Since the beginning of this year, the coronavirus has dominated the news and our attention like no other story in my lifetime.  I suspect we probably haven’t seen an event this consequential since World War II.  The problems brought by the pandemic are obvious:  serious illness, death, economic disruption, civil disorder, and brethren arguing endlessly about masks on Facebook.

However, even though God, for reasons of His own, periodically allows the devil to wreak havoc, this still is God’s world, not Satan’s.  Thus, every tragedy or disaster we encounter has something in it that we can learn from and use to grow spiritually.  COVID-19 is no different.  I don’t claim to know the purposes of God, but I do know that He always has a purpose, and the arc of history always will bend toward His glory.

Last week, Rufus suggested, and I agree, that we ought to consider how we should be learning and growing through the pandemic.  This morning, then, let’s examine at least some of the blessings we have received from COVID-19.

The first of these is that WE ARE HUMBLED.  Look at the words of David in Psalm 39:3-7.  As a society, the United States tells lots of lies to itself, but the biggest probably is the lie of our own sufficiency.  We live in the country of the American dream and the self-made man.  According to our national narrative, it’s possible for any of us, using our own abilities, to ensure happiness for ourselves forever.

Of course, this is not true, but we go to great lengths to preserve the myth.  Everything from Botox injections to nursing homes works together to hide the reality of aging and death from us.  The store shelves always are full, the credit card always swipes, and the party never ends.

Well, 2020 has been the year the party ended.  Death is an inescapable feature of the national conversation.  A few months ago, those store shelves didn’t have any toilet paper on them.  We laugh about it now, but I think all of us know in some corner of our minds that next month it could be bread and beans and rice that aren’t around.  Our brightest political and scientific minds have tried to solve our problems, and they have failed to protect us.

In short, we have been stripped of our illusions of self-sufficiency.  That’s why, I think, there’s an undertone of terror in the nightly news reports.  People have spent their lives trusting in themselves, and now they have realized that they can’t.

I think David’s conclusion in v. 7 has to be ours.  Because our lives are so short and fragile, because we are so powerless, we must put our hope in God and wait for Him.  That’s a hard realization for many.  When you bow before your Creator, you also must admit that He has the right to tell you what to do.  That doesn’t sound as much fun as a life of sin and selfish pleasure!  Nonetheless, in this time, it is plain to see that hoping in anything else or anyone else is vain.

Second, the coronavirus has DRAWN US CLOSER TOGETHER.  Consider Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 12:21-22.  Now, I recognize it sounds weird to say that this is a time of greater closeness in the church when our Sunday morning attendance is 2/3 of what it was, but I think that when all this finishes shaking out, that’s how things will be.  I fear that there will be some, not many, but some, who will fall away because of it, but I think the rest of us will be closer than we were before.

I was brought up by godly parents, and ever since I left home, I’ve been faithfully attending services someplace.  That means that the time of the lockdown a couple of months back was the longest time that I ever have spent without assembling with a congregation.  I recognize that I was better off than most—at least I got to go to the church building and see a few Christians! 

Nonetheless, the longer that time went on, the less I liked it.  I heard preaching and teaching.  I heard prayers.  I partook of the Lord’s Supper.  However, I wasn’t doing those things with all my brothers and sisters, and even though online services were the best we could do, it felt like the difference between eating a meal and pretending to eat off an empty plate.  It didn’t satisfy me.  Indeed, I know that right now there still are many members here who are staying at home because of health concerns, who are still trying to do the best they can with empty-plate Christianity.

When this time is over, none of us should forget that feeling.  Whenever we start taking our brethren for granted, we should recall 2020 to our minds and remind ourselves how vital they are in our spiritual lives.  Even now, there are things I want to do that I don’t feel like I should do.  I don’t think it’s wise to try to pack 30 people into our home to study right now, and I miss that too.  The fellowship that we have here is priceless, and I think God has used the virus to show us how priceless it is.

Finally, I think the events of this year should have RENEWED OUR SENSE OF MISSION.  I couldn’t put that mission any better than Jesus did in Matthew 5:14-16.  We are the light of the world.  Through our good works, we are supposed to shine so that others will glorify God.  We must remember too that the greater the darkness becomes, the more brightly our lights will shine.

Times are hard now, and they’re going to be harder in the future.  There are lots of hurting people out there, and there are going to be more:  those who lost loved ones to the virus, those who lost jobs, those who suffered from these times of loneliness and isolation.  I don’t care who wins the election in November; no human being is going to be able to make all the pain go away.

We can’t solve everybody’s problems, but we can solve the problems that are before us.  We can be generous to the poor and hungry.  We can comfort the bereaved and the lonely.  We can be the visible sign of the compassion of Christ.

Most of all, though, we can point those around us to God.  Let’s be honest, brethren.  The answers that the world has been dishing out to the coronavirus problem haven’t been very good, and increasingly, people with eyes to see will start looking for different answers. 

We have answers.  We have very good answers.  Indeed, we have the only possible answers.  The troubles of our time are too big for anybody but God.  When we find people who are humbled and mourning, with compassion and love, we can lead them to Him. 

I think it’s probably true that 2020 will prove to be a transformational year in the history of our country.  I don’t know what the future will look like, but I don’t think it’s beyond the realm of possibility that it will prove to be a time of spiritual transformation, a third Great Awakening.  It may well be that never again in our lives will we have an opportunity like this one.  Let’s take advantage of it!

John 9:39-41 contains one of the more enigmatic exchanges in the Bible.  In the rest of the Bible, blindness (either literal or metaphorical) is a bad thing.  When Jesus calls the Pharisees “blind guides” in Matthew 23:16, He is not complimenting them!  However, in John 9, blindness (at least initially) is a good thing.

The conversation begins in v. 39, when Jesus reveals that one of His works is vision transformation.  Through Him, those who are blind will see, spiritual versions of the blind man He just physically healed, but, provocatively, those who can see will become blind.

The Pharisees who are with Him don’t like the sound of this.  They believe that, spiritually speaking, they are among the people who can see.  They’ve got it all figured out.  However, Jesus’ words predict an ominous fate for them.  They don’t like that idea, so they press Jesus for a less offensive clarification.  When You said that people who see will become blind, Jesus, You weren’t talking about us, right???

However, Jesus doubles down with a paradox.  He tells them that if they were blind—clueless, lost in darkness—they would have no sin.  However, because they claim to be spiritually sighted, their sin remains.

Man!  What’s a poor self-confident spiritual elitist to do?

Jesus’ implied answer is “Repent!”  The Pharisees thought they had it all figured out, but they didn’t.  They thought they were righteous, but they weren’t.  The kind of sight they had wasn’t true spiritual vision.  It was self-delusion. 

What’s more, their form of spiritual blindness was even more dangerous than the blindness of the tax collector or the prostitute.  The latter at least could come to an awareness that they needed help from Jesus.  They didn’t think they saw.  The Pharisees, however, believed that they saw already, so they never would seek help for a problem they refused to acknowledge

It's easy for us to think of outsiders we know who have this problem.  The self-assured member of a denomination who refuses baptism for the forgiveness of sins because he already “got saved” certainly is present in this passage.  If you think you see already, your sin remains.

However, it is much more difficult for us to consider ourselves in the mirror that Jesus holds up.  We know what the Bible says.  We know and follow the truth ourselves.  We see, right?

Of course, the Pharisees gave the same answer for the same reason.  They knew Torah.  They devoted themselves to keeping the Law.  The problem wasn’t the things they saw.  It was the things they didn’t—their hypocrisy, their greed, their arrogance, and their hard-heartedness.

The same is true for us.  The most dangerous sins in our lives aren’t the ones we see.  They are the ones we don’t see, the Scriptures we gloss over, the evil actions we excuse in our hearts.  The problem is the dark corners of our lives where we are blind.

Rather than priding ourselves on our vision, we continually must humble ourselves before the Lord because of our blindness.  We must seek ever greater clarity of vision, but most of all, we must seek mercy from the God who helps us when we cannot help ourselves.  Our hope never can be in our own clear sight.  It must be that He sees us clearly yet loves us regardless.

As Bible students, one of our greatest challenges is separating what the Bible says from what we think the Bible says because of 200 years of Restoration tradition.  Often, the problem is not so much one of doctrine as one of emphasis.  Because we focus on one aspect of truth over another, we distort the overall picture.

This is particularly obvious when it comes to familial relationships.  Marriage and the family is not a major theme of Scripture.  You have the divorce passages in the gospels, the early part of 1 Corinthians 7, and instructions on Christian submission in Ephesians, Colossians, and 1 Peter.  That’s about it.

Nonetheless, marriage and the family is one of the major themes of preaching and teaching in churches of Christ.  We have gospel meetings, marriage-enrichment classes, books, and outside seminars galore!  With the aid of pop psychology, those few texts are inflated into one of the most important themes of the faith. 

By contrast, we take the opposite approach to 1 Corinthians 7:25-40, a text about singleness that is longer than any of those texts about marriage.  The way most brethren teach it, the most important thing in the context is the three words, “the present distress”.  They allow us to gloss over Paul’s comments about the spiritual advantages that the unmarried have, perhaps because we’re worried about sounding like we’re endorsing a celibate priesthood.

However, all of this creates in the minds of brethren the misconception that to be a Christian, you really ought to be married, and if you aren’t married (especially if you’re a woman), you’re a second-class Christian.  This has pernicious effects.  It certainly makes single Christians (a numerous tribe) feel inadequate, and it most likely pushes people into marriage who should not be getting married.  Would there be so many troubled marriages in the church if we spent more time emphasizing singleness as an acceptable alternative?

Don’t get me wrong.  I am pro-marriage and indeed happily married.  However, I’m pro-single Christians too.  There are many reasons why they are where they are.  Some haven’t gotten married yet.  Others have been widowed.  Others have gotten divorced.  Still others don’t want to get married.  All of those states can be every bit as valid for the child of God as marriage is.

What’s more, as Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 7:32-35, single Christians are able to serve God with their undivided attention in a way that married Christians aren’t.  I love my wife and children, but being a godly husband and father takes a lot of time and effort!  Without those obligations, there are many ways in which I could serve my God, my brother, and my neighbor that I now can’t contemplate.

To my single brothers and sisters, then, I say:  Don’t regard singleness as the unhappy waiting room you sit in before your real life as a Christian begins.  Don’t feel like it condemns you to second-class Christianity. 

Instead, serve the Lord where you are with what you have.  Use your precious gift of time to glorify God.  Be eager to help in the church.  Be active in your community.  Seek God diligently by yourself.  Study.  Pray.  If you doubt the value of such quiet moments, ask a Christian mother with children under the age of five!

Most of all, trust God.  He did not create you to have a meaningless, pointless, empty existence.  Though it is not good for man to be alone, our greatest need is not for marriage.  It is for Him, and only He can fill that need.  I know people who have tried to make marriage fill the God-shaped hole.  On the other hand, I also know those who never married and dedicated themselves to Christ instead.  Guess who has lived a happier, more fulfilled life? 

In time, all marriages come to an end, but the Christian’s walk with God does not.  What matters most is not whether we are married or will be married or anything of the sort.  What matters most is whether we seek completion in Him. 

In my time as a preacher, I’ve had my share of conversations with people who thought they had a moral or philosophical justification for their agnosticism/atheism.  They found something in the Bible they didn’t like.  Maybe it was God commanding the slaughter of the Canaanite children.  Maybe it was God condemning the practice of homosexuality as sinful.  Maybe it was God’s foreknowledge of human activity.  Regardless, there was something that displeased them, they couldn’t see how it was consistent with their understanding of God, so they concluded that God didn’t exist. 

I believe there are answers to all of these objections (and the others like them), but there’s an even more fundamental problem with that line of reasoning.  All of these scenarios begin with the doubter constructing their version of God  (possibly in good faith; possibly as a straw man), comparing their construct to the Biblical record, and concluding that the God of the Bible doesn’t measure up.  Their God wouldn’t do that!

To which I say, “So what?”  The God of the Bible doesn’t make sense to them.  Why should they have any expectation that a being of vastly greater understanding (which is how the Bible presents God) ought to make sense to them? 

I am quite confident that five years ago, when I told my children that they couldn’t eat Halloween candy for three meals a day, it didn’t make sense to them either.  “Candy tastes good, and it is there to be eaten.  It tastes better than stuffed peppers, so we should have it for dinner instead of stuffed peppers.  What am I missing?” 

Children don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t understand what they don’t understand.  And yet, my five-year-olds were much closer in intellect to me than I or any atheist doubter is to God.  If the child is unable to understand the parent, how much more will the creation struggle to understand the Creator!

Consequently, we should expect there to be many times when God does or tells us to do things that don’t make sense to us.  A God who is omniscient ought to be incomprehensible to human beings who aren’t.  Just like the toddler isn’t going to back Mom into a logical corner so that she offers up candy on demand, we aren’t going to be able to use the times that God doesn’t make sense to us to prove that He doesn’t exist.  The problem isn’t Him.  It’s us.

Indeed, it is the comprehensible God who looks much more like a figment of the human imagination.  The gods of the Greeks were comprehensible.  They got in ridiculous fusses with each other like people do.  They committed adultery like people do. 

Despite their greater power, these gods fit into a human frame.  They were idols, crafted to resemble people not only in outward features but in personality and scope.  They made sense because they were human in origin.

The God of the Bible does not make sense like that because He did not come from us.  He is not human or human-like.  He doesn’t even exist in the same state of reality.  He is utterly alien to us, and it is a tribute to His skill in communication that we are able to understand Him even as well as we do. 

The alien-ness and incomprehensibility of God, rather than being a sign of His non-existence, really is a proof to the contrary.  If we don’t understand Him, that is as it should be.  We can expect to have unanswered questions for as long as we live and maybe thereafter.  Conversely, if we think we do understand Him, we’re missing something.

Our job is not to make God make sense.  It is to seek to please Him.  As Moses wisely observed in Deuteronomy 29:29, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may obey all the words of this law.”

The devil has been hard at work for millennia, so he knows the best way to tempt any kind of person, even religious people.  We see his handiwork plainly in the Pharisees of the New Testament.  Even though many who accuse Christians of Pharisaism don’t know what they’re talking about, we still need to pay attention to the true characteristics of the Pharisees so that we don’t end up like them ourselves. 

First, Pharisees care more about appearances than the heart.  In Luke 11:39-41, Jesus accuses them of washing the outside of dishes while leaving the inside filthy.  How about us?  It’s easy to show up for Sunday-morning services looking like the picture of a saint, while our hearts are filled with evil desires that we spend the rest of the week living out.  Other Christians might be impressed, but God won’t be.

Second, Pharisees major in minors and ignore majors.  As Jesus points out in vs. 42, they tithed garden herbs (paying attention to a tiny detail of the Law of Moses) while neglecting justice and the love of God.  We can pride ourselves on going to the “right” church, but if we aren’t here because we love Jesus and long to serve Him, it won’t do us any good.

Third, Pharisees like impressing others.  Luke 11:43 reveals that they loved prominent seats and respectful greetings.  They viewed that as their due for their spiritual attainments.  Even though the practice of Christianity doesn’t have the same status in our larger society, self-interest still can creep into our faith.  Let’s imagine that we’ve worked really hard on something for the church, but nobody compliments us on it or notices that we’ve done it.  The Pharisee will be bothered by that, but the disciple won’t care.  They weren’t doing it for other people in the first place.

Fourth, the Pharisee leads others astray.  In v. 44, Jesus compares them to unmarked tombs.  This is another reference to the Law.  According to Numbers 19:16, anyone who touched a grave became unclean for seven days.  Thus, the Jews customarily whitewashed tombs so that other Jews would know not to touch them.  By contrast, an unmarked grave could spread uncleanness to those who did not know that they had been contaminated.

By extension, then, the Pharisees spread corruption to others who didn’t realize it—by teaching them to be Pharisaical instead of holy.  When we practice a hypocritical, checklist-based, lifeless version of Christianity, our teaching will be flawed too.  Rather than teaching others to become like Jesus, we will teach them to become like us.

Sadly, Pharisaism always will be a problem among God’s people.  With the devil’s help, we can turn even faith in Christ into a tool of self-promotion.  We only can guard against it by keeping our eyes focused on Him.  When we seek Him in humility, devotion, and love, the temptation to hypocrisy can find no root in our hearts.  That won’t make Satan very happy, but it will please the Lord.