July 2014.
GENESIS 1: 26-27: “Let us make the human race in our image, according to our likeness.
Isaiah 61: 1 “Proclaim freedom for the captives.”
God created; we uncreated.
God created everything we observe around us, all in different stages. It seems to me that, when creation was fully operational, when the butterflies where fluttering by, when the birds flew their erratic courses, when insects were strictly there for pollination, when everything was in full bloom, God took a break. He paused for a while, surveyed the scene, surmising that something was lacking.
Where until now everything else had sort of evolved, perhaps from seed, perhaps from different life-forms over the millennia taking on the shapes and sizes and figures we now know as created matter, when it came to calling the human race into being, God used a different method.
We were not created ex nihilo, out of nothing, as all other matter. They took their shapes and essence from the way God had visualized them. No, unlike everything before, God created us, women and men, using already existing stuff, the soil with its trillions of microbes and other substances. From the very earth he fashioned a human figure, a mirror image to his own appearance: perfection in other words.
I know this is a deep mystery. What does it mean to be created in God’s image? Jesus said of his father that “God is a Spirit,” Paul writes that God lives in inapproachable light: “Nobody has seen him and nobody can see him.” (1 Tim. 6:16). Paul also tells us that “Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation by whom all things were created.” (Col. 1: 15- 16).
What could I conclude from this? If Jesus was the first-born of all creation, was he the first human who, as a human being created everything, including the human race made in his image? Psalm 82: 6 says that “We are gods, all sons of the Most High.” When Jesus was accused by the Pharisees of calling himself “the Son of God” he pointed out to these bible experts that this is exactly what this Psalm tells us.
Bonhoeffer, in his Creation and Fall, referring to Genesis 1: 26-27 which deals with The Image of God on Earth, writes that “being created in God’s own image on earth means that humankind is like the Creator in that it is free.”
So, based on this I could say that being made in God’s image means two things: (1) we look like God- or Jesus, the image of the Father – and (2) we were created not as captives, but mentally, physically and spiritually free.
We are no longer free.
It is exactly this freedom that is now imperiled. We have become captives. The Bible speaks of this captivity both in Psalm 68: 18 and Isaiah 61: 1. Jesus quotes Isaiah 61: 1, when he speaks in his home town. There he says that Jesus has come to proclaim liberty to the captives, implying that his former playmates – and by implication we too – are prisoners of systems that enslave. These words so infuriate his former neighbours that they want to kill him.
Why were these small town people so upset, ready to do away with Jesus? Let me take a stab at this. Here was this bachelor Jesus, 30 years old, who had never once joined in to condemn the Roman occupiers, who, when others went out to chase girls, left to meditate in the countryside, who, where others participated in the parental business, had long discussions with the regional rabbis and sought out the shamans and the naturalists, those who like himself found solace in nature. He just was not a joiner. He was a maverick, traveling to pagan strongholds, doing all sorts of things a respectable Israelite would never do.
So this oddball was going to tell them what to do and what to believe? No way. When they heard Jesus say that they were captives of a civic spirit that was contrary to the freedom Jesus proclaimed, it was precisely this that so infuriated them: they were convinced that he was wrong, so wrong that they were certain that he was a traitor, a public disgrace.
Is the same true today? Do we too get upset when the true implications of these words become clear to us?
Let me explore how situations we take for granted and even love, have, in reality, become prisons for us. The people in Nazareth, in Jesus’ days, were totally sold on ‘them versus us’, the Roman occupiers and the Jewish traitors against those who refused to recognize that the Roman occupation had a shred of legality. This prevented them to see beyond the narrow confines of Jewishness and kept them from embracing a larger global perspective, something Jesus often emphasized. The Jews thought themselves better that all other people: they were the real seed of Abraham, the chosen people, while all others were inferior, lost forever. His fellow citizens hated Jesus’ tolerance.
I believe that what applied then to the Jews, also applies to the church of today. We too are prisoners. Before we can come to Jesus, we must be aware of our status as captives just as the pious Jews in Jesus’ home town. We too have to free ourselves from what enslaves us. We, more than any other generation, have become blind followers of sinful systems.
What am I really talking about?
We must look into the mirror and confess that we are prisoners of conditions that constantly debase God’s creation. We must recognize that we are subject to situations that undermine our health, enrich the rich and penalize the poor. We must confront ourselves with the truth that the way we live is deeply flawed, is not the Way of Life, but the Way of Death. We must confess with Milton in Paradise Lost that we rather “reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
We must acknowledge that we have become addicted to creation-debasing habits. We have become carboholics, slaves, captives, not free anymore to live and do what we like, or better what Christ demands of us. We still confess that Christ has set us free, that Christ is all and in all, according to Colossians 1: 15-20. We still maintain that we are free to use everything created, while respecting the holiness of each created entity. But these words belie our actions because we fail to see our true state of dependence on life-altering fossil fuels. The fact that everything created by God is holy means that we sin when we harm any facet of creation. I believe that it was exactly that to which Jesus referred to in the Lord’s Prayer. There he asked us to “Hallow his name,” regard everything created in his name as holy. We so flippantly recite these lines Sunday after Sunday without really fathoming what they mean. The grammatical construction of the phrases “Hallowed be thy name” and the next line “Thy Kingdom come”, suggest that we must constantly work to accomplish that. Both imply that we must keep on trying all our lives to realize that. Actually the line in the Lord’s Prayer asking us to “give us this day our daily bread” is wrongly translated. The word ‘epiousios’ translated as ‘daily’ really means something like ‘tomorrow’ referring to a later time. A better translation is “give us the wherewithal to always be focused on the kingdom that comes tomorrow”. “Forgive us our trespasses” is included in that same prayer because we cannot live without sin. We may live perfectly moral lives, but in regards to creation we constantly sin. I sincerely believe that when we appear before God’s throne of judgement, one of Jesus’ questions will centre on our ‘carbon foot print,’ asking us what we have done to reduce the harm caused by us to our own bodies, our fellow citizens and creation in general.
That’s why forgiveness is needed all the time.
Because we are addicted to a carboholic life-style, we need forgiveness every minute of the day. It is my contention that our entire society, the whole-wide-world in which we live, is conspiring to rob us off the freedom that Christ has given us and forcing us to live not according to the laws of creation but according to the laws of Capitalism, which thrives on Creational Destruction. The very first commandment Jesus gives us is to love God above anything else. This simply means that our priority in life is to love everything God has made. We don’t love Bach as a person. We don’t love Rembrandt for his charm: we love these men for their masterpieces. The same is true for God, who can only be known for his unequalled creation: the world we inhabit.
Rather than honoring his marvelous piece of art, the world and they who dwell therein, we daily molest it. The sort of society we have created leads to universal death, and we are, by and large, eager participants in this destructive act. Christ has promised to set us free from this bondage, but as is the case in all we do: God won’t do anything without us and we can’t do anything without him. Christian living has always been a total affair.
What are some of the other factors that entrap us?
Let me name a few, not in order of priority. (1) Transportation and Energy; (2) Food; (3) Religion; (4) Money and debt.
(1) Transportation and Energy.
Fact is that we live in a finite world. Fact is that our financial world looks like a bankrupt remnant of our past. Fact is that our energy resources are dwindling, that we hit peak conventional oil in the last decade. Shale is a pipedream, wind and solar can’t keep the grid running; these things, like the debt situation, look so obviously threatening to our way of life you’d think we’d be looking hard at seriously adapting that way of life. But we don’t, we just want to substitute one energy source with another, even though they’re hugely different and to a large extent incompatible.
We’re so addicted to the comfortable feeling of having all rooms in our homes heated or cooled, and to taking our own little transport units the same half hour drive to work and back every single day that we’d rather not think about why we do it than change our ways, even as it’s glaringly obvious that our ways must and will stop at some point. We’re not going to find some new magical mystery energy source, and besides, both our own legacy of profligate energy use and the 2nd law of thermodynamics tell us it wouldn’t be all that magical anyway.
The consumption of energy is a potentially very destructive force, as physics clearly states, which should really teach us that we need to be very careful about using it, burning it, and building our societies in ways that necessitate for us to use more of it all the time.
We have become captives of a transportation system that is now seen as destroying everything we hold dear. Yes, only prayer for forgiveness is all that we have left. “Forgive us our trespasses.”
(2)Food.
We have bought into a food culture in which eaters — that’s everyone — exploit animals, people and the environment, and which make ourselves sick. To change that, we have to change not only the way we behave as individuals but the way we behave as a society. Food, saturated with sugar, salt and other ingredients that cause cancers, heart attacks, diabetes and obesity, are for most the only available sources of nutrition. It has become impossible for many to free themselves from this trap, as pesticides and contaminated soil and water lead not to life but premature sickness and death. But try we must, even though it has become nearly impossible for those with little income and often no notion of a different approach.
Obesity, diabetes, cancer and other environmental diseases can be traced to the way we eat. Making meals from scratch, especially from home-grown ingredients has become a lost art. Just as General Motors bought up bus companies and then liquidated them to prevent people from using mass transportation and encouraging the use of autos and the building of subdivisions, multinational companies have done the same for food production. For them not nutrition, not basic health, but shelf life and deceptive appearance that promote profits is their goal, at the expense of general well-being. Never trust a product that is produced in a factory.
(3)Religion
Beware of religion that promotes heaven, wealth, nationalism and ignores or even condemns Climate Change. Beware of religions that know exactly what God wants us to do or what God doesn’t want us to do. We see through a glass darkly and today that glass is more obscured than ever. Churches, almost without exception, see the Bible as God’s only Word, while in reality Creation is God’s Primary Revelation. I see the Sin against the Holy Spirit, of which Jesus suggested that it would be the greatest of sins, having a connection to creation through wantonly and purposely harming God’s precious creation. (See John 3:16). We are already being punished by ignoring the impact of methane, CO2 and other substances. The Climate Change principle is dead simple: increase the amount of these substances in the atmosphere – in the soil and in the oceans – and temperatures will rise. It is basic physics. What awaits us is a world of violent storms and heatwaves, of crop losses and flooded nations, a world which at the same time will have far less energy available to deal with these issues, and no money/credit to speak of to buy that energy with. That looks like a pretty accurate picture of the world that we – or is that our children? – will live in.
The bright side is there’ll be far fewer of us, which will reduce per capita energy consumption drastically. The dark side is we will be fully unprepared, because we will have chosen to live in our past until our future caught up with it. Come to think of it: a nation and a world that no longer cares for the future is already dead.
(4) Finances and debt
What is true for transportation and food, also applies to finances. The global financial system owns our societies, banks, politicians, everybody, including you and me. It can do what it wants and what it pleases with impunity. Today all money matters are controlled to the advantage of the moneyed segment of society and to benefit the financial structure of the ruling class. As long as interest is kept at a very low level, our immense debt will be manageable. Where before savings and decent wages fueled the economy, now debt makes the world function. As soon as interest rates increase, making debt service impossible, our financial world too will collapse.
Is there a solution?
Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship wrote that there is not such a thing as “cheap grace,” something we wealthy Westerners are counting on for eternity.” Replying to the rich young man Jesus said that it is almost impossible for a rich person to enter the kingdom. We are much richer than even the Emperor of Rome in all his glory. No wonder Jesus wondered whether: “He will I find faith on earth when he returns” He also stated “Many are called but few are chosen.”
Fact is that we are saved by grace, because we cannot live perfectly, that’s why we must pray for forgiveness all the time, and, with the words of the church reformer Martin Luther, ‘sin bravely.’
When Christ returns he will not ask us how well we have observed religious customs but how carefully we have lived in God’s Holy Creation, the Kingdom to Come, and how well prepared we are for entering it. Johan Herman Bavinck in his Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision the Kingdom has pointed out that the New Creation is The Kingdom to come. That’s why Jesus has urged us to Seek First the Kingdom of God and the laws that govern it. That simply means that our primary task in life now is to seek the welfare of the creation from which we get our food, in which we live and move and have our being, and which will be perfected when Christ returns.
We now have to prepare ourselves for that situation. We must free ourselves from the slavery which has chained us to the secular forces that have imprisoned us and which threaten to separate us forever from the love of Christ. This love will become evident to every living creature when he returns as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.