This is a long article. I hope you’ll read it all anyway. If you’re staying home to help reduce the spread of the new Coronavirus (COVID-19), you may have more time on your hands anyway!

I’ve prayed and pondered long and hard what to say about the pandemic, wanting to encourage simultaneously both prudent care and fearless confidence.

Unsurprisingly, many in the media and politics exaggerate the danger. Both have strong incentives to do so. The media incite fears to increase audience, which attracts advertisers, which pays bills. Hence the saying common among journalists, “Bad news is good news; good news is no news.” Politicians incite fears to lead people to think they’re doing great things to protect them, which garners votes.

Also unsurprisingly, some people understate the danger. Some do it because they suspect politicians are just acting on the principle, “Never let a crisis go to waste,” making every emergency a new reason to shrink liberty and expand government. Some do it because they’ve seen many claims of catastrophe come and go unfulfilled and suspect this is just another. Others do it because they simply feel confident that God is in control.

What are faithful, wise Christians to do? How can we avoid both extremes, of over-reaction and under-reaction, of panic and complacency? How can we respond to this situation in terms of the two great commandments, to love God and to love our neighbors?

I believe five Biblical principles can help us.

First, trust God.

Psalm 91:1–3 speaks directly to our situation: “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.  I will say to the Lord, ‘My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.’ For he will deliver you from the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence.” Indeed, all the rest of that psalm is relevant; I hope you’ll read it. Does it guarantee that no Christian will ever get sick? No. But it gives us reason to believe God is in control, and if He afflicts us with illness, it is only because that’s better for us than not. As Romans 8:28 says, “… for those who love God all things work together for good ….”

When godly Jehoshaphat, king of Judah, learned that a vast army of several nations was about to attack, he

was afraid and set his face to seek the Lord, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah. And Judah assembled to seek help from the Lord; from all the cities of Judah they came to seek the Lord. And Jehoshaphat stood in the assembly of Judah and Jerusalem, in the house of the Lord, before the new court, and said, “O Lord, God of our fathers, are you not God in heaven? You rule over all the kingdoms of the nations. In your hand are power and might, so that none is able to withstand you. Did you not, our God, drive out the inhabitants of this land before your people Israel, and give it forever to the descendants of Abraham your friend? And they have lived in it and have built for you in it a sanctuary for your name, saying, ‘If disaster comes upon us, the sword, judgment, or pestilence, or famine, we will stand before this house and before you—for your name is in this house—and cry out to you in our affliction, and you will hear and save.’ And now behold, the men of Ammon and Moab and Mount Seir, whom you would not let Israel invade when they came from the land of Egypt, and whom they avoided and did not destroy—behold, they reward us by coming to drive us out of your possession, which you have given us to inherit. O our God, will you not execute judgment on them? For we are powerless against this great horde that is coming against us. We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.” (2 Chronicles 20:3–12)

Then “all Judah stood before the Lord, with their little ones, their wives, and their children,” and God instructed them through Jahaziel, “Do not be afraid … for the battle is not yours but God’s. … Stand firm, hold your position, and see the salvation of the Lord on your behalf ….” The people of Judah then held a worship service, singing praises to God, and God used other nations to “set an ambush” that routed the attackers, so that “when Judah … looked toward the horde … there were dead bodies lying on the ground; none had escaped” (verses 15–24).

I’m not saying God will wipe out the Coronavirus (though He could) and we should do nothing. What I am saying is that our first resort should be to God in prayer, and one thing we should pray for is widespread repentance and revival in our country and around the world. Scripture is filled with instances in which God used diseases to chasten or punish cities or nations. Who knows if the Coronavirus outbreak is such? Certainly responding in part by calling out to God in faith and repentance is an appropriate response to it. We should be thankful that our President called for March 16 to be a day of prayer; we should continue praying faithfully throughout this season.

Second, don’t fear.

Jehoshaphat “was afraid,” but “he set his face to seek the Lord.” When he did, his fears were stilled.

The most frequently repeated command in the Bible is “Do not be afraid,” or “Fear not.” Perhaps the best known is when God told Joshua, “Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go” (Joshua 1:9). When the disciples were in a boat battling a storm on the Sea of Galilee, they were afraid when they saw Jesus walking on the water, and He responded, “It is I; do not be afraid” (John 6:20). Why shouldn’t Joshua or the disciples have been afraid? In both instances, because God (in the disciples’ case, Jesus, God in the flesh) was with them. As God told Jeremiah, “Do not be afraid … for I am with you to deliver you” (Jeremiah 1:8). For just a few other examples, see Genesis 46:3; 1 Samuel 12:20; 2 Kings 1:15; 6:16; 19:6; 25:24; Nehemiah 4:14; Proverbs 3:25; Matthew 28:5, 10; Luke 1:13, 30; Acts 27:24).

Keeping things in perspective can reduce fear. COVID-19 is a serious risk, but we live with others every day. In the average year, over 37,000 Americans die of flu and over 38,000 in traffic accidents. COVID-19 is likely, like most epidemics, to peak and fall in weeks or months and so is unlikely to kill that many Americans ever, let alone each year.

Even in the face of grave danger, Christians need not be afraid, for God is with us.

Third, be prudent.

This will be my longest point, because prudence is difficult. As you’ll see in a moment, we need what I call “prudent prudence.”

When Satan tempted Jesus to throw Himself down from the temple, he quoted Psalm 91:11–12: “He will command his angels concerning you” and “On their hands they will bear you up ….” If anyone could have claimed those verses as justification, Jesus could. But He didn’t. Instead He quoted another scripture: “You shall not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matthew 4:7, quoting Deuteronomy 6:16).

Proverbs 22:3 says, “The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.” Apparently that’s a pretty important lesson, for it’s repeated, word-for-word, in Proverbs 27:12.

Our trust in God is no excuse for laziness, imprudence, or outright folly. In 1527, Martin Luther, responding by letter to a pastor who had asked whether it were permissible for a Christian to flee from the plague, wrote words that are astonishingly relevant to our present challenge:

If one makes no use of intelligence or medicine when he could do so without detriment to his neighbor, such a person injures his body and must beware lest he become a suicide in God’s eyes. By the same reasoning a person might forego eating and drinking, clothing and shelter, and boldly proclaim his faith that if God wanted to preserve him from starvation and cold, he could do so without food and clothing. Actually that would be suicide. It is even more shameful for a person to pay no heed to his own body and to fail to protect it against the plague the best he is able, and then to infect and poison others who might have remained alive if he had taken care of his body as he should have. He is thus responsible before God for his neighbor’s death and is a murderer many times over. Indeed, such people behave as though a house were burning in the city and nobody were trying to put the fire out. Instead they give leeway to the flames so that the whole city is consumed, saying that if God so willed, he could save the city without water to quench the fire.

No, my dear friends, that is no good. Use medicine; take potions which can help you; fumigate house, yard, and street; shun persons and places wherever your neighbor does not need your presence or has recovered, and act like a man who wants to help put out the burning city. What else is the epidemic but a fire which instead of consuming wood and straw devours life and body? You ought to think this way: “Very well, by God’s decree the enemy has sent us poison and deadly offal. Therefore I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become   contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above. See, this is such a God-fearing faith because it is neither brash nor foolhardy and does not tempt God.

Moreover, he who has contracted the disease and recovered should keep away from others and not admit them into his presence unless it be necessary. Though one should aid him in his time of need, as previously pointed out, he in turn should, after his recovery, so act toward others that no one becomes unnecessarily endangered on his account and so cause another’s death. “Whoever loves danger,” says the wise man, “will perish by it” [Ecclus. 3:26]. If the people in a city were to show themselves bold in their faith when a neighbor’s need so demands, and cautious when no emergency exists, and if everyone would help ward off contagion as best he can, then the death toll would indeed be moderate. But if some are too panicky and desert their neighbors in their plight, and if some are so foolish as not to take precautions but aggravate the contagion, then the devil has a heyday and many will die. On both counts this is a grievous offense to God and to man — here it is tempting God; there it is bringing man into despair.

I hope after finishing this article you’ll read Luther’s whole letter—it contains much godly wisdom well suited to our time.

Prudence, however, can be difficult. It requires attention not just to one danger but to many, including unintended consequences of our solutions. That’s what I call “prudent prudence.”

My doctor, after discovering I had a medical problem, advised against medication. He recommended a change in diet and exercise instead. He said something like this: “Cal, we medical doctors are trained to find a problem and fix it. We aren’t trained so much to think about new problems that our fix might create. It’s as if we told patients to back away from a fire without noticing the 500-foot cliff behind them.” He explained that the medication’s side effects could, in my case, be worse than the condition they treated.

If you’ve followed what the Cornwall Alliance says about climate change for long, you’ll recognize this as analogous to our warning that drastic attempts to reduce global warming by replacing abundant, affordable, reliable energy from fossil fuels with diffuse, expensive, unreliable energy from wind and solar are likely to cause much greater harm than good.

Some of our federal, state, and local governments’ responses to the Coronavirus raise the same concern for me. Don’t get me wrong. Some make perfect sense, like urging people to

• practice heightened personal hygiene, especially frequent and thorough handwashing with soap, and avoid touching our faces,
• cover our mouths and noses with tissue when we cough or sneeze and dispose of the tissue in a covered wastebasket,
• minimize personal contact beyond our own families—and even within them if we know a family member has been infected—,
• avoid large-group gatherings but practice “social distancing” if we attend them (keeping at least 5 or 6 feet apart, not shaking hands or hugging),
• stay home when sick so we don’t spread disease to others and overburden a healthcare system already stretched near its limits,
• be especially careful to avoid situations in which we could pass on any infectious disease—Coronavirus or other—to especially vulnerable people, like the elderly and those with medical conditions like heart or respiratory diseases, diabetes, or immune deficiencies.

Such actions can have two benefits. (1) They can reduce the total spread of the virus. (2) They can reduce the speed at which it spreads. The second is at least as important as the first. Why? Because although Coronavirus isn’t particularly deadly to most people (many infected show no symptoms, and most who do experience it as a bad cold or flu), very vulnerable people like those I’ve just described have very high fatality rates from it. When they contract it, they’re likely to need high-level hospital care. Slowing the speed at which such cases occur means both reducing total cases through the end of the epidemic and reducing the burden on medical professionals and making it less likely that we’ll run short of hospital beds, respirators, and other resources necessary to treat those infected.

But I’m increasingly concerned that some other recommendations, or even orders, by our governments run the risk of pushing us over a cliff while warning us away from a fire.

What I have in mind are recommendations, and in some jurisdictions outright orders, that many businesses simply shut their doors. That will quickly mean huge losses in jobs, income, and wealth for millions of people, causing increased poverty, which can pose even greater risks than COVID-19. Now, please don’t protest, “But we’re talking about human lives here! They can’t be exchanged for wealth!” Right. But wealth can protect lives—and lost wealth can endanger them. Let me explain.

From February 12 to March 12, even before most of those measures were imposed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 8,351 points, or over $11.5 Trillion, and it lost another 1,012 points, or about another $1.3 Trillion, by the time I wrote this (noon March 17). Is that just losses to fat-cat stock investors? No. It’s losses to over 180 million Americans who own stock—many through their 401(k)s or IRAs, meant to provide for old age. It’s losses that could require businesses to lay off employees, leaving them without incomes to pay for food, clothing, shelter, and everything else they need—including health care if they contract the Coronavirus.

How might we compare the effect of such losses with the effect of the Coronavirus? It’s possible to translate those financial losses to the economy as a whole into estimated excess deaths. Some economists have estimated that an extra fatality occurs in response to anywhere from $17.5 million to $26.5 (in inflation-adjusted dollars from when the studies were done) lost to the entire economy. If we take the higher estimate, a long-lasting loss of $12.8 trillion can be expected to cause, in time, over 483,000 extra deaths—more if we take the lower estimate.

Some of that stock-market loss—I don’t know how much—would have occurred without drastic governmental restrictions on businesses. Let’s assume it’s 90 percent, though I suspect it’s less. That would leave 10 percent attributable to such policies. If that’s so, then the policies would yield about 48,300 extra deaths over time. (Double that if the policies cost 20 percent of the loss; triple it for 30 percent; etc.)

Compare that with the risks from the Coronavirus. The situation is changing rapidly and in response to constantly changing actions by government officials, schools, hospitals, and others, so scenarios for the future, which are always precarious, become even more so. But what follows seems reasonably credible to me at this stage.

The US Centers for Disease Control reported that 6,606 people had died worldwide from the virus as of March 16. For the United States, it reported 75 deaths through March 16. Even China, where the virus began and officials tragically delayed response, had recorded only 3,218 deaths through March 16, with infection rates rapidly declining.

In my opinion, it is highly unlikely that the United States will suffer as many deaths as China has so far, but let’s be really generous to advocates of drastic actions and assume that over the long haul COVID-19 will kill 10,000 Americans. (That would be just over one-fourth of average annual flu deaths and about one-sixth the flu deaths of the 2017–2018 flu season.) If so, the number of deaths likely from lost wealth in the United States—if that wealth is not recovered soon—is likely to be at least 5 times the number from COVID-19. (Double that, triple it, or more if the policy-driven losses are higher percentages of total losses.)

The Manhattan Institute’s Heather MacDonald expressed just this concern when she wrote on March 13: “If the measures we undertake to protect a vulnerable few end up exposing them, along with the rest of society, to even more damaging risks—was it worth the cost? An example: there were 34,200 deaths in the United States during the 2018–19 influenza season, estimates the CDC. We did not shut down public events and institutions to try to slow the spread of the flu.” Her whole article is worth reading.

So I think it might be time for many Americans, including Christians, to start urging elected officials to back off of some of the more extreme measures so far imposed to stem the spread of the Coronavirus. Should school classes, sports events, concerts, etc., resume? I don’t know, but I suspect that in areas with few or no confirmed cases, they could resume with minor risk compared with other risks that we take for granted every day (like from flu, or traffic accidents—which killed 38,800 people in 2019). Should restaurants reopen? I think they could, safely, if they adopted enhanced hygiene practices, including using disinfectant to wash down tables and chairs between guests, requiring more frequent hand washing by servers and kitchen staff, placing hand sanitizer dispensers in many highly visible spots, and so on.

Should churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples cease gathering for worship and prayer? That should be left up to their leaders, but with adequate precautions I think they can continue meeting. They, too, can make hand sanitizer readily available. They can clean frequently and with disinfectant doorknobs or bars, handrails, and other surfaces people often touch, have offerings placed in boxes rather than passing plates around, adopt methods of dispensing communion that avoid having many people touch the same objects, encourage families to sit together and others to sit at least 5 or 6 feet from each other, urge anyone who shows any symptoms of sickness to stay home, and so on.

Dr. Daniel Chin, a physician trained in pulmonary and critical care medicine and epidemiology with 25 years of global public health experience who in 2003 led much of WHO’s support to China to contain the SARS epidemic, provides very helpful guidance in an article in Christianity Today for churches trying to determine the appropriate level of response depending on whether the church is in a community with

• no reported cases (maintain normal activities but step up public health practices and develop a plan for stronger action if cases arise in the community),
• some cases but only imported from another area or through contacts to an imported case (modify some activities, begin to implement response plan, communicate with members and local health officials), or
• one or more cases without a known contact case and with multiple generations of transmission (modify and cancel some activities, fully implement response plan, communicate; as nearby cases rise, cancel all but the most essential in-person activities; hold services online).

Fourth, submit, within limits, to governing authorities.

Even though I think some orders from our governments are excessive, and some perhaps even unconstitutional, Christians are bound by Scripture (Romans 13:1) to obey civil authorities unless they require us to disobey God. Hence we should, other than that exception, obey orders given as part of government’s efforts to stop the spread of the Coronavirus.

One point about which some church leaders will want to think very carefully is whether they should obey if governing authorities order churches not to meet for worship. While such an order would surely constitute a serious abridgment of religious liberty, would obeying it mean disobeying God? In a video message to his congregation, Rev. Jimmy Young, pastor of Grace Evangelical Church in Germantown, TN (near Memphis), suggests that that could be so. Why? Because the Fourth Commandment (“Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy …”; Exodus 20:8–11; Deuteronomy 5:12–15) implies, at least in the judgment of many Christians through the centuries, a moral obligation for believers to gather for worship on the Lord’s Day. Yet Young takes care to acknowledge that this is an issue on which Christian consciences differ.

One other thing we should be doing is considering how we might act, once this threat is behind us, to prevent government overreach in future emergencies.

Fifth, pray and work for revival, beginning with yourself and spreading through your church, your community, your nation, and the world.

2 Chronicles 7:13–14 says, “When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among my people, if my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.”

Disease doesn’t always indicate of God’s judgment—sometimes it has an entirely different purpose and implies a great compliment about someone’s integrity, as with Job. Yet God often sends disease as chastisement or punishment, whether on individuals, families, or whole nations. The universality of sin makes it certain that every person, every family, every church, every nation should be in continual repentance. If we forget that sometimes, we should be reminded of it in a time like this.

Hence we should spend time in serious prayer, searching our hearts, asking God to reveal the ways in which we sin against Him and to empower us by the Holy Spirit to change such ways. We should be praying for our neighbors, friends, and fellow citizens. And we should be sharing the gospel with others around us, and encouraging fellow believers to join us in spiritual exercises. We should pray for our governing officials.

As I mentioned at the start of this article, if you’re staying home to help reduce the spread of the Coronavirus, you have more time available. Spend some of it in Bible reading and prayer, in using social media or the phone to encourage others and build your relationships with them. “Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you” (James 4:8).

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash.