The Second Wave

When the Covid restrictions were first announced last Spring there was a tide of good will, community spirit and shared resolve. There was a new enemy but it was an enemy that we could beat if we all pulled together. The summer sun certainly helped keep the mood positive. It didn’t seem that long before things started to return, gradually, back to some kind of normality. We didn’t have to dig so deep anymore. We could relax a little.

Perhaps, like me, you hoped that this was the end. It was a serious threat but by taking action together we had avoided the worst. It was not as bad as it could have been. Alas, we were wrong! We couldn’t see how bad the second wave would be. We didn’t know how many new variants would arise and that they would prove more contagious to different subsections of society. Medical friends who have been following the studies closely inform me that they always feared this. The progression models differed on the details but they all predicted that a ‘second wave’ was coming and it would be worse than the first.

It reminded me of the biblical account of how sin entered the world. Perhaps you have read the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit. Perhaps you have wondered whether such a seemingly insignificant thing could really be all that serious. There are clearly deeper things at work than the superficial appearance - the Bible doesn’t tell us everything we might want to know about exactly why Adam and Eve’s relationship to God is tied up with this simple test of obedience or disobedience (which the Bible calls sin). What is clear is that things have gone wrong; they had stopped listening to the God who gave them a world full of wonderful things. Instead they listened to devilish and destructive lies and did the one thing they were told not to.

Still, it doesn’t seem so bad. They don’t die straight away, as they feared. They are sent into spiritual isolation but God treats them pretty gently. He promised to work out a long term plan to set things right again and made provision for their immediate needs like clothes to wear. Soon there are bouncing babies in the picture and it all looks pretty rosy.

Sadly sin had not been destroyed. It was just the end of the ‘first wave’. The second wave struck with sudden violence: jealousy, bitter rage, and murder. And so it goes on, line on line, wave after wave. As the book of Romans puts it

“...Death came into the world through one man, and death through sin, 

and so death spread to all men because all sinned...” (Romans 5:12).

On nearly every page, the Bible records the emergence of new variants of sin (disobedience to God): hatred and violence, deceit and corruption, sexual perversion and incest, idolatry and child sacrifice, arrogant self-righteousness and religious hypocrisy. It is a disease that infects the heart of every human being. The Bible’s greatest heroes prove just as ‘infected’ as everyone else. Sin is a pandemic in the fullest possible sense of the word!

This backdrop points to the importance of the Christian claim that Jesus Christ had no sin. He was not just an ‘asymptomatic carrier’; he was never infected. He was the first human being who was not overcome by the waves of sin - quite to the contrary, Jesus actually overcame sin, Satan and death. Romans 5:15 continues

“But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if many died through one 

man’s trespass, much more have the grace of God and the free 

gift by the grace of that one man Jesus Christ abounded for many”

While there are times where it still looks as though sin is thriving, the New Testament and the history of the church records the waves of divine power and holiness, pushing sin back like an overwhelming flood-tide. Christians look forward to a vision of heaven in which the infection of sin has been destroyed and removed forever.