This bug is not for you

Thank you for asking about the superbug (dever, nega, makkah, pestilence or plague (footnote 1.) in Hebrew; plege, loimos, in Koine Greek.

“Plagues are a way that God seeks to get our attention about our finitude and mortality as well as how we are giving attention to God” (Dr Darrell Bock, Professor at Dallas Theological Seminary).

Dr Bock continues: “They are an opportunity for reflection about how we live and a reminder we are not gods ourselves” (as quoted by Joel C. Rosenberg in “What does the Bible teach about Pestilence, Plagues and Global Pandemics?”

This Bug is not for you (footnote 2.) . Jesus’ furious love builds a fearless generation of worshippers. Psalm 90 says, “Establish the work of our hands for us…” (v 17).

How wondrous the Lord in this day where He has “carried us away like a flood” (v. 5) to bring the world to its knees through the tribulation of this present darkness. But this bug is not for you.

Millions have been swept away in just a very short period of months some estimates 5 million souls lost to this contagion (footnote 3.) as the rest of us have been in one sort of cloister or cocoon or other. But this bug is not for you.

How have we gained a heart of wisdom” (v 12) during these past months of counting? We have counted (footnote 4.) the infection rates, we have counted death rates (footnote 5.), we have counted calories, we have counted the number of Grab deliveries and hours spent in travail in the house of God or at the prayer altar.

A thousand years in the sight of heaven is like “yesterday” (v 4) but this bug is “not for you” (footnote 6.)

God calls us to hear this word of Moses, the servant of God, and his laws and statutes (Mal 4:4) and to see the “beauty of the LORD our God upon us” (v 17.)

What must it have been like to open the door of the ark and let the animals out in the days of Noah?

What would Nineveh have looked like after the revival of the Lord in the days of Jonah? What will the church of God look like after Covid will have lapsed?

The Alpha and the Omega is “… establishing the work of our hands for us” (v 17)

Behold, every man under his own vine and fig tree and nothing and no one will make him afraid” (Micah 4:4) is His precious promise to us all. Look for the beauty (footnote 7.) of the Lord after the receding of the flood waters and you shall see that this bug was not for you.

… footnotes…

(1.) We need to understand something interesting about bugs. Some can be seen with the naked eye – caterpillars, flies, mosquitoes, parasites. Sometimes these bugs are so small you can’t see them without very special equipment – like the nano-bugs in the SARS family under the broad heading of “infectious diseases”

(2.) Job was afflicted with a terrible disease to teach that God is in control. Miriam was afflicted with a terrible leprosy like disease to qualify Moses as an intercessor. Naaman’s disease drove him to seek help from his enemy, the Jews who were more than willing to help. Jesus healed many lepers (Matt ch. 8) in his day to show that God is a good God willing to heal. Jesus healed another leper (Luke ch. 17) and taught us to see where all healing comes from.

(3.) A bug is a bug is a bug. It should be treated with respect and understood as a form of life with its own biological priorities that often come in direct opposition to other life forms, namely the hosts they feed off of. So this knowledge is humbling since the rate at which these bugs multiply is truly wonderful.

(4.) Like wind that starts off as a gentle breeze before it races off to become a typhoon or hurricane in the Philippines or parts of America. Like the locust that grow into clouds of destruction over every green thing in Africa or Australia. Like the infestation of flies in Asia and parts of Russia that, if left unchecked, take on a life of its own devastating entire countrysides, disrupting supply chains and upending our neatly organised and efficient systems.

(5.) But by and large, the human immune system fights back and overcomes. The default natural ability of the body to meet challenges to health and wholeness is well documented. Reports are coming out of China that there are more who are recovering from the superbug than are dying from it. This is an important bit of information. The natural spiral of infection has defined limits and these numbers, while swimmingly large in their tens of thousands, suggest limits or boundaries imposed by the natural burn rate of infectivity.

(6.) We sometimes observe mass deaths of whales or extinctions of species in nature evidenced by carcasses in the wilderness and oceans. These come in alarming rates for the affected animals in specific family trees. In the case of the COVID19 superbug, we’ll need more information that we don’t currently have about its likes and dislikes, where it can survive and why it can suddenly dissipate as quickly as it multiplies.

(7.) All the wise men on social media can’t seem to put their finger (yet) on what are the elemental modalities of this superbug and its defaults. The study of this particular superbug is a noble field that medicine has yet to hack. At the moment all our human efforts seem to be barking up the wrong tree.

Please read – Modality Newsletter – SCCI Batch #53

** 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, etc is the infection rate that follows the natural (fibonacci) sequence for bugs, caterpillars, bats and locust, etc. This is what bugs do everyday. The low fatality (death) rate in S’pore however is due to the ethics of hygiene, quarantine for those affected and by paying attention to the laws of epidemics and the maths of contagion. As the good book says, “this plague is not for you” (Psalm 91).