The best way to understand God's character is too look at Jesus. Like father, like son. Jesus is the best revelation of God that there has ever been.
Jesus went about healing the sick. He was moved with compassion when a leper asked him for help. He wept when his friend died. Healing was probably the most dominant part of his ministry. In light of this revelation of his Father, we can be sure that God is not the cause of the coronavirus pandemic.
The other important aspect of our reality is that we are engaged in a spiritual battle; and war is rough. Humans gave the spiritual powers of evil authority to be active on the earth. As people turn away from Jesus in many parts of the modern world, God is being squeezed out of the world that he created and gave to his children, so the powers of evil are flexing their muscles.
The spiritual powers of evil love to kill and destroy. The coronavirus could be an accidental occurrence, but given the death and pain that it has produced, it is more likely to be the work of evil spiritual powers. They assisted God with the creation of the world, before the fall, so they understand how DNA functions. The spiritual powers of evil are not very creative, so when they discover a tactic that works, they are like to keep on doing it. They are currently trying out something that they would like to do more of to see how effective it would be. It might not be the worst that they can do.
Nothing big happens on earth by accident. All serious events are the result of interactions between the spiritual realms and the physical world that we see. When I worked as a statistician, I discovered that the key to understanding activities and event is to classify them correctly. If a business codes some of its expenses as loans, its profit will look better, buts its accounts will be a distortion of reality.
A key to classifying events correctly is understanding the full range of events that can occur. If we only expect one type of event, we will assume that is what they all are.
A secular materialistic world view assumes that all events are the result of physical causes.
People who believe in meticulous providence assume that every event is totally controlled by God.
Warning Event
In Prophetic Event, I describe the range of possible prophetic events and set out criteria for distinguishing between them. Understanding this range makes it easier to categorise particular events when they occur. This enables us to be clearer about things that are happening in our world.
The COVID-19 virus was not a Shaking Event, in which God shakes the people to shock his people into turning back to him. The reason is that, as far as I can tell, no Christians prophets warned of this pandemic in advance and God does nothing with warning his prophets (Amos 3:7). None of the prophets mentioned the COVID-19 virus in their 2020 prognostications. Since God did not warn of this event, he is most likely not the cause of it. The coronavirus pandemic is a Warning Event.
If the coronavirus is the work of the spiritual powers of evil, and they have been able to release it because humans have given them authority on the earth, God cannot just snap his fingers and remove it. Before that can happen, the authority situation on earth must change.
In this situation, the best thing to do is to pray that the gospel would go out in the power of the Spirit, so that the spiritual powers of evil are squeezed out of the strongholds they have gained. That will take longer than we would prefer, but it might be more effective than asking God for quick solutions. During a Warning Event, follows of Jesus should gather together, so they can provide spiritual protection for each other.
Old Testament Plagues
In the Old Testament, it seems like God caused plagues. The reason is that the OId Testament writers only had a partial view of reality. When thinking about plagues, they could only see two parties to the problem: humans and God. Apart from a small glimpse in Job 1 and Daniel 10, they did not understand the working of the spiritual powers of evil. They did not see the machinations going on between them, before evil events occurred on earth. It seems that God did not want to give powers of evil glory by revealing what they were up to until he had defeated them on the cross.
So because a plague seemed to have a supernatural cause, the Old Testament writers assumed that God was its cause. That was all that they could see.
Since the ministry of Jesus on earth, we now have a broader understanding of realities. We see three parties at work: humans, God and the spiritual powers of evil. This changes our understanding of what was happening in the Old Testament. If we read the Old Testament accounts through the eyes of Jesus' revelation, we will see that the spiritual powers of evil were sending plagues on the people of God, when they lost their spiritual protection. They sent plagues on the enemies of God's people when there were disputes different factions of evil spiritual powers.
The spiritual powers of evil are not united as we too often assume. If the Holy Spirit can't unite the church, how would the devil be able to unite his unruly lot. They often fight against each other. While some were working through Pharaoh, others were happy to have a go against him. God just had to let them get at it.
The Old Testament accounts are still true, because God is ultimately responsible for everything that happens on earth, because he created it. He is not directly responsible for the plagues, but he is ultimately responsible, so he does not mind taking the blame for things these did not directly do. That was better than giving glory to the powers of evil who did not deserve it. Accepting blame for things that you are not responsible for is cross behaviour, which is God's heart.
