A Child’s Question about the Coronavirus – Part 2

Natural Consequences. I need to explain something about consequences. When I was your age, and I disobeyed my Dad, I would get in trouble. Sometimes I would get in trouble because what I had done could have hurt me or hurt someone else. What if I had left the skillet on – and later my little sister walked into the kitchen, and not knowing there was a danger of a hot skillet, she reached her hand up on the counter into the skillet and was burned real bad?

If I had been warned not to leave the electric skillet on – then I was the one responsible for turning it off so that no one would get hurt. There are consequences for our disobedience or behaving wrong, right? So I get a spanking. I understand that. It’s a tool my Dad will use to correct my behavior so the next time I’m more careful.

There are natural consequences for a lot of actions. If you ride down the street on your bike as fast as you can with a blindfold on – you will probably run into something and get hurt! If you’re climbing real high in a tree and you decide to let go of the branches or the trunk of the tree, you’re probably going to fall! The laws of gravity will make sure you drop toward the earth! These painful examples tell us about natural consequences.

The laws of gravity are good! They are in place for a reason! God made the world this way. But it’s unfair if God suspends the laws of gravity just because you’re about to fall from a tree. If He cancels the law of gravity for you, then the law is canceled for me as I’m standing near the tree watching you – and suddenly I no longer have the ability to run with the football! (If gravity is no longer in charge I may just drift in space!)

That would really be weird, if I’m minding my own business and every time God suspends the laws of nature to rescue one person who is falling – everyone else is put at risk of being detached from the ground! If things like that happen without notice then we have nothing we can count on! With God’s natural laws, we have the best world that was able to be created. We can count on gravity, the seasons of the year, the tides of the ocean, the rotation of the planet and the orbit around the sun.

I tell you this because we need to know that the world in which we now live is good; it has natural laws that keeps everything the same. We can count on 2 + 2 = 4 every time! Part of the laws of nature allow for winds to whip up or waves to gather at sea. Part of the laws of nature allow for puppies to be born and flowers to blossom in the spring. Part of the laws of nature allow germs and viruses to spill out of my body when I sneeze or cough or bleed. That’s not a bad thing – unless someone I love is sitting too close to me when the virus breaks free from me. But if there is someone close by, then it’s just the natural chain of events that takes place, that the virus in me becomes the virus in someone else.

Sometimes the bad or the evil we see in the world wasn’t meant for bad or evil. It’s just what happens in the chain of events.

[See the final part 3 in this series tomorrow.]
Kevin Lantz, 3-31-2020; Barboursville, WV