By CHRIS FIELDS
Only God can create, heal, restore
“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Genesis chapters 1 and 2 are the only true accounts of creating everything ever created, and it was done by the Creator, God. Everything since then has just been a discovery of what God created.
Musicians have discovered how to put sounds together harmoniously and melodically. Artists have discovered how to translate images onto canvases. Inventors figure out how to take one preexistent substance and put it with another preexistent substance, thus discovering something totally new to humankind. Scientists do the same, discovering but never creating, while another comes along and finds flaws in the initial discovery, thus making the discovery better — and the cycle continues.
What’s unrealized is that it’s all just a discovery of something already known by the all-knowing God. The Bible tells us in Ecclesiastes 1:9, “There is nothing new under the sun. What has been will be again and what’s been done will be done again.”
Creation accounted for everything. God gave us everything we need to be successful and excel. Our purpose is to maximize what’s already been created, and we’ve done that exceptionally, Christians and heathens alike. But it seems in all our discovering, we forget we are only discovering what the Creator meant for us to discover. We forget to see the Creator in the discovery. We forget to see His goodness and His love and His mercy on display in the discovery.
This last year introduced us to a deadly virus that was new to the general public but known to those who had studied it and its effects. Before the latter part of 2019, only those who studied the coronavirus knew of its existence. What they didn’t know was how deadly it would be when introduced to the world, but God knew.
With the introduction of COVID-19 came one of the more remarkable achievements of medical science in discovering an immune response against the virus, which enabled the development and testing of an effective vaccine for COVID in less than 12 months. (The next-fastest vaccine development was the vaccination for the mumps, which took four years.)
What makes this even more remarkable was that science could never grasp the pathology of COVID-19 or its symptoms. They couldn’t discover or predict who was going to be affected, how they were going to be affected, or how they would recover, so everybody went on lockdown. But they discovered a vaccine faster than any other in the history of humanity. Imagine that! If this doesn’t sound like God, I don’t know what does.
For all of a year, I had to listen as Christians prayed and pled for relief and deliverance from the effects of COVID-19, and now that relief has come, Christians are reluctant to accept it. I had to sit and listen to Christians pray for a return to normalcy and life pre-pandemic, and when the answer came, they rejected it.
It’s no surprise, though, because the Bible is full of examples of how the Israelites prayed the same prayers of deliverance and providence, only to reject the answer when it came. Funny thing is, the main instance of answered prayers for deliverance and providence came in the form of Jesus, God Himself in the flesh, and Jews are still rejecting it to this day. So it’s no surprise that a lot of Christians today don’t see the miracle in the COVID-19 vaccination. They don’t see God’s providential hand moving and healing the nation. They don’t see His restoration power restoring and replenishing what’s been stolen.
I hear Christians day after day talk about how they aren’t going to get vaccinated and why, citing God as their source of reason and quoting Bible verses to justify their reasons, and I think, “Do you even know God?”
The God I know heals, restores and provides. The God I know makes the discovery of His creation available to His created as they need it for their benefit. Not to be divisive but to display His goodness, grace and mercy. To display His wisdom and power and to display His love. So if you haven’t been vaccinated and you are citing God as your reasoning for not being vaccinated, stop. Only He can create, heal and restore. Humanity can only discover it.
Chris Fields is the founder and executive director of H.E.A.L. Mississippi and a graduate in kinesiology with advance studies in nutrition. He serves as a clinical exercise physiologist/CPT and is credentialed in Exercise Is Medicine through American College of Sports Medicine.
