to be all of the time, with the additional vital element of loving God first, and flowing from that, loving our neighbour.

Atheism

This then highlights the third symptom destroying our society: Atheism. I hope my language does not seem too strong and offensive. But the rejection of God and trying to live independent of him is the problem behind all other problems in our world. It is at the root of materialism and individualism, as, without God and a spiritual dimension to life, this physical world becomes the be all and end all. As we dethrone God from his rightful place as the ruler and very centre of this world, we put ourselves in that place and become ‘mini-gods’ who others are to serve and obey.

I know there are many sacrificial and compassionate atheists who are responding in a wonderful way to the Coronavirus crisis, and perhaps they are as concerned by materialism and individualism as I am. The Bible explains this: Everyone being made in the image of God is blessed by Him in common grace. It is not the consistent and natural outworking of atheism. With nothing bigger to live for, the trajectory and tendency of atheism is towards this material world with us individuals at the centre of everything.

Coronavirus has brought the world to its knees and shown our weakness, mortality and inability to save ourselves. We are not in control – God is; and God is a God who truly cares about this world, indeed in the person of his Son has come into this world, where he suffered and died to provide the ultimate cure for all that is wrong with this world – and all that is wrong with us personally. John 3:16 famously says ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have everlasting life’

My prayer is that Coronavirus will show our society again everyone’s need of the mercy and involvement of God in our lives – that it will be part of the cure of materialism, individualism and atheism.