Do you ever feel like God is trying to get our attention?

So the four angels, who had been prepared for the hour, the day, the month, and the year, were released to kill a third of mankind.  --Revelation 9:15

We are 60 days into the COVID-19 disruption where I live.  Other countries started their quarantine much earlier, I know, and have therefore suffered much worse economic disruption. The World Health Organization recommended a very aggressive limitation of economic activity very early on, hoping that being pro-active in this situation would "flatten the curve" of the number of expected cases, and therefore the hospitals and healthcare systems would not be overwhelmed.

The mortality rate among those who were infected is somewhere between 1.3% and 3%.  Thankfully, however, most people will not be infected.  Although it is a serious public health threat, it is not nearly as deadly as once predicted.  As an example, if the same number of people in the United States come down with the coronavirus as contracted the flu last year (about 35 million), then up to 500,000 could die.  Statistically, given a US population of 330 million, the number of projected deaths from the pandemic would be just 0.15% of the population, or just 1.5 deaths for every 1000 people.

I have heard reporters in the media refer to this pandemic as something "of biblical proportions."  Those reporters have no idea what true biblical proportion means.

The eighth chapter of Revelation describes a judgment in which one third of the ocean will turn to blood, and one third of all sea creatures will die.  I have heard of an oceanic condition called Red Tide, but it has never resulted in the death of a third of all sea life (including ships and their crews, by the way--read Revelation 8:9-11).

The ninth chapter of Revelation describes a judgment in which one third of all mankind is killed.  Given the current world population of 7.8 billion people, a 33% mortality rate would result in 2.5 billion deaths in a short period of time.  According to www.worldometers.info, only 135,000 people died today, and the annual death rate currently is about 49 million per year.  As the world population increases, the number equal to one third of the population also increases, so by the time this prophecy comes true, it could affect many more.

If a flu-like virus with a mortality rate of just 3% has gotten world-wide attention, can you imagine the effect of a cataclysmic event ten times as deadly?  It should wake us up as to how powerful God is.  Yet Revelation 9:20 speaks of how hard-hearted the World is: "The rest of mankind, who were not killed by these plagues, did not repent of the works of their hands nor give up worshiping demons and idols of gold and silver and bronze and stone and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk, nor did they repent of their murders or their sorceries or their sexual immorality or their thefts."

I read an economics textbook in college that referred to the Black Plague in Europe, around 1346-1353 A.D.  At that time, almost 60% of the population of Europe died, but according to this economist, the result was a concentration of wealth among the survivors.  The two great social forces in the time were the State and the Church, and both sought to profit from this new-found wealth.  The state government, which had taxing authority, edged out the Catholic church and grew more powerful in the ensuing years.

I am afraid that the COVID-19 crisis has revealed the power of the State in the modern world.  Almost every government represented in the United Nations has declared a national emergency, and those within government are finding ways to profit from it.  Political theorist Saul Alinsky wrote, "Never let a crisis go to waste."

I am hopeful that God will send a spiritual revival in the hearts of people, so that they can see the absolute power and authority of God in the middle of the pandemic.  However, I can see that people are hard-hearted, and I am afraid that they are distracted by wealth redistribution and concentration of government power, and that they are looking to themselves or to the government to find a way to go about their day-to-day lives.