Keeping Up With God

By Shirley Ann Rich

This is a book about the belief that the coronavirus is a plague sent from God because he is angry with mankind. It is possible for people of Christian faith to accept this belief. Others may question it. There are 120 plagues mentioned in the Bible. According to the scriptures, these plagues were sent by God for this very reason. He was angry with the breakdown in family life. From the events of the garden of Eden going forward, earth life was created to establish family life. The purpose given is for families to continue into the next life after this testing time on earth. We all have to agree that earth life is a very short existence. It is natural for people to hope that there is something greater beyond this life. The Bible scriptures say there is an afterlife. This book follows God's creation of a special family that now fills up the whole earth. This is the house of Israel. Descendants of this family are found in all lands. According to the Bible, in eternity, there is no acceptance of sin in heaven. In order for us to return to heaven, we needed a savior who had never committed sin to die for us. This savior had to be born into the lineage of a special family. God created the Israelites to prepare for the birth of the Savior. This book follows the family of man, from Adam and Eve down to the apocalypse at the end of the earth, as told in the book of Revelation. All the contents of this book can be found on the internet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Newman Springs Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638815860

Book preview

Copyright © 2021 Shirley Ann Rich

All rights reserved

First Edition

NEWMAN SPRINGS PUBLISHING

320 Broad Street

Red Bank, NJ 07701

First originally published by Newman Springs Publishing 2021

ISBN 978-1-63881-585-3 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-63881-586-0 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Preface

When I was age five, there came a knock on our front door. Two missionaries stood there holding books of scriptures. One held the Bible, and the other held a Bible picture book for children. I was enthralled. I was so curious about the pictures. From that time forward, I wanted to read the Bible and learn all I could about Bible stories. This interest in Bible scriptures carried on throughout my life. Then I learned there were other scriptures not included in the Bible, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls. I spent a lot of time in my life studying scriptures. When the coronavirus became a pandemic for the world, I felt overwhelmed as to why. Then I recalled at least 120 plagues spoken of in the Bible. I was overcome with the belief that coronavirus is a plague sent from God because he is angry with mankind. Why is he angry? I decided that it must be because of the breakdown in family life. I wrote this book while sick in a hospital bed for two years. I had time to research all Bible scriptures, recorded history, summaries of theologians, and other scriptures not in the Bible. This information can be found on the internet. Numerous times I repeat stories to show the importance of the topic. The Bible repeats stories, admonishments, and commandments over and over again, so I am not out of line. You can read this book as the truth, or you can read it as my beliefs. I am attempting to show the importance of family life on earth. I follow God’s establishment of a covenant family that would be worthy of having Jesus Christ born into the linage. You will find there is information in this book you have never heard of in your lifetime. There are fifty plus books of scriptures left out of the Bible. This information comes from those missing scriptures. They are available if you search for them.

The Coronavirus Plague

On Thursday, March 4, 2021, at 3:37 p.m., a thought flashed into my mind. The thought was God is angry and created the coronavirus as a plague to cause families to reunite. That thought came like lightning. It was not my thought. I was watching the news on television. Pictures of needles going into arms to administer vaccines were constantly on the screen. Reporters were discussing how the coronavirus pandemic was causing a fall in the stock market. I leaned back and closed my eyes. Images of the children of Israel crossing the desert and following Moses filled my mind. I thought that trek was a family affair because they were the descendants of Abraham.

Why are families so important that God would send a plague into the world to force family life? Lately, Americans have been moving toward individual lifestyles. The importance of individuals doing their own thing has been on the rise. Human beings were not created to live alone. They are very social and need others. Loneliness is the main cause of depression.

Separation from family has become common in our society. Individuals are putting education, careers, and business success ahead of family life. Is God so angry about the shrinking families that he would send a plague? This kept running through my mind. I thought back to my childhood years in Sunday school at a big Baptist church. I had been taught about the great flood.

God had instructed Noah to build an ark to save the lives of his family and two of every kind of animal. What a giant task! So if God had been angry enough to send the great flood, why not send a plague? Did the great flood really happen? I decided to research any evidence that a great flood had happened.

I began looking for archaeological information that might show evidence of a great flood that once covered the earth. I found enough information to satisfy my curiosity. There is strong evidence in rock layers, fossils, and coal formations that this flood really did happen. The great flood shows there are consequences for disappointing God. He was so unhappy with the wickedness of mankind that he decided to kill them all. The message of biblical scriptures is a call to repentance in being obedient to the commandments of God. Also, it is a call to live by the teachings of Jesus Christ in the New Testament. So I was wondering, how many people in the world are Christians? Again, I did research. It seems that of over 7.8 billion people on this planet, only about one-third are Christians. Of the Christian population, only about one-third believe in the literal interpretation of Bible scriptures. This means about 800 million people on earth believe the stories in the Bible are true. The Bible begins in Genesis, with God creating so much in one day. People may be thinking, How could God possibly create that much in one day? This cannot be literal.

However, there exists a religious belief that God is a personage who lives on another gigantic planet. Some believe his planet is so large that it takes one thousand of our years for his planet to turn around one time. So one thousand of our years would be one day on his planet. They believe the creation story was written in God’s time on his planet.

There are some who believe Adam was born on another planet and brought here to begin populating this planet. The creation story is told in such a way as to be understood in simplicity down through the ages. The questions are many. Was Adam brought here or actually created here? Why was he in a state of innocence? Then was woman created from his rib after he arrived? Did God realize that Eve would eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Did God give Eve time to make the choice on her own to eat the fruit? Did he know she would break his commandment not to eat this fruit that would change her body? Did God want Eve to choose the hardship she was about to endure? After eating the fruit, she became mortal and could then bear children. Did God know that Adam would follow after her? What happened in the garden of Eden started the first family.

Why was it important to start family life on this planet? These human bodies are not created to last forever. Our bodies deteriorate until we eventually reach an end. What is the purpose of earth life anyway? So if we are going to start family life here, will our families continue beyond the grave? I went through a near-death experience that gave me more understanding.

I was taken by ambulance to an emergency room, as I had a life-threatening illness. While lying there, waiting for a doctor, I left my body and then came back to it. I discovered that I am a body within a body.

My spirit body looked like white neon light to me. I could see, hear, think, and move about just as in my physical body. I have done a lot of thinking about this shocking experience. I believe that God created our spirit bodies somewhere else in the universe. Then he brought us here to this earth to enter a physical body for a purpose. Since we can’t remember our former life, this must be a test. Physical life is short, and physical bodies decline rapidly; so the purpose must be to educate our spirit bodies. The only other likely reason could be to establish family groups.

Maybe another purpose of this earthly life is to learn good from evil. In being here, we gain an education for our spirit bodies. Bible scriptures promise that after we die, the time will come when we get our bodies back. I think I need to review the plan of salvation. For reasons our finite minds do not understand, the higher realms of the universe demand obedience to law. A perfect human being who never broke these laws had to give up his blood to pay for our sins on this planet. A spiritually perfect human paying this price is our only path back to our resurrected bodies. My thoughts are that, really and truly, we are spirit bodies first and foremost. These physical bodies are a secondary addition to our spirit bodies. With this thought in mind, does God care if he takes us out of this temporary physical body? If our behavior or an illness is extremely difficult, he may decide that we need to be removed from this body. Therefore, God can decide if thousands or millions of people need to die to correct a problem. This is exactly what happened with the great flood. People on earth had become so wicked that God was sorry he had created mankind. He decided to kill them all by drowning them in the great flood.

Genesis chapter 6, verse 7 reads, And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. According to this scripture, God became very sorry that he had created man.

So he planned to start all over again, with one family.

He must have wanted mankind to learn to live by the laws that govern the universe. If we are his spirit children, it could be that he wants us to learn the laws while in a temporary body. Then we could learn the consequences for breaking these laws. It seems that he plans to give us an eternal body once we have learned the lessons here on earth. If I can believe that unseen electromagnetic waves come through the air to operate my television and cell phone, then I can believe in prayer. Scientists have said that the human brain is like a computer. Scientists have even said that one human body is worth $80 million. I have read the belief on social media that when you are thinking thoughts, you are talking to the universe. In other words, our thoughts are electrical currents traveling up through the airwaves. Thoughts are vibration energies coming into and going out of our brains. So can’t God read our thoughts at all times? Of course, he can. This is why prayer works. So I am researching from a scientific point of view my flashing thought that God is angry.

I want to study all the reasons that he is angry enough to have brought the coronavirus plague into the world. This plague is completely changing our way of life. Even though we have new vaccines to try to help out, there are complications. More variants of the coronavirus are appearing. It seems the restrictions caused by this plague are going to be long-term. We may never again see the life we had before this disease. God is causing changes.

The World Health Organization gave the coronavirus the name of COVID-19. That stands for coronavirus infectious disease of 2019. Now it is the plague of 2019, 2020, and 2021. It does not seem to be going away soon, even with vaccines. At the time of this writing, 538,514 persons have died from the coronavirus in the United States in about one year. Compare that to 392,393 who died in World War I, World War II, and the Vietnam War combined. The average annual deaths from the flu are between 20,000 and 60,000. One definition of plague is a disastrous evil or affliction. It has driven us to stay home for safety. Now our family life has also become our social life. God has forced us to stay home with our families or face the possibility of death. I believe that when enough people have reached a renewed love of family, then God will provide answers for us to overcome the coronavirus. This is an impression in my spirit. I feel that many people are praying fervently for the answers. In writing about this concern for family life, it was not my original intention to review the major events in the Bible. However, the Bible is a family story about the family of Abraham. The large number of verses showing the lineage of descendants is very impressive. Just the sheer number of genealogy lists in the scriptures helps me realize how important family is to God.

Can you name your grandparents and great-grandparents and relatives from six generations back?

There was a scientific study done that suggested that the trauma in a person’s life is carried forward in their genes for six generations. Think about that. If you have unusual fears, check to see what happened in the lives of your grandparents. Researching our family histories will help us feel even more connected to our living family members. Every life has a story. Writing down family stories will be helpful for the children who are born into the family. A remarkable fact is that God picks out our relatives. Even the spouses we marry seem to be sent to us. Since the Bible is a family story, how can we deny the importance of family life? The rise of individuals being all alone for the sake of achieving success is not a part of God’s plan for mankind. So in God’s plan, he had to establish one strong family on earth that was worthy of having the Savior of the world as a member. After the flood, the world had much work that needed to be done.

Noah and his sons, Japheth, Ham, and Shem, had to repopulate the world. They had to till the ground and plant food for their families and the animals. They began to multiply. Their families became tribes, and the tribes became nations. God had a rainbow placed in the sky as a sign that he would never again destroy the earth with a flood. It had been ten generations from Adam to Noah. So it had taken that long for the world to become completely wicked. Today we are 126 generations from Adam. Every six to ten generations, men seem to forget God. Then God comes up with another catastrophic event to put fear back into the hearts of men. So after many generations since the great flood, men became prideful and carnal again. They began to build a tower in the city of Babel that would reach up to heaven, in the event of another flood. They had stopped believing God’s promise that there would never be another flood. Extremely intelligent men seem to forget that God is the greatest intelligence in the universe. God always has a better plan than anything we could imagine. God didn’t like the tower or the purpose of the tower, so he confused the language of everyone working on it. The construction of the tower ended. Families began to journey to settle in other lands.

Again, God had changed the lives and plans of men. We can see that since February of 2020, God has definitely changed the plans of mankind worldwide.

We have all had to change our plans. As of March 9, 2021, there have been 2,622,101 deaths from the coronavirus worldwide. That is equal to having more than everyone in the state of New Mexico die. People are afraid to travel. In addition to that, many travel restrictions have been put in place by governments. Are people realizing that God has sent a plague into the world? Plagues are mentioned in the Bible 120 times. The ten plagues sent to Egypt are the most memorable. To understand the ten plagues, we have to begin with a family story. It seems that God could not find a good family in all mankind that would be worthy of being the lineage of the coming Savior. One big problem was that men always resorted to worshipping idols. They would sacrifice human beings in the worship of