Perhaps you’ve seen, as I have, the argument that it’s silly to look for a purpose behind our pandemic—because how could we know the mind of God? We already know the world is sinful and broken—do we need any other reason for a global pandemic? Just sit tight, lament, and pray for relief.

If your mind has gone down that road, you know it’s pretty bleak.

Certainly, we should lament. And we know that we’ll never understand the mind of God. But Desiring God founder and TGC Council member John Piper offers a more hopeful view in his brand-new book, Coronavirus and Christ.

“God has dealt bitterly with the world right now,” Piper told Collin Hansen on his Gospelbound podcast. “Yet I’m going to make the claim that Christians can experience sweetness in it. The key is this: knowing that the same sovereignty that could stop the virus—and doesn’t—is the very same sovereignty that sustains the soul in it.”

In all of history’s painful stories—the fall in Eden, the loss in Ruth, the death of Jesus, the persecution of the early church—God’s purposes remain good. In this, too, “God is doing a billion things . . . and 99.9 percent of them are unknown to us,” Piper said.

But we know every one of them is working for good (Rom. 8:28). So as we sit tight, lament, and pray for relief, we can do so with grateful joy and bright hope.