On Pandemic Prayers

Over the last while I’ve heard prayer requests from people around me for the Covid-19 pandemic to end. 

This reminds me of other prayer requests I have heard from both adults and children for God to protect us from bad things. 

I was reflecting on this. So often we want God to take our troubles away. To end the pain. To deliver us from evil. And I want to affirm that it is good and right for us to ask him to do this – after all, there is firm biblical precedent for this – many psalms call out to the Lord to save us, to deliver us from evil people or bad things (eg, Psalm 54:1-2, 59:1, 64:1, 69:1, 70:1, 71:2, etc.). There is even a line in the very prayer that our Lord Jesus taught us to pray, ‘deliver us from evil’ (Matthew 6:13). And the Lord delights to answer our prayers and save and deliver his people from all kinds of trials. 

However, this is not the complete picture. Because the Bible also richly describes the place of suffering in the life of believers – suffering which involves the Lord allowing us at times to be impacted by evil people and bad things – like a pandemic. Just this morning I was reading Revelation 7:9-17, where in v14 it is revealed that the great multitude in white robes who stand before God are the ones who have come out of the ‘great tribulation’. Whatever the ‘great tribulation’ is, it doesn’t sound like a life unaffected by suffering – in fact, quite the reverse. In fitting with this, Hebrews 11:35-39 lists a whole lot of painful things that various people of God have suffered because of their faith, and multiple apostles write about the place of suffering in our spiritual formation – e.g, see Paul in Romans 5:3-5, James in James 1:2-4, and Peter in 1 Peter 1:6-7.

So I could just pray for God to end the Covid-19 pandemic, but it seems apparent that there is a good and right place for hardship in the Christian life. 

So, how do I communicate to people around me that it is both good and right to ask God for protection from bad things, but that if they still come it does not mean that he hasn’t heard us, or that he doesn’t exist, or that he doesn’t care about us? 

I am reminded of another passage, in Daniel 3:17-18, where Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego are before king Nebuchadnezzar, and are being threatened with being thrown into the blazing furnace if they don’t worship the king’s statue. In their defence, they both affirm that God is able to save them from the furnace and will save them from Nebuchadnezzar’s hand, but also affirm that, ‘even if he does not…’ they would not serve the king’s gods. This response both affirms God’s ability to act in this world to protect his people, and that he will ultimately save us (which, as Christians, we know he will do when Jesus returns), but also expresses that God is free to do otherwise – his power and his faithfulness are not undermined by him not always acting in line with our requests. We are called to worship him alone regardless of how he answers our prayers. And in fact, as we have seen elsewhere in Scripture, he may have very good reasons to let us suffer for a time (see the list of apostolic passages above).

So, when confronted with requests like our starting one, I do two things. On the one hand, I do indeed pray for God to end the pandemic. However, I also want to affirm that God greater and wiser than us, and that even if he doesn’t, I know he is good and faithful, and I pray he would give us strength to endure whatever hardship we are facing, and for God to grow us in our character and our trust of him through this time.