Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

MAN PROPOSES, BUT GOD DISPOSES.

“Man proposes, but God disposes” is a translation of the Latin:  “Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit”.

This well-known proverb played in my mind, when I read an article about AI, Artificial Intelligence, outlining the energy requirements powering this new phenomenon. Now Google and Microsoft are seeking to revive the Three Mile Nuclear Power Station – shut down in 1979 after a nuclear meltdown – to provide for AI’s immense electricity needs. 

Coal, too, is making a comeback: consumption of this ultra-polluting fossil fuel is now on track to rise to a new peak of 8.77bn tonnes by the end of the year – and could remain at near-record levels for years to come: we need electricity to power our toys!

How about Climate Change?

Suddenly, it seems, that Climate Change and Global Heating have been placed on the back burner, even as warming trends and unnatural weather conditions multiply. The fossil fuel industry also has their eyes on roughly three billion people, whose annual energy consumption is equal to only the yearly power use of my refrigerator. There’s a huge market out there, both for electricity use and modern conveniences, such as refrigeration and transportation. That’s how people in the energy industry calculate: they propose, but God, through his creation, has the final Word. Because…..

El Niño comes calling.

El Niño is a complex weather pattern that occurs when surface water in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean becomes warmer than average and easterly winds blow weaker than normal. These events, usually occurring every few years, can cause unusual and sometimes dangerous weather conditions worldwide, including droughts, floods and severe storms. El Niño is an important climatic happening, recognized as a factor of weather change responsible for large and varied detrimental effects. 

Now studies show that for the first time, significant loss of sea ice in the Arctic directly affects global climate extremes, including the increase in the frequency of severe El Niño occurrences. Make it a habit to regularly check ARCTIC NEWS, where climatologists post their weather warnings. It is well-known that temperatures at the Northern and Southern tips have skyrocketed in the past decade, boding ill for all of us, the 8 billion earth dwellers.

For us, even for us, the prosperous few, the news is bad.

Instead of eating a steady diet of high-quality food, we are being fed an endless stream of heavily-processed packaged foods that are loaded with extremely unhealthy filler ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup.

Sadly, many of us are also financially stressed, because the heavily-processed packaged foods are all that many of us can afford, even though, there too, prices have increased significantly.

Humanity, both rich and poor, faces a very dangerous time, exacerbated by the incoming TRUMP rule, blind to the ‘signs of the Times’. God, through his creation is speaking loud and clear, actually, is screaming to us: “Change your ways, live within the means and limits of my world, the cosmos, my first and foremost Love.”

Isaiah 11: 9 comes to mind: the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Listen to creation’s cries! Make the 4 laws of ecology a staple of life, remembering that:

1. Everything is connected to everything else.

2. Nothing ever disappears.

3. Nature- creation – knows best.

4. Nothing comes free.

Dr. Barry Commoner coined these laws some 60 years ago, and they have stood the test of times. 

Nature is like a human body: a defect there affects our total wellbeing. We live in a closed system, from which there is no escape: carbon fuels, when ignited through our beloved transportation systems, cause GHG – Green House Gases – which heat up the atmosphere. Loving God – a direct command – entails loving his creation. It’s as simple as that. 

We now are faced with paying the ultimate price for our luxurious life. Trump’s Christians – a blasphemy if there ever is one – have so distorted “The Good News”, that total annihilation is facing us.

We have made a choice. 

We have taken the restlessness road to ruin. We have enslaved God for our (temporary) conveniences. We have subjected God’s precious possession – bought back with the Life-blood of his beloved Son (see John 3: 16-17) – to the point where Hell on EARTH has become the only remaining option. 

But God has different plans. The Bible points to the way God disposes: But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. (2 Peter 3:10).

Yes, “Man proposes, but God disposes”.

OF COURSE, YOU WILL IGNORE THIS. 

DISARRAY EVERYWHERE.

When I, from my perch somewhere in the Western World, with increasing concern and compassion, survey the global scene, then I see disintegration, confusion, turmoil, uncertainty, indecision, restlessness everywhere. 

Examples aplenty. The USA and Trump, his boasts and threats, his egomaniacal character, his disregard for Climate Change, his appointments of deeply controversial people to key positions, assuring only more unease and anarchy, then I know that such global threats as heat, poverty, hunger, drought, will not be on his agenda. In Trump’s cabinet billionaires set the tone: immediate tax relief for them, while deficits soar.

Looking elsewhere, I see Germany politically and economically on the ropes; 

France is no better. I see the Middle East in a momentous muddle, its danger quotient enhanced by the sudden Syria turnover. Who is next? Iran? Saudi Arabia?  The world, vested on regularity and financial order, has been abandoned to hit-and-miss policies, is at a loss what to do, with environmental dangers and threats multiplying, while gold has a ride into the stratosphere. 

Of course, you will ignore this, even though…..

What really disturbed me was a headline on the ARCTIC NEWS website. Have a look. Here’s what you will see:

Did a Terminal Temperature Acceleration event start in December 2024?

Please note “Terminal”. The people who contribute to this website, are trained scientists: they have access to the latest sources and weather statistics. They carefully weigh which words to use.

Well, ‘terminal’ is defined as a condition, signaling the end of something: it also applies todiseases that lead to death, incurable. 

Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, something often done near the end of a year, it is generally assumed that 2024 was the hottest ever recorded. With signs of increased sunspots activities, with a new El Nino on the way, with polar ice rapidly disappearing, and thus no albedo effect – less ice reflecting sunrays back – the sun heat will be absorbed by the Polar seas, dislodging the methane there, speeding – yes speeding – Global Heat.

Of course, you will ignore this, even though……

Welcome to the new World Disorder.

Welcome to the new World Disorder, and my claim is that this state of affairs while lead to ever greater chaos and an unheard state of unwinding of law and order.

Of course, you will ignore this, because ‘There is no alternative.’

“There is no alternative” (TINA) is a political slogan originally coined by Margaret Thatcher, the PM of UK some 35 years ago.

She claimed that liberal capitalism is the only viable system. Politicians used TINA to justify policies of fiscal conservatism and austerity. 

Now ‘There is no alternative’ to our ‘energy-dependent’ society, so the ‘telos’ the ‘END’ can be predicted with the utmost accuracy.

And then there is another reason: We are losing our reasoning capacity. 

In recent years, an abundance of academic research from institutions including Harvard medical school, the University of Oxford and King’s College London found evidence that the internet is shrinking our grey matter, shortening our attention spans, weakening memory and distorting our cognitive processes. The areas of the brain found to be affected included “attentional capacities, as the constantly evolving stream of online information encourages our divided attention across multiple media sources”, “memory processes” and “social cognition”.

All this brings me to “The Second Coming”, a poem written by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919, influenced by the carnage of World War I (1914-18) and the Spanish Flu, which killed some 30 million people, often the young adults.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Of course, you will ignore this, because ‘There is no alternative.’

John the Baptizer comes to mind: “Prepare the way of the Lord”. Are we doing that, willy-nilly? 

A LONGTERM TREND IS COMING TO AN END.

Ah, we live in interesting times!

I know it is a Chinese curse, but still, from my perch in rural Eastern Ontario, midway between Canada’s two capitals, Toronto, its financial hub, and Ottawa its political place, matters look quite composed. The local Tim Horton always has a full parking lot. A new small coffee shop, smack in the centre of the village, does good business. Slowly ‘foreigners’ are finding their footing on our main street, with a Vietnamese running a successful new pharmacy, and a man from Trinidad reviving an auto-repair shop quite handily. So, yes, locally no complains. 

Churches? 

Not so rosy. While the local population is steadily increasing, and new housing and apartments are rapidly filling up, with the decline of mainstream religion in many parts of the world, all sorts of human needs – community, meaning – are being left unmet. It reminds me of one of my favorite Bible books, Amos. There I read, “The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land— not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.” 

Oh, yes, the Bible is still omnipresent. That’s not the problem: the problem is that the Word of God itself is a Trinity: (1) Creation, God’s manifest Word, (2) Christ, God’s Word become human, and (3) the Scriptures. The first two are from eternity to eternity: the last one, the Bible, will disappear in line with the fading church, as ‘religion’ is replaced with a way of life, in tune with creation. 

Trump, a passing problem.

The looming Trump administration will have a short life-span, as it adheres to an outdated premise, a mode of living based on Infinite World Resources.

It seems to me we are now experiencing the ‘stillness before the storm’. Next year looms, and, while weather volatility is certain to magnify, the US new regime is ignoring the cries of creation, where also monetary deficits are slated to soar. The US DEBT clock stands at an all-time high: debt per citizen close to $107,000, as the national – Washington- induced debt exceeds $36 Trillion. That means that the average family of 4.2 is responsible for close to $500,000 in National Debt, not counting mortgage, credit card and personal monetary obligations.

Cookie Jar.

I compare the world’s total resources – air, water, soil – of being contained in a simple jar, full of goodies, such as cookies, but the freshly baked delicacies are gone, and, what is left, are the crumbs, some still quite sizeable. With demand still growing, and supplies diminishing, the fight for the remainder will become intense. FIGHTS? Yes wars, all wars, are for natural resources, now also centering on foodstuff. 

Coffee, for instance. Or oranges.

Your morning – and afternoon – coffee is the latest staple threatened by climate chaos: the price of quality arabica beans shot to its highest level in half a century last week amid fears of a poor harvest in Brazil. It follows warnings that orange crops have been wiped out by the catastrophic floods in Valencia, Spain; and then there is the soaring cost of olive oil in recent years, as the southern Mediterranean has sweltered. In southern Africa drought has deprived the simple folk there of their basic staple: corn.

The messy Middle East.

It seems to me that, as civilization started in the Middle East, it also might end there. Once the presumed site of The Garden of Eden, Paradise, the reigns of Persian Emperors, its prominence has long been lost due to extreme exploitation.  Where, at one time a person could walk along Africa’s north shore entirely in the shade of towering trees, from Morocco, on the Atlantic to Syria on the Mediterranean, all these regions have turned into arid deserts. At one time the Sahara was fertile land, with savannahs supporting an abundance of wild life: now 70 percent of large animals are gone.

THIS LONGTERM TREND IS COMING TO AN END.

This phenomenon has become true for much of the fauna and flora. We, humans, are next in line, with the USA, as usual, leading the way, thanks to Trump’s triumphant victory. However, his feat leads to nature’s defeat, a form of vengeance, Holy Vengeance, I should add.

Debts and Death.

The problem with debt is that it has a deadline, is due at a certain date. That also holds true for environmental debt. Debt and Death are similar: both are unavoidable and spell trouble in the form of drastic curtailment of commercial and financial activities. 

I see a similarity between the desert-creating process during the preceding 10,000 years there, and the current Oil-exploitation there, causing the entire world to suffer fatal heat. This long-term danger has now become immediate. 

Be Prepared.

WISDOM AND LOVE.

There is one line in Dr. Sabine Dramm’s book that keeps me awake at night. She thoroughly analysed Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thoughts, and her final conclusion was:

What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one, and the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God.

I am not a very analytic person. It has taken me a long time to grasp the meaning of this sentence. The first part is plain to me: God and the world are one. That is a tremendous leap. Just imagine: God is identical to his creation.

 I imagine, I could compare God and Creation to Johann Sebastian Bach and his music. Perhaps as a person, Bach was not the most pleasant of man: quarreled easily, very opiniated, but his music is still unequalled. I believe it was Sir Ernest MacMillan who wrote a biography on Bach, based entirely on his musical oeuvre. 

But God is beyond understanding, that’s why we have Creation and God’s mandate to love it, and treasure it. The well-known text: The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom, comes to mind. I interpret this as “Being in awe of Creation is the onset of Understanding its Maker”.

But.

We, 21^st world citizens, have exploited natural resources for our exclusive benefit: sinning against Creation is sinning against God. 

Dramm continues”: “the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God.” 

What does this mean? 

My thought: God is the origin of all life and it is our task in life to acknowledge this and honor God as the creator, and, I may add, to love creation as God did: by sacrificing his Son, God bought Creation back with his blood.

Dr. Dramm is not alone. There also is Dr. J. H. Bavinck.

Yes, my sleep is haunted by another line, found in another book that makes me tremble. It is written by Bavinck: Its title is, “Between the Beginning and the End”, subtitled: A Radical Kingdom Vision. This Mission Professor says: “The Central Point of the Gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering, rather, its entire focus is that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom… There is no such thing as individual salvation: salvation of the person and salvation of creation go hand in hand.”

In other words, it’s not Me and God: it is Me and God and Creation: I repeat: salvation of the person and salvation of Creation go hand in hand. It is in Creation where we will spend eternity: that ‘salvation LIFE’, starts now. Jesus did not only die for our sins: Jesus – see John 10: 10 – brought us LIFE and that to the full. There’s where WISDOM starts!

Global Heating.

The implications of Romans 7: 19 suddenly dawned on me: For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. 

Society, at large, has placed me in a straitjacket: no matter what I do, my actions affect creation, that’s why we all will suffer the consequences of our sins against Creation, sins against the Creator.

God created this world with built-in defense mechanisms. God often punishes us through Creation, as is evident from the 10 plagues in Egypt, before the Israel Exodus: water turning to blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the killing of all firstborn of humans and cattle, all punishments ‘creation-oriented’.  When Israel as a nation, turned to idols, drought resulted.

Thanks to our fossil fuel consumption, the average global temperature anomaly for the first 10 months of 2024 (January to October) is 0.71°C above the 1991-2020 average, which is the highest on record for this period and 0.16°C warmer than the same period in 2023. This year is almost certain to be the hottest ever recorded globally, with floods and heatwaves roiling the climate crisis, wrecking harvests by extreme weather, unpredictable rains, and driving up food prices.

How will 2025 be? 

Permafrost thaws across the globe are destroying housing and infrastructure, and disrupting ecosystems. These slumps are also harbingers of a cascading environmental catastrophe: there is twice as much carbon locked up in permafrost as in the atmosphere. But the Trump regime ignores all this: Trump and ‘his Christians’, deeply influenced by Rapture and disdain for the earth, are totally ignoring God’s ultimate LOVE for his creation.

Heed the teaching of the TWO WISE MEN: God’s foremost love is for his creation: love what God loves, and have eternal life.

­DOES THIS BIBLE TEX REALLY APPLY TO TRUMP?

History

 “I am going to tell you what will happen later in the time of wrath, because the vision concerns the appointed time of the end……

He will cause deceit to prosper, and he will consider himself superior. When they feel secure, he will destroy many and take his stand against the Prince of princes. Yet he will be destroyed, but not by human power.

                                                                        Daniel 8: 25 

In applying this text to today. Yes, I am a fool, rushing in where angels fear to tread. 

The above reading is from this week’s lectionary. In my judgement, the ‘he’ there could be Donald Trump. So, read Daniel 8: 25 again, and substitute his name.

My daily routine.

Just a bit of history: mine. In 1990, thus 34 years ago, I started a daily routine, writing 400 words on weekdays, and 800 words on Sundays, dealing with a text from the ‘lectionary’, the daily readings from the Old and New Testaments, and the Psalms. I used the Upper Room Publications Journeying through the Day, and when after 26 years, it stopped publishing the book, I, continued my daily habit by reading the prescribed passages in the Vanderbilt Lectionary, and choosing a text to meditate on, writing some 250-300 words. That’s how I, this past week, was confronted with Daniel’s visions, as recorded in his 8^th chapter.

Karl Barth.

I love the advice of Karl Barth, a well-known theologian. “Preaching”, he said, “should be done with the Bible in one hand, and the Daily Paper in the other.” These words of wisdom apply to all who meditate.

Well… the current news is Trump and his choices for his cabinet, the people that will set the tone for Trump’s second term as President of the USA. It so happens that this week, November 17-24, the reading deals with Daniel. 

As a kid I loved that book, with the Lions’ Den, the experiences of his three friends had, sticking to their organic diet, and abiding by worshiping the God of their ancestors. And then the dreams Daniel was able to explain! 

But also, much mystery, and minds much sharper than mine have tried to explain how many events point to the Telos, the proverbial End. By the way, my blog is read all over the world, Russia, China, with lately many visitors from Lebanon and an undisclosed country, presumably North Korea.

So, here is what stirred my imagination: He will cause deceit to prosper, and he will consider himself superior. When they feel secure, he will destroy many and take his stand against the Prince of princes. Yet he will be destroyed, but not by human power.

Could this really apply to President-elect Donald Trump?

Context.

Yes, I am playing the fool here, but just as the Fool is Lear’s court jester, he also functions as a wise advisor the King, because he is the only character who is allowed to criticize Lear or question his decisions.

I believe there are no such things as coincidences: this text is an example. Today, Anno 2024-5, we have a perspective of planetary happenings, unequaled in times past. Thanks to satellites and universal surveyance, thanks to instant communication everywhere, there no longer are secrets. The human race has seen how we have moved from the Primeval Times, where Chaos was King, through endless cycles of human activities, each phase leaving historical traces, while ‘progress’ became the norm. Now the End looms, confirmed in the just concluded COP 29 conference. All official promises to reduce Global Heating, have become just words. We are in a relentless race, which will end in our total obliteration. 

Donald Trump’s election victory in the US will accelerate environmental dangers: his next four years will see the fulfillment and implementation of that prophecy, uttered 2,500 years ago.

Daniel was not alone in his prediction, although he was the first. Jesus quoted him in that terrible chapter of Matthew 24: 15: “So when you see standing in the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation,’ spoken of through the prophet Daniel–let the reader understand. That ‘holy place’ refers to God’s Holy Creation. The caution Jesus interjects, “Let the reader understand”, means that these words can only be understood, when the time for ‘desolation’, read Climate Change, is happening. 

Let me repeat Daniel’s words:

He will cause deceit to prosper, and he will consider himself superior. When they feel secure, he will destroy many and take his stand against the Prince of princes. Yet he will be destroyed, but not by human power.

We are on the cusp of irreversible, undeniable climate change: that ‘prediction’ is coming true, so, why not the Trump tragedy?

COP 29 AND JUDGEMENT 

For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”  (Acts 17: 32)

According to Luke, the physician, whose name appears as author at the start of the book of ACTS, Paul, the apostle, said this, while visiting Athens, Greece, somewhere between the years 40-45 A.D. 

Then Athens and, in particular ‘the Areopagus’ was the centre of the scientific world. It was there, on that famous hill, where the world’s wise and learned debated the topics of the day, and where newcomers were openly welcomed to air their views. 

So, Paul went there. But Paul, the apostle, educated in the world’s most ancient and unique school of thought, falling back on a thousand years of divine Jewish wisdom, was soon silenced when he mentioned “judgement and the resurrection of the dead”. The dead coming back to life, clashed with the Greek philosophy of the separation of body and soul, ingrained in Greek thought until this very day, and, sorry to say, prevalent in contemporary Christianity even now, evident in the dominant belief that upon death, we go to heaven. 

And then there is judgement. 

That brings me back to the present, and COP 29.

Is the church’s teaching to blame for CLIMATE CHANGE? Is that why judgement is waiting in the wings? In the text quoted above, it mentions that Jesus will return, heralding a day of reckoning, an occurrence often overlooked in churches.

In the King James Version of the Bible, the word ‘judgment’ appears 294 times, while the word “grace” is shown only 170 times. In my long life, with some 90 years of weekly church attendance, I cannot recall a sermon on ‘Judgment’, even though Paul uses that dreaded concept in his opening statement to the then World’s First University. 

Judgement and Sin.

In my opinion our generation is the most ‘sinful’ of all times, because a ‘sin against creation’, is a sin against the Creator. Yes, carbon use is sinful.

Creation/God is taking revenge.

Now creation is fighting back: we only are experiencing the opening salvos: COP 29 is a religious event: treasuring Creation is our main task in life. The thousands of COP delegates only increase earth’s vengeance. You may know that this week, Cop29 officially opened on Monday 11 November in Baku, Azerbaijan, a conference scheduled to end 11 days later. Had the church chosen to live by Genesis, describing the earth as God’s possession, and regarding it as ‘good’ and ‘very good’, in line with God’s opinion, this world gathering with 197 nations present, plus the European Union represented there, and the 28 preceding ones, would not have been necessary. Had ecclesiastical Christianity seen God’s grace to include the entire spectrum of life, believing God’s Earth and what it contains, as HOLY, following Psalm 24, “The Earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof, the world and all it contains,” a conference, such as COP 29, would not have been needed.

The conference is all about reducing, if not eliminating, the use of Carbon Products, known to cause our Climate Heating Predicament. The irony is that the host country Azerbaijan, relies on fossil fuels for more than 90 per cent of its exports. This, combined with the election of Trump, a Climate Change Denier, offer little to inspire confidence in this year’s conference.

So, why did Paul, the famous missionary, go there in the first place?  Paul, trained as a biblical scholar, wrote in the first letter to his church in Thessalonica (verse 5: 21), that we should ‘test all things and retain what is good’. 

That’s why he went to Athens, the centre of learning in his day, to learn first hand what ‘the world’ was teaching. 

He came, he saw, did not argue, and left.

In my previous blog I wrote: “Yes, Socrates, as recorded by Plato, welcomed death and eagerly drank the poison, sending him, supposedly, to a better life, because death could not be evil, as it frees the soul by guiding it to eternal truths, which, after all, is the entire point of life”.

And today?

Both, in their writings, Paul and Socrates are still around. At first blush, Socrates has been the winner, although his name is seldom mentioned. A casual look at English and American hymnbooks, reveals that heaven is almost universally praised as our ultimate destination. The fact that Trump has the overwhelming support of both Roman Catholic and Protestant believers, is a signal that Socratic beliefs are still particularly popular. Today we are witnessing the fulfillment of Socrates’ wish: the earth is seen as ‘evil’, as something to be destroyed.

God loves the earth. We are killing it. Climate Change is God’s built-in Judgement.