Early in the current coronavirus concern, on March 13, I sent an e-mail containing the following:
I just returned from Safeway. No toilet paper or tissues. Almost no bread. Lines at checkout. Many more people than a usual mid-day Friday.With testing rolling out, I expect perhaps a quarter of a million confirmed cases in the US within two weeks. I’d expect maybe 300 deaths in the same time frame.Panic will continue for the next ten days or so.Two or three weeks down the road, it will begin to be realized that it isn’t the disaster that some fear. China first, then Italy, will begin to return to normal. Things will begin to return to normal in the US. A month down the road, other events will push to the top of the news cycle. Economic damage will linger for several months.
Gov. Jared Polis offered grave predictions and a desperate call to action Friday over the future of the coronavirus, warning that tens of thousands of Coloradans could die if social distancing is not practiced, while reminding people that the effects of his orders restricting contact will not be seen for at least a few weeks.
The news conference marked the governor’s starkest warning to date, as he laid out two scenarios for the COVID-19 crisis — both of which he said could involve serious losses of life if the person-to-person spread of the disease isn’t slowed.
“Colorado hasn’t seen the worst of this. The United States hasn’t seen the worst of this. The world hasn’t seen the worst of this,” Polis said.
Citing modeling by the Colorado School of Public Health, Polis said it’s estimated that each person who contracts COVID-19 in Colorado is infecting an additional three to four people, and each of those infects another three to four — an exponential spread.
Under those two scenarios — depending on whether patients with COVID-19 are infecting three people each or four — either 23,000 or 33,200 people in Colorado could die by June if no social distancing is practiced, Polis said.
But Colorado is doing better than that, Polis noted. About 50% of the population was estimated to be practicing social distancing by avoiding crowds or isolating themselves before he issued his stay-at-home order this week. But that’s not nearly enough, he said.
As I write this, June is six weeks away. The governor has placed the state on, as I call it, “martial law lite.” I watched a local newscast last evening that reported on the lack of activity and staff layoffs in hospital emergency rooms and throughout healthcare in general. The same newscast showed the governor, a politically ambitious progressive, at a news conference in a large convention center, wearing a hard hat and with sleeves rolled up, presiding over the construction of overflow space for hundreds of non-critical patients. The predicted surge in patients, earlier slated for mid-April, has now been pushed back to May. Currently nearly three hundred Coloradans who tested positive for the virus have died. The governor is in a good position with his predictions. If the number doesn’t continue to grow rapidly, he can take partial credit for his tough social distancing measures, and if perchance the numbers grow rapidly, it will be well within the scope of his projections. At the national level, projections of deaths of those with positive tests also have been completely unreliable and have moved steadily downward.
In 1798, Thomas Malthus argued that human population always grows more rapidly than the human food supply until war, disease or famine reduces the number of people. He famously predicted that gains in living standards would be undermined as human population growth outstripped food production, and so would drive living standards back toward subsistence. History has shown that he was completely wrong. In more recent times, countless projections have been made about climate change originated by human activity. Next to none have come to pass in predicted time frames. Thomas Sowell has noted, “What can we be certain of from history? That human beings have been wrong innumerable times, by vast amounts, and with catastrophic results. Yet today there are still people who think that anyone who disagrees with them must be either bad or not know what he is talking about.”
Human predictions, even those based in scientific data, are, well, often wrong.
There is a source of predictions, however, that is always accurate. The Bible is filled with prophecies, principles, and promises that we can see over and over are completely correct. Upon completion of Solomon’s Temple,
Then the Lord appeared to Solomon by night, and said to him: “I have heard your prayer, and have chosen this place for Myself as a house of sacrifice. When I shut up heaven and there is no rain, or command the locusts to devour the land, or send pestilence among My people, if My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land. Now My eyes will be open and My ears attentive to prayer made in this place. For now I have chosen and sanctified this house, that My name may be there forever; and My eyes and ]My heart will be there perpetually. As for you, if you walk before Me as your father David walked, and do according to all that I have commanded you, and if you keep My statutes and My judgments, then I will establish the throne of your kingdom, as I covenanted with David your father, saying, ‘You shall not fail to have a man as ruler in Israel.’
“But if you turn away and forsake My statutes and My commandments which I have set before you, and go and serve other gods, and worship them, then I will uproot them from My land which I have given them; and this house which I have sanctified for My name I will cast out of My sight, and will make it a proverb and a byword among all peoples.” (2 Chronicles 7:12-19)
The rest of the Old Testament is a fulfillment of this pronouncement by God. Following Solomon, the kingdom divided. The northern kingdom of Israel fell away from following God and never returned to following Him. That kingdom was destroyed some seven centuries before Christ. The southern kingdom of Judah, headquartered at Jerusalem, also fell into times of apostasy but enjoyed times of revival and sometimes spectacular deliverance over the centuries before being overrun by the Babylonians. Before the captivity, prophets like Isaiah and Jeremiah under divine inspiration made many detailed and accurate prophecies, some fulfilled in their time, some fulfilled later in history, and some yet to be fulfilled. Even after the fall of the kingdom, God continued to fulfill promises made to Abraham and to the Hebrew nation, preserving the Jews and eventually restoring the nation in their homeland. During the captivity, Daniel received a vision that, coupled with other scriptures, lays out with stunning accuracy the course of world history, even dating the first advent of Messiah. While some prophesied events are yet future, the Old Testament is filled with amazing prophesies that have been fulfilled just as they were given.
Jesus spoke words of prophecy. He knew why He had come; He told the disciples of His impending death. Mark 10:32-34 records,
Now they were on the road, going up to Jerusalem, and Jesus was going before them; and they were amazed. And as they followed they were afraid. Then He took the twelve aside again and began to tell them the things that would happen to Him: “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and to the scribes; and they will condemn Him to death and deliver Him to the Gentiles; and they will mock Him, and scourge Him, and spit on Him, and kill Him. And the third day He will rise again.”
His death happened just as the Old Testament prophets had foretold, just as Isaiah (chapter 53) graphically described prophetically some seven centuries earlier, just as Jesus on more than one occasion had told His disciples would happen. And He rose from the grave, in fulfillment of numerous prophecies, just as He told the disciples that He would. Following the resurrection, He returned to heaven, and promised to come again:
Now when He had spoken these things, while they watched, He was taken up, and a cloud received Him out of their sight. And while they looked steadfastly toward heaven as He went up, behold, two men stood by them in white apparel, who also said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand gazing up into heaven? This same Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will so come in like manner as you saw Him go into heaven. (Acts 1:9-11)”
God knows all things. He created all things that we know and touch and feel and perceive. He is above space and time. He can predict with perfect accuracy all that will ever happen. It should come as no surprise that human predictions are not always so accurate. Humans are inherently not only imperfect but sinful and apart from God. Humans need to be saved from their sins. The Bible is replete with the message that we are lost, but in His grace God has made a way, the only way, for us to receive a new nature and eternal life. Jesus Christ, the Son of God incarnate, came to earth as a man, died, and rose again as the only acceptable and necessary atonement for our sin. In His divine wisdom and grace, God has decreed that if we but end our rebellion against Him, turn from our sins, turn to Him in faith, and accept what Christ has done on our behalf, we can know eternal life. That is not a human prediction. That is His promise.
Michael Stertz 