November 2010
Build houses and plant gardens and eat what they produce…… Seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, for if it prospers, you too will prosper. (Jeremiah 29:5 &7)
You would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed. (Jeremiah 51:9)
Here’s something we really don’t expect from Jeremiah: a positive statement. Says he “When in Babylon build houses, plant gardens, make the city prosper.”
Cities in those days where different from ours: people there were quite self-sufficient, with room to grow food. Nineveh, too, was that way. God told Jonah, “Should I not be concerned about that great city where so many people live and many cattle as well?”
Today the only large American city with space to grow food is Detroit. It now has oodles of empty spots, places where houses used to be, having lost more than half of its population. Want to buy a house cheap? Go to Motor City and get an extra lot thrown into the bargain.
So why did Jeremiah urge the tribe of Judah to blend in? Simple. God wanted his chosen people to stay in good condition physically, materially and take time to treasure their religious heritage. As a result much of the Hebrew Bible – the Old Testament – came into being during that 70 year exile. Apparently absence from Jerusalem made the heart grow fonder, made them appreciate God’s hand in history, and also made them realize that they were in the city of Babylon, but did not belong there.
This applies to us as well: we live in Babylon also. David, at the end of his reign acknowledged that we are ‘aliens and transients’. Walter Lippmann, the well-known American commentator wrote, “Every one of us is, from a spiritual point of view, an immigrant.” Jesus too reaffirmed that: “My kingdom is not of this world.”
All this simply means that we are different from the world, that we may not subscribe to its philosophy of “Growth at all cost”, just to name one example that does the most harm to our fragile planet. Because it’s God’s work of art we must always treat it with reverence, reason why Jesus urges us to ‘seek first the Kingdom and its righteousness’, live in tune with God’s laws and be ready when the New World comes. Luther once said that ‘even if I knew that the Lord would return tomorrow, I would still plant a tree today.’
Back to something more in tune with Jeremiah. It’s not for nothing that he is known as ‘the weeping prophet’ and best-known for his proverbial Jeremiads, his mournful lamentations. The weeping prophet knew something that we too should take to heart: in chapter 51:9 he expresses his sorrow when he writes: “We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed…… for her judgment reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the clouds.”
We are discovering the same about our world: it too is beyond healing. We too must pray for it and work for its wellbeing, yet we see each day more clearly that our planet too cannot be healed: it has gone beyond the point of no return.
Jared Diamond in his 567 page book COLLAPSE used the Easter Islands as an example for what’s ails us. That island needed trees for its survival, but, just as we do all the time, they kept on cutting them down. Dr Diamond writes “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it? Like modern loggers, did he shout ‘Jobs, not trees?’ Or ‘Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for our wood?’”
We are all Easter Islanders now. God’s world is choking, which means that God’s Word is choking, because God’s world is also God’s Word, if we believe what our Belgic Confession teaches us. To understand The Means by Which We Know God, it states that we know Him First by the creation, preservation, and government of the Universe since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God, his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul writes in Romans 1:20. ‘All these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse’.
To me this suggests that the corollary, the other side of the coin, is also true: Those who recognize God’s greatness in creation and glorify his name because of it and do everything to preserve it, stand justified.
The Belgic confession places the bible as a secondary source for knowing God, yet almost all churches see that as the exclusive way to discover Him. We speak of the Bible as His holy and divine Word, but I have never heard that the universe is his Holy and Divine Word. Does Gnosticism, which sees matter as evil, play a role here? Prof. Dr Harold Bloom – America’s most distinguished literary critic – thinks so. In his The American Religion he categorically states that because of Gnosticism, “the American Religion masks itself as Protestant Christianity yet has ceased to be Christian.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer says essentially the same when he states that those who deny that God, Earth and Humanity are intimately linked, are engaged in pious secularism.
It is high time that we reset our priorities: make God’s universe the Primary Word while using the Bible as “a lamp for our feet and a light for our path” (Psalm 119:105) in God’s created word.
The Christian Church needs an AGGIORNAMENTO: an act of bringing it up to date to reflect current conditions.
The Hielema couple lives mostly in Tweed, but is often in Ancaster where they attend a Christian Reformed Church.