A COVID Post-Mortem: Why Did So Many Godly People Get It Wrong?

March 28, 2025 Pastor Chris Oswald

Thesis Many godly people got COVID wrong because decades of "gospel-centered" teaching actually centered on justification alone, leaving believers unprepared to recognize mass deception, and because wooden biblicism prevented them from reasoning out biblical principles about government untrustworthiness and human greed when no explicit "COVID verse" existed.

Series

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Tone

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What's in this sermon

The shape of the argument

20 units across exposition, application, illustration, theological claim, and conclusion. The pastor's argument is built from these moving parts.

Pastoral correction · unit #19

"Oswald closes with a direct charge to humility and mutual learning from COVID mistakes, grounding the entire analysis in rejoicing over God's sovereignty and the security of salvation apart from human discernment. The final note is pastoral warmth rather than victory or judgment."

Doctrinal loci· 12 surfaced

Bibliology · 9 Ethics / Moral Theology · 6 Pastoral Theology · 6 Spiritual Warfare · 5 Anthropology · 4 Sanctification · 4 Soteriology · 4 Hamartiology · 3 Providence / Sovereignty · 2 Covenant Theology · 1 Ecclesiology · 1 Eschatology · 1

Bible citations· 11

Illustrations· 2

hypothetical · unit #8 — Oswald projects forward to warn that the exposure of governmental corruption and greed will be a dominant theme in coming years, potentially even leading to civil conflict, illustrating the scale of the deception that Christians failed to anticipate.
personal story · unit #16 — Oswald uses his own children's caution about Teflon pans as an illustration of the exhausting vigilance required when government authorities abdicate their protective role. He expresses pastoral sympathy for those who chose vaccination simply to escape the mental burden of constant discernment.

Theological claims· 9

Genuine learning requires deliberate reflection on past mistakes, and many Christians have avoided this necessary work regarding their COVID responses. unit #3
The so-called gospel-centered movement was actually justification-centered, focusing narrowly on individual forgiveness while neglecting the gospel's cosmic scope of God judging and defeating deceivers. unit #4
The Bible teaches that people in power are generally untrustworthy and motivated by greed, but evangelical Christians lacked this fundamental category during COVID, causing them to trust authorities who should not have been trusted. unit #7
The Bible teaches throughout that Christians are called to submit to government but not to trust it, a distinction rooted in biblical anthropology that was available to believers in March 2020 but widely ignored. unit #9
Evangelical Christians were trained in a biblicism that demands explicit proof texts for every issue, abandoning the Reformed Protestant tradition of reasoning from Scripture through good and necessary inferences. unit #10
Modern Christians have lost the ability to extract basic principles from Scripture and apply them to their own situations, requiring explicit mention of their specific context rather than doing the mental work themselves. unit #12
The Bible promises that Christians grow in wisdom and discernment through regular practice, so the widespread failure to recognize Anthony Fauci's evil reveals systemic failures in evangelical theological formation. unit #14
Christians were raised in a boomer culture that assumed altruistic motives in leaders, preventing them from recognizing that unregenerate public servants are typically grifters motivated by greed to the point of accepting mass death for personal gain. unit #15
Scripture teaches that the world has always been run largely by people serving the enemy of our souls, and while Christ's reign is advancing, the present moment requires a level of skepticism toward authorities that many Christians were not prepared to exercise. unit #17

Quotations· 3

"God is my everlasting king God is my strength and I will sing his power upholds my feeble frame and I'm victorious through his name Devils retreat when he appears Then I arise above my fears and every fiery dart Repel and vanquish all the force of hell through the Redeemer's precious blood I feel the mighty power of God through the rich aid divinely given I rise from earth and soar to heaven. Dear Lord, Thy weaker saints inspire and fill them with celestial fire on thy kind arm may they rely and all their foes shall surely fly Now, Lord, Thy wondrous power exert and every ransom soul support Give us fresh strength to wing our way to regions of eternal day There may we praise the great I am and shout the victories of the Lamb Raise every chorus to his blood and triumph in the power of God." — R. Burnham (unit #3)

"God judging his enemies is the main theme of the Bible" — Jim Hamilton (unit #6)

"Eisenhower warned explicitly about the development of a military industrial complex in which war became a profit motivation" — Dwight D. Eisenhower (unit #15)

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0 · Oswald frames the sermon as a retrospective analysis of COVID responses without shame or triumphalism, establishing his pastoral ethos of transparent regret-sharing so that wisdom gained through pain can benefit others

Sam, Welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Chris Oswald, senior pastor at Providence Community Church, and you are listening to the Providence Podcast. Well, I'm going to attempt to do something interesting today. I am going to attempt to do a. Analysis on why so many people got so much wrong about COVID But I'm going to attempt to do that in a way that has absolutely no sense of victory lap for those that were getting it right, or shame for those who got much of it wrong. My aim here is to simply do what I've been attempting to do in my own life for the past several years, and that is to look at my regrets through a lens of both rejoicing over the Lord's faithfulness and also redeeming my regrets by learning from them. It's been a big theme for me over the past several years. I made some kind of a commitment to the Lord at some point in the last, probably five, six years where I wanted to, within reason, as so far as it was helpful, be open with my congregation about the things in my past that I regret. And the reason for that is, of course, most plainly because all wisdom, all wisdom only comes about because of pain. The only way you can buy wisdom is through pain. But if God, if you listen to the Lord and you read His Word and you do what he says, you will actually be able to acquire wisdom at someone else's expense. And so you can actually acquire wisdom that someone else paid for with their pain. And this is, of course, a major theme in the scriptures. And so I have been attempting in ways that don't feel mournful or, you know, a kind of worldly grief that leads to death. I don't want to talk about my regrets in that sense. I don't think that's appropriate. It doesn't make any sense. I want to talk about my regrets in a way that gives much glory to God for carrying me through my many failures, and also that gives not only myself, but others the opportunity to learn from my mistakes.

1 · The pastor breaks from the introduction to reveal personal vulnerability about the loneliness and difficulty of COVID-era pastoral leadership when normal evangelical authorities failed to provide helpful guidance

And so when I go into this discussion, I want you to understand the aim is not to. Let me be just straightforward, authentically, kind of honest. I spend a lot of time thinking about COVID It was a very difficult period of time in which to be a pastor. And I spend a lot of time thinking about it in particular, because I took several risky stands that wound up being the right choices and yet felt very lonely within the company of fellow pastors and in particular felt relatively unhelped by the majority of the evangelical world that I would typically rely on. To offer help and clarity. You see, like, I'm just a, you know, I'm just a two bit player in a much bigger situation.

2 · Oswald establishes the Westminster Catechism's expansive reading of the Fifth Commandment as a blueprint for hierarchical relationships and submission to authorities, then reveals that COVID exposed how few evangelical authorities proved trustworthy when needed most

And I'm all about the fifth commandment, man. You honor your fathers and mothers and, you know, I'm all about the Westminster take on that. You got to know when you got to know who your superiors are. Parents is just a stand in for a much larger concept. Got it. You got to know where you rank, know your position in the hierarchy. And then if you, if there are people that are above you, you submit to them, you learn from them, you listen to them, and so on and so forth. And so the typical way you go through life is, you know, you rely on certain people to tell you the truth, to give you guidance and wisdom, and so on and so forth. And during that season, there were very few voices that wound up being trustworthy.

3 · Oswald issues a direct challenge to his listeners to engage in reflective self-examination about their COVID mistakes, then introduces a hymn celebrating God's power over devils and enemies as thematic preparation for the sermon's argument about spiritual warfare and deception

So I want to talk about that tonight a little bit. And again, not in any sense to make anyone who was wrong about COVID in various ways to feel guilty. But I do want you to understand, like, if you look back and see that you got stuff wrong, first of all, have you done that? Have you actually just taken a moment, sit down for an hour and just think about this? And if not, why not? Because how is it that you learn? To me, one key way of learning is to look back at things I've gotten wrong and try to understand why I got it wrong. Are you doing that? Have you done that with COVID Want to try to help you do that a little bit in this podcast. Also want to try to understand why it is that so many people that we look to typically for sense making and helping us apply the word of God to our particular situations. Why is, what was it that so many of those people got so much wrong? I've thought about this so much that actually I don't expect this podcast to be very long because I think I've just distilled it. And in all the time I've spent thinking about this, I think I've distilled this down to some pretty simple ideas. Well, first of all, let's get into our hymn for the day before we get into this discussion of COVID And the hymn for today is the Power of God by R. Burnham. And one thing I've learned as I've been reading these hymns is that, you know, these were often written for a British accent in which some of the words rhyme better in a British accent. As best as I can imagine in my British accent, interior monologue, Anyway, I've noticed that some of the rhymes are a little bit more awkward with this kind of flat Midwestern accent. But anyway, the hymn is a great hymn. In fact, I think we probably need to figure out a way to sing this. I don't actually even know what the melody sounds like. In a situation like with these older hymns, sometimes the melodies aren't good, so you might potentially even have to rewrite a completely new melody. But the lyrics on this one man are solid. God is my everlasting king God is my strength and I will sing his power upholds my feeble frame and I'm victorious through his name Devils retreat when he appears Then I arise above my fears and every fiery dart Repel and vanquish all the force of hell through the Redeemer's precious blood I feel the mighty power of God through the rich aid divinely given I rise from earth and soar to heaven. Dear Lord, Thy weaker saints inspire and fill them with celestial fire on thy kind arm may they rely and all their foes shall surely fly Now, Lord, Thy wondrous power exert and every ransom soul support Give us fresh strength to wing our way to regions of eternal day There may we praise the great I am and shout the victories of the Lamb Raise every chorus to his blood and triumph in the power of God. What a good hymn. Okay. And somewhat related to our conversation.

4 · Oswald introduces his first major diagnostic claim: the "gospel-centered movement" of the 1990s-2000s was actually a "justification-centered movement" that emphasized individual forgiveness while neglecting the gospel's broader scope, including God's defeat of the deceiver promised in Genesis 3:15

Why is it that we got Covid wrong? Why did so many get Covid wrong? Well, one of the things I'd like to point out is that beginning in the mid-90s, I guess I remember this starting to emerge in 1993 probably goes back to about 1989 would be my best understanding. I wasn't aware of it in 1989, but was aware of it in 1993, and kind of look back now and realize it started then. One of the things that had been happening over the last several decades is what we now refer to as the gospel centered movement. And that is probably not the right term. The right term is probably the justification centered movement. Now, this might get a bit into the theological weeds, but in a way that I think would actually be helpful to you. And that is just to understand that, you know, the gospel entails a wide variety of benefits. There's. It's good news and, like, really just a ton of different ways. You know, the first gospel promise appears in Genesis 3:15, in which God promises that the seed of Eve would one day rise up and crush the serpent's head. The same serpent who had deceived them. And so that's the first gospel promise. We call it in the theology world the euangelion, the first gospel promise. And that's not a promise of justification per se. It's a promise really of like, defeat of the deceiver. Anyway, so somewhere around 1993, 1989, something around there, a long time before a lot of you were born, this gospel centeredness arose. And by the time the 2000s rolled around, it was kind of codified as the way that reformed people talk about themselves, gospel centered.

5 · Oswald contrasts the justification-centered understanding of the gospel (focused on personal sin and forgiveness) with the biblical gospel's broader redemptive scope that includes God judging deceivers and enemies

Looking back now, it is pretty easy to see that for the most part, by gospel centered, they meant one particular aspect of the gospel, namely justification. The idea that God sent his son to become a propitiation for our sins, to make propitiation for our sins, to satisfy God's righteous requirements expressed in his wrath against sin. Jesus Christ took on flesh, lived a perfect life, and offered himself as a perfect sacrifice to win our forgiveness, a forgiveness that we could never have accumulated through even a perfect life. God's wrath is satisfied against our sin through the substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ. And so when people talk about being gospel centered, that's really what they mean. They mean justification centered for the most part. But as I've mentioned a moment ago, gospel is actually much bigger than that. It has to do with redeeming the whole world, judging the serpent and the serpent's seed, judging not only the devil, but the people who are ruled by the devil. And so there's actually a whole bunch more to the gospel. I mean, adoption is way more consequential ultimately than justification even. And so one of the reasons why I think Covid caught a number of typically theologically solid guys by surprise is that they weren't actually as gospel centered as they thought they were. They were really more justification centered. They were focused on one particular benefit of the gospel or one particular part of the gospel. And the part that they were focused on had to do with God's dealing with our sin. The part that they were not focused on was somewhat pertinent to the psalm that we had just read or the hymn that we had just read. And that is like God is judging his enemies, and who are his enemies? His enemies are deceivers, his enemies are liars, as Satan was from the beginning. It really hasn't been a sufficient focus within the gospel centered movement on God's broader redemptive work. Not only to forgive you, but to judge deception. Deception is a key element of the Scriptures. And I just don't think that we were on good footing, good gospel footing, to encounter a mass deception simply did not have a broad enough gospel window. A gospel filter or gospel lens. That's the word I'm looking for, lens through which to view the world that we live in. And so we were really teaching people to think mostly about themselves and mostly about their own sin and not about the enemy outside of them, which is the deceiver, the first enemy. Before our sin ever came onto the scene, there was the serpent, who was wiser than all the other creatures. Shrewder, I think, maybe not wiser anyway.

6 · Oswald deepens the theological argument by showing how justification itself should be understood as part of God's broader cosmic battle against the accuser, citing Zechariah's vision and Romans 8

So one of the things that I would say had been brewing for a long time is this justification centeredness that is called gospel centeredness. And it leaves us vulnerable to a whole, a very important aspect of our kind of navigating reality. And that is like, not all of our problems are due to us. Exactly. The world is full of deceivers who do the will of their father the devil. And the true gospel, like the gospel that's actually presented in the Bible, focuses on this a lot. You've heard me say many times that Psalm 110 is the most quoted or alluded to Old Testament passage in the New Testament, specifically Psalm 110, 1, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies a footstool. This is all Genesis 3:15 stuff. Jim Hamilton, a theologian from Southern Seminary, wrote a good book on this that he argued that that's actually the main theme of the Bible, God judging his enemies. Now, just as an aside, like as a theological aside, remember what I just talked about in my podcast on my kind of John 14 sermon gone wrong? Because it's like, really key to understanding this. If the whole program of the Bible is actually more broadly God dealing with his enemies. And justification becomes a way of shutting the accuser's mouth like that. It becomes filtered kind of more through that lens. There's a beautiful passage in the Old Testament where a vision is put before Zechariah and he sees Joshua, the high priest, standing before God. And Satan is kind of positioned there as a prosecuting attorney. And Satan is just pointing out just all the rubbish, the filthy garments of the high priest. And then God says, enough, Put new clothes on this priest. Give him glory clothes, you know, not sinful tatters. And it's almost as if he's shutting up the devil. He's like, now what are you going to say? And of course, you know, we all the gospel centered people, you know, love Romans 8, but, you know, Romans 8 is rooted in that very concept. The Concept that started in the garden. Who shall bring a charge against God's elect? It is him who justifies. So even justification needs to be set in a lens or in, in the context of this broader issue, this broader cosmic battle between God and the devil. But because we were just kind of focused on, and you know, we thought that we were being gospel centered with this justification focus, like we forgot that live in a world full of people who lie.

7 · Oswald names the core failure: evangelical Christians lacked a biblical category for the untrustworthiness of people in power and the motivating force of greed

And so I believe that is actually the centerpiece of my understanding of why so many people got it wrong. We literally just didn't get what is actually a fundamental in The Bible, and that is people in power are generally not trustworthy. Generally not trustworthy. And this is something I'm guilty of. In fact, it is still, it is still confounding to me. And that is I literally constantly underestimate the role greed plays in the average person's motivation. I have just been raised, you know, since I was a kid, to believe in eternity and to believe in like an evening out and in fact, to kind of to believe in a ultimate eternal reward that is based on justice and grace. It's hard for me to remember that a lot of people think this life is all there is and that pleasure is the main point and consuming is more or less the only thing that matters. I just don't live in that world. I don't think that way. At least I hope I don't. And so I believe that one of the reasons why so many people got jabs they now regret or did a bunch of other things they now regret related to Covid was they just didn't have this category that the Bible has clearly provided. And that category being governments lie, people are greedy. Prepare accordingly.

8 · Oswald projects forward to warn that the exposure of governmental corruption and greed will be a dominant theme in coming years, potentially even leading to civil conflict, illustrating the scale of the deception that Christians failed to anticipate

That's going to be, I think if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly, that's going to be a major theme over the next several years, maybe even to the point of provoking a civil war. This, the exposure, the degree to which the government has been corrupt and motivated by greed is well beyond what most Christians understood a few years ago.

9 · Oswald sharpens the distinction between submitting to government (which may be required) and trusting government (which the Bible warns against)

Now, let me see if I can keep. Let me see if I can keep a couple ideas in my head because I want to say two things about, about this. Sometimes I do these podcasts with scripts. I'm not, I'm not doing that here. One of the things that is kind of like really consequential in all of this, it seems to me anyway, is that folks just didn't. Didn't understand that by and large, you can't trust. Sorry, back up. Folks did not understand that the Bible teaches that by and large you cannot trust the government. Now, you may need to be, you may be called to submit to it, but you're not supposed to trust it. And that is actually not a niche idea in the scriptures. It's throughout the whole scriptures. And it also just fits with what the Bible says about man. You know, the Bible has a theory or, you know, more than a theory of anthropology. Like, what is a man? What is he about? What is he motivated by? That's been. That was there for us in March of 2020, friends. All that data was there for us.

10 · Oswald introduces his second major diagnostic claim: evangelical Christians were trained in a wooden "biblicism" that required explicit proof texts rather than reasoning from Scripture

And that leads me to kind of another broad kind of problem, a systemic problem, I guess you could say, as to why we got so much of this wrong. First one was we did not actually have the full gospel in mind. We were not sufficiently trained on the full gospel. We were told that we were gospel centered. If we were justification centered, that is simply not true. That's the first one. The second one is, well, backing up. We did not have a proper understanding of the role the deceivers play in the great story of God. And number two, we were simply trained for many years, well before COVID to be what is sometimes referred to as Biblicists. Biblicists. What I mean by that is this need to have a verse, a proof text, speak very specifically about the issue that we're dealing with. So this is a great challenge for Christians today. It actually is a fault of our forefathers, our spiritual forefathers, some of whom are still alive. And that is we have been training Christians to think that if the Bible doesn't speak explicitly about something, then there's no biblical data about that issue. We have not learned how to. Actually, this was a key feature of Puritanism and key feature of Protestantism. We used to be able to reason from the Bible. I believe I mentioned at some point earlier on in this podcast that this idea of the fifth commandment, and it's not just about parents, it's about superiors, it's really got the view of a hierarchy in mind. Learn who your superiors are. Learn who your inferiors are. That all comes from the Westminster Catechism. Westminster, Larger and Shorter Catechism both deal with this. It's essentially an extension of the fifth commandment of what. What the Westminster talks about. This is a good and necessary inferences from God's word. And it's just like, yeah, like, you know, in. In the Fifth Commandment, though it speaks specifically of parents, is the blueprint for dealing with those in authority, for instance, or those who are your superiors. But, you know, we've been trained. It's really, really quite terrible, actually. We've been trained to think that if the Bible doesn't say it explicitly, if it doesn't use the word we use for something, for instance, we don't know how to figure things anymore.

11 · Oswald illustrates the problem of biblicism by noting that prominent theologians claimed the Bible offered no guidance on COVID-19, when in fact biblical principles about government untrustworthiness, greed, and mass hysteria were directly applicable

And so there was this whole group of prominent theologians who literally were with biblicist instincts who didn't know how to navigate this novel coronavirus because the Bible doesn't ever talk about a novel coronavirus. And it was just weird to Watch. The relative lack of theological agility that was playing out in real time back in 2020 is a really weird thing. And it's funny because John MacArthur did really well with this. He handled things well, but he's an extreme biblicist in many respects. And for him, it was just simple. It was like, well, the Bible says we have to meet for church, which, fair enough, but there was much more to be learned. I remember reading one prominent theologian who I really respect, say that the Bible doesn't give us any clear guidance on how to handle COVID 19. And I'm thinking, well, the Bible tells us that the government is typically untrustworthy. The Bible tells us that people are motivated by greed. The Bible talks plenty about mass hysteria. You know, there's a lot of things.

12 · Oswald expands the problem of biblicism into contemporary preaching, noting that modern Christians struggle to apply biblical principles to their own contexts if the preacher doesn't explicitly address their situation

So anyway, one of the other reasons why a lot of people got things wrong is they actually don't know how to reason from Scripture. If the verse doesn't exist for the particular thing. They don't. They don't. They don't know how to get truth. Well, that's a. And that's a big problem. That's a. That's a real burden of my preaching is to try to help people. Do that, to try to help people. This is a thing we encounter from time to time because, for instance, say you're single and I'm preaching a sermon and I make an application related to marriage. Well, you know, years ago, Christians could understand the basic principle and learn how to apply the basic principle to their context. Even if the preacher didn't specifically mention their context, they could do that mental work on their own. People can't do that as much anymore. And so there's people that feel singled out because they weren't mentioned in an illustration. It's like, well, honestly, you have to learn how to take God's Word and understand its basic principles and then apply it to your situation. There's pretty much single. Every single passage is rooted in the same basic physics, the basic, same basic spiritual physics. I guess you could say it's just a matter of, like, figuring out how it applies to your unique situation.

13 · Oswald identifies the irony that wooden biblicism produced clumsy literalist readings of Romans 13 on government authority while simultaneously misapplying the "weak brother" passages in an overly elastic way, revealing inconsistent hermeneutics driven by fear rather than careful exegesis

So people were really impaired in their judgment because they didn't know how to do this reasoning. It was, it was all there for him. It just didn't. Just didn't work. Ironically, this also led to really clumsy interpretations of Romans 13. A very literalist, like, just, just absolutely no nuance or understanding of lots of occasions in Scripture where that's, that's. There's a deepening of what is meant in Romans 13. And people didn't know how to handle that. So they took a very wooden interpretation of that. And then like the one place they were the most elastic, you know, the one place they were the most like, willing to apply things had to do with the weak neighbor thing, the weak brother thing. And oh my goodness, that was a whole travesty of hermeneutics. I think the most angry I ever got during COVID had to do with that because I just bad biblical interpretation really annoys me. And I'm thinking, what are you doing here? This is nothing. This is not the passage to use for this anyway.

14 · Oswald summarizes his two central diagnostic claims—justification-centered gospel reductionism and wooden biblicism—then frames these failures as violations of the biblical promise that Christians should grow in discernment

So we had a couple problems. Just to sum it up. One, the gospel centered thing is not what it says it is. It was a justification centered movement focused mostly on an individualistic understanding of, of God's forgiveness so that we don't, you know, so that we don't go to hell, which, which is glorious, of course, but the gospel is much broader than that. And number two, there was a wooden biblicism that needed a passage to say explicitly wear a mask or don't wear a mask. And in absence of those passages, people were just lost. So like I told you, there's nothing about this that is like rooted in some kind of, you know, victory lap or making people feel bad. I really want to just understand why did so many people get this wrong? A basic claim of God's word is, is that if you're a Christian, you become wiser over time and you become more discerning and you have your, you know, your conscience trained and your mind trained, you know, through regular discernment of good and evil. Why did so many people miss the fact that Anthony Fauci was evil? Why did they miss that?

15 · Oswald argues that a "boomerism" culture of altruistic trust in leaders prevented Christians from recognizing that unregenerate people—especially those in power—are motivated by greed severe enough to cause mass death

I think it's because they actually were raised in a kind of boomerism that had altruistic kind of charitable assignments toward their leaders. They didn't understand that no people are pretty nasty without Christ and so called public servants are usually grifters. This is all relevant. Like one of the reasons I'm bringing all this up is because we are going to go through a period of time where the thing that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about in his departing address from the presidency, this is going to be almost everything for a while. And that is Eisenhower warned explicitly about the development of a military industrial complex in Western which war became a profit motivation. What you're going to see and what you've seen when the JFK files were released and you'll see it elsewhere, is that you Honestly need to be much more skeptical of anything to do with military action. And that is because humans are motivated by greed to an extent that is hard to understand if you're a Christian. And they really will let millions die to buy a nicer house. As disgusting and crazy as that sounds, that's actually true. And the Bible's told us that all along. You're either in one or two camps as a human being. You're either in the darkness or in the light. You either have God as your father or the devil. And the devil has come to steal, kill, and destroy.

16 · Oswald uses his own children's caution about Teflon pans as an illustration of the exhausting vigilance required when government authorities abdicate their protective role

I was at Sam's today getting a few things for the church, and I saw a pan on sale. And I looked at the pan and the pan was Teflon coated. And I was thinking about my kids and how, like, none of my kids will use Teflon coating. I was thinking about how for my kids, they live in a world where it's sort of understood that the government has completely relinquished any actual benevolent intention in like, you know, like guarding food even, or, you know, food or food related products like pans. Like, they don't even. They're not even trying to take care of you any longer. And so my kids are living in this world where they have to think through ingredients, think through pan uses, this whole world where essentially their brains have to work all the time because the authorities that have been placed in above them are more or less not taking care of them. They're not exercising their responsibility as outlined in Romans 13. I was just thinking about, like, how much more thinking they have to do and how much more careful they have to be. And I can see why some people were just like, just give me the jab. Because I'm just tired of thinking about this. I don't want to. I can just see how people would rather rent out. It's perfectly understandable. It's extremely disconcerting. And it's a lot of work to just think through all these things all the time and to not believe like your doctor when he talks about when your kids should get vaccines and so on, it's just. It's just such a different world than we thought we had.

17 · Oswald asserts that Scripture reveals this has always been the world we live in—a world run by people who serve the enemy—and while he maintains optimistic eschatology, the current moment requires continued skepticism and street smarts that many Christians were not prepared to exercise

But that is the world we have. And the truth is, is that when we look at God's word, we can see that that's the world we've always had. We are living in a world that is by and large run by people who work for the enemy of our souls. And yes, I'm an optimistic guy when it comes to eschatology, and I do see many evidences of Christ's reign taking hold on earth. But we are not even close to the place where we can stop being suspicious and street smart. And people I think, just weren't prepared to live in the world of deep skepticism toward our authorities. And it's just like, well, that's the world we live in.

18 · Oswald recapitulates his three diagnostic claims—justification-centered gospel teaching that ignored spiritual warfare, wooden biblicism that couldn't reason from Scripture, and the exhausting difficulty of constant vigilance—then reiterates his pastoral aim of learning rather than shaming and warns that this period of history is far from over

So to review, why did so many get Covid wrong? First one, there was this whole period of time, probably 20, 30 years worth of time, where all of our Bible teachers only talk about justification for the most part, at least in the reformed world. And like, they were like gospel centered, you know, trademark. And it's like they did not prepare us to live in a world with bullets shooting past our head and vaccines that were not at all tested and potentially quite dangerous. We weren't taught the spiritual dynamics of the world. And that is that it's a war. And it's a war, yes, not a flesh and blood per se, but the spiritual principalities and authorities, they, they do occupy human actions and occupy human hearts. So we were not really prepared to think well about the fact that so many people wanted to, would, would gladly sell us for $20, so sell our bodies for $20 and so forth. So that was one thing. The other thing is we, we had this Biblicism, this wooden Biblicism. So we weren't able to reason from God's word. It was all there all along. Don't trust government too easily. People are motivated by greed, you know, blah, blah, blah. There's lots of things you could have reasoned out of God's word. Some of us did. That was there. And then like lastly, I just think that it is actually a really hard pill to swallow to realize that you're, you have to think all the time now because we're just living in a particular moment where it's just very dangerous to trust people. And yeah, so, you know, there's plenty of reasons why we got stuff wrong. And I don't bring that up for any kind of shaming reason. I actually bring it up because I want you to, you know, learn from this. I don't think we're even close to the end of this particular period of history.

19 · Oswald closes with a direct charge to humility and mutual learning from COVID mistakes, grounding the entire analysis in rejoicing over God's sovereignty and the security of salvation apart from human discernment

All right, well, thanks so much for listening. I feel much better now. That's been something I've want I've wanted to share for a long time. And, you know, we all took different positions during that time, and some of us were more right than others. Definitely don't care about any of that. Just want us all to be humble enough to learn from our mistakes and also humble enough to acknowledge them so that others can learn from them, too. And, you know, and it's like my experience with my regrets, it ultimately just reminds us, boy, I'm sure glad God's in charge. And that my eternal joy doesn't depend on my own street smarts. Because sometimes I can be fooled, too. All right. God bless my friends. Hope this was interesting, provocative, helpful, edifying, whatever. Have a great day.

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