Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

TRAGIC TRUMP.

In my weekly blogs, now in their 26th year, I have never relied on ‘artificial’ input. My writings are derived from my daily reading of three sources: The Toronto-Canada- Globe and Mail, the New York -USA- Times, and the British The Guardian. I then embroider my writing, enlightened by decades of book intelligence, and honed by my ‘Christian’ tentacles, which is my overall basis.  

Oh, yes, I sometimes blatantly copy stuff, not always with proper acknowledgement, for which I offer my sincere apologies, while not vouching to never do it again, fully aware that it makes me look smarter than I really am. All that reading, however, does tickle my brain and feeds my intellect. I also confess, I do consult Google. One never knows how it/she/he/whatever, would react as it assumes human/satanic/semi-godly features, such as vengeance, jealousy, suspicion – and take revenge on me, humble blogger, who types with two, often misguided fingers, using the ‘delete’ button three times more often than any other key.

Tragic Trump.

My heading is all about Donald J. Trump (DJT). I consulted my brain, and found two verbs that included his initials and describe his traits: DisJoinTed and DeJecT. That the president is disjointed in his words and that his actions often make no sense, is obvious. To me he actually became a tragic figure: Deject, Downcast and Dispirited. Yes, deeply deficient. Three times married: unhappiness galore, angry partners, tragic outcomes. Gone Bankrupt repeatedly: deception, debts, falsehoods, more tragic consequences. And now in early November he faces ferocious failure: How will he, spoiled, vengefully insecure, react?

Also, he claims of possessing super intellect, and that, by his own admission, without ever reading anything!  Does watching TV do this? Isn’t TV

often called ‘the boob-tube’?

Anyway, AI stands for Artificial Intelligence, but it reads and steals ferociously, but D.J.T. has – again by his own admission – only Innate Intelligence: is born with all he knows: really tragic.

And me? The little I know, I have acquired through books and articles, and, especially, by relying on ‘the fear of the Lord’, the onset of wisdom.

I am highly disturbed.

Not being aware that the foregoing blabber might have more than a grain of truth, to my utter dismay, just after I wrote this, I read a highly disturbing article in the New York Times of September 29, describing a dinner meeting gathering of AI leaders and religious personages from some 20 different streams. There one participant, a rabbi, noticed that Mr. Olah – the host, and Toronto-born to boot – and his colleagues were suggesting something far more significant. These Anthropic leaders were talking about Claude – AI’s offspring – as if it were not mere software, but these AI Creators were relating to their brainchild as it were a conscious being. They really thought that their machine had human features: Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect: that’s why they called together the world’s religious leaders to endow their ‘software’ created brainchild with an amalgam of religious input.

Not an easy task.

I could just as well ask: Which denomination proclaims the true religion. In Canada, there are at least 10 active, distinct Christian denominations that explicitly include the word “Reformed” in their description. All claim – not openly but implicitly – to represent the true Reformation.

Is there a secular Redeemer around?

The Guardian asked its readers to suggest a person capable of getting us out of the mess we have created. The paper wrote: “It is clear that the world as it is – considering the climate crisis, the rise of nationalism, geopolitical tumult, the possibility of AI killing us all by the end of the decade – could do with some more ethically astute and capable leadership”.

There were many suggestions, among them Mark Carney and Jesus Christ. Mark Carney, the current Canadian Prime Minister, is now famous for standing up to Donald Trump. Jesus Christ needs no introduction.

Let me cite one the responses.

One reader wrote: “The climate crisis, technology challenges and the power concentrated within a group of several billionaires are unprecedented in human history. The leader we need is probably a woman, already an activist, someone who does not care to be a politician, but does care about making the planet livable and safe, for current and next generations. And she or he can get things done. We don’t need someone who is “just” wise and has the right worldview, we need someone who acts, despite all the bureaucracies and dependencies we have created in the world. The right people are already there. Only we have not noticed yet, glued to the old template and old perspectives.”

Just as through one man, Donald Trump, the entire world is in disarray, suffers from tragedy, so, through One man -Jesus Christ – the entire world has been rectified and redeemed: that’s the comedy of the Gospel.

Pray for Parousia.

EVERYTHING BECOMES WHAT IT IS.

Three dangers wrapped in one.

Dr. J. H. Bavinck, in his book on Revelation, the last Bible book, claims that its dominating theme is: everything becomes what it is.  

I suggest: this is happening now, anno 2026.

A closer look at our lives, reveals that we have enslaved creation to serve our extravagance. If it is true that everything becomes what is, then the masquerade is over, the ugliness of our true selves is being revealed, and the laws of ecology kick in as the climate and financial bills are due.

The three dangers wrapped in one.

Yes, it is true. And the pace is picking up speed, the slow motion of change so typical until a century ago, is so yesterday. Everywhere we look, everywhere we go, everywhere we venture, in every endeavor, everything is under attack.

There now are three dangers wrapped in one: The Arms Race, AI and Climate Change, all the result of human pride (hubris).

It is true, the uniqueness of our time is that we are approaching Revelation. We are facing the true meaning of Apocalypse, which is its Greek word. Now the masks are being torn away, and the naked nature of events is being revealed.

Remember Satan?

You may remember how Satan was kicked out of heaven, landing feet first on earth.

That same Satan is now the immense moving force behind the world’s happenings. He holds humanity in the clutches of the fateful illusion that God/Creation is irrelevant, is something stale, situated in the past, a self-satisfied sugar uncle. Satan sold humanity on the notion that men and women everywhere are now fully in charge. That same Satan, that seemingly invincible enemy, the creator of the grand world illusion, this contemptible conjurer and mass murderer, has, in fact, been defeated a long time ago. He has been thrown out of heaven as one totally crushed, he is moribund flung down into defeat.

And yet he continues to sound like a victor, and continues to daily gain immense victories. He acts totally different from what he in reality is: this is a creature, exiled from heaven, the banned one, who carries his death sentence written on his forehead.

And Satan embodies 666. And 666 is the embodiment of AI.

The Book of Revelation: Revelation 13: 18 introduces that mysterious number. The verse states, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number for a person. Its number is six hundred sixty-six [666]”.

Computer language is all about numbers, an endless variety of 0 and 1. The perfect number is ‘777’, evident in our 7 days week, and in 7 x 7 +1 indicating the Year of Jubilee. It is impossible for AI to attain perfection, even though it comes close, very close. 666 remains fallible for the simple reason that it is a human number. AI fails, because the Bible categorically states: Surely, I was brought forth in iniquity; I was sinful when my mother conceived me. Psalm 51: 5.

We see AI’s sinfulness daily.

 Yet…..while all human effort fails, our good deeds – and there are good deeds – will follow us into eternity.  See Revelation 14: 13.

Look around.

Under a global cloud of wars and bitter divisions, world leaders met at the United Nations this week facing new fears that runaway artificial intelligence could threaten humanity even as climate shocks and escalating prices are already making life much tougher for hundreds of millions of people.

The annual high-level gathering at the UN General Assembly will also be consumed with major wars in Iran, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Congo and Myanmar and a persisting question: Can the leaders do anything to end them?

And we don’t know what we don’t know. Last week, Open AI announced that it found six more “concerning” incidents. But we have no guarantee that the events we have learned about represent all or even most of the A.I. behavior we should worry about. The reason we don’t know is because we are losing control.

Is AI becoming more human? I believe the question could well be reversed: Are humans becoming more like the machine?

Neil Postman, long ago, wrote: Amusing ourselves to death.

In his book, Postman contends that print media cultivated active reading and critical thinking, while television encourages passivity and instant gratification. He invites readers to ponder how different media forms profoundly influence our perception of the world—and whether society has sacrificed depth for amusement.

Now he is vindicated: Reading has become a lost art, and with it the human advantage.

It is as if the human race, given a verdict of terminal illness, for which there is no cure, have adopted the Gladiator slogan “Ave Cesar, morituri te salutant, those about to die, greet you. That’s the time we live in.

There is that universal cognition, that general insight that Rupert Sheldrake calls ‘morphic resonance’. It instills in humanity the subconscious notion, not expressed, not verbalized that warns them, in their bones, that the humanist dream of endless technological and economic progress turns into a nightmare, for the life of nature and the life of the human mind are not separate from each other. Just as God is alive and eternal, so too creation is alive and eternal and we too share in that collective memory.

There now are three dangers wrapped in one: The Arms Race, AI and Climate Change, all the result of human pride (hubris). Now, everything is becoming what it is.

ANOTHER JEREMIAD? WE NEED A ‘DAY OF ATONEMENT’.

“A jeremiad is a long, mournful complaint, speech, or piece of writing that warns of a society’s moral decline and prophesies disaster if it does not change.”

I like that definition. It fits my feelings. Trump is a perfect example of society’s moral decline, evident in his boasts that he is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT”, a textbook illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which incompetent people are highly confident in their own judgment because they’re too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent.

But First: Yom Kippur: Day of Atonement.

It was a yearly event to cleanse the Tabernacle, make atonement for the sins of the high priest and the community, and restore fellowship with God. Leviticus 19.

It is time that the world is told that literally our sins cry to heaven, in the form of the adverse weather events now upon us. If atonement was necessary 3,000 years ago, by divine edict, today it is untold times more called for, also because we have lost our Kingdom vision.

You may remember that my mind is fixated on the Coming Kingdom to whose arrival all Christians look forward. In the Lord’s Prayer, often glibly recited, we fail to appreciate Jesus’ true meaning. Psalm 33: 9 simply says: “God spoke and it came to be”. Whatever ‘came to be’, is holy, because it is God’s divine Word. “Hallowed – an old-fashioned word for ‘holy’ – is everything created by God’s word in his name. It has nothing to do with God’s name, as God is beyond name. It has everything to do with his creation.

Jesus first priority in his prayer, is for us to recognize the holiness of creation. His second quest is to pursue the coming of the Kingdom, the perfected New Creation.

My ‘blessed’ youth.

Both my grandfathers were born in 1870. They also both were elders in the local Reformed Church. I had the privilege to observe them in action. They, to me, illustrated the Kingdom.

How and why?

I witnessed how my paternal grandfather, a small rural grocer, in his horse-drawn two-wheeled wagon, consisting of a large wooden box filled with life’s simple needs – sugar, coffee, tea, soap, etc. – called on my maternal grandmother, a small farmer’s spouse, who paid for her purchases in farm-fresh eggs from free-roaming poultry: a simple barter process. That, to me, a young boy then, made a lasting impression.

Forward to 2026, and back to jeremiad.

Mr. Benz invented the automobile engine a century ago.

There are estimates of fatalities caused by this invention. Google tells me that between 60 to 80 million people have died since the birth of our so beloved vehicle, and hundreds of millions injured or maimed.

Should I also mention Climate Change, also a direct result of powering the pistons? A recent report by an official Canadian thinktank, cautions that “Canada can no longer avoid a hotter climate, and must prepare now for decades of more extreme and damaging weather, and whatever the world does about emissions going forward, the report finds that Canada will be nearly 3 C warmer, on average, over the next two decades, compared to pre-industrial times. Scary stuff. That qualifies for a Jeremiad label. As well as the looming El Niño which is going to be brutal. That El Nino is “Unprecedented”, but the extraordinary is starting to sound ordinary, the unprecedented merely routine.

We need a DAY OF ATONEMENT.

In 1939, in grade 5 of the JC Wirtz School, just around the corner from where I lived, the teacher told us, eager youngsters, that exactly 100 years ago, the first train, pulled by a steam engine, had traveled from Amsterdam to Haarlem, and, get this, he smirked, some people had called this “The Devil’s Doing.” We now realize that, yes, the devil is in the deadly details.

This brings me to THE TOWER OF BABEL.

The people’s desire to build a tower “that reaches to the heavens” reflects their ambition to achieve greatness and autonomy apart from God. This act of defiance against God’s command to “fill the earth” – see Genesis 9 – demonstrates humanity’s inclination towards self-reliance and pride, so God intervened. Read Genesis 11, which records God’s reaction: “And the LORD said, ‘If they have begun to do this as one people speaking the same language, then nothing they devise will be beyond them. Come, let Us go down and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.'”

So, what will God do today, now that we again all speak the same language, and AI is challenging God?

Here is my opinion.

AI speaks in ‘code’. The Lord will throw a pipe wrench into their precious computer speech, confusing the world’s super brains, unable to complete their ultimate goal.

AI won’t destroy the world: it simply will become another vain and failed effort to dominate creation. The immense need for finite energy in the form of fossil fuels, to power their insatiable need for electricity, will hasten the Day of Climate Reckoning.

My conclusion?

We, Christians, in these last days, must confess our forced complicity in embracing ‘the spirit of the age.’ Universal acknowledgement in the form of a period of atonement is needed, while waiting and praying for Parousia.

MANY ARE CALLED…….

Last Sunday, I woke up with a start from my afternoon nap. My sudden thought was: churches are on the wrong track. Wrong? Why that immediate impulse? I then and there decided to pursue this. Inspired, perhaps?

My 800+ words blogs are the fruit of week-long thinking. They don’t flow out of my fingers through good fortune. No, they are the child of my brain working 24/7 all the time: they crowd my thinking and my going, my waking and my sleeping.

I look back many centuries.

For some 1800 years the church has been preoccupied with heaven. Their majestic worship edifices, the famous cathedrals in Europe, have

 their spires perpendicularly pointing up high into the sky: They brazenly turn away from God’s earth, and aim directly at the heavens.

Their ultra-high ceilings are adorned with trumpeting troubadours, beckoning us, earthlings, to enter the heavenly realms, where ‘saints’ in glory stand, drawn from every nation, come from every land.

Is Heaven simply my obsession, my preoccupation, my distorted intuition?

I know: going to heaven at death, is still the overriding belief, assumed as God’s truth. The parting words of my older brother, at our 40^th wedding dinner, were: “See you in heaven”. These beliefs are reflected in many church buildings, no matter which denomination, even Scottish Presbyterian, reinforced by the ancient hymns, silently or emphatically, and often blatantly expressed in sermons. Especially now, as the earth is gasping for breath, we long to escape to heaven. And escape it is!

Even now, the totality of the worship-setting exposes the ‘heaven’ desire. It’s not what we say that counts: it’s what we do. The parking lot surrounding the church buildings, tells the brutal tale.

Where do we go when we die?

God loves the world, says the Bible. How do we ‘live’ that love for the world?

We stay put: “Earth we are and to earth we shall return”, God reminds us in Genesis 3: 19. The Earth! Our place forever. The Earth! The world created by the Word and therefore constituting God’s Primary, His Direct Word. The Bible – a human book – is God’s indirect Word. That’s why we no longer can see God without the world, or the world without God. If we want to gain wisdom, then the simple rule is to see that God and the world are one. A sin against the earth is a sin against God.

 No wonder: “Many are called………. but few are chosen,” Matthew 22: 14 tells us.

This begs the question: How then are we to live?

That should make us think. That has made me think. “Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves”, Jesus reminds us. That tells us to look to creation, and always remember that a renewed creation is our future.

God loves the world. God loves us. He showed this by becoming human. Jesus is not simply ‘a’ man. Jesus ‘is’ man, is humanity. The name Jesus contains within itself the entirety of humanity, and the entirety of God. We, therefore, must love God, expressing that love by unconditionally loving the world. That’s why a large paved parking lot next to the church is a contradiction in terms.

Does the end – our carbon-rich life – justify the means? Was Luther right when he said “Sin Bravely”, in Latin – Pecca Fortiter? (Luther was fluent in Latin, then the main scientific language of his day, early 16^th Century.)

What does my writing this week, try to say? It centers around Jesus’ words: “Many are called, and few are chosen.” Chosen to live in the New Creation.

Again, a general observation.

There is more and more talk about the earth being finite. There is more and more evidence that we are facing extreme weather conditions, so unusual, so hot, so dangerous, that 2 Peter 3: 10, is now within the realm of possibilities: “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”. Think about that. Arctic News repeatedly mentions the danger of the methane erupting in the shallow Arctic Ocean, the most potent of all Green House Gases,

How are we to live?

The new world to come will last forever. We can only live there ‘forever’ when we NOW love it. We cannot live without love. If God so loved the world, loved it more than anything else, including his son, should we not love it also, following God’s example? Only when we love the world with our heart, soul and mind, with every molecule we possess, then we too will inherit the earth.

Climate Change reflects our ‘sins against Creation’. It will give us ‘hell on earth’. Today we experience the perils, outlined in Matthew 24. Repent. Move into Metanoia, new thinking encompassing New Creation conditions. It is not too late, but remember: “Many are called, but few are chosen.”

Can today’s church still bring the New Creation Message in word and deed?

A NEW WORLD ORDER IS COMNG.

That is the title of an article in the New York Times, this past week. The editorial was written by one of the most famous historians of our age: Margaret MacMillan, a former warden of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. And a Canadian scholar.

The headline had a stark conclusion: We Aren’t Ready.

Her article in the New York Times, points to a change in the here and now. Some excerpts. Here are her words, in part.

“When a storm is coming, there will always be signs. The wind might suddenly drop. The tide goes out farther than usual. Streamers of clouds sail across the sky.

“It’s possible to misread or even ignore these signs — to insist that the drops of rain are just a passing shower — until it’s too late. That’s when the real trouble arrives.

“What is true of weather is also true of human affairs. Regimes look strong until they don’t. Revolutions at home and upheavals in the international order — the two so often go together — are easy to see in retrospect, but are not always anticipated. Yet if we look closer, we’ll often find the signs were there.

“Today, new temperature records have been set and reset this summer, the earth has baked in droughts, and wildfires have raged. Debt across advanced economies is approaching historic highs. Cuts in medical and food aid, most significantly by the United States, have caused unnecessary deaths and helped the spread of diseases, one of which, sooner or later, could become another pandemic. Artificial intelligence continues its rapid, unregulated rise, threatening jobs, security and, in darker projections, human existence.”

She continues:

“Revisionist powers flout rules and norms with impunity. Electorates are angry and volatile. Slow, deliberate, necessarily discreet diplomacy, which builds trust and understanding, has given way to a performative, brash style more suited for TikTok-addled attention spans or the playground.”

Here she points to Trump, of course.

“A world war is not inevitable, but the threat of a catastrophic conflict between big and well-armed powers is closer than it has been for decades.

“But a new reality has arrived with startling speed. The world order that held together for most of our lives started to erode when those within it got too comfortable and complacent, and when there was too much acceptance — even approval — of bad behavior.

“We have arrived in a new age of disorder. We must prepare ourselves, which begins with being honest about the seriousness of the moment we’re in, and accepting that our fragile system is faltering. And that any future of cooperation will have to look different.”

So far Margaret MacMillan.

My comments: I was immediately reminded of a saying by the Italian philosopher, Antonio Gramsci, who said: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

This confirms MacMillan’s words in much starker terms.

I don’t have to repeat what we daily read and observe. It’s all old news. We are like the well-known frog sitting in gradually ever hotter water, and blithely roasting to death. That example – not true in real life – indicates our lack to observe the approaching necessary ‘paradigm’ shift, the change needed to, possibly, avoid the total oblivion of all that lives and moves and has a being.

Cassandra.

Another illustration fits in perfectly. I saw a few weeks ago the 3 hours long film ODYSSEY. The movie reminded me of another character from Greek mythology:

Cassandra. She is a different famous fixture from the Greek ancient heritage. Today she rules contemporary reality.

Here’s the setting.

 The God Apollo fell in love with Cassandra, the daughter of Priamos, king of Troy. In order to seduce her, Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy. However, when she still declined his advances, he cursed her with the restriction that nobody would believe her predictions. So, when she foresaw Troy’s fall and Agamemnon’s death, they all ignored her words.

Apply her to today’s circumstances and I repeat: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

We ignore at our peril, another Cassandra case.

What does today tell us about tomorrow?

Jesus has the answer. Matthew 24 reveals that his disciples too were anxious about the future. They were suffering under Roman occupation, and wondered when it would end. I know exactly the feeling, having, as a teenager, lived 5 years under the Hitler – Nazi regime. Then too the longing was for liberation; it came, however, with fires and death.

Now the entire world suffers from ‘unnatural’ natural disasters, with a Super El Nino on the way, and wars and rumors of war multiplying.

Matthew 24 says it all. Read it aloud, and tell your family. The Bible warns us repeatedly that the end of our comfortable lives will come suddenly, but not without warnings.

Margaret MacMillan is right: A NEW WORLD ORDER IS COMNG: the birth pains are there. Believe what the Scriptures tell us: I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away.                          (Revelation 21)

TESTING, TESTING, TESTING.

Insanity.

We’re living in an utterly insane world. No doubt about it. Two happenings stand out: Climate Change, the direct result of our infatuation with poisonous oil, fueled by our desire to speed up history, and AI, Artificial Intelligence, the brazen attempt to replace God by means of human ingenuity, inspired and infused and initiated by the Arch enemy, God’s eternal opponent, who was kicked out of heaven, and landed, feet first, on earth. All too evident in the events unfolding now.

TESTING: Is the church still a counterweight?

The church has basically become powerless, mainly because of its preaching of leaving the earth and going to heaven, promoting this heresy either actively or by implication. Of course, just as in World War II, 1939-45, in the Netherlands where I was born and lived till 1951, there were pockets of resistance to the German occupation, so too, today, there are reforming attempts by an Earth/Church movement, a sort of fifth column contingent consisting of a roaming remnant of religious refugees.

TESTING: Can they still affect change?

The climate crisis means that we have to change everything – the way we live, the way we produce, the way we trade, the way we travel, the way we eat, the way we think, the way we pray, the way we bring THE WAY, THE TRUTH AND THE LIFE. Of course, these needed changes ain’t gonne te happen: too drastic. So, God is going to affect the change Himself.

Should I mention debt?

In addition of the climate debt, which is too immense to be repaid or restored, there also is monetary debt, expressed in dollars or euros. The boastful US president who wants America to be first, has a first in the per capita national debt of $115,000 for each of the 350 million American, in addition to their personal debt, such as mortgage, car payments, credit card money owed. It all is based on steady, well-paying jobs, now endangered by AI taking over routine work.

TESTING GOD.

There is fierce competition out there who or what will rule the world. The final battle is about to happen. Not only we are being tested: God too is on probation.

Of course, this has always been the age-old contest, starting in Paradise, openly staged in the Bible, as recorded in 1 Kings 18, describing a contest between God and Baal.

As Robert Wright puts it in his bookThe God Test: “Never before has the near-term future … held such a wide array of not-implausible paths for humankind that would be so wildly transformative.” But will this be heaven or hell? Heaven, says Elon Musk, who predicts “an age of amazing abundance” – although he also sees a 10-20% chance of killer robots murdering us all. Hell is more likely according to Geoffrey Hinton, one of the intellectual founding fathers of AI. “My intuition is, we’re toast,” he told an interviewer in 2023. And talking to Sebastian Mallaby, author of The Infinity Machine, a book about the quest for superintelligence, Hinton estimates p(doom) – the probability of human extinction – at 50%, “because I haven’t got a clue how to estimate the real number”. “As soon as evolution [of AI] kicks in, we’re fucked,” he adds cheerfully. But whether it’s God or Godzilla, artificial superintelligence is just around the corner.

That battle, that age-old battle, is now reaching a climax.

TESTING TECHNOLGY.

There was a prophet, a French Christian, Jacques Ellul, who wrote The Technological Society, more than 70 years ago. I bought the English version in 1965.

In his 1954 book the French author and philosopher Jacques Ellul discusses an idea he refers to as “technique,” which he defines as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity”; in other words, the idea of technology divorced from any specific machine, advancement, innovation, or field of science or industry.

After putting forth his definition, Ellul offered a startling hypothesis: Technology has already outpaced humanity, and it is only a matter of time before humans lose control over it. Having control over a particular type of technology, such as computers or automobiles, is meaningless, Ellul believes, because technology as a whole has a life and mind of its own. Furthermore, he fears any solution we might develop to counter the controlling effects of technology has already been countered by technology itself, even if we do not know the details of said solution. That is how far ahead we’ve allowed technology to progress. This hypothesis is especially startling when one considers that it has been more than 70 years since Ellul formulated it.

Jacques Ellul. A true prophet.

Testing times.

God is testing us. Life is always a battle: Now the lines are drawn: succumb to the machine, or live the Kingdom life in preparation for the New World to come.

Pray without ceasing, especially for the roaming remnant of religious refugees, me included, both within the church and elsewhere. Always thinking and hoping.