COVID-19 and the End Times

You’re not crazy if you’ve wondered whether or not COVID-19 is a sign of the end times. Whether it’s the sci-fi movie feel of a world-wide virus without a cure, or the political and conspiracy theory nature of it, you’re not wrong to wonder. 

While this pandemic is completely unprecedented, a strong biblical case can be made against COVID-19 being a sign of the end times.

The verse that most of our end times fear stems from is Revelation 6:7-8, which reads “When he opened the fourth seal, I heard the voice of the fourth living creature say, ‘Come!’ And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.”

While COVID-19 can be defined as a “pestilence” and it has killed a significant number of people, in order for it to be the Revelation pestilence, it would also need to be a judgment from God. 

One of the clearest examples of judgment in the Bible is the plagues sent to Egypt. These plagues were sent because Pharaoh refused to let the Israelites leave and worship God, even though he was specifically commanded (by God through Aaron and Moses) to do exactly that. If you take a close look at this story in Scripture, you’ll see that a judgment from God produces a few criteria. A judgment from God is:

• supernatural, not natural 
• preceded by a loud and clear warning
• something that targets a specific group of people for specific sins

In layman’s terms (because that’s the best I can do for you when it comes to diseases) COVID-19 is a virus that infected animals and then mutated and, through a wet market in Wuhan, China, began infecting humans as well. While this sounds “supernatural” it’s actually not. This is simply how viruses work. Are viruses creepy and difficult to trace? Absolutely. Are they supernatural? Not so much. 

If you look at the plagues that God sent to the Egyptians in Exodus, you will gain a better understanding of what supernatural events look like. The water of the Nile river was INSTANTLY turned into blood, and dust literally BECAME gnats. Those are completely supernatural events: meaning, there’s no way they could happen without God’s intervention. 

Even the plagues that involve “natural” events are not actually natural: yes, the death of livestock in the fifth plague is a natural occurrence (all animals die at some point), but the INSTANT death of ONLY the livestock belonging to the Egyptians is supernatural. Similarly, boils are a natural occurrence, however the sudden infliction of boils on every single Egyptian is not natural. 

The second and third criteria for judgment plagues work together. COVID-19 is primarily killing elderly people and those who are immunocompromised. In order for COVID-19 to be a judgment from God, we would have needed at some point in the recent past to have heard a specific warning concerning a sin that this demographic was committing. As far as I know, the elderly and the immunocompromised are not any more sinful than any other demographic on earth. 

If anything, COVID-19 is simply a blatant reminder of the fact that this world is broken, sinful, and not our real home.