The Great Imitator

   “Surely, He shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.”  (Psalm 91:3).

   Pestilence. This is one of those antiquated words that dystopian novelists and heavy metal bands like to throw around; but do we know — really know — what the word means? 

   The Exhaustive Concordance of the Bible (more affectionately referred to as the Strong’s Concordance) informs us that pestilence comes from the Hebrew word deber [Strong’s 1698: דֶּבֶר] meaning, “a pandemic occurrence of sickness that causes widespread death, often with the associative meaning of judgment from God.”

   The definition specifies three aspects that must be present for a disease to be categorized as pestilence:

• pandemic sickness

• widespread death

• judgment from God

   With this definition in mind, does COVID-19 fit the bill? 

   A pandemic is an illness prevalent over a whole country or the world. So far, looks like COVID is in the running. Next, has the coronavirus resulted in widespread death? Well, now we are already into a gray area. One must navigate through a minefield of online data, laden with ever-changing “facts” and confirmation bias to even find a reliable or consistently reported d ...

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