MARCH 29 2015

WE CAN’T LOVE JESUS IF WE DON’T LOVE CREATION

That’s quite the controversial statement. It hit me when I was doing one of my 3 times-a-week runs. In the winter I run indoors on my treadmill and I have a series of CDs I play when I do so. One song is based on John 3: 16: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that who believes in him has everlasting life”. The choir kept on repeating the phrase, “God so loves the world”, and then my grey cells woke up thinking about people like Bach and Mozart, van Gogh and Rembrandt, and their exquisite works of art. We love these creators of master pieces not because of their personalities – we really don’t know them – we love them for their paintings or their musical talents. Thanks to the Bible we know a lot about Jesus, of course, but is that enough reason to love him?

So you say you love Jesus or God?

Let me take another example. While I am writing this I am listening to Bach’s majestic Mass in B Minor. I love Bach, that is to say I love his music. I don’t have a personal crush on Johann Sebastian, I really don’t know him all that well as a person. I know a few particulars about his life: his wives – 3 in all – died on him; he had 20 children, about half lived to be adults; he was a workaholic writer of music, the greatest in the world.

So what about Jesus? I love him too. Pray to him every day. When he lived on earth he did what no other person ever did: died to restore creation. He loved creation so much that he gave his life to restore it. Why did he love it so much? Simple. He created it, just as Bach created his oratorios and organ pieces.

Actually the Christian life boils down to the summary of the law Jesus gave us: Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and your neighbor as yourself. Loving God is not so simple. He is invisible, the Bible tells me. So how do we love God? We love him just as we love Bach, by loving his creation. Romans 1: 20 affirms that in a negative way. There it says that people are condemned because they have not connected creation to the Creator.  Colossians 1: 15-20 is more positive. It contains one of the greatest truths ever written. Here is what it says:

“For by Jesus the Christ all things were created: Things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible….all things were created by him and for him… and in him all things hold together….For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Jesus Christ and through him reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood shred on the cross.”

There is the gospel in a nutshell. We love Bach because of his music. We love Jesus because of creation. This leads me to conclude that: Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. If we don’t love creation, we cannot love Jesus. It is as simple as that! Or as complicated! To be ‘born again’ means to treat the earth as holy, means trying always to stop polluting.

This week I am re-reading a book I bought on September 12 1998, almost 17 years ago. Since then I have read The Hidden Face of God at least 3 times before. Psalm 22 mentions it. Jesus quotes this Psalm when he hung on the cross to die: My God, my God why have you left me, one of the most moving exclamations ever recorded. Actually the Bible refers to God hiding his face 30 times. It means that God has left us to our devices because we have chosen to forget about God. That’s because as a society we have been increasingly abusing God’s creation, plundering it, polluting it, soiling and savaging it for the benefit of the few. These acts have caused God to leave us.

The author of The Hidden Face of God , Richard Elliott Friedman, a professor of the Hebrew language, writes that “the disappearance of God is a more terrifying condition than divine punishment, in a way that children would be less afraid of their parents’ punishing them than of their parents’ leaving them…….. It is one thing to cry out to one’s God and hear the divine voice saying, “You’ve been bad.” It is another to cry out and hear nothing but the sound of a thin hush………But either way, come to terms with this: in the Bible God creates humans, becomes known to them, interacts with them, and then leaves.”

There’s where we are.

We are left on our own: solely responsible for our world. That, my dear people, is the deplorable state we are in. We are in the most scary, frightening, mindboggling situation we can imagine. God has left us. We are on our own even though God still looks after his own people. His absence we can notice everywhere. The whole world is adrift like a rudderless ship on an ocean that is increasingly beset by dangerous currents, by immense hurricanes or typhoons, by unnatural ingredients, millions of tons of non-degradable plastic, choking fish and poisoning sea life in general, jellyfish crowding out every living thing, the waters now the planet’s garbage dump, also saturated with CO2. The whole human world too is adrift, fighting for the remaining green spaces, and ruining them in turn, plastering the economies with phantom money in a desperate attempt to engender economic growth, akin to trying to get blood from a stone.

The world’s unwise wizards are in lockstep to repeat the mistakes of the past because as ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom’ so the opposite is true as well as the wise words of Solomon attest (Proverbs 19: 3): “Peoples’ own folly ruins their lives, yet their hearts rage against the Lord.” When things go bad, people blame the Lord, when life is good it’s our doing, of course.

I was in occupied the Netherlands from 1940-45 where the Nazi Germans were the possessors of the land and robbed it blind, depriving us of our own food. That state of terror ended when the Canadian soldiers liberated our city on April 10 1945, now 70 years ago. That same sort of occupation is now happening to the Globe. Jesus, in Matthew 4, tempted by the Devil, readily admits that Satan can indeed give the world to Jesus if he only were to bow down and worship the Devil. Jesus knew that Satan’s reign would be temporary, ending when He returns.

The Covenant.

Here’s what happened. Many a thousand of years ago God made a covenant with humanity, a document that today would start as follows:

“Hereafter God will be known as the party of the first part, and humans will be known as the party of the second part.”

God, in essence, treated us as equals. In that covenant the relations between God and the human race were defined. God would always bless us. The things that Yahweh required of his human covenant partners where listed as given to us in Micah 6: 8 “To act justly, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God.” Failure to do so would result in alienation and exile and would ultimately end in God leaving his people to their own devices.

This is the situation we humans encounter today, ending in total disaster, just as was the case when the Ten Tribes of the original twelve tribes of Israel vanished when they broke the covenant.

Where are we now?

We already have gutted half of the earth’s treasures. A new study in Sweden claims that we now have used up 50 percent of the earth resources. It scares the wits out of me because I once predicted in an essay When will Christ Return – see side bar – that the Lord will come back when we have used up half of creation for our benefit. A Swedish scientist claims in a new theory that humanity has exceeded four of the nine limits for keeping the planet hospitable to modern life. Environmental science professor Johan Rockstrom, the executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, argues that there are nine “planetary boundaries” in a new paper published in Science – and human beings have already crossed four of them.

Those nine include carbon dioxide concentrations, maintaining biodiversity at 90 percent, the use of nitrogen and phosphorous, maintaining 75 percent of original forests, aerosol emissions, stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, fresh water use and the dumping of pollutants.

“The planet has been our best friend by buffering our actions and showing its resilience,” said Rockstrom. “But for the first time ever, we might shift the planet from friend to foe.” (My comments: God withdrew his protection).

Rockstrom’s planetary boundary theory was first conceived in 2007. His new paper reveals that because of climate stability, which began when the Ice Age ended 11,000 years ago, a planetary calm helped our ancestors to cultivate wheat, domesticate animals, and launch industrial and communications revolutions. But those advances have strained the stability of the planet, and Rockstrom says we have broken four boundaries: too much nitrogen has been added to ecosystems, too many forests have been cut down, the climate is changing too quickly and species are going extinct at too great a rate.

Ben Swann, Professor of Ethics from the University of Florida said that we have accelerated the extinction crisis through deforestation and ocean acidification, a development which is driving species to extinction.

“[Human] beings have increased, even from 1925, from 2 billion – which is considered to be a sustainable population for human beings, according to northern European consumption standards – to 7.2 billion at this point,” he said.

We are at a crucial point in human history. There are too many of us and we simply consume too much of the earth’s resources. It’s almost impossible to both love creation and Christ. Yet we can’t love Jesus of we don’t love creation. That is the ultimate dilemma we face. Only loving Jesus and having no regard for creation resorts, says Bonhoeffer, to “Pious Secularism”, so evident in the USA. Much of the ecclesiastical enterprise is based on loving God without ever defining this, except interpreting this in anthropological terms: love your neighbor. It is true that Paul writes that by loving our neighbor we have fulfilled the law (Romans 13: 8). However we forget that these are empty slogans when we don’t draw the lines all the way to life’s essentials: we undercut our love for our fellow beings when we pollute the very ingredients life depends on: soil, water, air.

Friedrich Nietzsche has written the remarkable words: “Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God dies. And these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful sin.” Nietzsche lost his mind when he saw a horse whipped to death. He was a sort of prophet, and I believe that in the cruel death of an animal he foresaw the death of creation, mindlessly murdered by a mad humanity.

We indeed have lost all sense of sanity. Basically, for those who reject the holiness of creation, God is dead. Living without God means the loss of the source of wisdom, with insanity as the ultimate result. Society at large abandoned God a long time ago. We still have some religious trappings, but they are basically empty of meaning.

How then shall we live?

That’s the perennial question. Visualize a world of total permanence and try to live by that vision, perpetually praying for wisdom and constantly asking for forgiveness, because it is an impossible assignment, yet one we must adhere too however falteringly. Only then can we really love Jesus and see him as the ultimate source of all happiness.

Remember:

Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. If we now don’t love creation, we cannot love Jesus. It is as simple as that! Or as complicated!