Today our daughter and two grandsons were sitting on the deck looking out over the small lake they live on. It was a calm and sunny day. Out of nowhere a waterspout appeared, gathered strength and ripped the roof from their neighbour’s gazebo. They hardly had time to rush into the house when it had gone.

A black swan is a term for an event which comes out of nowhere and upsets everyone’s applecart. The last black swan was probably the day two planes flew into the World Trade Center. That changed our world. Now we’re living in another one.

We are surely living in unusual days.

As we negotiate our way through week after week of isolation, it compels us to ask the question “Why?”

Eastern religions are based largely on fate. Fate does not allow us to ask “Why?” There is simply no answer. It just is, and we have to put up with it. There is no significance and no meaning to life or to what happens to us.

Our present crisis has exposed a fatal weakness in our secular society. We have become utterly dependent on solutions that come from the material world around us. The demise of devastating diseases like polio, measles, diphtheria and many others has left us with a false confidence that medicine is the answer to everything. And then to our shock, we find out it isn’t.

Ten times in the book of Revelation believers are described as those who conquer. We are victors, never victims. Even if we die for our faith, we die in victory.

It is impossible for a Christian living in obedience to God to be defeated. To live in victory is our inheritance.

At the end of Daniel’s life, he received a mysterious message from God: “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”

But in that same moment, Daniel was told to seal up his mysterious vision and leave it until the time of the end.

That vision, Revelation shows us, was unsealed by Christ when he ascended to the right hand of the Father, and as a result a series of cascading events is unleashed on the earth, events which run throughout the church age and climax in the Lord’s return.