Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

WHERE ARE WE? (see the special announcement following this blog)

Part 3: We are wandering in a wilderness of our own making.

According to the Bible the people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were stuck in the desert for 40 years, during which the Lord provided them with ‘food from heaven’, manna. During those wandering days the manna was only good for one day, except on the Sabbath when miraculously, it lasted for 48 hours. Those Israelis with an inclination to trade and profit- not an unusual trait among these folk – got a bum deal. If they gathered a bit more than needed for their own family intending to sell it later to the lazy fellows who had not picked up enough for themselves, this effort would misfire as speculation in food proved impossible. The Lord ordained that all manna, being essential food and not a commodity, could not be sold for a profit. Does that mean that holding back food for later gain is a sin? Yes. It is equally true is that robbing food off its nutritional value, for the single motive of profit, is a sin as well.

Today we, like the people of Israel, also dwell in the desert, one of our own making. We have fashioned a world that is increasingly unfit for all living creatures, plants, animals, and us humans as well, God’s Kingdom to come. By growing and distorting the food the way we do, we are becoming self-consumers: cannibals in other words.

That needs an explanation.

Thanks to intensive land use through mining, road building, city construction, vacuuming the oceans, tar-sand extraction, and especially land-clearing, we humans have appropriated major portions of the globe for our exclusive use at the expense of everything else, and have made the earth largely unfit for organic cultivation. By mainly relying on chemicals to grow crops we are destroying the very basis of life, leaving little or no space for the non-human world. Don’t get fooled by the package: by all appearance our planet still looks OK. It’s the invisibles, the air, water and soil that hide the contamination.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass originally available, our total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity,” which was 100 percent ‘in the beginning.’ There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both concluded about a decade ago, that we humans, a single species among millions, consumed about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. Now, thanks to fracking, the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the rise of China as an industrial power, the never-ending global forests clearing and fires, overgrazing, ocean depleting and the ever higher pollution, a rapid increase in Primary Productivity is occurring: it could now easily be more than 45 percent. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We, the 7 billion plus of us raping plunderers,  have simply stolen the food, the habitat, the soil, air, water from all other creatures, all deserving an equal portion to live, in the process distorting our own habitat.

The Dust Bowl in the Thirties and the sand storms in China and fire storms elsewhere are no accident of nature. Intensive cultivation and replacing the prairies with our own preferred grass, wheat, has vastly reduced the top soil, while Climate Change is doing the rest. The paradox is that now we feed most of this grain to livestock, while that same livestock was perfectly content to eat native prairie grass. Never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef cattle raised in the same area today. We call that progress.

I have this book: Fast Food Nation. I bought it at the Tweed Thrift shop for $2.00, brand new, never been read. The original price was $38.95 purchased at the Redeemer College Bookstore of all places. In it I read that on these same former prairies where once millions of buffalo roamed, now covered with endless stretches of corn and wheat, ConAgra operates feedlots containing up to 100,000 head of cattle, so closely crowded together that it looks like an ocean of mooing, moving mass of multiple shades of white and brown. These animals eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs, their digestion aided by anabolic steroids implanted in their ear. Just to gain 400 pounds – about 180 kilos – each animal consumes 3000 pounds – 1350 kg – of grain, while each day depositing 50 liters of urine and manure which is dumped in a nearby lagoon, leaving more excrement than a city of Chicago produces.

By plowing up the prairies, by eliminating the buffalo and replacing them with grain-fed cows, we have caused the topsoil to disappear. But no problem: when the most fertile soil in the world vanishes we fill it again with new energy in the form of (finite and polluting) oil-rich fertilizers. Chandran Nair, who runs the Global Institute for Tomorrow, argues that the true economic cost of a US$4 burger is US$100, if the cost of converting grain to meat, water and energy use is factored in. That is just one example of the debt we owe to our children and grandchildren. Indeed we live on Borrowed Time.

God had a purpose when he told Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to live off the fruits of the land, be vegetarian. Now, in 2014, this truth makes eminent sense again because the mass marketing of meat is leading to the death of the country side, in the process pumping billions of tons of Green House Gases – the most lethal methane – into the air. Thanks to the nitrates in fertilizers sea-beds are deprived of oxygen, creating numerous dead zones in the world’s oceans. Thanks to endless monoculture crops, fields lose their wildlife. Thanks to expanded need for feed, native tribes are forced out of their rainforest habitat, depriving the world of so needed weather stabilizers and precious oxygen. Thanks to America’s cheap meat peasants in India no longer can make a living, committing suicide in droves. Thanks to ‘mega-dairies’ where 10,000 cows are kept fouling the air in California, children suffer from asthma. Thanks to the excess of effluent from nearby farms where as many as a million pigs are produced each year in China entire villages lack clean water.

The Oceans too suffer.

Next time you eat chicken, which, thanks to Tyson Foods, has become the lowest priced meat, you might pray a prayer for the poor people in Peru.

In Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat a special chapter is devoted to the fish meal industry. The lunacy of this business is that it takes a valuable protein that very few people eat enough of – oily fish – and turning it into a protein that is less healthy and that we already eat in excess: broiler chicken. Here is a quote from that book:

Fishmeal is one of the filthiest secrets of the factory-farming industry, an environmental catastrophe that involves sucking millions of tons of small fish out of the sea and crushing them into fish oil and dry feed for farmed fish, pigs and chickens. The process deprives millions of larger wild fish, birds and marine mammals of their natural prey, drastically depleting stocks of important species. It also pumps vile fatty waste into the ocean bays, creating dead zones; polluting the atmosphere around the processing plants, causing wide-spread human health problems; and diverts what could be a highly valuable source of nutrition for people to industrially farmed animals.

The result is that in Peru, near these factories, 20-30 percent of the people suffer from malnutrition and children develop lesions on their skin from the fumes the fishmeal factories emit. The book states that 99 percent of the broiler chickens in America are reared in the worst kind of processing plants where many chickens are diseased and in such poor shape that they can barely walk, while the minimum-wage workers suffer swollen hands from being pecked when catching the birds. Due to the crowded conditions food poisoning is rampant. Nearly a third of the planet’s land surface is devoted to rearing farm animals or growing their feed. If these cereals went directly to humans, an extra three billions people could be fed.

Where are we?

We are wandering in a wilderness of our own making and dying in the process thanks to fast – and increasingly foul food. Capitalism is decapitating us. “The lust for money is the root of all evil” writes Paul to his protégé in 1 Tim. 6:10. That is especially true in food production. Food now comes from oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least ten calories of oil. When my grandparents farmed, they produced pure food calories: no electricity but real horse- and human muscle power for input. Now even to obtain the oil takes lots of oil: today there is a lot more oil in our food and there is less oil in our oil. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today that ratio is as high as 40 barrels equivalent for 100 obtained in the Alberta Tar Sands. Fracking too has an extreme high ratio. The lower the energy return, the higher the pollution, and this danger will only increase as we need the energy to survive. Forget sustainable development. Forget measures to control Climate Change. We are at the point of no return, addicted as we are to oil, to sugar, to processed foods, all conspiring to make us dig our own graves.

About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled “processed,” meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food. Want to abandon our sugar addiction? Simple. Make meals from scratch. Even better: grow it yourself. Liberate yourself from the corporate clutches that cater to our cravings for sweets that slowly kill us.

Get a healthy breakfast. It is so simple to prepare oats in a slow cooker at night to be ready in the morning, rather than eat cereals. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap.

Then there is ethanol, another lie. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The (US) Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA calls this a bargain, because gasohol is a “clean fuel,” which is just as much baloney as calling Tar Sand Oil ethical. This claim to cleanness is in dispute at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. The grain used to make a gallon of ‘bio’ fuel can feed a family for weeks. Eating a carrot gives the eater all that carrot’s energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other in-edibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten.

Where are we?

Just as the cows, the pigs, the chickens, all wallowing in their own dirt on the way to a cruel death, pumped full with antibiotics, our bodies too, chockfull with chemical compounds, are on that same road, rapidly losing the ability to resist infections, while wandering aimless from mall to mall.

Psalm 13 comes to mind: “The fool has said in his heart: There is no God above.” We are those fools. My commentary says, “A fool is not an ignoramus, an atheist or an agnostic. A fool is one who has his values all wrong, and is encouraged to live as if God would never take action.” In food production too we have chosen the way of death, death for ourselves and death for the planet.

I’ve been taught that Reformation applies to all of life. Everything needs to be changed drastically. The matter of SEAKING FIRST THE KINGDOM, as Jesus asked us to do, means embracing a Global Perspective, involving also seeking the welfare of all animals and every single aspect of the natural world.

Next week: Where are we in the mad maze of magic money?

The book featured below has influenced my thinking and my life more than any other book I own. Translating it so that a wider audience may also benefit, has, without doubt, been, by the grace of God, my most rewarding accomplishment. The translation has greatly benefitted from the careful editing by Harry van Dyke, professor emeritus in history of Redeemer University College.

Copyright © 2014 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, All rights reserved

April 27 2014.

WHERE ARE WE?

Part Two

 IS EVER GREATER ECONOMIC GROWTH THE ORIGINAL SIN?

Barack Obama was one man who was influenced by a sermon. In 2004, as a senator, he recalled that his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., in a sermon, used the phrase: the Audacity of Hope. Obama says that this audacity is what “was the best of the American spirit,” namely “the audacity to believe despite all the evidence to the contrary.” That belief, he said, was to be convinced that America would always be on top, would have an ever-growing economy.

However, there is a major difference between the hope Christians have and what the politicians proclaim as “hope for an ever-growing economy”. Ten years later, today in 2014, there still is a completely unfounded and utterly irrational picture of the world being touted that claims all will be fine, just wait, be patient because soon, when the world economy rebounds, the wonderful certainty of unbounded growth will dissolve all debt and make us richer than we’ve ever been before. All we need is hope.

Actually it is all ‘hype’.

Of course hope and faith fit together like an automobile and fuel. We used to sing “love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage”, but that line now is totally outdated. Hebrew 11: 1 refers to both hope and faith: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see,” but the Americans, being very religious, apply this biblical definition of faith to Infinite Growth. For them this confession reads: “Faith is being sure of our hope for economic Growth and being certain that this will continue for ever and ever”. It’s also the “golden calf” of the Canadian Harper government which has three priorities: Growth, Jobs and lower Taxes.

The characteristic of an idol is that it does not condone critical views and questions. We can argue with God but an idol does not grant us this opportunity. The Growth God is such a powerful deity that taking on additional, even unlimited, debt, in order to get to the Promised Land of More tolerates no scrutiny.

The adherents of the Church of Forever Growth, having Faith in Infinite Economic Advance, far outnumber the believers in the God as confessed in the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. The faithful flock of “Forever More”, after having accumulated already infinite earthly possessions, blindly follows their Golden Calf along its unidirectional and one-dimensional path to more of the same, because The Lord of More demands that we shop till we drop. The Lord of More demands that we never question why. The Lord of More demands that we close our ears to the cries of creation. The Lord of More demands that we close our eyes to the floods, the droughts, the heat waves, the stress on trees, the dangers for our very lungs. The Lord of More demands that we close our hearts and minds to what the real Lord of the Universe is trying to tell us. The Lord of More demands that we dull our minds, never wondering what we wish to do with all the “more” we want to own. The Lord of More demands that we regard as false all the surveys that show that the happiest people on the planet do not live in the richest communities, but in the closest knit ones.

Stones for Bread, Snakes for Fish

The Lord of More gives us exactly what Jesus pointed at in Matthew 7:9: “Which of you, if his son or daughter asks for bread, will give them a stone? Or if he or she asks for a fish, will give them a snake?” Yet that is exactly what we are doing to our children where it concerns their future! We are sacrificing our children for the immediate gratification of our wants, which are never satisfied, and leave a world full of our toys and trinkets but empty of everything that guarantees life.

Still a bit hesitant to believe that the Lord of More is a real god? Christians believe that the Lord created the world ‘ex nihilo’ out of nothing. The banks, the real rulers of the world nowadays, have, since 1970, created 33 Trillions of virtual dollars ‘ex nihilo’, yes ‘money out of nothing’, making the bankers, including the head of the Federal Bank, Janet Yellen, the modern equivalents of ‘gods’.

No wonder the faithful followers of the Lord of More keep on chasing the ‘the golden calf.’ They do because they know of no other reality and have no other answer. The bitter truth is that only growth can rescue us from the economic situation we find ourselves in. Even though we can rationally understand that the principle of ‘always more’ is ridiculously impossible, and fatal to our survival, we cannot escape the trap it lures us into. The human mind is as unidirectional and one-dimensional as the Religinon of More. We simply have no other choice but to lie to ourselves about that. We must believe that we do the things we do because our rational brain tells us to, even though, when we take a step back, we are all perfectly capable of seeing that it just can’t be possible. There’s where the true faith of the Western World comes in, a faith inspired by the Great Deceiver, already present in the Garden of Eden where Infinite Growth had its birth.

A curious reversal

There is a curious reversal in the first few chapters of the Bible. Look it up, easily done by going to Google and type in Genesis 2:9. There the fruit trees are described as “trees pleasing to the eye and good for food.”  In the next chapter, Genesis 3: 6, the order is reversed. Suddenly it says: “the fruit was good for food and pleasing to the eye.” It is exactly there that the economic desire, the Lord of More took over from the Lord of All, for whom beauty and splendour and the aesthetic always has preference over the economic, the urge for MORE.

Years ago, in 1972, when I read the first publication by the Club of Rome, the still utterly relevant The Limits of Growth, I had a real conversion: I saw the impossibility of Infinite Growth. Now this same Club of Rome- yes they are still there- has just published a new book: Extraction: How the Quest for mineral Wealth is Plundering the Planet. It emphasizes that as we dig, drill, and excavate to unearth the planet’s mineral bounty, the resources we exploit from ores, veins, seams, and wells are gradually becoming exhausted. Mineral treasures that took millions, or even billions, of years to form are now being squandered in just centuries–or sometimes just decades.
Will there come a time when we actually run out of minerals? Debates already soar over how we are going to obtain energy without oil, coal, and gas. But what about the other mineral losses we face? Without metals, and semiconductors, how are we going to keep our industrial system running? Without mineral fertilizers and fuels, how are we going to produce the food we need?
Ugo Bardi, the author, delivers a sweeping history of the mining industry, starting with its humble beginning when our early ancestors started digging underground to find the stones they needed for their tools. He traces the links between mineral riches and empires, wars, and civilizations, and shows how mining in its various forms came to be one of the largest global industries. He also illustrates how the gigantic mining machine is now starting to show signs of difficulties. The easy mineral resources, the least expensive to extract and process, have been mostly exploited and depleted. There are plenty of minerals left to extract, but at higher costs and with increasing difficulties.
The effects of depletion take different forms and one may be the economic crisis that is gripping the world system. And depletion is not the only problem. Mining has a dark side–pollution–that takes many forms and delivers many consequences, including climate change.
The world we have been accustomed to, so far, was based on cheap mineral resources and on the ability of the ecosystem to absorb pollution without generating damage to human beings. Both conditions are rapidly disappearing. Having thoroughly plundered planet Earth, we are entering a new world.

We are entering a new world.

Bardi draws upon the world’s leading minerals experts to offer a compelling glimpse into that new world ahead, a world filled with our toys, but empty of the basics of life, as we now have to deal with Peak soil, Peak Oil, Peak Water and still peaking populations and ever expanding desires.

We live in a time of glaring paradoxes. We have convinced ourselves that it is possible to take on more debt in order to get out of debt, as long as there is more growth awaiting us in our fantasy future. It’s no more than yet another lie we can’t escape, simply because we can’t escape who we are. The Lord of More will always in the end leave us with less. When we pursue the economic at the expense of all that is beautiful, we end up with total misery.

 Where are we? Have we reached the End of the Line?

Suppose for a minute that we have reached the final stage of history, one where there not only is no longer growth, but where our ever-more complicated system collapses, a situation that is becoming ever more likely.

I am trying to determine where we are in the year of the Lord 2014. There is an urgent need for ideas about what to do in case growth does not return, in case there’s no going back to the golden era of ever more, even in case our house of cards, built in debt, collapses.

Do you have any idea? Do I? If you have, tell your politician because there are no such ideas. Politicians all over the world are desperate. That’s why war is becoming a real possibility, the last thing we need. China, with its teeming billions, is at its wits end. It needs growth. There are millions of peasants out there who want work. China needs growth but its previous growth came at the expense of poisoning its waters, its soil and its air. Now, with pollution saturating its very soul, where does it turn? How is growth possible when the system is so sick? More of the same will speed up the process of decay. Still the only real discussion is not whether we do or do not need growth, but is how much growth is needed. And the answer always is: as much as we can.

The world has a big problem. Economic advance has lately been seen as a sign of progress, and, for the last 200 years, even during the Dirty Thirties, our world has, indeed, seen steady growth. Yet for many countries in Europe, the 17^th and 18^th Centuries were The Age of Progress: Cultural Progress: Rembrandt, Shakespeare, Bach, Handel, Mozart come to mind: that was real progress: artistic advancement. Where are these people today? We are culturally deprived. The singular quest for economic growth has dulled our minds. And now we are stuck. Now nobody has any idea what to do without growth. There is no course that teaches “The No-Growth- Society.”

 Herman Daly is the exception.

Herman Daly, formerly with the World Bank, now a professor at the University of the Maryland School of Public Affairs, and a recipient of the Heineken Prize for environmental science by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, has long advocated a fundamental change in economic thinking. In his book Beyond Growth he argues that we must conceive of the economy as part of the ecosystem and, as a result, give up on the idea of economic growth because it leads to universal destruction. He writes: “The value of a sawmill is zero without forests; the value of fishing boats is zero without fish; the value of refineries is zero without remaining deposits of petroleum; the value of dams is zero without rivers and catchment areas with sufficient forest covering to prevent erosion and siltation of the lake behind the dam….Our ability and inclination to enrich the present at the expense of the future and of other species, is as real and as sinful as our tendency to further enrich the wealthy at the expense of the poor. To hand back to God the gift of Creation in a degraded state capable of supporting less life, less abundantly, and for a shorter future is surely a sin. If it is a sin to kill and to steal, then surely it is a sin to destroy carrying capacity – the capacity of the earth to support life now and in the future.”

He concludes his book as follows: “We must face the failures of the growth idolatry. We must stop crying out to the growing economy, “Deliver me, for thou art my god!” Instead we must have the courage to ask with Isaiah (44:20, The Message) ‘This lover of emptiness, of nothing, is so out of touch with reality, so far gone, that he can’t even look at what he’s doing, can’t even look at the no-good stick of wood in his hand and say, “This is crazy.”’

Where are we? We are in the grip of the idolatry of Infinite Growth which is the ultimate destroyer.

Where are we? (All about food.)

Where are we?

Part one.

General Overview.

Of course the question of Where are We is not a difficult one if it is a matter of location, especially if we are the proud owner of a GPS instrument. A few years ago I rented a car in the Netherlands on my way to visit relatives in a country with such a maze of streets that exact destinations are difficult to find, so I used a GPS and the voice directed me perfectly to the correct address.

The question Where Are We is a little harder to answer when we include (1) politics or (2) economics or (3) the environment or (4) food supply or (5) even religion. Yet it is exactly to these fields where I will venture to go in my explorations of this topic: in other words a discovery tour where we are in 2014 in the greater context of the world’s happenings.

This year, 2014, is exactly 100 years after the start of The Great War that was primarily fought in Belgium and France on the West front and along the Russian frontier in the East. It lasted from 1914 till 1918 and involved almost all European nations, plus from 1917-18 the USA as well.

When the strife started, Europe still had two Emperors: Kaiser Wilhelm II of greater Germany and Franz Joseph, the ruler of Austria-Hungary. His realm included not only Austria and Hungary, with Vienna as the capital, but also Bohemia, Moravia, Hungary, Galicia, Transylvania, Bosnia and Croatia: too much of a mix to be stable. Once that war was concluded on November 11 1918, millions of soldiers had been killed, nothing concrete had been achieved, but two emperors were gone, together with their empires, and finally the 20^th Century had begun, which ended in 1989. Now the long interim period to Century 21 is over, and we have arrived at the final stage of humanity. The Final Stage? Yes.

Exactly 100 years after WWI, war rumblings are again everywhere. In Margaret MacMillan’s book The War That Ended Peace, the road to 1914, I read (page 440): “Across the (European) Continent in 1911, economies were sliding into recession. Prices had been going up while wages had been falling behind, something that had hit the poorest classes hard.” That sentence scared me, because it depicts exactly our situation today. Are we now at that same point in 2014 as Europe was just before World War I? Are the great nations, Russia and China on the one hand and the NATO countries plus Japan on the other hand, manoeuvring themselves in such a situation about the current flashpoint of the Ukraine, where backing off becomes impossible?

Margaret MacMillan starts her book with two quotes, one by Albert Camus, “There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always wars and plagues take people by surprise.” The other quote is by Elizabeth Bowen: “War is not an accident: it is an outcome. One cannot go back too far to ask, of what?”

Are we in for both wars and plagues? The Spanish Flu, emerging when World War I was winding down, killed as many civilians as there had been battlefield casualties: both events took more than 20 million to the grave, and that in a world with less than 2 billion inhabitants, the majority small settlements dwellers. Now most people live in cities, perfect disease breeding grounds, with a world population in excess of 7 billion and unmatched mobility, where obesity and diabetes are reaching epidemic proportions, all perfect conditions to propagate a pandemic. Already MERS- Middle East Respiratory Syndrome – and EBOLA, both highly contagious and dangerous diseases, are making the rounds in Africa and the Middle – and now Far East.

Where are we? Are we concerned? Do people talk about the current threats, such as Climate Change, resource depletion, fragile economic conditions? Not that I have noticed: on the contrary. Mentioning these distinct possibilities, bordering on certainties, is a sure way to become unpopular. As long as we can watch inane TV and see silly film stars and increasing nakedness we are satisfied with that pure insanity. Fact is that when civilizations start to die they go insane, and indeed craziness is evident everywhere. We don’t mind that the ice sheets in the Arctic are melting. We don’t care that temperatures are rising. We pay no attention to the scary scenarios the scientists tell us about, with the poisoning of air, soil and water. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, insider-trading and outright theft. Jesus has something to say about this: “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge and you did not mourn.” (Matt.11:17). If there ever is a time to mourn, with the death of species, the global spread of pollution, cancers proliferating, fraud more frequent than ever, it is now. Where are the real eyes that realize real lies?

 How did we get to the point we are today?

Of course it’s ‘the frog in the slowly boiling pan’ symptom all over again. It all is happening so gradually. I remember spending time at my maternal grandparents’ farm in the 1930’s: a dozen cows all milked by hand, the milk processed the same day in the nearby plant. No refrigeration, of course, so small was not only beautiful, but the only way to go. No carbon footprint whatsoever. My paternal grandparents had a grocery store, selling sugar, coffee, tea, often in exchange for eggs, thus partly a barter economy. The church was at the centre of life.

Now everything and everybody has changed. The church is at the margin for most. Society at large evolved from religious authority to secular rule, from agriculture to industrial, from rural to urban, from local to global, from periphery to centre, from decentralized to centralized, from low-density energy to high-density energy, from wood to coal to oil/natural gas, from industrial to communication technology, from gold to fiat currencies, from local scarcity and high cost to global abundance, from islands of prosperity to continents of prosperity, from cash to credit, from collateral to leverage, from productive to consumerist and from sustainable to unsustainable. That’s where we are now.

Here’s why. In today’s world the resources needed for our technological pursuits are being used at breakneck rates and thus are either already facing depletion or will do so in the near future. When coal has already been mined so heavily that sulfurous, low-energy brown coal—the kind that miners in the 19th century used to discard as waste—has become the standard fuel for coal-fired power plants, for example, it’s a bit late to talk about a coal-to-liquids program to replace any serious fraction of the world’s petroleum consumption: the attempt to do so would send coal prices soaring to economy-wrecking heights. Richard Heinberg has pointed out in his book Peak Everything, that a great deal of the coal still remaining in the ground will take more energy to extract than it will produce when burnt, making it an energy sink rather than an energy source.

Where are we?

In the early 20th century, there was an abundance of everything, allowing the development of autos, highways, aircraft, radio, telephones and most recently the Internet. This progress started slowly, picked up speed, creating a period of widespread adoption and technological leaps, followed by a maturation phase allowing the advancement of refinements rather than leaps. Now we enter a mature economy with no or little growth, stagnated development and, in a world with a growing population, a shrinking job market.

Take air travel. The leap from open-cockpit aircraft of the 1910s to the long-distance comfort of the DC-3 in the 1930s was enormous, as was the leap from the prop-driven DC-3 to the greater capacity and speed of the 707 jet airliner. But since the advent of the Boeing 727 in 1964 and the jumbo-jet 747 in 1969, very little about the passenger experience of flight has changed (or has changed for the worse): the envelope of speed is little changed, and efficiency has improved, but these are mostly invisible to the passengers.
Cars too are a good example. I bought my first one in 1952, an Austin, which lasted exactly one year. Improvements in the past 60 plus years since have been gradual: my current car, a diesel, is still excellent, even after 12 years, but the basic concept has remained the same. The same is true of computers. Once computers reached the Mac OS X/Windows XP level, improvements have been of marginal utility. All this suggests that we are at the end of technologies.

In the meantime the costs of our lifestyle continue to go up due to higher energy costs, bureaucratic bloat and weather related crop failures. At the same time, with stagnant wages and interest income lower than the inflation rates, more of our collective consumption is being funded with debt, which is another way of saying that present consumption is being paid for with future income.

Ever since 1800 one invention after another has created more wealth and more jobs, while plenty of cheap energy led to an exponential increase in population. This ever upward rise in production moved to lower-labor costs and with automation and mechanization gave us higher-value services.

Now no longer is there the Next Big Thing that generates more jobs. On the contrary: the next big thing is ROBOTS, taking away whatever manufacturing jobs there still are, and new soft-ware, that can do almost anything, may make accountants and lawyers disposable too. The logical Next Big Thing is De-Growth, forcing us to consume less and do more with less. But there is only one problem with this: our system cannot cope with De-Growth, because it is built on Growth, depends on only one pathway: higher consumption, higher costs and higher debt. Any reduction in any of these three collapses the system. The current Big Thing–the world-wide web–is the first technology that is not creating more jobs than it eliminates. But how safe is this new trend? The recent appearance of the Heart Bleed virus shows that the Internet is extremely vulnerable.

Where are we?

Basically we are at the end of the line because we have placed all our bets on continuous growth, which means that we are on a one-way street to exhaustion. Our pensions, our labour market, our entire merchandizing set-up depends on more sales, growing revenue, increasing tax revenue to pay for the medical expense, old-age pensions and repairing and maintaining our infrastructure, roads, bridges, electrical system and education on all levels.

We cannot imagine a world that consumes less, generates fewer conventional jobs and reduces debt rather than creates more debt. The only strategy left is to do more of what has failed before, until it collapses. And sooner or later our Capitalist system will go the way of all systems before it, because, simply put, many of the problems which we see today in the world, economic problems, political problems, strategic problems, geo-political problems, are due to the fact that resources everywhere are running out because of natural limits. Some of these boundaries are pollution-related, such as climate change. Others are cost-related, such as the need for deeper wells or desalination to provide water for a growing population, and the need for greater food productivity per acre because of more mouths to feed. The extraction of oil and other fossil fuels are another good example as resource extraction becomes more complex, requiring a larger share of our shrinking pay cheques.

When limits hit, governments are especially likely to suffer from inadequate funding and excessive debt, because tax revenue suffers if wages and profits drop.

Let me give a simple example: imagine a few persons in charge of a million dollars. The interest is higher than their outgo, so for a while the capital increases, but as the number of dependents grows the income of that huge amount is no longer sufficient, so they start eating into the capital, something we as the human race have been doing now for decades. Now the original sum is almost gone. Then what? The only outcome is collapse.

We have made a deal with the Devil.

Why does this happen? We have made a deal with the Devil. We have become hooked on the heroin of carbon-fuels. We have become carbo-holics, offered our very selves in exchange for diabolical favours, such as supposedly unlimited energy, unlimited wealth, unlimited convenience, unlimited luxury and unlimited economic growth. The devil has sold us an illusion, still perpetrated by electioneering politicians.

Where are we?

More about that next week.

JOB Then and JOB Now: Conclusion

part 3

To view all three parts go to www.hielema.ca/blog

The End is in the Beginning.

JOB’s three so-called friends, later joined by a fourth, fanatically believed in the equivalent of the North American doctrine that God rewards strict religious observance. They were convinced that somehow Job had deviated from that. Before his suffering JOB too had adhered to this orthodox teaching which he had held as gospel truth. However, after his encounter with a series of unexpected mishaps, JOB changed his mind: “No”, he defiantly told God, ”No, I have not sinned. No, God, you are making a grave mistake.” Consequently the book of JOB eases us into a revolutionary prospect that we can argue with God against God, and that this is our God-given duty. The book does this both beautifully but also in a somewhat mysterious way.
The book is beautiful because it reads like an ancient heroic tale. It is mysterious because it is almost certain that JOB never lived. I think it is in the Bible because there is an intimate connection between JOB Then and JOB Now. Here’s why.
(1) I believe that JOB represents not the people of Israel, for the simple reason that there is no real Jewish connection evident in the book of JOB at all, but the entire world, both ancient and contemporary. In other words, God is saying that Israel, as a nation, is no longer an exclusive people, but that everybody in the world, past and present, is included in his plan for salvation.
That would be a drastic change. Thus the writer of the book of JOB points to a new relationship between humans and God then and now, one based not simply on obeying God’s laws as outlined in the books of Moses, the Torah, or faithfully going to church, but especially on a vibrant, all-inclusive lifestyle, expressing a deep appreciation for creation, and thus living so that its wellbeing is constantly considered.
God wants all people, not only Jews, to be saved, a thought that met with a lot of denial and resistance in the pre-Christian church, so much so that some 800 years later, when Jesus appeared on the scene, his disciples still had not fully absorbed these new emphases. I also believe that God looks with compassion on those who follow his creational laws, recognizing Him as the origin of life, something Romans 1: 20 points to.
(2) And then there are these disastrous happening and the matter of this Satan figure. Where do this creature and these calamities fit in? Here I have to fast forward some 800 years again, to the New Testament time of Jesus at the start of his ministry as related in Matthew 4. There the Satan showed Jesus all the glories of the world, the Egyptian pyramids,  the Greek Parthenon, the splendor of Rome, the Inca institutions, the marvelous temples in Indonesia and Asia, and offered the entire world and its glories to Jesus, on the condition that Jesus bow down and worship the Satan.
Jesus does not dispute that Satan is the ruling power of the globe: on the contrary, he later calls him ‘The Prince of the World.’ Yes, the Satan, now more than ever, is controls the world, witness the Holocaust, Rwanda, AIDS, cancers, wars, Climate Change, the religious Right.
This explains also why this book is not popular with the theologians: it is simply too controversial. Is Satan in charge today? Yes.
(3) When finally God speaks to JOB, he opens JOB’s mind to some radical new thinking. The book tells us that we are never able to rest on past achievements, that there simply is no retirement for us ever.
Already the word “the land of Uz” gives an indication of this new meaning. Dr. David Wolfers, the author of Deep Things out of Darkness, a 550 page book dealing exclusively with JOB, translates the word “Uz”, (the physical location where JOB supposedly lived) as “the Land of Council.” He thinks that the book asks us to look at the Bible with a critical eye, to weigh its ideas carefully and consider them to see whether we express the right view. In other words, he recommends that churches, mosques and synagogues everywhere, must meet to discuss, probe, investigate and discover what the gospel means for us in this millennium. No longer are matters clear-cut: we have changed, circumstances have changed, the world has changed.
(4) And then there are the four friends. Dr. Wolfers, himself a Jew who devoted 20 years of his life to the study of JOB, thinks that they may stand for three or four ethnic minorities within the Jewish nation, with their different types of worship, all centering on a faulty view of God. Transposing the scene to the religious JOB Now, I believe it could well be that the first three friends, in our time, represent the three major orthodox religions: Judaism, based on the Old Testament only, orthodox Christianity, both the Protestant wing, mostly influenced by Gnosticism and hierarchical Roman Catholicism- still stuck on papal infallibility and male dominance- and Islam, later joined by the fourth in the form of the so-called Christian Right, all based on the false doctrine of either good works or a stagnant view of God.
Although JOB replies to the first three speakers, he wisely does not enter into dialogue with the orthodox Christian Right, which, he thinks correctly, is a waste of breath.

The most liberating element about the entire book of JOB is that here is a human being who is not a good and patient and pious God-fearer, but a person who fights God with all the passion he can muster. The New Testament speaks of such a person as one who is blessed because he or she hungers and thirsts for righteousness and is willing to die for that ideal.
JOB is suffering because God wants to teach JOB something. God wants to teach JOB that he must let go of some of the ideas he has about God, taught by previous generations, true for them in their time, perhaps, but not true for JOB now.
Only when God had personally spoken to JOB, only then did he understand for the first time in his life- and his suffering was the turning point- that God was different than he first had imagined. He expressed this when he said: “I have heard of you with my ears, but now my eyes have seen you.” JOB’s idea of God was based on the oral traditions: what his ancestors had told him, what he had heard in numerous sermons. But now something different is forming in his mind, some new thoughts and new ideas. The eye of his mind is seeing a new God and also, looking inward, is seeing a new JOB.
And what is it that JOB starts to see?

The book’s Central Point.

Here I come to the central point of the book, which makes it one of the most profound sources of contemporary spirituality. The accusing Angel believed that JOB was only obedient to God because God had made him rich and prosperous, and so the Satan thinks that JOB will curse God if his blessings are taken away. However, there the Satan miscalculated. True, JOB was initially very much concerned about himself and his family. He figured that, because he was so rich and so blessed with possessions, he was the centre of the universe.
The sin of JOB Then, the sin of Israel and our sin, the sin of JOB Now, is Anthropocentrism, the arrogant and deluded belief that the earth and the universe were designed for our benefit and control, something the entire World, including all religions, believes with a passion. John 3: 16 is always wrongly interpreted as if it reads: “God so loved the human race….” When God talks to JOB He says: “JOB, I’ve got a few questions for you. Where were you when I planned the earth? Tell me if you are so wise. Were you there when I stopped the waters as they issued gushing from the womb?”
For verse after verse the voice in the whirlwind rages on, outlining all the interdependent elements of creation- the winds, clouds, thunderstorms, the lightning, lions, antelopes, oxen, ostriches, horses, hawks, vultures, bulls, serpents. The voice lashes out at JOB’s and our narrow self-centeredness, admonishing that he can never understand the complexity and the functioning of the planet and cosmos. “Have you been to the edge of the universe? Speak up, if you have such knowledge,” a remark very applicable today when the Hubble spacecraft probes ever deeper into the universe and the pictures become ever more baffling, or when Mars is being explored and the questions multiply.
What we see here is the very opposite of a universe built for us to manipulate as we will. Instead of being given dominion over plants and animals, or a license to subdue creation, JOB Then is told- and we, JOB Now, with him- to bow down and be humble and love ‘the cosmos’. He and we are required to understand absolute humility before the face of God and thus JOB says in the end: “I have heard of you with my ears (heard the Torah, heard hundreds of sermons) but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.”
The Hebrew word for ‘dust’ here is exactly the same word used in Genesis 2, out of which God fashioned Adam, whose name actually means ‘dust’. So the rebirth of JOB is akin to becoming Adam. He is the prototype of the New Humanity, in line with Jesus, God’s son.

As a parable JOB represents the New Adam, the New Humanity, fully at ease being human, being of the earth. Dust we are; ‘Adam’ we are and to dust, to ‘Adam’, the New Adam we shall return.

JOB’s Surrender

His ultimate surrender is not the sort of mindless obedience often required by orthodox religion. It is the kind of surrender that is “the whole-hearted giving of oneself,” a surrender to God’s creation, His Universe, arising from a humility that leads to wisdom instead of self-centered pride. JOB is born again, converted from an ego-centered person to an eco-centered consciousness based on awe for God and His great creation. That is the basic message of the book of JOB. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Theologian killed by the Hitler crowd in April 1945, just before the end of World War II, says in Schoepfung und Fall (Creation and Fall): “God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” That is the coming new Trinity, to be implemented now. We are not here to maximize personal consumption and to glorify individual greed, the basic message of the gods of our age. As citizens of the world we must, following JOB’s message, progress from being ego-centered to becoming eco-centered.
We know what happened to JOB. The story is well-known how he received double his capital as well as his family back.
Here is another reason why the Book of JOB is so curiously contemporary. Consider the following: the most up-to-date detail in the epilogue is the mention of JOB’s daughters. In this new world where JOB Then and JOB Now merge, which is humanity’s future, these fair women are not inferior to the brothers and do not have to go to their brothers’ houses for the annual celebration. Indeed, they are given the same honour by receiving a share of JOB’s wealth as their inheritance, totally new for that age. Each is named, while the seven sons of JOB remain anonymous. The names themselves- Dove, Cinnamon and Eye-shadow- symbolize peace, abundance and a specifically female kind of grace. The story’s centre of gravity has shifted from righteousness to beauty and the focus is now the manifestation of inner peace.

Female Beauty

And something else: “And in all the world there were no women as beautiful as JOB’s daughters.” There is something enormously satisfying about the prominence of women at the end of JOB. Here they are especially included. The lesson here is that JOB, and in JOB all people, have learned to surrender not only their erroneous ideas about God but also their male compulsion to control. The daughters have almost the last word. I think that even though now women are still secondary in many cultures, especially in religious institutions, in the new world they will be more than equal.

And in the entire world there were no women as beautiful as JOB’s daughters. What JOB also tells us is that in the world to come there will be great appreciation for beauty, including female beauty.

We see more and more how organized Religion has lost the Gospel of the Earth. No wonder it has stagnated. Those who want to find this ‘gospel of the earth’ need look no further than the Book of JOB.

In short the book of JOB depicts the history of the world: first the ideal situation, then the Satan episode, spoiling the perfection, followed by hardship, questions, wrong theology, God’s answer and the final restoration with double the blessings.

The End is in the Beginning

Everything has a beginning and an end. Now, at the edge of the End-time, our world will descend to the state it was before, when everything will revert back to what existed in the time before the Beginning, the Primeval Time. Just as death is close to birth, so the down­turn is not far from the upswing. Just as all that has been neatly ordered stems from chaotic disorder, emanating from the fog of the Primeval, so the cosmos too will revert back to that same undefined state. The End?time is nothing else but the return to the Beginning before history. Not only do we ourselves need a re-birth: all of creation will be re-born, allowing us a New Beginning. It is for this newness that we live, building on Christ’s promise in Revelation 21: 5: “I am making everything new!”

Yes, The End is in the Beginning.

Bibliography
The Book of JOB, Stephen Mitchel, North Point Press
The Comforting Whirlwind, God, JOB and the scale of Creation,
Bill McKibben, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Deep Things out of Darkness, David Wolfers, Pharos & Eerdmans
The Lost Gospel of the Earth, Tom Hayden, Sierra Book Club

A Testament to Freedom, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harper San Francisco
The End of Science, John Horgan, Helix Books
Antwoord uit he Onweer ( A ‘Thunder’ Reply ) Dr K.H. Miscotte
JOB, Challenging a silent God, Nick Overduin, CRC Publications.
The Hidden Face of God, Richard Elliott Friedman, Harpers
Time Magazine, August 4 1997

Between Beginning and End: a Radical Kingdom Vision, J. H. Bavinck, Eerdmans (Forthcoming)

Approaching the End, Stanley Hauerwas, Eerdmans

Creation and Fall, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fortress Press.

Next week:

The first part of a series on WHERE ARE WE?

JOB Then and JOB Now

Part 2.

The End is in the Beginning.

Why do I blog?

‘JOB Now’, meaning we and our world, is entering a ‘JOB Then’ situation, indicating cosmic disasters. Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about human activity pushing the planet beyond its limits. In a recent study, 22 leading scientists warned that “humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale transition with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.”

In plain language it says that our biological resources – water, trees, soil, air – which we now take for granted, will be subject to sudden and unpredictable transformations probably sooner than later.

That means we, personified in ‘JOB Now’, are in deep trouble, something the church can no longer ignore, because that trouble plays out in a world chockfull with the inequalities that flow from deeply entrenched power structures, both within individual countries and between the so-called developed and developing worlds. Stir in the ecological crises which will greatly exacerbate existing problems rooted in the unjust distribution of wealth and power, and our troubles are likely to magnify exponentially. I see it as the role of preachers and self-appointed bloggers like me to warn our society that we are in deep denial, denial that is especially anchored in the relatively privileged sectors, such as organized religion where our affluence insulates us from the immediate consequences. Bonhoeffer’s advice to the Church of Christ, in his introduction to Creation and Fall, is: “To witness to the end of all things, to live from the end, to think from the end, to act from the end, to proclaim its message for the end.” In this the church fails miserably.

Therefore  I see it as my duty to sound the unpleasantly loud alarm that we must drastically change the way we think, move, worship, especially the latter, because only as a community can we prepare ourselves for the future.

What has this to do with JOB Then?

The Book of JOB is all about personal catastrophes that represent global happenings. JOB’s friends, in their out-dated ideas, are part of that as well. JOB’s friends are the typical, judgmental know-it-all believers, be they Christians, Muslims or Jews who know exactly why JOB is in this deplorable state: it is God’s punishment. We too, in our out-dated orthodox religions, often see the law, traditions and ecclesiastical confessions as more important than love without preconditions. When JOB was rich and healthy, his friends valued his opinion (being rich always gives enhanced credibility) but not anymore. Now something has changed and it is not they. It’s JOB. His suffering has made him a different person. Now the God JOB relies on is a totally different God. Who is right? JOB honoring a mysterious, unknowable God or his companions who revere a God about whom they know everything?

Eliphaz bluntly tells JOB in Chapter 15: “JOB, you are undermining religion and crippling faith in God.” Sounds familiar to me! Buddy Bildad dooms him to hell in Chapter 18: “Brimstone will be strewn on your household.” But JOB stubbornly clings to his faith when he says in Chapter 19:25: “I know that my Redeemer is alive and that in the end He will stand upon the earth. He will plead for me in God’s court; he would stand up and vindicate my name.”
Amazing words. Unbelievable what suffering can do to people. It can totally change them. The Satan had not counted on this sort of conversion, a conversion brought about by the suffering God inflicted upon JOB. He had figured that JOB’s theology would be stagnant, a theology teaching that religion never is for nothing. I once heard a radio preacher say that the road to prosperity is simple: “start everyday with prayer, go to church, tithe, of course give to his radio or television program and read the bible.”
The Satan wanted to score a fast one with God, and prove once and for all that JOB would deny God as soon as he had become a welfare bum. But he failed in JOB, because this sort of tit for tat is the theology of the devil.
JOB’s story tells us that there are no immediate rewards to religion and by this I don’t mean that being religious does not benefit people now. It does. Religion gives people, in general, a moral focus, stability, security and a purpose in life.
Suffering can teach us wisdom. Faith can find expression in wisdom and in Chapter 28 we see the continuation of JOB’s conversion, because conversion is always a slow and never-ending process, just as acquiring wisdom is. Here JOB confesses his basic ignorance. He, who once was very rich, now confesses that being well-off can hinder the development of wisdom, something we, prosperous Westerners, forget at our peril. In his suffering JOB’s conclusion is wonderful: “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to shun evil, that is understanding.”

What next?
After all these torrents of words, silence. “What next?” these former friends wonder. Then the Lord spoke to JOB out of a whirlwind. God Himself answers JOB personally. The Hidden One remains hidden, but not completely. God addresses Himself to the one person who has asked constantly “Why”. The other four men knew the answers, gave the pious platitudes, were comfortable, and avoided the touchy issues, reminding me of most of the sermons I have heard all my life. God did not direct himself to the four men but to JOB, who had suffered, and was puzzled by it all.
The curious thing about the Lord’s sayings is that they all come as questions. “Where were you when I founded the earth? Who determined its measurements – if you know? Do you know the seasons of the mountain-goats? Have you marked the calving of the deer? “Do you give the horse its strength” Do you cloth his neck with thunder? Do you understand the sea and can you grasp from where all these waters come and what purpose they serve? Have the portals of Death been rolled back for you?”
Now it dawns on JOB that his suffering, which he had made the central point of the universe, is nothing compared to God’s greatness, to his over-arching wisdom. While God hurls these questions at JOB, a strange peace descends on him. He starts to realize that part of the secret of salvation is that God does things just for the sake of doing things. He now starts to see that all of life is a miracle which needs neither a reason nor a cause but no other ground than God’s creative act, no other purpose than His own glorification, in which salvation is included.
JOB’s suffering has sharpened his thinking and he discovers to his amazement that in and above all other useful, moral, beautiful goals, rises the one great given that God be known, be lived, be confessed, and believed as the only Divine being. His Essence is nothing else but to live and to give life.
God’s aim for us humans is to have all living entities participate in His fullness. We, humans, are not the only focal point. We are not the totality of creation, although we often think so. John 3:16 explicitly says: God so loved the world, the cosmos that He sent His son. In the world we ask for reasons, but when ask for a reason for the world there is only one answer: the answer is that the pivot of life is God and God alone, who can only be approached through Jesus, who calls himself “The Son of Man”, humanity personified, who wants us to be nothing else but be fully human too, earthly as the earth is earth. We may think that we are powerful with our tools and brains. We are not. Says one of the greatest minds in science, John Wheeler of Princeton, in a book called The End of Science: “As the tiny island of our knowledge grows, so does the great shore of our ignorance.” We, at the height of our scientific powers, are discovering that the more we know, the more we discover we don’t know. The real Answer, the key to the Universe is now as elusive as ever and more and more scientists are admitting that. What God wants JOB to understand is that God is Infinite in His creative powers, Infinite in the beauty of creation, Infinite in the design of His work of Art. God wants ‘JOB Then’ and ‘JOB Now’ to marvel at His ingenuity. He wants both JOBs to be astounded by the revival of nature in the spring, by the multitude of flowers which adorn the landscape, by the erratic flight of the swallows, the steaming heat of the summer, the almost plaintive sounds of autumn, the stark dignity of the winter landscape. He wants JOB Then and JOB Now to affirm that their first duty in life is the enjoy God forever, and this pleasant duty starts with marveling at his creation.
When God is finished, all JOB can do is to exclaim in utter surrender in Chapter 40: “How can I reply to you? I lay my hand on my mouth. Once I have spoken, but I cannot answer; even twice, but I can no more.” His conversion is affirmed when he confesses in chapter 42:
“I know you can do all things and nothing you wish is impossible.
Who is this whose ignorant words cover my designs with darkness?
I have spoken of the unspeakable and tried to grasp the Infinite.
Listen and I will speak. I will question you: please, instruct me.
I heard of you with my ears; but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.” That last word ‘dust’ means earth: earth we are and to earth we shall return.
JOB did not find a solution for his questions, but he did find deliverance from his questions. JOB never saw God but his new-found comfort was that God saw him, because JOB came to Him with questions: “Why did you do this, Lord? Why did that happen to me, Lord?”
The meaning of the book of JOB is not that JOB could solve the problem of his suffering in his life or that we can solve the pain and injustice in our lives. We, as JOB Now, are starting to realize that, for the time being, yes, till the very end of time, until the Lord returns, we are on our own. God is testing us JOB Now as he did JOB Then. We now experience what God predicted in Deut.32: 20, “I will hide my face from them and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation.”

This perversity applies to us all. The newest Climate Change report, on page 4 of March 31 Globe and Mail and front-page news in the New York Times, cites the risk of death or injury on a wide scale, probable damage to public health, displacement of people and potential mass migrations. That same New York Times issue, on the editorial page, contains a scathing report on Canada’s (read PM Harper’s) disastrous environmental record in connection with the Alberta Tar Sands. It makes me ashamed to be a Canadian citizen. We are on a treadmill to death and nothing will stop the disasters that face us, as JOB Now.

JOB’s Basic Truth

The basic truth of the book of JOB is that we must not take generally accepted truths for granted but that the most basic ideas about God and religion have to be probed and questioned without ceasing. We never arrive; we never can say: we know enough. As long as we live we have to keep up our search for Truth, and we joyfully must accept this. As long as we live we must probe for wisdom.

Fact is that we need a radical conversion. Many of us are shuttled by way of cheap gasoline from climate-controlled house, to an artificially lighted work-place, to a prepackaged supermarket, to a night in front of electronic amusement, and there is little, in all this, to shock one’s level of energy and material use out of the unconscious realm. Just as JOB Then, we need a totally new way of life, not just ‘brother are you born again?’ but consciously trying to live a God- that means Cosmos- pleasing existence.

Next week: The End is in the Beginning: Conclusion of JOB Then and JOB Now.

JOB then and JOB now.

Part One

The end is in the beginning.

We all know about JOB, that mythical figure, who is perhaps the Bible’s best known character, after Jesus. The book of JOB is a story with a purpose, which also is the definition of a myth or parable. The purpose of ‘JOB then’, written perhaps 3000 years ago, was to warn Israel about a wrong religion. The purpose of ‘JOB now’ is exactly the same: also a warning about the wrong way of worship.

We all know something about JOB. We know that he was famous for his afflictions and his supposed patience, a man fabulously rich, who suddenly lost all his wealth, his children and in a violent argument with his wife was told to curse God and die.
We also may vaguely remember how three men, come from afar, visited him in his misery, joined later by a younger visitor and how these fellows made long speeches, to which JOB replied. How finally God spoke up, vindicated JOB, rebuked the four friends, after which JOB received twice as much wealth back as well as his family.

The Satan scene

The book is famous for that strange encounter with a mysterious figure called the Satan, who, out of the blue, appears in heaven and when God asks him, “what are you doing here?” says, “Oh, I was going out for a stroll, saw the door open and decided to say hello.”

Strange business, this. Can just anybody enter heaven? To me it suggests that this entire tale is not a true story but is there to illustrate a certain truth. And what is that truth? That’s what this essay – which comes in three parts – is all about, so stay with me.

Back to the meeting of these two sworn enemies, who actually behave as if they were on a friendly footing. Listen to their casual chatter. The Lord says to the Satan almost as an afterthought: “Say, you get around. In your wanderings have you noticed JOB out there in the land of Uz? I tell you, no better person anywhere in the whole world.”
“No wonder,” replies the Satan: “look, you have given him special protection and have favoured him above everyone else. I bet you that if somebody were to ruin him financially and kill off his immediate family, he’ll curse you to the face.”

That set me thinking. Has this curious encounter between God and the Satan any significance for us today? After all, unless the Bible helps us here and now, it is merely an interesting book of great literary value. What then is the meaning of this meeting for 2014 and beyond? What does this amicable conversation, between two arch enemies – that’s how the rest of the Bible portrays God and Satan – tell us that is valuable for you and me now, at this moment, in our life-time?

So here’s how I see it. It seems to me that JOB then represented the human world in ‘the beginning’, living a ‘paradise-like’ life, where everything was just perfect. However, nothing is more dangerous than having everything.

The Satan is used by God to teach us all a lesson –because life is nothing else than one endless learning process: we never arrive, will never quit learning, not even in eternity. Part of our ‘lesson’ is that JOB was abandoned by God and left to the wiles of Satan, something that applies to us as well: at some point in history the world and we who live in it also were abandoned by God and released in the hands of the Satan. J. H. Bavinck, in his forth-coming book Between Beginning and End: a Radical Vision of the Kingdom makes this quite clear. That Satan now is in charge accounts for the wars, the cancer pandemics, the Holocaust, Capitalism, Global Warming, and the total world-wide destruction we are busy completing. Just like JOB we too need a lesson, many of us too have more than Job could ever dream.

That’s why God in his infinite wisdom says to the Satan, ”All-right. It’s a deal. He is in your power. Don’t touch his body, though.”
And so it happens. JOB loses everything and has no clue about the wager God made with the Accuser.
And JOB? He believed, with all people then and many today, that being rich in possessions was a sign of piety. The Osteen church with its Prosperity Gospel thrives on this: for them being wealthy is a sign of God’s blessings. And evidently the Satan is of that same opinion because he figures that, as soon as JOB would lose his personal and material treasures, he would deny God.
However, even though JOB is reduced to utter poverty, his faith remains steadfast, evident from his famous words: “Naked came I from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Quite the statement. Just imagine that we, you, I, in one day, see our immediate family killed in a car accident, a drunken driver being the cause; then lightning strikes, our house burns up and we have forgotten to renew the insurance; next, due to a market crash, our portfolio is wiped out, our JOB disappears, and all we have left are the clothes on our body. What would our reaction be? Like JOB? Not likely. But better be prepared: today all signs point to a horrendous future, to perils for which we are totally unprepared. For JOB the sudden downturn came unannounced. We do have warnings, even though we ignore them. All crucial measures of the health of the ecosphere in which we live—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity—suggest that our high-energy/high-technology society is unsustainable. Because we live in an oil-based society and are rapidly depleting the cheapest and most easily accessible oil reserves, we face a huge adjustment in the way of life on which our existence is based. We now have entered an era of “extreme energy” evident in such dangerous and destructive technologies as hydro-fracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop removal, tar sands extraction, all of which will hasten the coming calamities of climate change. Welcome to ‘JOB now.’

Back to ‘JOB then.’
Again a mysterious Satan visit. Again God gives him permission, this time to affect his health. So JOB becomes an AIDS sufferer, quarantined, placed in isolation, somewhere in nowhere. There his wife approaches him and angrily shouts, “Do you still cling to your pious ways? They are no use to you now. Curse God, if he exists and then die like a man!” But JOB remains unperturbed: “Shall we accept the good from associating with the God, and the evil not accept?”

It’s bad enough when our spouse accuses us. However, JOB’s real agony starts when his close friends arrive.

The Three Friends

Of course the big news about his misfortune has spread rapidly through the land (imagine Bill Gates gone broke!), and three friends from far away heard it too and made ready to pay him a visit. Weeks must have passed for this to happen. They often had been JOB’s guests at his lavish banquets where they had enjoyed vigorous but agreeable discussions ranging far afield. When they see JOB in the distance, sitting on a small hill, they stop, sit down and look at him for 7 days and 7 nights, without saying a single word.
JOB too remains quiet, even though his mind is in overdrive. Somehow their body language reveals to him their thinking before they even utter one word. And as they sit there and he sits there, he gets madder and madder, because he is utterly at a loss. JOB tries to fathom why he is suffering so much. Somehow he could bear it as long as nobody sees him. But now he has become a public spectacle. Continuously his mind revolves around the basic question: “God is doing this to me. No, God can’t do this to me. Yes, it is God. No, it isn’t.” He is going crazy. His mind, already weakened by his sickness, cannot think straight anymore.

For JOB one thing is sure: he already knows what these three are going to tell him. A long time ago – at least it seemed a long time ago – when they talked, often till deep in the night, they agreed, God’s favour is reflected in a multitude of offspring and material blessings. And, of course, the opposite is true as well: personal calamity spells sin: the greater the punishment, the more serious the crime against God.
Then he had thought like them. Not anymore. What is happening to him has not happened because he has sinned. No. No. With all his power in his weakened body he now denies this theory. And yet, he still does not know the alternative, he just can’t grasp why God is treating him this way.
As his friends sit there for what seemed like an eternity, silently and disapprovingly staring at him, it dawns on JOB that they are his friends no longer, because people who do not understand your deep-seated anguish, are friends no more.
Suddenly his mind snaps, his patience gone. Who ever said that JOB was long-suffering, had it all wrong. He burst out in a fit of total anger: anger at himself, anger at his own uncertainty, anger at his friends for their cold orthodoxy, their Calvinistic certainty, anger at God for whatever. And he burst out: “God curse the day I was born and the night that forced me from the womb”.
The entire third chapter is one long condemnation. JOB: “Why couldn’t I have died as they pulled me out of the dark. Now I would be at rest, I would be sound asleep.” Hey, no heaven talk there!

Speaker One

His outburst opens a flood. First Eliphaz. Not a word of pity. Only more hammer-blows: “These words will perhaps upset you” so he starts optimistically. “Once you brought relief to the comfortless, but now, when disaster comes to you, you rebel. Tell me, have you ever known anybody who underwent this, being innocent?”
That’s how the first friend starts: Pious words. Cruel words. Conventional words. This fellow knows exactly what God thinks or does. Today we call that ‘gnosticism’, the most prevalent Christian heresy.
But JOB does not buy his line. No longer. In Chapter 7 he challenges God and demands an impartial judgment. JOB knows that in his particular case, even though God has caused him all this misery, only God can be the true judge. So it is no wonder that JOB screams at God, “Why have you made me your target? How come that I am in this miserable condition?” Here JOB plays a dangerous game. He thinks, correctly in my opinion, that he can honour God only through fighting with God. That’s a new angle: Praise God through battling with him. Arguing with God about what has happened to us. Not just meekly say: “OK God, I take what you give me.” No, JOB is different.

Speaker Two

Enter the next speaker: Bildad, of the same stripe as Eliphaz, only more so, even less honourable. He makes a snotty remark how JOB’s kids were spoiled brats. Says he “Your children must have been evil: he punished them for their crimes.” In his further remarks he shows that he actually is afraid that whatever happened to JOB might happen to him as well. His insecurity is best portrayed by his vision of God. He tells JOB: “listen, this is what God wants, because God never betrays the innocent.” To Bildad too God is an open book, for him there’s no reserve, no real fear of the hidden God. To JOB God is a mystery. God is THE mystery. That is God’s essence. After all, a god we can understand is no god.
An essential point of the book of JOB is the relationship between God’s revelation on the one hand and God’s hiddenness on the other. The paradox Christians and agnostics alike face is how God can reveal Himself when He is Hidden, when He is the Totally Incomprehensible One, Mystery Incorporated. JOB, before his ordeal, had a clear picture of God: if he behaved properly, God would bless him. Simple. An article in TIME on the Mormons said unashamedly that “material achievement in the USA remains the earthly manifestation of virtue.” To JOB that idea has been shattered. His earlier notions about God have been found wanting. With Bildad and his companions their concepts about God have become their God. For them there are no divine secrets and no sudden surprises, no mysteries. They know exactly what God has in mind for JOB and so their awe for God has disappeared and their so-called piety has become a form of godlessness.

To be continued next week.