February 9 2022
EVERYTHING BECOMES WHAT IT IS.
That’s what Revelation, the last Bible book is all about. It exposes the LIE of our economic and ecclesiastical situation, and thereby indicate that the END is here.
Here are some of these signs.
David Brooks, long-time columnist for the New York Times, and, together with Jonathan Capehart, a Friday night feature on the PBS News Hour, had a long essay last Friday in his regular spot in America’s leading Newspaper, The New York Times, expounding at length about the catastrophic chaos in the Christian Religion that splits churches continent-wide. Actually, an age-old problem, dating back to pre-exile Israel more than 2500 years ago. There’s a curious passage in Isaiah 6, where in verse 3, the ‘holiness of the earth’ is affirmed, (also proclaimed in Psalm 24) and then a few verses later: “Be ever hearing (the Gospel), but never understanding”.
That’s what I concluded from David’s Brooks’ essay, in which he cites Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Seminary: “Many of the seminarians at Fuller are moving away from church as we normally conceive it. They want to build communities that are smaller, intimate, authentic, which can often fit in a living room. They see faith as inseparably linked to community service with the poor and marginalized. There’s a general interest in getting away from all the bitterness that has devoured the elders and just diving back into the Bible.”
Neither Brooks nor Labberton mention Creation as God’s Primary Word, basically endorsing Gnosticism. Harold Bloom, in his THE AMERICAN RELIGION, in 1993, wrote, and I paraphrase, “The American Religion has ceased to be Christian, consumed as it is by GNOSTICISM, that pagan belief that nature and grace are separate entities, that God in Heaven has nothing to do with the earth below, calling ‘Spirit’ divine, and ‘Nature’ evil.”
Why is it so difficult to connect the Christian Religion to Creation? Today the most applicable text in the Bible is John 3: 16, expounding God’s ultimate love affair with Creation, sacrificing the life of his beloved Son to buy the cosmos back from the Satan, the “Prince of this World”, as Jesus, correctly, called him.
Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer, J. H. Bavinck, are steeped in Biblical knowledge. Here’s a quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “I entreat you remain true to the earth (his emphasis),and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.”
Bonhoeffer sees God and the world (cosmos) as one. Bavinck states that ‘personal redemption and the redemption of the earth go hand in hand.’
The church has never given heed to these warnings. Now that the earth is in extreme peril, the church goes its wayward way, without any consideration for God’s wonderful word in creation: it, with some exceptions has become a clear example of EVERYTHING BECOMES WHAT IT IS: a fraud.
Last week’s New York Times, openly admitted “The End of the World.”
“I can’t say precisely when the end began, just that in the past several years, “the end of the world” stopped referring to a future cataclysmic event and started to describe our present situation.”
So writes Amanda Hess on February 3 2022 on Times’ front page. She continued:
“Across the ironized hellscape of the internet, we began “tweeting through the apocalypse” and blogging the Golden Globes ceremony “during the end times” and streaming “Emily in Paris” “at the end of the world.” Often the features of our dystopia are itemized, as if we are briskly touring the concentric circles of hell — rising inequality, declining democracy, unending pandemic, the financial system optimistically described as “late” capitalism — until we have reached the inferno’s toasty center, which is the destruction of the Earth through man-made global warming.”
The END is caused by the fraudulent thesis that “Infinite Growth is possible in a Finite World.”
Should I mention the economy? Or the rebellion against vaccination, abetted by “The Christians”.
ARCTIC NEWS – worth a look – in its February 5 and 7 issues, believes that, yes, The End is Near. Typical of The End is that human true nature is exposed.
Everything becomes what it is.
Fortunately, there also is Revelation 14: 13, where it says, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on…they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them”. Fortunately, there also is Romans 5: 21: “Just as SIN reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
This world is rushing to the End. We all know that. “Even though the LIE is fast, in race with truth, the LIE comes last”.