It Will Be Okay
2020 has been a tough year. The coronavirus is ravaging our people and our economy because it has a unique combination of characteristics: (1) it’s deadly; (2) it’s highly contagious (Dr. Fauci said the only virus that is more contagious is measles); and (3) it can be spread by people who are asymptomatic and therefore don’t even know they have it.
At last count, COVID-19—the disease caused by the coronavirus—has killed more than 211,000 people in the U.S., and more than one million have died worldwide. The disease has devastated the U.S. economy, with unemployment currently standing at 7.9%.
But this country and the world have seen worse. In the 1918 flu pandemic, 675,000 Americans died, and at least 50 million people lost their lives worldwide.
In World War II, about 419,000 Americans were killed, and worldwide the total deaths may have been as many as 85 million—or about 3% of the world’s total pre-war population.
Unemployment during the Great Depression reached 25% in the United States in 1933. In Germany the unemployment rate reached 30%. Many people, like my father, put off marriage because they could not afford it.
The author of Psalm 66 was no stranger to hard times. In Psalm 66:10-12 he says:
For You have tried us, O God;
You have refined us as silver is refined.
You brought us into the net;
You laid an oppressive burden upon our loins.
You made men ride over our heads;
We went through fire and through water. . . .
The psalmist may have been speaking about the Babylonian Captivity, when the Jews lost almost everything— not merely their jobs, but their homes, their land, their cities, their nation. Many lost their lives.
The Babylonian Captivity began in 605 B.C., when the Babylonians conducted the 1st of what would be at least 3, and probably 4, deportations of the Jews to Babylon. Nineteen years later, in 586 B.C. the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, razed the temple to the ground, and carried off most of the remaining Jewish population.
The Jews remained in Babylon for 70 years, until about 536 B.C., when their new masters, the Persians, allowed them to return to Jerusalem. Then, according to the psalmist, God “brought us out into a place of abundance.” (Psalm 66:12)
The early Christians suffered, too, at the hands of the Jews and the Romans. Being a Christian in the first three centuries of Christianity could—and often did—result in loss of position, status, property, and freedom. Christians in those days could be imprisoned, tortured, exiled, sold into slavery, or killed, just for being a Christian. That is still true in some places today.
Peter’s advice to those early Christians in 1st Peter 3:13-22 was this: Endure. And try to be like Jesus.
The worst that can happen to us is that we will go to be with Him. And what could be better than that? As Paul said in Philippians 1:21: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”
This pandemic will one day pass. Just try to get through it. Endure. And one day, in this life or the next, God will bring us into a place of abundance.
(You can read more about the Babylonian Captivity and many other Old Testament topics in Part 2 of The Old Testament Made Simple, which will be available in early 2021. Part 1 is available on Amazon.com now. For a description of Part 1, click here. For a list of chapters, including several sample chapters you can read, click here.)
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