There is no one to tell him that it is God who is shaking the nation through the coronavirus which will go on for a long time yet. But that needn’t stop the rest of us repenting before God in humility
Most people are thoroughly fed up with the coronavirus and the succession of lockdowns.
Nearly a year ago, when all this started, nobody thought we would still be in the same position today, fighting to control the virus.
But this is no ordinary flu. We were told it’s a plague that is quite capable of wiping out large sectors of the population, which is why health experts called for such tight restrictions on social mixing.
Indecision
We all know this, but we don’t like any restrictions on our freedom to live our lives according to our own desires, so we look for any way around the rules and if that is not possible then we want to blame someone. The easiest target is the government, whose policies have been flawed by indecision and many last-minute changes in the rules.
The prime minister has borne the brunt of this criticism and there have even been calls for him to step aside because his leadership is deemed inadequate. Clearly, he does not like being the bearer of bad news. He is a natural campaigner and an irrepressible optimist.
It is against all his inclinations to have to impose restrictions upon the population, so he is reluctant to take the advice of his health experts. This reluctance is transmitted to the nation as indecision, which makes people lose confidence in his leadership.
Lack of spiritual guidance
There is no other natural leader in the Tory Party at the moment who could replace Boris, and a change of prime minister at this stage in the pandemic would undoubtedly create enormous instability, which would do great harm both at national and international levels.
The prime minister’s policy is to highlight any items of good news that he can obtain, such as the number of vaccinations being carried out. Their hope is that by the middle of February all the front-line health staff, the over-80s and the most vulnerable will have been vaccinated. But the vaccine will not save the nation.
A change of prime minister at this stage would create enormous instability
The reason for the rapid change of policy in Boris’s leadership is because he does not understand what is going on! He has plenty of experts on the scientific facts among his advisers, and there is no shortage of political advisers around him.
But what is lacking is spiritual leadership. For at least the last four prime ministers there has been a ‘faith adviser’ in Number Ten, and more recently there has been a small group of evangelical intercessors who meet daily for prayer. But the role of the ‘faith adviser’ is a wide remit covering other faiths as well as Christianity, and the group of intercessors has no direct communication with the PM, other than through the faith adviser.
Absence of strong leadership
There are many individuals in both Houses of Parliament who are strongly committed Christians, but the way the political establishment works means that they have no direct access to the PM. Among church leaders there is no outstanding Bible-believing Christian exercising a notable public ministry in any of the denominations. We have an Archbishop of Canterbury who is ‘all things to all men’ but exercises only weak leadership, and an Archbishop of York who is notoriously liberal, with a record of antipathy towards
Bible-believing evangelicals.
So where does the prime minister receive any biblically -based Christian counsel? The plain answer is that there is no Christian counsel available to him. There is no one to tell him that it is God who is shaking the nation through the coronavirus pandemic which will go on for a long time yet, until God achieves his purpose in sending it, or allowing it to happen, which in biblical terms is one and the same thing.
The God factor
So long as the ‘God factor’ is left out from this plague we will never learn the lesson it is intended to convey. We should be asking: “What is God looking for?”
So long as the ‘God factor’ is left out from this plague we will never learn the lesson it is intended to convey.
Quite simply: God is looking for repentance for all the wickedness that we have committed, and the ungodly laws that we have passed in our Parliament since the end of the Second World War. We have now reached the tipping point of iniquity, the point where God has said: “Enough is enough”, and the point where he must intervene in human history for the ultimate benefit of humanity.
We can learn a lot from the history of Israel recorded in the Bible where God has intervened in the past. In the sixth century BC he sent the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem and the whole land of Judah. This is reported in the historical book of 2 Kings, where it says: “Surely at the commandment of the LORD this came upon Judah, to remove them from his sight because of the sins of Manasseh, according to all that he had done, and also because of the innocent blood that he had shed; for he had filled Jerusalem with innocent blood, which the LORD would not pardon.” (2 Kings 24:3-4).
In Britain, we pollute the land with the blood of the innocent by the vast number of babies we burn in the incinerators outside our hospitals and clinics every working day. To date we have killed nine million babies. But there are many other ways in which we all, as individuals, cause
offence to God – by our ungodly ways, greed, corruption, injustice, and utter disregard for the Word of God.
It is surely time for examining our ways and coming before God in humility. Repentance has to start somewhere. Like judgement, it should start in the household of God – that means it should start with
Bible-believing Christians!