With all the finger-pointing going on, I’d like to share a piece one of our viewers sent me a few days ago. In my humble opinion, it is a point of view that deserves a hearing. So, with a few tweaks for spacing purposes, here is a fresh perspective from D. Bryan White:

The COVID virus has produced its share of finger-pointing over the last few months. Some good, God-fearing "saints" see God's judgment in all that has transpired, particularly in the last few days. So, In light of these heated arguments from the Right and Left, perhaps it would be well to refer back to the quintessential commentary on the wisdom or foolishness of construing everything as God's will, found in the book of Job.

The rain was believed by the devout of old to be a blessing, famine a curse—this idea extrapolated from Deuteronomy. Yet Job's rejoinder in his own defense was the observation: rain fell on the just and the unjust. The 3 visiting theologians at that impromptu Ash Heap Summit were sure Job's troubles were a divine sign of God's open displeasure over his secret sins but had no answer to Job's paradoxical observation—except to double down and insist his misfortune was a heaven directed curse.

When God finally gets his chance to comment, he ups the ante by observing—rain falls in the desert too—desert to be seen here as a metaphor for a place where neither the righteous nor wicked live.

Hmmm . . . So rain can be simply the product of a wandering thunderstorm, nothing more!

Perhaps we can use this to point out that the COVID virus travels on the wind, and lands wherever. Heaven has nothing to do with wind direction nor its ill effects. I say this for I have heard some good Adventist friends in California pointing to the Napa Valley fires as God's clear judgment against wineries. But I note as well, the Adventist Review is reporting several Adventists pastors have lost homes in St. Helena and Angwin! Were they too under some pointed wrath of Heaven?

Was the fact so many Republicans tested positive for COVID over the last 48 hours a divine punishment? Or, was another more predictable law in play—“as you sow, so shall you reap.” Plant squash seed and you get . . . squash. Build a house on a dry brushy hillside, and the fire is a natural risk. Put a bunch of people, Republican or Democrat, in close quarters without precautions, and you get a COVID outbreak. God is inserting into the din of “words without knowledge" a reminder of another law—cause, and effect.

The only judgment threatened by heaven in Job's story was against the "friends" whose self-righteous finger-pointing was offensive to God.

A little more prayer for our enemies and a little less finger-pointing does seem to be a far more bankable, God-sanctioned moral during times of crisis—then—and now.