DECEMBER 25 2016
WHY WAS JESUS BORN?
So, it is Christmas, the day in which we hear about Jesus the Christ, who, in popular understanding, forever remains a baby, because as an adult he became too outspoken and controversial. That he died (see John 3: 16, the most important text in the Bible today) to forever restore creation and the human race to a pristine and sinless state, is almost never mentioned: not one preacher in 10,000 will tell you that. Amor Mundi, love for our fragile world, is needed now more than ever. That’s why Christ came: he personified that love by his death.
Yes, Amor Mundi, love for the world was the exact reason why Jesus came to earth! He came to give us eternal life on an earth that sorely needed total renewal.
No wonder Bonhoeffer and Bavinck are unpopular when they express the perfect Biblical truth that the redemption of you and me and the redemption of the cosmos – the world we occupy – go hand in hand: you can’t have one without the other!!
Yes, you read that correctly. If you say you love Jesus but have no qualms about polluting the atmosphere, then something indispensable is missing. The saving of sinners and the restoration of creation are two sides of the same coin. That’s why we daily must ask ‘to forgive us our trespasses’ involving God’s Holy Cosmos. That also means that a renewed earth is our eternal destination and not heaven where God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody can see or ever has seen. (1 Tim: 6: 16).
THAT HEAVEN THING AGAIN
Somehow the HEAVEN HERESY reminds me of my very early youth when my parents read me stories from “De kinder Bijbel”, our beautifully illustrated Children’s Bible. I can recall how I was told of Lazarus, the brother of Mary and Martha, who suddenly fell ill and died.
John 11 relates the story. Just as we, when sickness strikes, rush to the hospital, so his two sisters right away sent a messenger to the great healer, Jesus, their best friend. The chapter relates how Jesus ‘loved’ (‘agape’ in Greek) that family, yet when the news reached him he waited a couple of days before meeting with his grieving friends, but by that time Lazarus had been buried. When Jesus arrived, he said that Lazarus was asleep which made Martha say the remarkable words (verse 24) “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day”.
It is exactly these words that the church seems to have forgotten, extolling instead the supposed benefits of heaven of which John 3: 13 says that nobody has ever gone there, except Jesus who came from there.
As a kid I was so brainwashed about heaven that, when the story was read to me I remember wondering “why would Jesus call Lazarus back from that so beautiful heaven?” My parents ignored my query.
The root of our Environmental COLLAPSE.
I call it ‘COLLAPSE’ when we have killed 58% of all vertebrate wildlife just between 1970 and 2012, and at a rate of 2% per year we will have massacred close to 70% of it by 2020, barely 4 years from now.
It is my considerate opinion that belief in heaven is at the root of our environmental crisis, which has culminated in the paganist heresy of RAPTURE, that great untruth that has poisoned modern Christianity as thoroughly as the snake in the Garden of Eden.
Blame Hal Lindsey and his unbiblical book THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH which led to the LEFT BEHIND SERIES.
His tale spinning purely relies on his imagination, and not on biblical givens. I have no idea why Hal Lindsey had such an intense interest in Israel, evident from page 32 of The Late Great Planet Earth. There he asserts, without presenting any evidence: “Sometime in the future there will be a seven-year period climaxed by the visible return of Jesus Christ in Israel.”
What we face here is the old dispensationalist notion of the seven-year kingdom. Lindsey arrived at the figure of seven years by adding up the 42 months and 1260 days of Revelation 11:2-3. Lindsey claims that the age of the church will end when the believers are taken up to Christ. That event will mark the beginning of the seven-year period, a period in which the state of Israel will play a major role and World War III will begin.
He claims – again without proof – that during that period, more people will turn to Christ in faith. Through the work of 144,000 Jewish evangelists, there will be a great revival among the Jews. That must be the reason why Lindsey is so interested in the development of the modern state of Israel: still all pure speculation.
He also asserts that when the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem is near it will be time for the “Rapture.” The believers will be taken up to Christ in the air, but the world will go right on turning and life will continue. Everywhere people will disappear suddenly—from athletic fields, from lecture halls, from offices, from churches. That’s why we read on bumper stickers: “If the driver disappears, grab the wheel!”
Let’s test all this on Scripture.
The word RAPTURE does not appear in the bible at all but it has a curious pedigree: both RAPTURE and RAPE come from the Latin verb RAPIO of which the passive form is RAPTUS, meaning “seized”. In essence they mean the same thing: RAPE is the violent seizing of sex, and RAPTURE the violent raping of creation.
Matthew 24: 39 explicitly says that “the sinners are taken away” and not the believers, but many gullible Christians haven’t got a clue what the Bible really teaches, and are easy victims for anything, including the TRUMP tragedy, the most perfect Devil’s ploy since the Garden of Eden.
Back to the Lindsey lies.
According to Lindsey’s book – which for a while outsold the Bible – after the Rapture, the seven-year period will begin. For 3 1/2 years, the two witnesses, whom Lindsey calls “Jesus freaks,” will go about their work. After that the Antichrist will bare his fangs and the persecution (the Great Tribulation) will begin. At about that time, the inferno of World War III will break out, with Jerusalem at the center of events. Once those seven frightening years are over, Jesus will return and the millennial kingdom will begin. That kingdom, in turn, will be followed by judgment and, finally, ultimate glory.
THE HEAVEN MYTH
The title of the book THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH says it all. It implies that the world we live in will disappear, will be gone, will somehow evaporate or melt away.
That, in itself, is an admission that God has failed, that God was imperfect, because the world which he created and called `good` after each phase of creation and `very good` when God surveyed the ultimate result, has been a mistake: why else would it have to fade away?
It is an admission that the old GNOSTIC heresy that creation is a work of the DEVIL is alive and well. In Lindsey`s notion, we can abuse and pollute and exploit the earth at our heart`s content, because it is evil to start with.
According to this false statement the birth of Christ, which we celebrate today, is only significant because he has come to save human souls of which some will be raptured up to heaven. His birth, life, death, and resurrection has nothing to do with the rest of creation, which makes the teaching of RAPTURE a LIE.
I have said it before and will say it again: John 3: 16 portrays the heart of the gospel: GOD SO LOVED THE COSMOS. It does not say, as most churchgoers believe: God so loved the human race. Of course he loves us, but the Greek is quite explicit here. The word COSMOS indicates all created matter. True, humans occupy an important place in creation, but God equally cares for lions and elephants and whales and dolphins and polar bears, not to forget trees and the flowers in the field.
The earth and we humans, belong together.
A long time ago, the Bible tells us, God fashioned the first human pair from the earth. The Hebrew word for soil is Adamah, from which Adam was formed. The word adam reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the soil of the earth, hence the well-known saying: soil we are and to soil we shall return. Just as we have red clay and black soil, we too have people of different colors. The word ‘adam’ typifies the human race in its unbreakable unity. We all come from the earth and we all go back to the earth. Earth-bound we are, forever. We, the human beings, are adam, and belong to adamah, the life bearing earth. With every sinew of our exis¬tence we are tied to the earth, which bears us and feeds us.
Where does the HEAVEN NOTION originate?
It all goes back to Plato and Socrates.
Socrates was condemned to die because he had been a bad influence on the Greek youth. Jesus died because he was a bad influence on the church of his day. Socrates gladly drank the chalice filled with deadly poison, seeing death as better than life. Jesus saw death as the ultimate enemy.
Both did not leave any personal writings: Socrates’ teachings were meticulously recorded by Plato, while we know about Jesus from the four Gospels.
Since Christianity became a global phenomenon, who has been more influential: Jesus or Socrates?
Sad to say: The Greek –pagan -philosophy of heaven as the Christian’s eternal habitat has triumphed, thanks to Socrates. That’s the reason why most of Christianity – almost every expression whether that is Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, or every other denominational wing – has suffered from a form of dualism, splitting body from soul, sacred from secular.
Originating in Socrates, as recorded by Plato, many ideas which were long regarded and accepted as the pure unadulterated essence of Christianity, such as the doctrine of an immortal soul, a self-denying attitude towards matters involving our body, and the view of sexuality as in itself ‘the sinful lust of the flesh’, are deeply rooted in Platonic thought.
It is evident everywhere. Look no further than the hymns we sing in church: in most of them there is a ‘heaven’ reference, and salvation only applies to men and women, never to ‘nature’, the whole creation, as plainly outlined in Romans 8: 22.
I like the current Pope, but when I see him in his white robe, escorted by all male companions also immaculately dressed in identical pure habits, I see dualism at work: the church separate from society, as the priestly class represents God and his angels. Just as Jesus is supposed to be sexless so these men are supposed to be that too. We know that reality is different. We cannot separate sex from life: denying the presence of sex is akin to denying creation.
Why does this lie linger on?
The HEAVEN lie lingers on because it is much more convenient. We can live our leisurely lives – at least we Westerners – and not pay any attention to ‘the suffering of Creation’, forgetting that Christ came to earth, lived there depending on charity, and died as a criminal, to redeem Creation, the Cosmos, us as her inhabitants, but also every single species, which, at one time formed a total harmonious totality.
The TRUMP tragedy is resting on the false notion that creation is there to be exploited, to be stripped of everything possible to enrich the One Percent.
That everything exists for SERVICE of which Jesus was the prime example, witness his very own words as expressed in Matthew 20: 28: “The Son of man did not come to be served but to serve”, is not understood.
That ‘service’ was and today still is primarily aimed at restoring his now totally despoiled creation to its original state. John 3: 16 explicitly states that those – and only those – who love creation as Christ did, will have eternal life. That is the radical emphasis in today’s Good News.
So do away with that pious Christmas mentality and focus on the real task the Church is charged with: love the cosmos as Jesus did.