Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

I know your deeds, that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either one or the other!                                      Revelation 3: 16

I once had a book, a Dutch book, with the title – in Dutch of course – “Letters from Heaven” directed to the 7 churches in Asia Minor, roughly the area of Turkey today.

The last one was sent to ‘lukewarm’, ‘Lackadaisical’ Laodicea: ‘Lackadaisical’ fittingly indicating lack of enthusiasm and determination, neither hot nor cold.

The footnote, in my study bible, gives an interesting comment: “Laodicea was the wealthiest city (in the area) during Roman times. It was widely known for its banking establishment, medical school and textile industry. Its greatest weakness was the lack of an adequate water supply.”

The writer of that letter could be talking of us today, 2025: Even the climatic conditions are similar: Laodicea was an advanced society, much like ours, including a threatening lack of natural resources, and failure of genuine faith, because prosperity pushes prayer away, and propels passivity. That’s why we must “Pray without ceasing” because we too suffer from lukewarmness.

“Pray without ceasing” is found in 1 Thessalonians 5: 17. Prayer usually means having a dialogue with God. To me it has become a more direct activity, encouraged by Bonhoeffer’s Life. Dr. Sabine Dramm, in her book:  ”Bonhoeffer: An Introduction to his thoughts”, summarizes Bonhoeffer’s belief as, “Specific to the Christian Faith is the perception of God and the world as one.”

That makes sense to me, echoing the Belgic Confession, which says: “We know God first of all through his creation”, just as we know Shakespeare, Bach, Rembrandt, by their works: therefore “Pray without ceasing” to me really means that we constantly must have the welfare of creation in mind: No ‘lukewarmness’ allowed! Harming God’s ‘work of art’, constitutes lèse majesté, the insulting of a monarch, in this case the Creator.

Goliath’s Curse.

This brings me to a new book whose summary appeared in the (British) The Guardian a few weeks ago. It was published in the USA on September 23, and I ordered it right away.

Here are some of my initial impressions:

Cambridge professor, Dr. Luke Kemp’s new book covers the rise and collapse of more than 400 societies over 15,000 years. The lessons he has drawn are often striking: people are fundamentally egalitarian but are led to collapses by enriched, status-obsessed elites, taking advantage of general apathy and lukewarmness.

He writes, “Today’s global civilisation, however, is deeply interconnected and unequal and will lead to the worst possible societal collapse. The threat is from leaders who are “walking versions of the dark triad” – narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism – in a world menaced by the climate crisis, nuclear weapons, artificial intelligence and killer robots.”

He cites three reasons why the collapse of the global Goliath would be far worse than previous events.

“First is that collapses are accompanied by surges in violence as elites try to reassert their dominance. In the past, those battles were waged with swords or muskets. Today we have nuclear weapons.

“Second, people in the past were not heavily reliant on empires or states for services and, unlike today, could easily go back to farming or hunting and gathering. Today, most of us are specialised, and we’re dependent upon global infrastructure. If that falls away, we too will fall.

“Last but not least is that, unfortunately, all the threats we face today are far worse than in the past. Past climatic changes that precipitated collapses, for example, usually involved a temperature change of 1C at a regional level. Today, we face 3C globally. There are also about 10,000 nuclear weapons, technologies such as artificial intelligence and killer robots and engineered pandemics, all sources of catastrophic global risk.”

Kemp says his argument that Goliaths require rulers who are strong in the triad of dark traits is borne out today. “The three most powerful men in the world are a walking version of the dark triad: Trump is a textbook narcissist, Putin is a cold psychopath, and Xi Jinping came to rule [China] by being a confirmed autocrat.”

What will happen?

“The global Goliath is the endgame for humanity”, Kemp says, like the final moves in a chess match that determine the result. He sees two outcomes: self-destruction or a fundamental transformation of society.

He believes the first outcome is the most likely, but says escaping global collapse could be achieved. “First and foremost, we need to create genuine democratic societies to level all the forms of power that lead to Goliaths.”

“That means running societies through citizen assemblies and juries, aided by digital technologies to enable direct democracy at large scales. History shows that more democratic societies tend to be more resilient”.

Is that believable?

The short answer is “No”, confirmed by the events described in Revelation 21, the last Bible book. Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

Thank you, Jesus, for vanquishing the Goliath’s Curse!

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IS MY ANALYSIS CORRECT?

“The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved.”

                                                               Jeremiah 20: 8

So, how do I explain this text from Jeremiah, the prophet famous as the ‘bringer of doom’. He enriched our modern parlor through ‘Jeremiads’, those long, mournful complaints or lamentations.

In this text, what is this man, Jeremiah, commonly known as a major prophet, trying to say? Is there anything applicable for today, 2025, now 2500 years later?

Yes, I sincerely believe that the Bible speaks to us now, even after many, many centuries. Why? Because human nature has not changed at all, thus the message brought to us after some millennia, remains relevant, and so do the prophecies.

Take Isaiah 24:

For the LORD has spoken this word.

4The earth mourns and withers; 

the world languishes and fades; 

the exalted of the earth waste away.

5The earth is defiled by its people; 

they have transgressed the laws; 

they have overstepped the decrees 

and broken the everlasting covenant.

6Therefore a curse has consumed the earth, 

and its inhabitants must bear the guilt; 

the earth’s dwellers have been burned, 

and only a few survive.

True then, true now.

So, let me refresh your memory, and repeat the words of the original text: “The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved.”

As the quote from Isaiah 24 shows, human destructive nature remained constant during the past 2,500 years: then as now the earth is under attack by us, sinful creatures, while God/Creation fights back.

While I am writing this, my eyes are fixed on the semi-tropical portion of the Atlantic Ocean, and also on the Pacific: Both huge waterbodies are given birth to immensely destructive natural phenomena, known as Hurricanes and Typhoons. They now increasingly are the direct products of our enslavement to fossil fuels that – unimaginable until now, I should add – we have heated these immense waterbodies covering 70% of the globe, to the point of generating aquatic super-monsters, capable of nuclear-size calamities. Should I mention earthquakes? Revelation 11: 13 does, and so does Jesus in Matthew 24. Expect them too!

Back to the original question again: “The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved.”

We have harvested the earth, have taken out her easy treasures, the low-hanging fruit, and now the glorious days of summer are gone, and we face the unpredictable days of depletion, pollution, storms, rain, snow and ice, procuring a plethora of poisonous by-products in the process. New dangers loom. By exceeding 420+ parts per million of CO? in the atmosphere, we have crossed an unprecedented threshold for our species, forcing our bodies, our lungs, to operate in a chemical environment for which it was not designed. This planetary experiment is already showing its effects, and the price could include our own mental acuity, in addition to the perils, hitherto unknown in human history. New reports show that Carbon Dioxide dilutes the human intellect to think properly, and thwarts our reasoning powers, prevents or obstructs our judgement and hampers the drawing of the rightful conclusions for altering our destructive behavior. Just as the disciples did not believe that Jesus would die, neither do we believe that Creation shares that fate, also.

Blame CO2. Inhalong CO2 plays havoc with the very features that makes us human, while our being created in God’s image is reduced, and so is our ability to absorb the Good News.

“The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved.”

What does this mean for you and me?

The harvest is past. This means that no more revelations are in the offing. We have heard and experienced all the possible Good News that was available. Now with the harvest past, and the summer ended, preaching has become difficult. The ears that are capable to hear, are shut, our sermons fail to reach the intended targets: the summer of solace and security for gospel proclamation, has come to an end, and, by and large, salvation is no longer possible, humanly speaking.

For the church this new situation means securing what has been learned, throwing overboard denominational structures, in the process, negating theological, that is human devised doctrines, while emotionally, spiritually, yes, also physically, preparing for the Parousia, the ‘sudden and unexpected appearance of the Lord in all his glory’.

“The harvest is past, the summer has ended, and we are not saved.”

Call it the warning before the door closes, the door to salvation. The 10 tribes of Israel, refusing to repent, disappeared from the world scene. We, as the human race, have remade God’s creation in our image, have poisoned every cubic millimeter on earth, water and air, have made sane life, have made obedient life, impossible.

Pray for Parousia. Now.

Is my analysis correct? Remember that Jesus comes as ‘the thief in the night’!

CHRISTIANISM

Many whom God has, the church does not have, and many whom the church has, God does not have.

                                                                        Augustine.                            

Somehow the above quote reminds me of, “Ave Caesar, morituri te salutant” (“Hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you”).

These words were shouted by the gladiators, condemned to die, while entering the Colosseum, the immense arena in Rome, still today a tourist attraction. Their fighting to death provided entertainment for the masses, including the emperor. Any connection here to today?

Perhaps.

Some discouraging words of Jesus come to mind, such as ‘Many are called, and few are chosen’ (Mathew 22:14), and another one of Jesus’ pessimistic utterances, “Will I find faith on earth when I return?” (Luke 18: 38).

As a person not far from one hundred years old, born in 1928, my vivid recollection of my grandparents, born in 1870, 155 years ago, fills me with a kind of longing, the days before our carbon-powered society, living during a full century of world peace – 1815-1914. My grandparents, I know, were at peace with the earth, and humble before God. Today we, like the gladiators, are condemned to die, because of our Carbon Addiction. 2 Peter 3 comes to mind.

Now, 50 years after the appearance of Limits of Growth, in which the Club of Rome publication forecasted today’s turmoil, due to disappearing resources, the world is afraid: governments don’t longer want to hear about pollution and Global Heating anymore, hiding behind a cheap Christianity: no longer ‘the meek -those who claim nothing for themselves – will inherit the earth’, but the bold, those possessing nuclear bombs.

This time around, Anno 2025, the original Christian confession: Creation being God’s WORD, the belief that God and the earth are intimately connected – see the Belgic Confession – is regarded as nonsense. The New Testament text: “God so loved the cosmos, to the point of sacrificing his Son to buy it back from the powers of Darkness”, has been replaced with exploitation, a heresy which has given us Christianism, the false religion that separates God from his cosmos, and us from the all-knowing Lord.

Both Bonhoeffer and J. H. Bavinck are both boldly blunt: Salvation of the person, and salvation of the earth, are two sides of the same coin. No wonder the church father Augustine wrote: “Many whom God has, the church does not have, and many whom the church has, God does not have.”

The Trump cohorts abuse the Bible-teaching to justify their actions, and, by and large, Organized Christianity has failed to counter their claims, failed to openly, loudly, convincingly defy these heresies, degenerating Christianity into Christianism.

All this confirms Matthew 24:24: “For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect.” Think AI!

By and large Christianity has become an ideology, abused by the Right-wing adherents to herald their heresies, has become a sterile story: Christianism, just as Communism and Capitalism

Warnings Galore.

This past week, Arctic News suggested that next year, with an El Nino expected, the world temperature may exceed 3 Degrees C. – have a look at Arctic News– high enough to cause universal death. Another paper – see Ugo Bardi – established that the rise in CO2, from 280 to 420 will universally affect the cognitive capacity of all humanity: making us more stupid and unable to grasp the consequences of our sins against creation, against God’s Majesty, against the very existence of our being. 

Almost everywhere you look, the spike of climate alarm that followed the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, has given way to something its supporters might describe as climate moderation but which critics would call complacency or indifference.

Complacency or quiet piety?

I live in a Christian Retirement Home, in St. Catharines, On., a small city in the Niagara Peninsula, where I and my immediate family lived before, from 1955 – 1975. Then, tired of sterile dogmatic indoctrination, we moved away to be involved in a religious experiment, that soon faltered, and became intimately involved in the Tweed, (On) Presbyterian Church for close to a half century.

Now, after 50 years of absence, I came back to the Dutch Reformed church scene, and discovered that there are almost as many little denominations as there are people living in this area, all offshoots of the original church, Christian Reformed. The situation reminds me of a suburb of Los Angeles, Beverly Heights, when my middle daughter lived there. There I counted 10 different Jewish synagogues along its main street.

Christ did not bring religion: He brought us LIFE: John 10:10 shouts: “I have come to bring you LIFE, and that to the full”. Churches, through their doctrinal pronouncements, foster Christianism, cold, human, dogmatic, sterile, ideological teaching, a far cry from Jesus’ teachings.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. (Matthew 11: 28)

When creation suffers, God suffers. We suffer. Maranatha. Beware of Christianism. Love God’s earth with all your heart, soul and mind. Its your eternal habitat!

AI AND Ai

By now, most people recognize the AI abbreviation: the A = Artificial, the I = Intelligence. Intelligence occurs naturally in us, humans, measured by IQ or Intelligence Quotient, with the average graded as 100. Animals, such as elephants, dolphins, dogs, apes, also, have considerable intelligence.

The burning question today is: “Can machines have ‘intelligence’?”

I guess not. Humans are unique: Made in God’s Image. A machine, a computer, is a factory-made device, can be programmed to simulate intelligence. When I misspell a word – which I often do – my computer warns me, and sometimes correct the error. That’s an inbuilt feature, which I greatly appreciate.

It seems to me that AI is basically a gigantic search machine that feeds on the information stored somewhere out there on a brother or sister instrument. It also seems to me, ignorant, computer-unwise, constantly searching, intense ‘religious’ person, that AI= Artificial Intelligence, is the culmination of human – thus sinful – endeavour to create a god in his/her own image. To achieve that, an ever – increasing mass of God’s buried energy resources – already in short supply and highly toxic – is needed to advance this self-defeating goal.    

Nevertheless, AI systems achieve results by processing vast amounts of data to recognize patterns, adapt to new information, and make decisions or recommendations to reach specific goals: and, in the process, replace lots of working people.

However: crime also keeps pace.

It is a typical human trait that, as soon as technical advances appear,

with remarkable efficiency they are being exploited for criminal purposes, deployed not to expand human understanding but to systematically subvert it. Instead of “democratizing intelligence,” we are witnessing a sort of collective brain damage. My website, www.hielema.ca., is almost daily attacked by evil – mostly Russian – infiltrators, trying to limit its reach.

So, where does Ai come in?

God saw the Jacob clan, entering ‘the promised land’ as his special people, holy to the Lord, an example for the world to follow. There’s where Ai comes in.

Ai? My resource book is the Bible, a collection of books, spanning many centuries of stories in simple language, understandable for us ignorant creatures, that’s why these booklets can give us an impression of God’s way with the human race. In very simple words, the Bible, immense in scope, relays how God created, how we uncreated, and how Jesus, God’s very Son, and also the very human, re-created.

Take Ai.

Notice the difference! The ‘i’ is low-case: not AI, but Ai. There is a Bible Story about Ai. I know, everybody has a Bible, the best-known and least-read book. Actually, the word Bible is Greek, Biblos, simply meaning ‘book’. It also is called, “The Book of books”, because it contains 66 booklets, of which 39 appear in the Older Testament, and 27 in the Newer one.

What happened in Ai, some 3,500 years ago, tells us about AI today. The story is found in the book named after Joshua, the man who succeeded Moses. He was the general who led the conquest of the Promised Land, among which the City of Ai, a small settlement, featured prominently. It seemed to be an easy target for Joshua’s veteran fighting force. But the initial plan misfired, the attack was repelled and scores of God’s people were killed. Suddenly, God, the mighty Lord, had abandoned his army, and God’s name sullied.

What was the cause?

One person’s Greed had dire consequences. Before Jericho’s immense walls mysteriously toppled, God had given specific instructions NOT to use the occasion to extract personal treasures from the ruins. One person, however, discovered a trove of gold, silver and other valuables, and secretly buried them. That one sin, caused the death of scores of people, and damaged Israel’s reputation as God’s chosen race.

The real point was that God’s honor was at stake here. The nation of Israel was (and still is) supposed to be an example for the rest of the world: yes, a city on the hill! It failed (fails) because of greed. Now the church, too, just as Ai, has taken that place: its members ought to be examples of godly living, especially as it applies to God’s Creation, God’s everlasting Created Word.

Back to AI.

Apart from its potential and imminent danger of spreading falsehoods and damaging the human psyche, AI needs the input – a word I dislike – of immense electricity volumes, so much that, since most of them are generated by fossil fuels, Climate Change will accelerate rapidly. Climate change, now beyond repair, is the equivalent to the defeat of Joshua’s army, then a rather minor affair, now a world-wide disaster that will quickly accelerate. Yes, our Greed, too, has dire consequences. Climate Change will cause the unlocking of the gigantic volumes of METHANE, buried in the shallow, already overheated, Arctic Ocean, a gas one hundred times more lethal than the C02 we dump into the finely balanced air mixture we inhale every few seconds.

Just as in “Ai”, God, the sovereign ruler of the universe, today too, is not to be trifled with: his works are holy, his universe is holy.

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AI, GOD AND US.

This past Tuesday, the day after Labor Day 2025, I read Thomas L. Friedman’s 4,000 words essay in the New York Times. It affected me deeply. Friedman, the most senior columnist in this world-class paper, predicted that, unless the USA and China, unite in taming the Artificial Intelligence (AI) monster for the preservation of humanity, our future will be ruled by this machine.

The article reminded me of Jacques Ellul, the author of THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY, a book published in France in 1955, and whose 1964 English translation I bought in 1965.

Here is the synopsis the Internet provided.

Dive deep into the chilling predictions of French philosopher Jacques Ellul, particularly his seminal work, The Technological Society. Ellul argues that the true danger isn’t machines taking over, but the rise of “Technique” – the relentless pursuit of optimal efficiency in every human endeavor. Reading it, we discover how this principle, applied universally from industry to psychology, subtly shapes our behavior, values, and even our thoughts. Jacques Ellul explains how this drive for efficiency becomes autonomous, unified, and self-augmenting, creating a system that demands human adaptation, leading to a new, insidious form of enslavement. It explores how Ellul’s concepts of Technique and the technological society reveal the hidden pressures of modern life, from algorithmic feeds to performance metrics, demonstrating how we become optimized components within the very systems we build. Understanding Jacques Ellul provides crucial insights into navigating the modern world and resisting the passive conformity demanded by efficiency. We learn why Jacques Ellul’s warnings in The Technological Society are more relevant than ever in our digital age, and see how Ellul challenges us to critically examine the dominance of technology.

Jacques Ellul was also an extraordinary Christian, who saw the danger of enslavement.

Here is one of his quotes:
“Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.”

Professor Ellul’s prophetic words stir deep resonance within me: they hit me in my guts! They echo Friedman’s prediction, another contemporary prophet. Here is what Friedman writes:

A.I. will spread like a steam vapor and seep into everything. It will be in your watch, your toaster, your car, your computer, your glasses and your pacemaker — always connected, always communicating, always collecting data to improve performance. As it does, it will change everything about everything — including geopolitics and trade between the world’s two A.I. superpowers, and the need for cooperation will become ever more apparent each month.

The above quote reminds me of ‘the Antichrist’, the opponent of the Holy Spirit. Friedman emphasizes that there are two things in the world happening faster than you think: one is climate change and the other artificial intelligence — heading toward some level of “autonomous omni-presence, artificial intelligence, sometimes called superintelligence”.

When will we get there?

When will we get there? “This year, next year, five years — I’m not sure”, he writes. “But I would say the consensus within the A.I community is that we’re going to get there. And that is going to change everything about everything”.  Friedman also writes: “Before there was God and us. Now there is God, us and AI.”

I know this to be incorrect: ‘evil’ was always there: always, in the entire history, there always were God, Satan and us. Now, with Satan kicked out of heaven, he has landed feet first on earth.

It could well be that, just as God is a spirit, AI embodies, as Friedman writes, a vapor a ‘spirit’, unobtrusively invading everything, making AI the ‘new’ God!

We must not forget that history basically is the ‘fight between Good and Evil’.

History started in Paradise, and finds its finale in the End, today’s climax. The struggle basically is ‘who rules the earth’. That “The world today is swept by once-in-a-century transformations,” is obvious: by and large it has succumbed to nihilism: no longer is there a reigning, overarching, ‘faith’ system. The Age of Rationalism is over: Reason is no longer sufficient to enact a lasting future: spiritual understanding has replaced it: AI is the new God.

This means that we must look around us, not with our eyes only, but through the Spirit, giving free expression to ‘intuition’, our ‘inner’ facilities, our ‘gut’ feelings, and so rekindle indigenous wisdom, genuine love for all created matter.

That’s why I reemphasize Ellul’s assessment of ‘the Christian”:

“Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.

And we all say: Amen!

 THROUGH A GLASS, DARKLY.

For now, we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 

That’s the King James version of the conclusion of that famous poem, that Ode to Love, Paul wrote, as recorded in 1 Corinthians 13.

Translating is much more an art rather than a science. Here are some other examples of this very famous text:

For now, we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

That’s the New Living Translation, known as the NIV.

Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely.

That’s how the translators put it in the English Standard Version.

For now, we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.

That’s how the American Standard Version runs.

Differences.

All versions differ. Why? Because translating is an art, not a science.

I translated 4 books from Dutch to English, all published by or through Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Mich. USA. My theory of translating is: an effort to render a foreign text in a new language more beautiful than the original. And I believe that I have somewhat been successful in this effort.

I realize this sounds rather boastful, that’s why the Dutch have a saying: the phrase “Eigen roem stinkt” translates as: “Your own fame stinks”. It means that boasting about your own achievements or taking too much pride in yourself can be off-putting or unpleasant to others. 

But how about if somebody else praises you? I translated Dr. J. H. Bavinck’s book with the Dutch title, “DE MENSCH EN ZIJN WERELD, which the publisher entitled, “Between the Beginning and the End”, subtitled, A Radical Kingdom Vision.

Of the four reviewers, Dr. John Bolt of Calvin Seminary regarded the script as ‘elegant’, while Dr. Charles Van Engen of Fuller Theological Seminary was more explicit, writing, Bert Hielema’s translation is outstanding, readable, fluid, clear, forceful, and compelling.

In his 150 pages book, Dr. Bavinck, a professor of missions at the Amsterdam Free University devoted an entire chapter to the concept of God’s Kingdom, a topic he thought – and I concur – is sorely misinterpreted or misunderstood in contemporary Christianity: totally seen ‘through a glass darkly’.

Why?

Whenever the secular press refers to the outcome of the Christian Life, it sees Heaven as the goal of human existence, a concept totally influenced by Pagan Greek Philosophy. Most of Christianity has promoted and maintained this religious error, to the point where Trump, with the almost unanimous endorsement of The American Religion, has scrapped all environmental protection rules, in full accord with this pagan notion. Not only is much of the Church’s teaching totally wrong or misdirected, its vision has become more than blurred: It has become an obstacle to Salvation. “The Radical Kingdom Vision”, as espoused by Bavinck made him write:

“It is God’s intention to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one overarching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation: all salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in Him. 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 wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”

In plain language this means that: My salvation and the salvation of creation go hand in hand. That is the “Radical Kingdom Vision” Dr. Bavinck opens up for us. No wonder Jesus lamented, “Many are called, and few are chosen”. (Matthew 22: 14).

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, is there truth in this at all?” 

We should be careful in what we believe for sure. Much of what I was told to be the ‘gospel’ truth – heaven, hell, evolution, doctrines, ‘Sunday best’, the place of women – has darkened in obscurity. Is same sex next?

Today, the mirror has become almost totally black, as Gnosticism rules the church, a heresy the Apostle John repeatedly warned against. Its central point is that spirit is entirely good and matter is entirely evil, making the human body/creation, bad, while only heaven/spirit is good. That today is the church’s ruling faith, in total contrast with John 3: 16, where Jesus categorically states that God’s total love is centered on his creation, hence Dr. Bavinck’s definition of redemption: the salvation of the person and salvation of creation go hand in hand. Indeed: a radical concept.

Did you ever hear that in church?