October 21 2023
CHAOS CAUSES CHAOS, BECAUSE…..
EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE.
Chaos in US congress. Chaos in the world’s weather. Chaos in Ukraine. Chaos in the Middle East. Chaos in many families. Chaos in the most church denominations. Chaos in people’s minds. Chaos in education. Chaos in office towers. Chaos in the Trump’s mind. Chaos in the Amazon and Canada’s boreal forests, both turning from a ‘carbon sink’, to a carbon emitter. Chaos in both the Arctic and Antarctic.
Why such wide-spread Chaos?
Because everything is connected to everything else!
There used to be self-contained communities, minimally touched by outside happenings. Now everything is connected to everything else, thanks to TV, Internet, world-wide trade, global money flows, last minute supply lines.
Now all this is on the cusp of unraveling, because Middle East tensions will soon affect the world’s blood supply: OIL.
Chaos, derived from the Greek khaos, means ‘vast chasm, void’.
There is a tremendous ‘void’ in the world’s vocabulary: the “God” factor is missing, yet the Middle East is consumed with ‘religion’. Religion kills, as we saw in the World Trade Centre now two decades ago. Religion kills as we see everyday in our world, especially around the Israel region. Islam always has been a violent religion, forcing people to adhere to its vision of religion.
Christianity is based on love, love for God, and, as Romans 11: 36 attests: “From God and through God and to God are all things”, with “God’s fulness now dwelling in Jesus Christ”, as Paul writes to believers.
The Matthew 24 scenario.
Today we are living the words of Matthew 24: “21 For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again, because “Escalation begets escalation”.
The US says its decision to dispatch a second aircraft carrier group in the eastern Mediterranean is intended to bolster Israel’s security and “deter any state or non-state actor” from widening the conflict. That vague wording conceals a world of anxiety about a possible head-on collision with Iran.
Iran is the “state actor” that controls and coordinates the “non-state actors” – Hamas and the militant group Palestinian Islamic Jihad in Gaza; Tehran-affiliated militias in Syria, Iraq and Yemen; and the most powerful of them all, Lebanon’s Hezbollah (the “Party of God”). This is what Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calls the “axis of resistance”.
Iran undoubtedly views the additional deployment as an American escalation. It appears to be placing its militias on notice that new war fronts may soon open up. Israel is already fending off daily, limited Hezbollah cross-border attacks in the north, and is warning of the “destruction of Lebanon” if the militia joins Hamas’s war.
That same chapter, Matthew 24, warns us about false prophets, now evident everywhere, including the church, where the ‘heaven heresy’ is still dominant. Oh, yes, people are ‘spiritual’, a booming industry.
A recent study found that nearly nine out of 10 Americans hold one belief that can be described as “new-age spiritualism”, whether that’s reincarnation, telepathy, or astrology. However, the biblical given, captured in John 3, explicitly states that, “nobody has ever gone to heaven, except Jesus who came from there”, (verse 13), and especially verse 16, which captures more than any other text, the essence of the Gospel: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
We are called to love God, and to love what he loves. That simple directive, quite explicit, beyond theological jargon and doctrine, states that, to gain eternal life, in God’s new creation, is to ‘love God through loving creation’.
I repeat: the entire “Christian” faith can be summarized by sincerely believing that God, by sacrificing his Son, as payment for buying back Creation, will grant us eternal life, not, not, in heaven, but here on ‘terra firma’, God’s own earth. Romans 1: 20 says, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse”.
In my mind, the corollary, the direct and natural consequence of this text, is that those who see creation as divine and holy, and live that belief, will find grace in God’s eyes.
Look at the world realistically: Already the current El Niño is strengthening; already there are further reasons why the temperature can be expected to keep rising beyond today, causing increasing chaos, increasing wars, increasing search for water, for grain, for oil, with people moving to more moderate climates, away from tropical countries, and dangers from heat, floods and earthquakes.
Remember: “Like a thief in the night…..”