We have promoted the spirituality of the Church, and yet we have denied the power of the Kingdom of God over all of life.  We have retreated back into our caves under the guise of protecting preaching and sacraments, and delivered the world over to Satan by ignoring the totality of God’s law. 

The airways are full of sermonettes and devotionals about how Christians should respond to the present pandemic.  Most of them are very encouraging and faithful to the Scriptures.  However, coming from a theonomic bias, there is something missing.  It’s usually always missing among both the rapture dispensationalists and the neo-puritans.  I’ve heard numerous Christian and Reformed podcasts on the present crisis, but seldom a Scripture passage from the law of God is ever mentioned.

Certainly, God is sovereign, and nothing happens apart from his will.  This is a great comfort for all of us.  Our days have been numbered by a merciful God. This is not to deny the necessity of protecting ourselves through routine hygiene procedures.  Just read some of the Quarantine Laws in the Old Testament (see my Quarantine Laws and the Bible, from October 30, 2014).

However, in all the comfort messages I hear, what seems to be missing is a blindness to the fact that we are in this predicament today because we have either ignored or rebelled against God’s holy law.  I am not talking about generalities here, but direct connections can be made.  Examples are numerous.

For example, we have ignored God’s law about diluting the money supply.  Our gold has become dim and our wine diluted with water. We now face an astronomical debt with inflated money that may drown us all.  We ignored the ways of the ant and did not prepare for the future.  Most of the fatalities of the virus are our elderly citizens who learned this lesson by living through two world wars and a Great Depression.  They saved for a rainy day.  They are the wise ones among us and God is taking them from us.  Preachers should have been calling for repentance long ago.

As another example, we have ignored God’s law about restitution and other penalties regarding crime.  We have created an ungodly and merciless prison system.  Justice should be swift and proportional to the crime.  Today, in many places, prisoners are being let go without proper biblical penalties applied. Policemen are being told to ignore petty theft, and storeowners can only watch while their inventory is looted.  We have created a giant prison industrial complex that feeds upon itself.  Preachers should have been calling for repentance long ago.

We tend to pride ourselves in America about the idea of separation of Church and State.  However, the church has relented and let the civil government engulf what once were considered the religious spheres of responsibility.  This can be seen in two areas.  First, the education of our young children is a distinctively “religious act.”  Whether it be delegated to the family or to private Christian schools, it is the ultimate responsibility of the head of the house, namely the father.  State-sponsored education is surely a result of the failure of the Christian faith in this country.

Secondly, charity was removed from the individual and the church, and given over to the state.  Today, we have a massive welfare system, both direct, via EBT (Electronic Benefits Transfer) cards, and indirect, via tax credits.  We have created a monster that will devour us all.

Our separation of church and state doctrine seems to have been truncated to meet our every increasing irresponsibility in both the family and the church.  Preachers should have been preaching about both items, but we failed to do so.

We have promoted the spirituality of the Church, and yet we have denied the power of the Kingdom of God over all of life.  We have retreated back into our caves under the guise of protecting preaching and sacraments, and delivered the world over to Satan by ignoring the totality of God’s law.

We live in an American Baptist Culture that focuses on the individual over the corporate body.  Sadly, most Presbyterians have adopted the Baptist view regarding the role of the Church and the Civil Government.  The theology of the covenant has been restricted to infant baptisms.

Perhaps this pandemic will pass too!  However, if the preachers in our pulpits continue to ignore the law of God, then the next one may be much worse.

Larry E. Ball is a retired minister in the Presbyterian Church in America and is now a CPA. He lives in Kingsport, Tennessee.