WISDOM AND LOVE.
There is one line in Dr. Sabine Dramm’s book that keeps me awake at night. She thoroughly analysed Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thoughts, and her final conclusion was:
What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one, and the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God.
I am not a very analytic person. It has taken me a long time to grasp the meaning of this sentence. The first part is plain to me: God and the world are one. That is a tremendous leap. Just imagine: God is identical to his creation.
I imagine, I could compare God and Creation to Johann Sebastian Bach and his music. Perhaps as a person, Bach was not the most pleasant of man: quarreled easily, very opiniated, but his music is still unequalled. I believe it was Sir Ernest MacMillan who wrote a biography on Bach, based entirely on his musical oeuvre.
But God is beyond understanding, that’s why we have Creation and God’s mandate to love it, and treasure it. The well-known text: The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom, comes to mind. I interpret this as “Being in awe of Creation is the onset of Understanding its Maker”.
But.
We, 21st world citizens, have exploited natural resources for our exclusive benefit: sinning against Creation is sinning against God.
Dramm continues”: “the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God.”
What does this mean?
My thought: God is the origin of all life and it is our task in life to acknowledge this and honor God as the creator, and, I may add, to love creation as God did: by sacrificing his Son, God bought Creation back with his blood.
Dr. Dramm is not alone. There also is Dr. J. H. Bavinck.
Yes, my sleep is haunted by another line, found in another book that makes me tremble. It is written by Bavinck: Its title is, “Between the Beginning and the End”, subtitled: A Radical Kingdom Vision. This Mission Professor says: “The Central Point of the Gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering, rather, its entire focus is that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom… There is no such thing as individual salvation: salvation of the person and salvation of creation go hand in hand.”
In other words, it’s not Me and God: it is Me and God and Creation: I repeat: salvation of the person and salvation of Creation go hand in hand. It is in Creation where we will spend eternity: that ‘salvation LIFE’, starts now. Jesus did not only die for our sins: Jesus – see John 10: 10 – brought us LIFE and that to the full. There’s where WISDOM starts!
Global Heating.
The implications of Romans 7: 19 suddenly dawned on me: For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing.
Society, at large, has placed me in a straitjacket: no matter what I do, my actions affect creation, that’s why we all will suffer the consequences of our sins against Creation, sins against the Creator.
God created this world with built-in defense mechanisms. God often punishes us through Creation, as is evident from the 10 plagues in Egypt, before the Israel Exodus: water turning to blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the killing of all firstborn of humans and cattle, all punishments ‘creation-oriented’. When Israel as a nation, turned to idols, drought resulted.
Thanks to our fossil fuel consumption, the average global temperature anomaly for the first 10 months of 2024 (January to October) is 0.71°C above the 1991-2020 average, which is the highest on record for this period and 0.16°C warmer than the same period in 2023. This year is almost certain to be the hottest ever recorded globally, with floods and heatwaves roiling the climate crisis, wrecking harvests by extreme weather, unpredictable rains, and driving up food prices.
How will 2025 be?
Permafrost thaws across the globe are destroying housing and infrastructure, and disrupting ecosystems. These slumps are also harbingers of a cascading environmental catastrophe: there is twice as much carbon locked up in permafrost as in the atmosphere. But the Trump regime ignores all this: Trump and ‘his Christians’, deeply influenced by Rapture and disdain for the earth, are totally ignoring God’s ultimate LOVE for his creation.
Heed the teaching of the TWO WISE MEN: God’s foremost love is for his creation: love what God loves, and have eternal life.