What is this thing?
It’s a question we all have asked, because of the strangeness.
In fact that’s the most prominent symptom: an uncanny feeling accompanied by confusion and fear, all hallmarks of the evil one.
We are being terrorized, and God has allowed it — COVID-19 — as a purification. Because of it we have stopped. We have stepped back from daily life. We have reflected (hopefully). Hopefully, we are not obsessed. We have re-evaluated — whether one is an idle pastor alone in a rectory or a health-care worker surrounded by mayhem or those confined to their homes — appreciating now the “little” things in life (and also doing a bit of birdwatching, plus praying).
This is all being brought up due to the news that test results indicated nearly three million people in New York State may already have antibodies to it — have brushed against it.
If that statistic holds up (more than twenty percent of those living in New York City itself), it means the virus is far less deadly — far less actually, physically fatal — than initially believed. It makes the uproar a bit less warranted. How can we socially distance if so many already have carried it? The death rate: thus far, about one in seven thousand.
You can see the deaths-per-hundred-thousand in your state, or county here.
Call it unusual, odd, anomalous. Those are all synonyms. That “s” in “strange” has coiled, has wrapped itself, around us.
Of course, social distancing has proved important, and there are other ways of judging coronavirus. One is by the descriptions and photos of emergency rooms: The annual flu doesn’t cause folks to die in hallways, doesn’t lead to use of refrigerator trucks to act as morgues, and doesn’t necessitate, as in New York, a mass community grave.
No question: something way out of the ordinary has occurred and is afoot and wends to an as yet undisclosed destiny.
And this is how terrorism works.
On September 11, under three thousand died, yet the entire nation shut down. The reason: an act of terror. Yes, people died. Yes, there were extraordinarily unusual scenes.
But the lethality, when looked at nationally, was minuscule. What was your chance of being in the Twin Towers or Pentagon or that plane over Pennsylvania? One in 100,000? So far, coronavirus is about 16.66 times as deadly (yes, that was the actual calculation as of yesterday).
During 9/11 it was the fear. It was the terror. This is how Satan operates: making loud bangs or sending shadows or causing screams in the dark of night. He confabulates in nightmares (just as now so many are having corona dreams). Note how this virus hates sunshine.
New York, America, and the world are haunted. We have been terrorized.
New York, America, and the world brought it upon themselves (this microbial version of al Qaeda) by seeking refuge in what is worldly instead of seeking refuge in the embrace of God.
It’s like a reverse neutron bomb. That was a proposed nuclear device that killed with radiation but left buildings standing. The coronavirus, on the opposite hand, seems to be targeting “buildings” (our institutions and way of life) much more than causing human deaths. And though it has already gone much farther than any other “sign of the times” — edging into the category of chastisement — God’s Mercy is still operating.
It has what a researcher called the “secret power” of stealth asymptomatic transmission. It causes “secret pneumonia.” It can remain in the eyes for weeks. It turned the skin of two Chinese doctors black. The head of W.H.O. called it a “devil.”
A televangelist Candice Smithyman, at Freedom Destiny Church in Orange Park, Florida, where her husband is senior pastor, says the new coronavirus is a “demonic force.” A strange story, she relates. “On Saturday, April 4, at 4 a.m., I was abruptly awoken by God after an encounter with a strong demonic force that came into my bedroom and tried to put a sickness upon me on my chest. I cried out in my sleep three times as I rebuked this demon. This dream was not because I was receiving the coronavirus; it was a warning dream, to tell the people that this virus is a demonic force and there is a way to deal with it spiritually, as well as biologically.“
For discernment.
“Are we worshipping God or worshipping the fear of this virus?” asked this evangelist. “Have we made this bigger than what it really is in our minds so the fear of the demon of coronavirus has become an idol?”
“It’s a very silent, evil disease,” said the daughter of a preacher who died from it. “I want people to understand how fast, how secretly this disease can creep up on you,” said this woman, Lisa Schwartz.
Hopefully, it will end soon — whatever “end” means. It has confounded everyone. It seems dangerous. It doesn’t seem dangerous. It seems exaggerated. It does not seem exaggerated. It is there and here and there again. Nowhere or everywhere. What does it really look like? A pathogenic poltergeist. There will be concerns for months, if not years. We’ll never forget the Great Terror of 2020.
Hopefully, little doses of it are causing those anti-bodies and gradually the populace is becoming immunized. How else to explain why, if twenty percent have been exposed, there aren’t even more dead in New York?
If we don’t discard our materialism and pride, our abuse of how God made the world, our hatred and vitriol, our idolatry, our fornication, our pornography (the purchase of which has increased due to those government checks), the terror will come again, and again; there will be a worse pandemic, or a worse something. (Remember this word: prion.)
Before corona hit, it seemed all anyone cared about was what went “viral” on Facebook or Twitter or Youtube. That’s all we had time for.
Now we have a virus indeed.
[resources Tower of Light]