February 28 2016
OUR EARTH IS IN THE DEVIL’S DEADLY GRIP.
Never mind the song “This is my Father’s world.” Never mind contemporary testimonies that state that “Our world belongs to God”. Never mind us singing “Beautiful Savior, King of Creation.” All this sounds very pious, and, yes, ultimately all this is true, but today these lines are simply incorrect, deceiving us, giving us a false sense of security and sending the wrong message to the masses.
Fact is that ‘our earth is in the devil’s deadly grip’. Never mind what the churches proclaim. The church’s message has, by and large, become so ineffective that people are quitting them en masse, and part of the reason is that the church no longer calls a spade a spade. All evidence shows that things here, down under where you and I live, are getting worse by the day. You want an explanation for the Holocaust and Climate Change, for Cancer and continuous conflicts? Look no further than the devil. All signs indicate that what used to be God’s world is now under a curse, a curse so bad that even Bill Gates, the richest man on earth, admits that it needs a miracle, something beyond the power of humans, to rectify the situation.
The trouble is that the church reads the Bible wrong. It has been blinded by Greek philosophy, which has proved more enduring and more incisive than the Scriptures. The one cardinal text in the Bible that I think has been constantly misinterpreted is John 3: 16: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son (as a ransom to buy the world back) that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” Yes, our everlasting life depends on the correct interpretation of this text.
So what does this text really mean for me? To me it indicates that ownership of the world, the cosmos, had been transferred to the Devil, who now is in full possession, but that, in principle, Jesus’ death on the cross bought it back, the transfer to be implemented when his Kingdom comes in the New Creation.
Compare this situation to a real estate deal. For some 10 years in my 40+ years of business life I have been a Real Estate Broker. Here’s what I did: I listed a property, put up a sign, advertised it, had an offer with some conditions such as financing, and when these conditions were met within a stated time limit, the deal was final. Only then would I stick up a SOLD sign on the property. I would receive my commission upon closing when the new owners would move in.
Back to John 3: 16, which also involved a Real Estate deal, this time the entire earth, the cosmos, as the Greek word has it. In the Garden of Eden God gave the earth to the human race. Psalm 115: 16 simply says: ’The highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he has given to humanity.’ Period. Then something strange happened: Adam and Eve gave it away. That clever fellow, the Devil, tricked them to transfer ownership, with the result that everything changed: thorns and thistles instead of edibles. There’s where Jesus entered the picture. He didn’t come to rescue you and me from eternal death – that too – but his PRIMARY MISSION was to wrest creation out of the hands of the Devil.
Back to that Real Estate deal. On Calvary Jesus paid the price: His life. That made the sale final. We now live in that limbo stage between the point in time when the deal became final, and the closing of the sale when the new owners move in. It is in this particular interval that we now live: between Calvary when Jesus suffered the most horrible death and his return which is now imminent. The closer we get to the Second Coming, the worse things will get for the planet, and for us.
Of course with the old owner still in possession of the property – the cosmos in this case, the world and those who dwell therein – the Devil is not the most cooperative of owners. On the contrary: he hates Jesus. He is the ultimate enemy. He knows that he is on the losing end. He knows that once Jesus returns, he’s had it. So, as the most vindictive of all creatures, he is busy inflicting the most possible damage to the house, and, even though he cannot totally destroy it, he is busy gutting the inside so that very little good remains.
There’s where we are at. Jesus really wants us to refrain from being implicated in this ‘wrecking’ business, but the sad truth is, believe it or not, we all are the Devil’s willing allies. The church, in some ways, is the leader in this by teaching the crowd that our ultimate destination is HEAVEN. So who cares! Thrash the joint. “Get in line, get in line, follow the ‘to heaven’ sign!” was a song I was taught in grade- and Sunday school. There’s hardly a hymn in my (Presbyterian) church’s songbook that does not somehow allude to the glories and beauty of heaven, all pure Gnostic nonsense, distancing us from the earth.
Yes, the Bible is full of texts that indicate the Devil’s present hold on creation. Take Matthew 4: 8-9, where it says: “Again the devil took him (Jesus) to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor: the great pyramid of Giza, the Colosseum in Rome, the great wall of China, the Taj Mahal, just to name a few, and said: “All this I will give you if you will bow down and worship me.”
Jesus did not dispute that claim. He didn’t say “This is my Father’s world.” He did not quote “Our world belongs to God.” Nothing of that sort. Actually, in John 17, when Jesus intimately talked with his father just before his final trial and death, he confessed (verse 15): “My prayer is not that you take them (my followers) out of this world but that you protect them from the evil one.” The evil one is what Jesus calls The Prince of this world, the real ruler here. Verse 16 also is often misinterpreted as well. “They are not of this world (the world belonging to the devil) as I am not of it.” The heaven-heretics interpret this to mean that neither Jesus nor we belong to this world but have heaven as our future. Jesus actually says the opposite: neither he nor we belong to a world dominated by the Devil. The apostle John is very emphatic on this score: in 1 John 5: 19 he explicitly states that “We know we are children of God and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.”
Need I say more?
Walter Brueggemann in his book, “INTERPRETATION AND OBEDIENCE” makes the point that new times need new approaches.
Here’s what Brueggemann writes – and I fully agree with him -:”The case for theological education cannot be made once and for all. It needs to be made again and again because what theology and theological education are called to do varies in each social setting and cultural circumstance……….We live in a culture that in its dominant modes is committed to a reading of reality that is false and will finally dehumanize and destroy……I suggest that the church in our cultural setting is largely contained in and seduced by that false reading of reality so that it has little energy or imagination, not to say courage for its mission.”
Looking at the church in my more than eight decades of faithful attendance I have not noticed an iota of change in the way the church operates. The only difference from the 1930’s is that today the sermon is 15-20 minutes long while in my youth I often endured 45 minutes of preaching, and that twice on a Sunday.
It is my contention that today we live in a unique time, a time never before experienced by the human race. Everything today has an expiry date in it, yet we live as if the earth is infinite. Just last week I saw an article that outlined how close to 90 million acres of forests in North America are under threat due to Climate Change and the beetles. As the forests go so do we. And that is just one example.
That brings me to the point I really want to make: churches are failing to do their task; churches are telling us that this world belong to God. That is true in the sense that God created it, just like the Nacht Wacht belongs to Rembrandt who painted it in 1650 or so, but is now the possession of the Dutch Government. God created but now this world belongs to us, and we made a mess of it by transferring it to God’s enemy.
Yet, we are in this world to stay. Dietrich Bonhoeffer has something to say about soil and the earth.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a theology professor in Berlin and totally opposed to the Hitler regime. He was hanged in April 1945, a few weeks before Germany collapsed. He was then 39 years old and the author of many books. I have his A TESTAMENT TO FREEDOM a 530 page volume containing his essential writings. In it he takes the church to task as it has moved away from the earth and has embraced the pagan-idea of heaven, increasingly seeing the earth as evil. Here are his words: “Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from the earth in other worlds beyond: he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children.”
Bonhoeffer calls this ‘heaven message’ pious secularism. His words: “The Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth is pious secularism which also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things.”
In his CREATION AND FALL he is again very outspoken. There he writes: “The soil and animals over which I have dominion, are the world in which I live, without which I cease to be. It is my world, my earth, over which I rule…. I belong completely to this world. It bears me, nurtures me and holds me…. God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” So far Bonhoeffer, my kind of theologian.
Then there is J. H. Bavinck
Bavinck too has written about this. In BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END: A RADICAL KINGDOM VISION Bavinck, talking about Jesus, the Son of Man, humanity personified, wrote: “Numer¬ous nations still maintain the ceremony of treating a small child with special rituals when it first gets into touch with the fertile earth. This contact with the earth is an essential element of life. We are taken from the earth, we belong to the earth, and we live through the earth. Our bond with the earth is so strong that we cannot for a moment imagine existing apart from the earth, and hanging – as Jesus did on the cross – breaks the contact with the earth. Hanging places a person outside the great cosmic unity and puts him all by himself as an exile, outside the wider context of God’s glorious creation. That is why hanging is an eloquent expression of being expelled from God’s kingdom. When suspended above the earth, humans are placed outside the contact with the earth. Exiles, lonely and lost souls, humans are carried outside the powerful context of God’s life-energizing grace. Such is the signi¬fi¬cance of that dreadful death, death on the cross. The Scriptures, rather than emphasizing that death on the cross is pain¬ful, point out that it foreshadows the cruel reality of carrying God’s curse.”
Walter Brueggemann concludes his book THE LAND with these words: “The gospel is about the coming of the new age, the new kingdom, the new land.”
Jesus died not to save our souls on the way to heaven. No, no, no. He died to force the devil to let go of the earth and to restore it to its original perfection. That’s why loving God is expressed in loving the earth, his precious possession. It’s here where we will enjoy eternal life. It’s the church’s task to prepare people for this.