Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

PROPHETS AND PREDICTIONS.

In my ‘religion-dominated’ youth I was taught that every Christian was supposed to be ‘a prophet, priest and king’, a core Calvinistic concept. I can see myself as a priest, praying at mealtime, praying at bedtime. At home I also was taught that we humans are ‘the crown of creation’.

Today, 85 years later, my religious views have broadened: I now believe that through Jesus’ humanity, God and the world have become one; that I can’t love God without the world, and I can’t love the world without God.

That’s why I no longer see God apart from the world or the world apart from God. I see God and the world as one. Does this make me prophet?

What then is prophet?

A prophet is a person who follows Christ, and sees Christ not essentially as a teacher or legislator, but as a human being to the core, a real person like myself. That means that I should not – and I emphasize ‘not’ – be a mere adherent, and advocate of definite doctrines, but should always be a true human being, a real person before God.

It’s commonly believed that a prophet is a special person who speaks for God, a person who foretells the future, at least that’s what my dictionary tells me.

However, I take issue with this definition, because it would limit the office of prophet to crackpots, since nobody can predict the future. 

Am I a prophet? A closer look.

In the Bible prophets are called ‘seers’ not because they could see into the future, but because they could see the truth, could understand the deeper meaning of life and have a holistic view on events.

Prophets don’t concentrate on what’s going on in isolation, but they grasp the true consequences of the day’s happenings, and the deeper spiritual message of the present moment. They shed unblinking light on the pain and injustices of the present, both personal and societal.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who openly and unabashedly dares to look to what is happening ‘out there’ and, as a consequence, fully embraces his or her responsibility for the immense challenges evident in our rapidly deteriorating society. 

Thus, a prophet is not an extraordinary gifted person who knows the unknown, a sort of fortune-teller who magically foretells what is to come. No, a prophet is first and foremost a believer who refuses to nostalgically wallow in the past, but is convinced that our new present requires new thinking and different approaches.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who has the courage to critically look at past decisions, including those involving doctrines, to test them on their relevance for today and tomorrow.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who, from his or her perspective on life today, acts to keep creation viable for our children and grandchildren and strives for a church in which young people feel at home.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who by seeing Scripture as a lamp for their feet and a light for their path in God’s wonderful creation, knows that Christ, as the Son of Man, the Ben-Adam, the Son of the Soil, will return to make all things new. That’s why a prophet, in spite of all the sin and evil in this world, looks to the future with full confidence.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who now already can visualize what this future will be like and thus can critically evaluate the present in the light of the glorious future that is coming. 

Prophets are unpopular, of course.

Prophets are unpopular because they question the status quo; prophets are unpopular because people hate change; prophets are unpopular because people are comfortable; prophets are unpopular because politicians avoid controversy at all cost, hate to be bringers of bad news, even though they know better; prophets are unpopular even in the church as it plain from even a cursory reading of the Old Testament prophets, where both the major and minor ones reveal that organized religion in the days before Christ resembled today’s rulers: they want to please everybody. And not much has changed in the after Christ institutions.

Here’s how I see society today.

God has disappeared. Technology has become an end in itself, with a soul of its own. Its symbol is the machine, in the form of computers and automobiles and airplanes and satellites. They all embody the violation and exploitation of nature, God’s good creation, clear evidence of human arrogance which tries to set up an anti-world in the face of the world that was created by God. AI – Artificial Intelligence- is the latest and last expression of this attempt. The benefits of technology pale into insignificance beside its demonical properties.

That is my prophecy and prediction, based on trends and tendencies in contemporary society. 1 John 5: 19 comes to mind:

We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.

Bottom of Form

PONDERINGS ON A PARABLE.

What is a parable? My dictionary defines it as a simple story used to illustrate a certain truth.

Off and one for decades I have tried to make sense of the Parable of the Ten Virgins. I am sure that many are familiar with it, but just in case, a synopsis.

The parable mentions ten Bride’s maids, young girls, I imagine, who are responsible for preparing the bride to meet the bridegroom. Five of them Jesus calls foolish, five of them wise.

Jesus starts this unusual story with the words, “At that time.” At what time? I believe this phrase refers to the previous chapter, Matthew 24, which deals with the End of Days, the Day and Hour we don’t know.

Imagination.

One of my rules for writing is ‘letting my imagination go wild’. So, if I were to film this scene I would see ten excited young women, invited to an important wedding, and play a part in the proceedings. They are quite a relaxed bunch. The tension whether they would be invited is over. They made the cut and still a bit nervous, so they entered the hall with some trepidation, and when they had seen how the others were attired, they felt better and actually quite pleased with themselves.

But, somehow Jesus made a definite distinction in the group. Five he called foolish. Five he called wise. That’s one thing I found questionable. Why are the foolish called foolish? We know that the foolish are labeled that way because they had not taken extra oil along for their lamps.

Tell me: What would you have done had you been among the chosen Ten? The wedding is in the afternoon, say three o’clock. They were all there at least an hour before. The party is somewhat later, but certainly well over before midnight, because tomorrow is another busy day. The lights are needed for that short trip to the wedding hall, so, until that time the lamps are trimmed to a tiny flame. With a full tank there’s plenty of oil for the entire proceeding, with fuel to spare. Plain common sense. The bridegroom was known to be a punctual man, so why take along extra jars of that stinking and expensive kerosene? Suppose that the heavy crock pot would break and spill its contents all over the new dress. These containers weren’t like the metal or plastic ones we have:  no, they were frail, cumbersome and heavy. Mother was right: just to carry a lamp with a full tank would be enough. Also, how to carry the food, when one hand is needed to carry the light and another the extra oil. I agree with the so-called foolish maidens. Their action made perfect sense.

“But,” says Jesus, “those wise women took the trouble of lugging these heavy jars with them.” Why would they do this? Ridiculous, really. How could they properly attend to their task preparing the bride, and also carry the extra wine and food? That smelly stuff could easily mix with the other provisions! Nothing could be more impractical.

Those who Jesus called ‘wise’ do things totally beyond the call of duty, needlessly complicating their lives. To me the Foolish make much more sense.

Can you think of one reason why Jesus calls the practical teens foolish and the overcautious wise? Jesus must have a reason, so let me make a guess, and for this I will take a little detour.

The routine of Sunday, of hearing a sermon and attending a Christian Institution, can be compared to the normal supply of oil.
But we all know, there is more to meeting the bridegroom than routine matters. That’s why the super cautious oil bottle bearing women are called wise. They are prepared for more, and they probably don’t even know what that more is. However, they find this out when the bridegroom took long in coming.

I try to see the context of this parable. It is set after Matthew 24, with its heading, “Sign of the End of Age” and “The Day and Hour of Jesus’ Return Unknown.” Jesus, after a long sermon on the final days of humanity, speaks this parable. He begins, “Then” or “At his particular moment, at the End of Days”. I think that Jesus knew that at the End of Days Oil would again be a key element in the world. Jesus had a perfect overview of history from the embryo beginnings to the pollution- saturated end.

So, when the young girls, exhausted after extending their teenage chatter well beyond their usual bedtime – which was at sun down, as oil was too expensive to use for extended periods – the wedding feast turns into a slumber party. All Ten are sacked out on couches and across the floor of the verandah where they were keeping a lookout.

Then, finally, at midnight, there was a cry, “There comes the bridegroom. Wake up to meet him.”

The parable portrays the practical reality of life: The unexpected does happen. Trees go up in flames. Arctic ice is melting at a record rate. Glaciers are disappearing.  Suddenly the doomsters have substantial evidence for their message. The unexpected does happen. Before you realize the Lord is there, while we slumber the time away.

“Then all the maidens rose and trimmed their lamps.” They all straightened out their dresses, quickly combed their rumpled hair, turn to their lamps and five of them discover that they have practically run out of oil. They are not ready anymore to welcome the bridegroom. All the wick-trimming in the world, all the shaking and trying is useless: their lights are dead. The unexpected did happen. The Oil is gone. The always reliable, punctual bridegroom was late for his own party.

What does it all mean?

What does this all mean? God has taken so long to do anything that the world has dug its own grave. The lights are going out in this world.

Unless there is something other than the wisdom of the world to help it, there is no way that the world can straighten out the mess, politically, ecologically and economically.

So, what do we do? Well, listen to the rest of the parable.

“And the foolish said to the wise, “Give as some of your oil, for our lights are going out.” But the wise replied, “Perhaps there will not be enough for us and you. Go to the fuel dealer and buy some.”

How is that for a Christian answer? Aren’t we supposed to share things with others? Try to buy some fuel at midnight!

That was another mystery for me. For a long time, I really did not know what to think of that rather snotty reply of the Five Wise Women. Now it seems to me that this answer suggests that there comes a time, and perhaps has come, that we have to shrug our shoulders and go our own way. Time does run out as it always does in real life.

The parable suggests to me that a day will come when it will be too late to reform society.

It’s on that note that the parable ends. “While they went to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready, those who had the extra oil, went with him into the marriage feast and the door was shut. Afterwards the others came, knocked and said, ‘Lord, open up.’ But he said, ‘Sorry, I don’t know you’.”

Isn’t that a strange reply? The Lord doesn’t say, “I have never called you, or I have never loved you.” No, he says, “Listen, you have never bothered to get to know me. You never really took the time to seriously find out what I really stand for and what my creation is all about.

“What about preparing your selves so that the entry into the Kingdom, the renewed creation, is not a shock, but has become the next logical step in your life. Since you did not understand that to be my follower is to love creation for whose redemption I died. That’s why I now reject you. You were so caught up in the system and assumed that the commonly accepted, pragmatic solution was the norm, I now don’t know you.”

I set out with: What is a parable? My dictionary defines it as a simple story used to illustrate a certain truth.

We, as children of love, must show that we love God and thus his creation, and love neighbors as we ought to love ourselves. Our eyes, minds, hearts, must be focused on Christ’s truth: always! Even when his return, his Parousia, is long in coming.

MAGA: MAKE AMERICA GRIEVE AGAIN.

Matthew 24 calling.

Color me nervous. Even more than that: color me alarmed. Even more than that: color me frightened, afraid of Climate Change causing food shortages, afraid of nuclear wars, ending in our total annihilation.

It’s not that we lack warning. Jesus’ contemporaries were also busy with earth’s final conditions. Seeing a true prophet in Jesus, his disciples asked him for signs of ‘the end of the age’, meaning not only the end of the Roman occupation, but also the return of the good times as in the unspoiled Garden of Eden. Matthew 24 records this, as a warning to us, 2,000 years and some 70 billion people later, those born between then and today.

Jesus answered: “You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come.  Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.”

Sorry, Jesus, but I am alarmed: it seems to me, that the ‘birth pains’ have now started in earnest, and the time for ‘grieving’ has begun.

We now are descending into a burst of war madness that reminds me of Jesus’ words, and that at the very time when Global Heating endangers crops everywhere. Nothing, however, accelerates CO2 formation more than the destructive consequences of war. Wars kill more than people: they kill all that lives: soil, air, water, relationships, family ties, justice, laws.

Wars have no winners.

Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of Great Nations, touched an especially raw nerve when it came to the United States by suggesting (albeit with great care and with all sorts of qualification) that however powerful the US is, this did not necessarily guarantee it a dominant position in the international system forever. That’s happening now: the exact opposite of MAGA, “Making it Great Again”. The Trump slogan resembles more: “Making America Grieve Again”.

The USA is already a loser in healthcare, in social benefits, in longevity, in wealth inequity. Raised on the idea that the United States was an exceptional country with an enormous capacity for inventing and reinventing itself, in many respects, America has become a disadvantaged nation. Prof. Paul Kennedy’s argument that the United States might not be able to escape one of the most basic laws of world history went down rather badly in a nation that had become accustomed to being number one. No longer true, and Trump is accelerating this process.

Why do we have wars today?

Simple: the world is running out of basic resources such as wood, arable land, clean water, yes oil and coal, exacerbated by Global Warming. The easy to obtain raw materials has been exploited first: now comes the hard part! War economies, actually, speed up this disintegration process.

Why do we have this rush to destroy? Why this built-in death-wish?

In a sense, it is perfectly normal. Consumer economies are rare in history; military economies are the rule. The Roman Empire remains a good example. It is well known that most Empires tend to collapse as a result of overspending on their military. It happened to the Soviet Union in 1989. Every war is also a war on nature, on biodiversity, and on the climate. Today these many wars are driving us to global climate global destruction. Military Emissions means Humanity will not survive war.

Wars and rumors of war. The USA has a very poor record in its waging of wars since the conclusion of World War II: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, are still fresh in peoples’ minds. Will Iran be next? Wars always cause a lot of grief, grief for lost relatives, grief for destroyed structures, lost innocence, lost natural and artistic treasures.

Wars and Rumors of War.

Yes, even the Rumors of War drive up pollution, as war production always has a negative influence on overall global wellbeing. It temporarily provides jobs, but even that is now limited, as the manufacturing of capital products, such as tanks and airplanes, is being replaced with masses of drones and anti-air attack- devices, easy to produce.

To me, surveying the global scene, I see little hope for peace, as the world also experiences “The Limits of Growth”, the End of Earth’s Abundance, the fights for the last of oil, for the last of arable land, now very much reduced because of rapidly increasing drought conditions.

Nevertheless, of all the wars, the war against Creation is the most dangerous: that’s why the Second Coming is at hand. Civilization started in the Middle East. Might it also end there? Then grief will be replaced with JOY!

THE OLD TIME RELIGION: still good enough?

I just reread an interview with Dr. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury from 2012-22, thus the former head of the Anglican Church. An erudite man, writer, poet: in short: a very polished person.

Why did I do this? I tried to detect a new approach to the traditional way – Jesus saves, as explained in the Scriptures – which, to me is no longer effective.

Take this text:

“Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”, the opening words of Psalm 8. I was curious: would he mention Creation?After all, God is a total unity. Our words – my words – what I say or do, do not always complement each other. Not so with God. The Belgic confession says it better than I can phrase it:

We know God by two means:

First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book

in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:

God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.

All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.

Of course. Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

Romans 1: 20 explains that also: by us observing creation, God shows his full authority, and so reveals his majesty, affirming the lines in Psalm 8, but Dr. Williams, biblical scholar, great theologian, never mentioned this essential path to salvation.

Just look what is happening in God’s Garden, the world He gave to us to improve.

This year has just begun!

This year is exceeding 2023 – Canada’s worst wildfire season. In addition to the loss of plants and animals and poor air quality for a huge area, this illustrates a dangerous feedback loop. Estimates in the journal Nature calculate that the C02 emissions from the 2023 Canadian wildfires equals the total annual emissions of India. The CO2 released by wildfires heats the planet, which creates more drought and more wildfires, which creates more global heat, and so on.

As the Earth warms, harmful algal blooms are on the rise – even invading the polar regions. These unusual intrusions are driven by a mixture of pollution from agriculture, runoff from human waste and, increasingly, global heating – sometimes with dramatic consequences for wildlife and humans. As they spread, they are changing the colour of the world’s lakes, rivers and oceans. Remember: Creation is God’s gift to us!

I now live in suburban St. Catharines, Ontario. Daily I walk along carefully maintained lawns: beautifully manicured: not one weed, but also no bees and butterflies, and very few birds. I read this week that ”Insects are now plummeting in protected regions round the world, leading to crashing bird populations. Climate change is one of many factors, with an increasing effect. There are regions with virtually no insects left.”

I also read this week: The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and glorious day of the Lord. (Acts 2: 20). That is happening now, 2025! Forest Fires confirm the Finale.

To me the question arises: For what purpose is Christendom on earth?

My simple answer is: Christendom is here to establish peace: Peace on Earth!  

We are here to become one with the Earth. We are here to establish intimate connections with all that lives. We are here to search for the right way, the Christ-like Way, so that we live in full harmony with God’s beloved cosmos. We are here to live in the hopeful expectation of God’s New Creation. We are here not to make people Christians, Bible believers, as Dr. Williams said in his lengthy interview. Our real purpose is to become priests in partnership with God’s creation, mediators of the God’s Covenant as outlined in Genesis 9. Yes, the Bible is essential!

John 3: 16 is at the heart of the Gospel. “God so loved the WORLD!” When God sacrificed His Son to ‘buy back’ Creation from The Evil One, should we not follow that ‘cosmos-loving’ path as well? The reward is eternal life in the New Creation!

Look at TODAY!

This weekend the heads of our ruling countries meet in Canada, in a region clouded in smog and smoke from forest fires, a sign of ‘WAR AGAINST CREATION’.

The ‘old-time religion’, still good enough?

Psalm 24 still rules:  The earth is the LORD’s, and everything in it, the world, and all who live in it. That was true 2,500 years ago: that is true today in 2025, and will be true forever on the renewed earth.

That is not a ‘religious act”: that means a ‘way of LIFE!’ That’s what I missed in Dr. Rowan William’s interview.

THE OMINOUS THIRTY MINUTES OF SILENCE.

On November 11 1918 history was made: the end of a murderous war, in which millions of young lives were callously killed in a dispute that had no other cause than stupidity and vainglory. The world – Europe actually – had not seen a war for 100 years, and the generals had become restless, while the wisdom to prevent a conflict, was absent. The German Kaiser was a stupid person, not inclined to listen to reason, so in August 1914 the guns started roaring, not to be silenced for 4 years.

To commemorate this tragic event – and tragic it was – since then, now for 106 years, on every November 11, 2 minutes of silence is maintained, a pause to reflect on human bellicosity.

However, there is a silence-precedent. The last Bible book, Revelation 8: 1, records a similar event: When he opened the seventh seal, there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.

J. H. Bavinck, in his book on Revelation, entitled And On and On the Ages Roll, comments on this text: “We don’t have the slightest idea of what this means. Who can state this with any certainty?”

Well, I am fool enough to venture an explanation.

I believe that our ‘2 minutes of silence’ may indicate a possible explanation. Just as we now, for more than a century, have reflected on the folly of war, and, annually, have recalled the uselessness of the millions of deaths in Flanders Fields, wars and rumors of war have intensified, especially our relentless rebellion against God/Creation.

That brings me to the angels, who for thousands of years, have fought the vain attempts by humans to outwit God. However, today, for ‘thirty minutes’, these very same angels have stopped their efforts to influence human behavior, and have given humanity a free hand to challenge God for the last time. Trump is leading the way by abolishing all efforts to stop Climate Change: a daring bid to be like the Almighty! And, so far, God is letting him get away with it:  just as ‘Old Testament religion’ was successful in crucifying the Christ, so God is allowing the human race to destroy creation.

Everything becomes what it is.

Bavinck sees the purpose of the Bible’s last book, as ‘everything becomes what it is’. He bases this on Revelation 22: 10-11: “Let they who do wrong, continue with their sinful conduct; let they who do right, pursue their good works”. So, for ‘30 minutes’ the angels will not intervene: We are on our own for good or ill!

That really means that God is retreating and giving us the liberty to follow our own way. We see how, in 2025, the result of the widespread use of pesticide and fertilisers, of light and chemical pollution, leads to loss of habitat and the growth of industrial agriculture; we see how this has reduced the number of insects, has imperiled the existence of wild life, has aided the disappearance of birds; we see it in Climate Change, drought and floods, forest fires and ever stronger and more frequent hurricanes; we see it in the fading of ‘faith’, the advent of rulers like Trump and Putin, dictators and right-wing thinking, wars and rumors of war; we see it as the heavenly silence endures.

So, how long is the heavenly 30 minutes of silence?

Everybody knows that in the Bible a minute is not 60 seconds, nor does ‘soon’ mean in a day or two.

So, how long is ‘the heavenly 30 Minutes’? The Bible gives no hint, so God allows me to speculate, because the divine timetable is different: “One day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day”, says 2 Peter 3.

That is no help, so, here is my – possible – explanation. A day has 24 full hours, and thus 48 thirty minutes periods. Historians have determined that ‘history’ runs back some 4800 years to Mesopotamia and Egypt, or 48 x 100 years. By connecting the two, my tentative answer is that ’30 minutes’ heaven-time indicates roughly 100 years: perhaps 1914-2025.

Why 1914-2025?

The Lord gave me a hint: last week, I, at random, picked up a book “Sinners and the Sea”, the untold story of Noah’s wife, written by a Jewish author, Rebecca Kanner. We know the story, how, after the God-induced Flood, wiping out all human life, the Noah clan makes a new start.

The same will happen after ‘the 30 minutes’ have expired, but this time the ‘destructors are us’. And we are well on the way: since 1914 we have seen TWO World Wars, are preparing for a THIRD, while the War against Creation/God is intensifying, and AI, the ultimate Tower of Babel, looms.

When Noah’s Fludde came, the people then ridiculed the effort of building the Ark. Noah’s explanation was ignored, just as today the signs are not heeded. I believe that “the 30 minutes’ are now in force and will soon expire.

Will there be a repeat of global demise, now human-generated?

Yes.

HOW THEN SHALL WE LIVE?                       

The perennial question.

In detective stories, the principal character, the celebrated investigator who always, in the end, nails the culprit, often lets the reader know that there is no such thing as coincidence: every occurrence, all circumstances have significance.

I can affirm this in my weekly writing: I scan a lot of perhaps useless stuff. I daily read three newspapers: The Globe and Mail, the British the Guardian, and the New York Times. Much of the writing in these three sources often seems irrelevant, yet, sometimes an article finds a place in staging my next episode of self-discovery: that’s really what my blogs are.

In these confusing times, especially for Christians, the question of “Christian Living” is a burning one. The late Harold Bloom, the famous literary critic, in his book The American Religion, states that the churches in which Americans worship, have, by and large, ceased to be Christian, now plainly evident in its leader, Donald Trump.

So, what is ‘religion?’

It reminds me of a book I have with the intriguing title, What Christianity is NOT”, written by Dr. Douglas John Hall, a McGill professor, a man I met at an environmental conference in Madison Wisconsin some 35 years ago, organized by Dr. Calvin de Witt. I discovered, having attended a few of these gatherings, that is typical for  ‘Christian’ environmental meetings, that the presenters often outnumber the attendees. This certainly was the case at this Wisconsin meeting, in a Roman Catholic Convent. By and large church people are not at all interested in matters dealing with God’s Creation because the overwhelming percentage of church-going people expect to go to heaven, away from this wicked earth.   

Dr. Hall starts his book with a short Latin sentence: Si comprehendis, non est Deus, a line attributed to St. Augustine, meaning, “If you understand it, you are not talking about God”.

 He also mentions Karl Barth, who wrote, “The message of the Bible is that God hates religion”. In that same vein Bonhoeffer writes, “Jesus does not call people to a new religion but to life”. He bases this on John 10: 10, where Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

I believe that the thief in this text is especially us, 21th century humans: if there ever was a rapacious and destructive being in history is us, my generation. I am writing these lines on Ascension Day. There the angels appearing at the event of Jesus leaving the earth, declared: This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” (Acts 1: 11).  Jesus is earth-bound! Praise the Lord.

“Seek first the Kingdom”: that’s how Jesus defines his mission. That simply means, “seeking the welfare of creation, God’s work of art, for whose restoration Christ died! Not just for us sinners? The common belief?

Dr. Sabine Dramm, quoting Bonhoeffer, wrote: “Christ died for the world, and Christ is Christ only in the midst of the world. God cannot be understood without the world nor the world without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ: Only they who love the earth and God as one, has faith in God’s Kingdom”. When did you hear that in church?

Yet he echoes what J. H. Bavinck writes in his Between the Beginning and the End: “The Central point of the gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering; rather, its entire focus is aimed at the unique and powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom.”

Bavinck’s – not surprising – conclusion is that ‘there is no such thing as individual salvation: all salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all-wise of Him who lives and rules forever.”

Bonhoeffer concluded that “Only they who love the earth and God as one, have faith in God’s Kingdom”. He also wrote: “They who love God love Him as Lord of the earth as it is; they who loves the earth, love Him as Lord of the earth.

Based on this, a new look at Christianity is far overdue. Not heaven-oriented, but earth-driven. That’s why present-day Christianity is not a religion: it is ‘a way of life’, a total commitment to the welfare of creation: God’s Kingdom!

How then shall we live?

Therefore: “Seek first the Kingdom”, that means, The welfare of God’s Creation.