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Is the coronavirus the wages of sin or a gateway to grace?

Romans 6.12-23

The New Revised Standard Version rather slavishly follows the Authorised Version of the Bible here, on which it’s based. Wilfully ignoring the modern connotations of a phrase like ‘you once presented your members as slaves to impurity’, it persists in using this rather archaic translation of a Greek word that really means ‘limbs’. What Paul seems to be saying is that in the past we were zombies for sin, but now we that we’ve given our lives to Christ we can enjoy God’s free gift of eternal life - we can truly live in him.

Mind you, taking into account the conduct of American presidents past and present, it’s easy to understand why the American translators of the New Revised Standard Version obstinately stuck with the word ‘members’. Perhaps they felt it’s new sexualised meaning wasn’t entirely inappropriate. What Paul is saying still works when it’s understood as a way of allowing God to take control of some of our more fundamental drives and instincts.

But in a time of global pandemic this seems almost a distraction from Paul’s concluding argument, that ‘the wages of sin is death’. With sea levels rising, the weather see-sawing from one extreme to the other, forest fires occurring more often as human beings encroach on the last wildernesses, and global pandemics becoming more of a threat because we’ve been travelling in greater numbers around the world while at the same time putting wildlife under ever greater pressure, some people have seen events like the Coronavirus as a judgement on us for taking our planet for granted. They think the wages of using the Earth as a limitless resource is going to be death for our civilisation, unless we seize the opportunity the pandemic has given us to turn over our lives to righteousness instead.

The other day I watched a TV advert that, instead of encouraging us to buy more clothes, was encouraging us to wash them more gently so that they last longer. From slavery to fashion to everlasting clothes - is this new mindset one of God’s free gifts to us?

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