Our spiritual Ebola

I believe that God often uses our physical world to mirror spiritual realities. When I see the fear and death surrounding the massive Ebola outbreak in West Africa, with the quarantined patients and the medical professionals in alien-like protective suits, fighting an often deadly disease with no known cure, I think of our spiritual Ebola.

It's a far deadlier disease that has contaminated us all, leaving us completely alone and quarantined in our desperate condition. And yet, a physical disease strikes more fear in us than the spiritual disease we already are dying from. We fear an Ebola outbreak coming to our country, meanwhile we are completely unaware of our own spiritual death.

One day, God will come to us in His holiness, unable to touch us in our sin, and will cast us out into eternal separation from him. He is the doctor, clean and wearing a protective suit. We are the sick, unclean, untouchable, dying. We will burn in our contamination, still contagious even in our death. Unless, of course, we take His medicine. The only cure is the vaccine of His Son, who, on our behalf, walked into the Ebola ward without any suit, suffered the death of an Ebola patient, and conquered the feared disease.

We now have no fear of death, those who reside with Jesus, the Great Cure. But healing exists only for those of us who wake up to the reality that an outbreak much worse than Ebola lies within our very hearts, and we have much more to fear than physical death.

"The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge." Proverbs 1:7a