Comfort for Our 2020 Imperfect World

The misery of the COVID-19 worldwide pandemic reveals that we are all alike.  All men are conceived and born in sin.  All men are by nature corrupt.  All men are the same. And if all are the same, we could conclude that this is normal. If we all had six fingers on each hand, we would think that this is normal. We would not know better. In like manner, all men are depraved. Thus we tend to think that this is natural. Imperfection is a part of humanity. “To err is human,” they say.  

Yet it is not; imperfection is abnormal. God created us perfect but we have become depraved through our fall into sin. This teaches us that we should not judge the correctness of what we do by looking to what most other people do. Sometimes we say, “everybody does it!” which seems to imply that it must be acceptable. However, what our friends or society in the mainstream accepts is not necessarily what God accepts.

There is no way in which we can come to know our misery from what we experience in ourselves, in fellow man or in daily life. Yet we have seen that it is very important that we possess a true knowledge of our sins and misery, otherwise we will not turn to God and seek the forgiveness of our sins and redemption from our misery. From where, then, do we come to know our sins and misery?