John Piper: COVID-19 is ‘God’s judgment’
By: Jonathan Poletti
Tags: Covid 19, Religion, Life, Spirituality, Disease

The Minneapolis pastor and professor who became, from the 1980s on, the brains behind modern Evangelicalism, has been busy channeling the thoughts of God. The Creator, he realizes, is yet again sending out special bugs like secret agents.

Just like AIDS, as he long insisted, was sent to get the gays, the Coronavirus has a license to kill.

For the past few weeks we’ve seen the Evangelical world being put in a tight spot. The churches suddenly became toxic, and income from donations must’ve shriveled up. That had to hurt. They were closed by authorities, if they didn’t do it themselves, and all the fake-healing and handwaving they could manage wouldn’t be that interesting.

All they had left was the Internet, and in an instant, “Christianity” became a podcast. If they weren’t careful, it might seem like God didn’t like them anymore.

Piper had contributed to the crisis only a stern warning about watching porn at home. Had he lost his taste for fire and brimstone? The great, finger-wagging American prophet of doom seemed off his game.

But actually, he was writing a book.

“The coronavirus is God’s thunderclap call for all of us to repent and realign our lives with the infinite worth of Christ,” he announces now.

The “new” book is his 74-year-old fingers typing out the sentences he’s typed many times. “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition,” as he quotes C.S. Lewis, like he did in—by my count—five previous books.

Even his ideas on disease as divine judgment repeat his messaging on AIDS. “Nevertheless, God sometimes uses disease to bring particular judgments upon those who reject him and give themselves over to sin,” he writes in Coronavirus and Christ.

“If any epidemic ever spread because of disobedience to God’s Word, it is AIDS,” he writes in 2002.

It’s quite a swan song for one of the greatest flamethrowers in American Christian history. He can judge the world all over again. Out on virtual tour for the book, he swipes at his nemesis N.T. Wright, who wrote on March 29th an article pushing back against the Piper-esque judgment talk: “No doubt the usual silly suspects will tell us why God is doing this to us.”

Piper knew when he was being called out, and he didn’t appreciate it.

“It’s not silly to want to know what God is doing and to try to find out from the Bible,” he replies in an interview with The Gospel Coalition.

Piper “finds out” the will of the Creator, as usual, in the strangest ways. Ordinary people might read Acts 12:23 and find a story about Herod the king that obviously re-works the ‘Prince of Tyre’ passage of Ezekiel 28.

Immediately, because Herod did not give praise to God, an angel of the Lord struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died.

Piper finds a story of God striking at one enemy, with a lot more in waiting. “God sometimes uses disease to bring particular judgments upon those who reject him and give themselves over to sin,” he writes.

He knows this . . . how?

He repeats, for his Evangelical fans who want to hate this world, that it’s “fallen,” and the viruses are proof.

It seems amazing that so familiar a biblical narrative could be distorted as far as he does. No new beings, in the Genesis narrative, are created after the so-called Fall. They were there when God called everything “good”!

Viruses are part of the ecosystem, part of life. If we want to know God’s thoughts, we might look at the physical world? We might eventually learn how to live here in harmony with all the types of life that exist.

But Piper insists on looking out at an ugly, “sinful” planet he just wants to be judged, and swept into the dustbin of cosmic history. In the new book, he reflects mournfully on how the “good” world that God saw in Genesis 1 is gone. “All its beauty is interwoven with evil and disasters and diseases and frustrations. God had created it perfect.”

Uninformed people might assume he was giving them facts.

In biblical theology, very clearly, the world is just as it is when God first sees it. “For everything God created is good,” as Paul affirms in 1 Timothy 4:4. The word ‘good’ here is the same as Genesis 1.

The world has always been ‘good’. And ‘good’ in Genesis 1 doesn’t mean ideal or perfect in some Piper-approved way. It means fertile!

The same word is used many times, as in Judges 15:2 . . . for a simple girl being offered as a wife.

But Piper wants an ugly, evil world, and he’s done his best to create one.

Gifted as he is at messaging around tough situations, his book helps Evangelicalism with the tricky problems the Coronavirus presents. Aren’t Christians the good people? Doesn’t God favor them?—the usual thinking goes. So why are Christians able to get it?

Piper steps forward and lets everyone know what God is thinking.

The coronavirus is, therefore, never a clear and simple punishment on any person. The most loving, Spirit-filled Christian, whose sins are forgiven through Christ, may die of the coronavirus disease. But it is fitting that every one of us search our own heart to discern if our suffering is God’s judgment on the way we live.

Look at yourself, he advises, and decide if God is judging you too. And if you get the Coronavirus, you have a strong clue that you are.

“The coronavirus is a God-given wake-up call to be ready for the second coming of Christ,” he writes. So even the good people are being divinely put on notice. It gives everyone something to feel bad about.

I’m reading the book, realizing that people who are sick tonight might get his message: God wants them dead.

John Piper says so!