I am usually very hesitant to label any current event the fulfilment of prophecy, in that history has taught us that such utterances have not always been able to withstand close scrutiny. However, the life that most of us are currently leading, because of the pandemic, begs for some degree of commentary in light of biblical realities, in order to discover if there is any congruity with God’s master plan or with some form of rationality.
So much has changed for me and my family in the last six months that the extravagant freedoms of the past now seem to be a distant dream. Mary and I used to rationalize living 3,500 miles away from our children and grandchildren by saying that we were just six and a half hours from them (Washington to London by air), just an hour more than flying from Washington DC to Los Angeles. Now we are more than eight months away from them, not having seen them since Christmas of last year. The prospect of seeing them anytime soon is not great either. It might be another four months, six months or twelve months. The plaintive voice of our three-year old granddaughter, Lois, expressing the hope of seeing Granddad and GG again “when Corona has gone back to its home” keeps replaying in our consciousness like a stuck phonograph record.
Everyone by now has learned or should have learned certain important lessons from the current pandemic, lessons such as the fragility of life, the importance of relationships, the heightened vulnerability of some in our society to killer diseases due to their occupation, and the fact that we cannot escape our shared humanity, despite the attempts of some to do just that. But for me, the biggest lesson drawn from the pandemic, even if it is not the most important, is how quickly everything that we take for granted or consider normal can change. Just look at the rows of passenger planes sitting on square miles of tarmac in various countries due to lack of demand for air travel, the hotels that are empty, churches in which praise and prayer are absent or piped into homes via high speed data transmission cables. The societal changes that have happened over the last six months have been so sudden and transforming that news of major and more significant changes in our world, such as the rapid melting of the glaciers in Greenland and the alarming expansion of the Sahara Desert in Africa, both of which have enormous implications for our planet, have been ignored to a large degree.
Current events remind me of a description given by Ellen White in Testimonies, vol. 9 regarding the state of the world just before the Second Coming: “The calamities by land and sea, the unsettled state of society, the alarms of war, are portentous. They forecast approaching events of the greatest magnitude. The agencies of evil are combining their forces and consolidating. They are strengthening for the last great crisis. Great changes are soon to take place in our world, and the final movements will be rapid ones.” Can we see our present world in this photograph? I think we can. At least, I can see it.
Do current events call us to re-examine and reaffirm the hope in our hearts that our Lord will come as promised? Absolutely! From whichever angle we look at these events, the words of Ellen White above ring with a certain degree of confluence and clarity. We are possibly seeing the unfolding of events as predicted by our Lord in Matt. 24 and commented on by God’s messenger to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Our response then should be as Jesus counsels in Matt. 24: 44, “Therefore you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”
So, while we are embracing the opportunity provided by the pandemic to do a bit more house-cleaning than we did in the past and re-order items in our homes, why not also take time to re-order our life priorities and look forward with renewed hope to the day when the kingdoms of this world will become the kingdom of our Lord.