Punishment can be defined as the infliction or imposition of a penalty as retribution for an offense. “Crime demands just punishment”.
People working in the NHS front-line do so mostly as a result of it being a calling for them, not because it is a career choice motivated by financial rewards or fulfillment born out of societal appreciation. When an individual’s work life is their ministry, reflecting God, adding value to the society, preserving life, then we can say they do good works. Till date, more than one hundred and ten NHS front-line staff (see reference below) have lost their lives to Covid-19. In addition, we have little persons as young as five years of age, as well as older people in their nineties, and everything in between succumbing to corona virus.
This require us to rethink our attitude towards death, especially death as a result of illness, and whether such illness or plague is a form of punishment. Nobody is saying that corona virus is a blessing, as Jesus Christ told us in the gospel of Mathew chapter 5 verse 45; God causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. But according to Job in the book of Job 2:10; Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?
When an individual dies, what does the dead body knows and or feels? Absolutely nothing, since with the exception of Jesus Christ, no one has clinically died for two or three days and then come back to life, resurrect, to tell us about the situation after death. So, we have to take the Preacher’s word for it in Ecclesiastes 9:5; For the living know that they will die, but the dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even their name is forgotten. Therefore, whatever means that brings about this state of knowing or feeling nothing, should not be considered as punishment, but merely the means of translating energy or souls from one realm to another realm.
The Scriptures tell us that God is a Spirit, and that we can not in the physical realm see God, and there is a Spiritual realm where God reigns, and that there is judgement after death, and that when an individual has been chosen by God, redeemed by the Blood of Christ, their sins committed in the physical realm are forgiven and they get to spend eternity with Christ, in a state where there is no pain, no suffering, no death, full of peace, joy and happiness, a place of eternal dibs on happiness. This is what Christians hope for (they do not have it in the physical realm, you do not hope for what you already have), and since you can not see God in the physical realm, believing that those He chooses get to spend eternity with Him, pretty much sums up the definition of Faith according to Hebrews 11:1; Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. Therefore, whatever mechanism brings about “realm translation”, another synonym for death, especially of those individuals chosen by God to do good works (some NHS front-line staff members! I do not know, I am not the one who decides, that is the remit of God), can not be regarded as punishment.
