Stop the spread! The mandate to isolate and mitigate are found everywhere today, as we seek to stomp out COVID-19. There are calls to glean from other countries as to how to combat the rapidly advancing pandemic. And rightly so, as there is much to learn from this crisis on a variety of levels.
Strangely enough, as we seek to put to death this Corona killer, I believe COVID-19 can remind Christians of the need to put to death the components of our earthly nature (Col. 3:5).
Dr. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, made the following statement recently:
“We feel that the mitigation that we are doing is having an effect. It’s very difficult to quantitate it because you have two dynamics things going on at the same time. You have the virus going up and the mitigation trying to push it down.”
I’ve always thought of Dr. Fauci as an incredible leader and scientist from my time, years ago, at the National Institutes of Health; however, when he spoke those words, for a moment, he took on the role of theologian, as he inadvertently described the battle within a believer, which Paul articulates below in Romans 6.
8 Now if we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also live with Him, 9 knowing that Christ, having been raised from the dead, is never to die again; death no longer is master over Him. 10 For the death that He died, He died to sin once for all; but the life that He lives, He lives to God. 11 Even so consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
12 Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, 13 and do not go on presenting the members of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those alive from the dead, and your members as instruments of righteousness to God. 14 For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law but under grace.
In the same manner that there is an unquestionable progressive spread occurring through COVID-19 physically in society, Scripture makes clear that sin operates individually in the same way within a believer. Notice the progression warned against in Psalm 1 from walking to standing to sitting:
How blessed is the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked,
Nor stand in the path of sinners,
Nor sit in the seat of scoffers!
So, while we wait anxiously for a vaccine and treatment for COVID-19, which wars against our bodies, we heed Peter’s spiritual warning,
“I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.” (1 Pet. 2:11)
And we take comfort that the medication for mortification of sin is readily available in obedience to the Word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit.
It is an inescapable reality that, even as believers saved by grace and legally imputed with Christ’s righteousness (Rom. 5:19), we will never be free of sin in our lives on this side of heaven.
However, a great resource in this battle is a sermon by John MacArthur: Winning the Battle Against Sin.
