Let me begin with a parallelism: Eternity is to the coronavirus as stars are to daylight. We do not see the stars during the daylight hours. We miss the immensity of the universe and our part in it; yet the stars are there, invisible to the naked eye.
Similarly, eternity is present in the midst of the coronavirus, but it remains out of our sight. Hence we miss all it brings in these calamitous days. We fathom the dangers and the diseases of these times apart from the reality of eternity.
Paul knew some people who had a preview of eternity. He mentioned in Corinthians the 500 people who saw the Lord Jesus Christ after his resurrection. Some were living at the time he wrote. What Jesus said isn’t as important as his leaving eternity and briefly appearing before 500 mortals. In Jesus we see beyond our time and space into his.
I want to insert the reality of eternity into the coronavirus. Its presence replaces many places of darkness. I will explore four places seen in the light of eternity. As is my custom I will rely on one of my consultants. This one again is the Rev. Helmut Thielicke, pastor of a congregation in Stuttgart, Germany, during its bombing in 1944.
1. First fear. The coronavirus brings multiple fears—of the virus itself, of protection, of contracting it, and finally of death. The virus is small, it lurks in hidden places, it seeks out randomly, and it kills. And it generates fear.
What we need is assurance, assurance in triple dose: assurance of the future, of our own health, and of whatever lies beyond death. All that we find in Jesus. As the Lord and maker of creation, he holds the future in his hands. As the one who brings unlimited living water, he gives peace. As the one who was resurrected from his own tomb, he brings hope beyond death. One of his recurring statements is, “Have no fear.” He is the great contradiction to the rule of fear.
In a sermon on Christ’s kingdom Thielicke told how he found that in the depths of human experience. “When standing over a crater that had had a direct hit, killing more than 50 persons, a woman came up to speak to me. She said, ‘My husband was in that crater. His place was right under the hole and all that was left was his cup. But we were there when you preached last in the cathedral, and my husband believed what you said. And here, standing before that pit, I want to thank you for preparing him for eternity.’”
2. Sorrow. I realize this makes for a strange mixture—God’s sorrows in the midst of a pandemic that has his fingerprints. Nevertheless, they do mix. “There is no place where earth’s sorrows are more felt than up in heaven.” There is lamentation in heaven just as in families grieving over the results of COVID-19. The tears of Jesus at the grave of his friend Lazarus give us a lens for his sadness at the deaths of all his friends around the world.
Again from Thielicke:
Could human eyes endure the sight of this vast sum of distress and gloom, of mutilated bodies and mortal dread? Could human ears bear the cries of misery that rise to heaven every day? Because he hears it in love, it wounds and hurts him. His heart is pierced by every knife that is drawn, every bullet shot, every evil word that is spoken. The Savior is literally riddled with the sufferings of the world.
3. Evil. Habukkuk is the place where we hear God’s answer to evil. Brandishing fist in anger, the prophet asks God to show his justice. God has tolerated evil in his world, and Habakkuk wants to know if God will ever act against the evil and their wickedness . God gives two answers, definitively and robustly. First: “The just shall live by faith” (2:4). That is, not by sight, not soon, not by seeing justice in this world. But it will come. At the Day of the Lord. And the second: “The Lord is in his holy temple” (2:20). Not absent, not disinterested, not unobservant. He sees, he knows, he is angry, and his is keeping a list. The perpetrators of evil will meet the holy God.
4. Preparing for life in heaven. Paul expresses his longing for heaven: “When I consider whether to remain and work or to die, I much prefer to die, for then I would be with Christ” (Phil. 1:23).
I will only offer two suggestions for preparing for eternity with Christ—contrition and praise.
For the first, we look at Paul’s self-description, “I am the chief of sinners.” Paul’s eager anticipation for heaven was founded nowhere else—that Christ’s death bought him forgiveness for his sin, even for his persecution of the church. He, the chief of sinners, received the means of grace and the hope to live forever in the presence of Christ and his Father.
Our eagerness for heaven, our preparation for eternity with Christ, is measured by where we place ourselves under the chief of sinners. The deeper our contrition for our sin, the nearer our rank to Paul. The dearer our love for our Savior, the greater our desire to worship him in his glorious majesty.
The second is praise. Praise in this life is our orientation life in eternity.
Again from Thielicke:
To praise God means to see things from the perspective of their end. One day a man told me why he had such calm composure and could inspire that in others. In the most frightful moments of an air raid he stopped praying and continued only to praise God. Looking beyond that mortal terror he saw the vast expanse of eternity. Those anguished seconds were nothing more than a swiftly passing moment in the perspective of the end of things.
The coronavirus leans into our lives with ferocious strength. The reality of eternity gives us the resources of God to stand.
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