With everything going on in the world, many people are saying we are close to the great tribulation and end times. We are in a huge pandemic that has killed over 5 million people worldwide so far. In addition to physical death and illness, this pandemic has divided families and friends, and even affected the way we are allowed to worship God in church. If we aren’t in the end times, we are definitely in a tribulation.
The world has been through many tough tribulations before. Smallpox killed over 500 million people, the Spanish Flu killed 50 million and the Plague of Justinian killed 30 to 50 million people. Those pandemics each lasted around 100 years killing 500,000 to 5 million each year. Back then, living conditions were a lot less sanitary and the only way people knew how to avoid getting sick was to avoid sick people. Also, the world of medicine hadn’t evolved enough to help stop the spread of disease or cure it.
Humanity is in a much better position now to fight disease, but pandemics still should wake us up and show us how weak we are both physically and spiritually. Despite the progress we have made to fight disease, we haven’t made much progress in fighting spiritual disease. The internet can be an unsanitary sewer with pornography, gossip, and hate spread all over the place. Living in these conditions, it’s obvious why we also have a spiritual pandemic. Smallpox killed 500 million people, but how many millions of people were spiritually killed by lust? How many millions were spiritually killed by sloth? It’s usually after doing something wrong that we will say, “Well, I’m just human.” We are all just human with all the physical and spiritual weaknesses that go along with being human.
When times are tough, we need to be tougher. When we live in unsanitary conditions, we need to be even more careful. If we don’t become stronger and we don’t become more careful, we will put our lives and the lives of others at risk. Just as disease is contagious, so is sin. But, the good news is that virtue is also contagious and can be used to help the people we come in contact with to avoid sin or overcome it.
As we go through life, we are all writing our own story, but how will our story end? Hopefully, our last chapter will be the best, but when will our last chapter come? Most of us don’t know when we will die, so we should always strive to make each chapter better than the last.
