Tony Watts

What in the World is God doing with COVID-19 Tony Watts

Reading a "Peanuts" comic strip many years ago stuck with me like no other. It was a total of four frames that involved a simple conversation between Lucy and Linus as they watched the torrential rain fall from their window. "Boy," said Lucy, "Look at it rain... What if it floods the whole world." "It will never do that," responded Linus, "God promised...and the sign of the promise is the rainbow." "You've taken a great load off my mind," Lucy told Linus. And then it happened. Linus made one of the greatest statements ever found in a comic strip, or anywhere else, for that matter. "Sound theology has a way of doing that," said Linus to his previously worried older sister. This profound idea is behind the writing of What in the World is God doing with COVID-19? As the Corona Virus made its way around the world and all but crippled the American way of life, fear and uncertainty began to weigh heavily upon the hearts of many. In its midst, I began hearing all sorts of ideas about God and what he was doing with the virus. Many insisted that he was judging the world while others shouted warnings about the anti-Christ and his mark awaiting us all. Still another was perfectly fine with the depressing idea that Christianity had no answers to the virus at all because, according to him, it wasn't supposed to. So, which is it? What are people, particularly Christians, supposed to think? This booklet addresses these issues. While there are many things we cannot know in regard to suffering, there are some things we can know with confidence. Hence, What in the World is God doing with COVID-19? focuses on those often forgotten theological truths that can help take those burdensome "loads" of fear and uncertainty "off" as we absorb them. It focuses on God's use of COVID-19, and any other form of suffering, in his exposure of sin and just what it means to be under his "judgment." It gives attention to his sovereign control over the affairs of men and just how the virus demonstrates this reality. And finally, it highlights God's loving reach for those who, in the absence of COVID-19, might otherwise continue and die in their sin. This book, then, affirms that the best vaccine for the uncertainty and fear spawned by COVID-19, or any other source, is a good dose of sound theology.