Joshua Tan

“God is giving the world in the coronavirus outbreak, as in all other calamities, a physical picture of the moral horror and spiritual ugliness of God-belittling sin... Here’s my suggestion: God put the physical world under a curse so that the physical horrors we see around us in diseases and calamities would become a vivid picture of how horrible sin is. In other words, physical evil is a parable, a drama, a signpost pointing to the moral outrage of rebellion against God... Calamities are God’s previews of what sin deserves and will one day receive in judgment a thousand times worse. They are warnings. They are wake-up calls to see the moral horror and spiritual ugliness of sin against God.”
― John Piper, Coronavirus and Christ

“First lines are particularly important as they draw people in and help unlock the whole song. Last lines are also important, driving people toward a big vision or challenge of commitment or expression of praise. We are looking for delightful phrases, little twists on things we have heard before, both freshness and familiarity, easily understood but engaging.”
― Keith Getty, Sing!: How Worship Transforms Your Life, Family, and Church

“The coronavirus is God’s thunderclap call for all of us to repent and realign our lives with the infinite worth of Christ... The reason God exposes us to such losses is to rouse us to rely on Christ. Or to put it another way, the reason he makes calamity the occasion for offering Christ to the world is that the supreme, all-satisfying greatness of Christ shines more brightly when Christ sustains joy in suffering.”
― John Piper, Coronavirus and Christ

“The question of god lay at the heart of second-Temple Jewish life. Each affirmation, each act of worship, contained the question: not Who? (they knew the answer to that), nor yet Why? (again, they knew: because he was the creator, the covenant god), or particularly Where? (land and Temple remained the focus), but How? What? and, above all, When? How, they wanted to know, would YHWH deliver them? What did he want them to be doing in the meantime? And, When would it happen? The resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth provided the early Christians with a new, unexpected and crystal clear answer to these three questions; and, by doing so, it raised the first three in a quite new way.”
― N.T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God