Quarantine Quick Reads - Russian Roulette?

We are getting used to seeing the statistics. Of the people who get ill most will have relatively mild symptoms, some worse, a few will need to go to hospital. It will only prove to be fatal for a minority most of whom will have an underlying vulnerability because of age or pre-existing health conditions. There are, however, a number of young, fit, seemingly healthy people who have succumbed to the disease without being in any of the high-risk categories.

So is it all just a roll of the dice? Is it a game of Russian roulette - every time you go to the shops to buy milk you take the chance, not knowing if, perhaps, there is a viral bullet in the chamber. In a sense, this is all that the theory of evolution offers people - survival of the fittest with the odd chance that sometimes the fittest will die too. In stark contrast, according to the Bible, life is not a game of odds. Rather, it is a gift from God:

“God himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the

face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries

of their dwelling place...” (Acts 17:25-26).

We cannot always see what is going on from heaven’s perspective. It is remarkable to think that these verses are pulling back the curtain to give us a glimpse of the mind of God! Life is not a game of human probabilities but of divine certainties, not an enormously improbable accident but a deliberate, intentional gift from God. There is comfort in knowing that these apparently out of control times are not actually out of control and our destinies are in the hands of the God who “made us to live”. Though we cannot understand it He sets the parameters of our lives so that we

“...should seek God, and perhaps feel our way towards him and find him.

Yet He is actually not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27).

To ‘find’ this God, whether in a time of health and happiness or sickness and sadness, is to start a new life which continues for eternity beyond the grave with no chance of it ever ending.