Posted on February 24, 2013 by Bert Hielema

February 24 2013

Horticulture versus agriculture

“The land is mine,” says the Lord (Lev. 25:23)

We have 50 acres of land. Typical Eastern Ontario terrain: a bit of clear land where I planted 4000 trees, enough open space around our house to have a spacious vegetable garden, a toolshed, a woodshed, and a guest house with garage. The rest is woods, rocks, hills and lots of wet lands.

Actually according to Leviticus: my first sentence is wrong: “the land is mine” says the Lord. I have legal title, but ultimately the Lord created it and He gave me the holy obligation to look after it.

Last week I concluded my column by suggesting that we can’t do anything without Jesus and Jesus won’t do anything without us. In other words: Ora et Labora, pray and work. That applies to land also: God gave it to us; we must work it to the best of our calling. How do we do that?

There are three basic necessities in life: shelter, clothing and food. I built our house in 1975 on solid rock. It’ll be there a few more years. Clothing: got a closet full: more than I ever will wear out. Food: even though it is good to fast once in a while, our bodies need daily refueling.

Very early humanity, like Adam and Eve, were simply gatherers. The Garden of Eden provided them with a great variety of fruits. Instructed by the Lord-Creator they had first-hand knowledge of the earth’s bounties. When banned from paradise, hunting was added to their skills. Much later horticulture expanded to agriculture which in turn led to domesticating animals and our current industrial culture.

The original foragers lived in small bands and tribes. There some would be tool makers, others skilled in medicine, but almost none had exclusive specialties and everyone helped gather food. Most of their calories came from meat or fish, supplemented with fruit, nuts, and some wild grain and tubers. Rarely would a forager overexploit the environment because destruction of a resource one season would mean starvation the next. Foragers would naturally limit population expansion in line with available resources.

Agriculturists domesticated grain which allowed hoarding and surplus. Because land owners tend to get greedy, the Lord in Leviticus 25 ordained that every fiftieth year would be the Year of Jubilee, in which all land sold would revert back to the original owner: “because (verse 23) the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.” I doubt whether it ever did take place.

Most of the earth’s surface was forest at one time. Agriculture changed that. When a forest is cleared for crops, the soil begins to deplete immediately but that won’t be noticed for many years, but once it is ruined it may never recover: that’s how deserts start their sterile lives.  When land supply was abundant, farmers, faced with soil exhaustion simply moved on to ‘greener pastures’, often displacing the natives. These original foragers were usually confined to a certain region where they knew the habits of particular species and had a culture built around a certain place. They rarely conquered new lands, as new terrain and its different species would alter the culture’s knowledge, stories, and traditions. Agricultural societies were and are more progressive, always in need of equipment for grain processing, tractors, combines, robot-milk machines: million dollar tools. This is not a condemnation: we all are engaged in some form of the rat race. As a result societal structures have grown more complicated, from mega-cities to complex governing bodies.

We think of foragers as frequently facing famine, but actually agriculturists fared far worse. Hunter-gatherers, with much lower population densities, with a much more diverse food supply and greater mobility, could find some food in nearly any conditions where farmers regularly experience hunger conditions. By and large they were healthier and taller than farmers.  The historian Fernand Braudel shows that in Europe country-wide famines occurred 10 times in the tenth century, 26 in the eleventh, 2 in the twelfth, 4 in the fourteenth, 7 in the fifteenth, 13 in the sixteenth, 11 in the seventeenth, and 16 in the eighteenth century. Agriculture did not become a reliable source of food until fossil fuels gave us the massive energy subsidies needed to avoid shortfalls: farming now needs 4 to 10 fuel calories for each calorie of food energy.

Leviticus 25 says that “the land belongs to the Lord.” Forager cultures have a built-in check on population, since the plants and animals they depend on cannot be over-harvested without immediate harm. But agriculture has no similar limit on over-exploitation of resources. Thanks to the recent abundance of fertilizer and cheap fuel modern agriculture caused our current population explosion.

Here’s what Jesus had to say about abundant yields. In the parable of the Rich Fool – as recorded in Luke 12: 16-21 – he tells us about a man who had an excellent crop, so good that he planned to tear down the old barns and build new ones to store the surplus, sell it off slowly and enjoy life. Then God showed up: “fool, tonight you’ll die.” It reminds me of Psalm 14: “The fool says in his heart, ’There is no God.’” The Grail Psalms, commenting here, say: “The fool is one who has his values all wrong – get rich quick, never mind the poor – and is encouraged by past experience to behave as if God would never take action.” The fool does not believe that ‘the land belongs to God,’ so he can do with the land and the surplus as he pleases, even though his actions lead to death. Is that what current agriculture will do to us?

Jesus always looks to the final result, the ultimate outcome. So, what are the consequences of a surplus?  A surplus creates class division – rich versus poor; grain must be stored, which requires technology and materials to build barns; it takes people to guard it, and a hierarchical organization to centralize the storage and decide how it will be sold off, waiting for the best marketing conditions. Was that the reason why Jesus spoke this parable? A surplus offers a target for power struggles among the heirs, an object of desire for poor neighbours, increasing the scale of wars. With agriculture, power is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. They who control the surplus control the group. Personal freedom erodes under agriculture.

There is another way to look at this. Agriculture is chronos, the Greek word for time as the clock dictates, time ruled by machines, time that is money, time that turns on technology that not only eclipses our souls, but also kills creation. Agriculture is now an industry, synonymous with manufactured food of which, perhaps, 10 percent is farm-stuff, liberally spiked with addictive salt and sugar. Most of our food cost is advertising, packaging, profit, and sustained by large volumes of climate changing carbon energy. Cheap food ultimately leads to expensive health care. Agriculture today, like the Rich Young Fool, causes people to die before their time, witness obesity, diabetes, heart attacks, and cancers. Modern agriculture has resulted in concentration of power by the elite whose only aim is profit.

Creation lives by kairos, a different time frame, that of the earth. We must find a way of growing food that fits in with kairos, the time in tune with the earth, the time that ticks eternally and knows no hour. I believe horticulture is kairos, eternal time, sustainable for ever.

While agriculture has an expiry date, horticulture has not. It uses simple methods to raise useful plants and animals. Horticulture in this sense is difficult to define precisely. Simply put, horticulturists are gardeners rather than farmers, using hand tools, while leaving some land fallow. That sort of gardening is a religious act, regarding the earth as a living entity.

In the long run – and that must always be our aim – horticulture is the most efficient method known for obtaining food, measured by return on energy invested.  Horticulturists use poly-cultures, tree crops, perennials, and limited tillage, and have an intimate relationship with diverse species of plants and animals. Horticulture is permaculture, and is a way of growing for eternity. It’s the way to sustainability. Where horticulture has structural constraints against large population, hoarding of surplus, and centralized command and control structures, agriculture inevitably leads to all of those. I have said it before: we need to be anthropoi teleioi (Matt. 5:48), people (anthropoi) who always keeping ‘the end’ (telos) in mind.

In the new earth there is no place for agriculture. Only foraging and horticulture will stand the test of eternity.

Next week: The next pope: a clown or a clone? If you have a chance at all, buy, beg, borrow, but read Morris West’s The Clowns of God in the next week or so. It’s about a pope who abdicates.

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Our World Today

Posted on February 17, 2013 by Bert Hielema

February 17 2013

Comparing the 14th Century with the 21st Century

Why would I compare our century with one of 700 years ago? Since I have no TV, blame books, which I read all the time. The culprit in this case: Barbara W. Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror, the calamities of the 14th Century.

Take our favourite conversation topic: the weather.

The 14th Century is known as the start of the little ice-age. The Baltic Sea froze over twice, in 1303 and in 1306-7. Years of unseasonable cold, storms and rain followed.  In 1315, and I quote: “after rain so incessant that they were compared to the Biblical flood, crops failed all over Europe, and famine, the dark horsemen of the Apocalypse, became familiar to all.”

Today we have the opposite: also Climate Change but in a different direction: February is the 340th consecutive month with an above-average temperature. If you were born in or after April 1985, if you are right now 28 years old or younger, you have never lived through a month that was colder than average.  Where 700 years ago too much rain and cold played havoc with the crops, now we have either not enough moisture in some places and too much in other areas, both threatening the food situation.

Our world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of food. Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold.

As a result we now enter a new era haunted by hunger, because on the one end of the food spectrum there is population growth, rising affluence and the conversion of food into fuel for cars, all combining to raise consumption by record amounts. On the other side, extreme soil erosion, growing water shortages, and the earth’s rising temperature are making it more difficult to expand production. Unless the trend reverses, food prices will continue to rise and hunger will continue to spread.

Back 700 years the cold and rainy weather, the resulting shortening of the growing season as well as the reduction in crop yields had already weakened the health of the people, reducing the natural resistance to disease. When, in 1348, the Black Death reached the shores of Italy, infected fleas attached themselves to rats and then to humans and so spread this plague. It is estimated that between 25- 50% of Europe’s people fell victim to the pestilence. Not knowing what caused this fatal illness created total bewilderment and moral devastation. A second variation –pneumatic plague – attacked the respiratory system by merely breathing the exhaled air of a victim, an even more deadly kind. Death slowed food production, goods became scarce and prices soared. In France the price of wheat increased fourfold by 1350.

Environmental problems and moral decay go hand in hand, true now, where we suffer from a global fraud epidemic, true then in the 14th Century when the church and society were in total disarray. At one time there were three popes. I could argue that there is none now. Although the church then was the main financial beneficiary from the plague, it also became much more unpopular. When sudden death threatened everyone with the prospect of dying in sin, the church became the destination of peoples’ wealth. Writes Tuchman: “Human conduct was found to be wickeder than before, more avaricious and grasping, more litigious, more bellicose, and this was nowhere more apparent than in the church itself.”

Today that same church too is in real trouble. We are rushing to final questions and by that I mean that the Truth with a capital T is emerging, even though churches and clergy are obstructing it. The Christian church can no longer ignore the equality of women, can no longer deny that the earth is the Lord’s, that heaven is a myth. Islam cannot maintain male superiority forever. The Roman Catholic Church, governed by a few dozen old men, must, in the near future, admit that celibacy is not a divine ordinance while on a daily basis its clergy’s sex-related acts are being exposed. In the 21st century church attendance is rapidly declining with young and middle age people leaving the church in droves.

In the 14th century- as today – the rich became richer and the poor poorer. Writes Tuchman: “Division of rich and poor became increasingly sharp. With control of the raw material and tools of production, the owners were able to reduce wages in classic exploitation”. This sentence applies word for word to today’s economy. We increasingly read how in our Western world the middle class is disappearing, as good jobs are either outsourced to low wage countries, or replaced by robots.

As yet we have not had a pandemic but there are many indications that show that once a new virus emerges it will encounter a population that is quite unhealthy and increasingly old and vulnerable. The New Scientist reports that the so-called baby boomers, those born after the Second World War are less healthy than the previous generation. The survey indicates that half of the boomers do not exercise at all, compared with 17 percent of their forebears while 39 percent are obese compared with 29 percent of the previous generation. Now even new-born babies are loaded with scores of dangerous chemical compounds in their bodies. Also antibiotics are increasingly becoming less effective or even useless with the inherent danger that even a small infection may lead to death. All this suggests that when a pandemic does strike, the consequences may be devastating.

The 14th Century saw the One Hundred Year War between France and England, which actually lasted from 1337-1453 or 116 years. Will the 21st century see a Hundred Year War? Yes, and it is already there: it’s the Western World, especially the USA, versus fundamentalist Islam, especially the Taliban, the extreme version of the followers of the prophet Mohammed, a war that has already been raging for decades, and will never end.

War is often a symptom of decline or a sign of radical change. The end of the Hundred Year War heralded the Renaissance, and a totally different outlook on life. Out of the pain, the calamities, the unimaginable suffering of the 14th century emerged the Renaissance, the birth of a new world, a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life. Beginning in Italy, it spread to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, influencing literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, science, religion.

What is in store for us in the 21st Century? Here are some excerpts from an article written by Dr. Robert Jensen, professor of Journalism of the University of Texas. Under the heading: We are all apocalyptic now, or at least we should be, if we are rational, he writes:

“We’ve built a world based on the assumption that we will have endless energy to subsidize endless economic expansion, which was supposed to magically produce justice. That world is over, both in reality and in dreams. Either we begin to build a different world, or there will be no world capable of sustaining a large-scale human presence.

“When we take seriously what physics, chemistry and biology tell us about the health of the living world on which we depend, we all should be thinking apocalyptically. Look at any crucial measure of the ecosphere — groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, increased toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity, and the ultimate game-changer of climate disruption — and ask a simple question: Where we are heading? Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about how human activity is pushing the planet beyond its limits.

“If we look honestly at the state of the world, it is difficult not to conclude that we are in end times of sorts — not the end of the physical world, but the end of the First-World way of living and the end of the systems on which that life is based.” (emphasis added)

Dr. Jensen speaks as a prophet: “We are in the end times.” That is now generally acknowledged. It’s also purely biblical. Just as the calamitous 14th century ended with New Life, the now called Renaissance, so our period will also see New Birth, the New Creation, which Jesus is busy preparing. Because we can’t do anything without Jesus, and Jesus won’t do anything without us, our prayer and action should be: “Prepare ye the Way of the Lord!”

Next week: agriculture versus horticulture.

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Our World Today

Posted on February 10, 2013 by Bert Hielema

February 10 2013

The Lord’s Prayer and the Church’s blind spot.

2000 years ago a mysterious star- indicating the birth of a king- guided three kings to Jerusalem. There they went to see the real source of power, Herod the King, to ask what he knew about this baby King. Clueless but concerned, Herod summoned the Bible experts, the teachers of the law and the Pharisees. The church leaders, knowing the Scriptures, directed the three magi to Bethlehem, but they themselves ignored the extraordinary event how three important foreign dignitaries, traveling for weeks, had followed a celestial sign that indicated the birth of a royal child. The official church had a distinct blind spot regarding the coming Messiah. The biblical scholars in Jesus’ time wanted the Messiah to be a secular power figure: failure to recognize Jesus as the Son of God spelled the end of the Old Testament temple worship.

History is repeating itself. Again the church has a blind spot: this time she fails to recognize “the Gospel of the Kingdom.”  Will this have the same consequences for the New Testament church?

Most church goers are very familiar with the Lord’s Prayer. Often the communal prayer in a church service is concluded with the well-known words of the prayer Jesus taught us.

I have been influenced to write about the Lord’s Prayer while translating De Mensch en zijn Wereld, We and Our World written by Dr. J.H.Bavinck. Its third chapter deals with “The Kingdom” (available upon request). Here this well-known Dutch professor writes that: “The concept of the Kingdom of God resounds like a majestic chorale through the Bible from Genesis to Revelation….. God’s Kingdom has a cosmic character, which means that it comprises the entire world as we have come to know it. Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the world of animals and all plants.”

Dr. Herman Ridderbos, another Dutch theologian, in his classic book The Coming of the Kingdom affirms this: “The central theme of Jesus’ message is the coming of the Kingdom of God”. In its introduction he writes: “The kingdom of God is a purely future and eschatological event, presupposing the end of this world; and therefore, cannot possibly reveal itself already in this world…. It is nothing but the commencement of the new world, after the catastrophic upheaval of the present era.” In connection with the Lord’s Prayer he writes that “The Lord’s Prayer has been entirely inspired by the coming of the kingdom.”

I don’t know why the church is so reluctant to deal with the kingdom, but I have a feeling that the church wants her members to be comfortable and at ease. It frightens people that the “coming of the kingdom” is preceded by catastrophic upheaval, of which today there are plenty of signs. I also believe that ignoring to pursue “the coming of the Kingdom” is the real reason why today’s church is in rapid decline: when the church misses her true calling then people sense that and leave. Jesus himself told the church (Matt.24:14): “To preach the Gospel of the Kingdom.” It is my wish that having a new look at the Lord’s Prayer may help to remedy this situation to some extent.

So let me start with these first words: “Our Father”.

There is an intimacy expressed there that is typically New Testament. I see that as the result of Jesus, as the Son of God, being human. He is like us in everything except for sin. By addressing God as “Our Father”, we move away from individualism and stress the idea of community that will be perfectly realized in the New Creation, the Kingdom to Come. There God’s people will enjoy the unsurpassed bliss of a renewed Earth. When we address God as Father this implies that we will share in the sheer happiness of the Kingdom that is to come and signifies that a brand new relationship between God and his people has begun.

“Hallowed be Thy name.”

That is old-fashioned language. It simply expresses the wish, or command, that God’s name be made holy. God is synonymous with his name. God created the earth by naming the parts, sun, moon, seas, animals, humans. All of these are holy because they carry God’s signature. The prayer simply asks us not to profane God’s name, not to defile his creation, but treat it as God’s holy property. When we pollute, we take God’s name in vain; we then molest his majesty; we do not hallow God’s name.

“Your Kingdom Come.”

If there were ever a prayer that indicates the ultimate desire of the church, then it is these three simple words: “Your Kingdom Come”, closely followed by “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Both petitions are similar in aim. Here we pray not for us, not for this world, not to make life better for us, but we simply ask God to speed up the return of Christ so that ‘real’ life can begin. The Psalms often mention how the rich have their reward ‘in this life’. We hear and read about the “One Percent” who have their yachts, are accompanied by beautiful women and jet all over the world: “They have their reward” in this short life, 70-80- perhaps 90 years. The Lord’s Prayer has a different emphasis: eternal life on God’s totally renewed earth, restored to its “Eden” like beauty. That is what we express when we pray “Your Kingdom Come.” When we ask that God’s will be done, then our request is equally radical. In essence, we say: “Lord, I will do my level best to follow your commands by living so that when you return I have no trouble fitting into life in the New Creation, an adjustment that must begin here and now.

And here comes a difficult one. “Give us this day our daily bread”.

Translators have had great difficulty with this text because of the one word ‘daily’, the Greek ‘epiousios’. Among my many books is one by Dr. Diarmaid MacCullogh, who wrote Christianity, the first 3000 years. Dr. MacCullogh is a professor of church history at Oxford University. On page 89 of this 800 page book he writes: “Epiousios does not mean ‘daily.’ In other words: the line has nothing to do with making us comfortable by giving us our ‘daily’ bread. The Greek word means something like ‘of extra substance,’ and if we can assign any meaning to epiousios it may point to the new time of the coming kingdom”

Other authors, such as Robert Guelich in his The Foundation for understanding the SERMON ON THE MOUNT also deals extensively with this word. Commenting on this petition he writes: “The eschatological element remains inherent in the request, since Jesus’ ministry introduces the new age.”

Based on these sources and the general direction of the prayer, the request “Give us today our daily bread” could mean something like this: “Grant us the wherewithal to prepare ourselves for the Kingdom to come.” This is also in full agreement with the following verses in Matthew 6, where it says in verse 25: “do not worry about what you eat and drink. Is not life more important than food?” So really our request for daily bread does not fit into the spirit of the chapter at all, which looks ahead to life in the New Creation. That is, perhaps the most difficult part of the prayer: it asks us to be in the world but not of the world.

And forgive us our debts as we also have forgiven our debtors.

I believe that our greatest sins are of an environmental nature. We constantly sin against God’s creation, especially we people of the 21st Century, where each time we drive a car, switch on a light, eat manufactured food, we increase the environmental debt. (It takes at least 10 fuel calories to produce one food calorie.)  At this stage of history we cannot ‘not’ sin in whatever we do. No holier than thou attitude is ever warranted. We can only expect to be forgiven when we at the same time forgive others of their sins.

Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the evil one.

1 John 5: 19 tells us that “the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” It’s up to each one of us to determine where temptation lies. We all are touched by the power of the evil one.

I believe that Jesus gives us this prayer with the Kingdom in mind. When we recite it reflect on its real meaning while patiently waiting for Christ to bring his Kingdom: WHICH IS AT HAND! Hallelujah.

Next week a comparison between the 14th and the 21st century.

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Our World Today

Posted on February 3, 2013 by Bert Hielema

February 3 2012

HOW THEN SHALL WE LIVE?

One of the most e-mailed articles in the New York Times issue of January 28 had this opening paragraph:

“A couple of weeks ago, on a leisurely Sunday afternoon, 40 people gathered at a church in Washington Heights for a show-and-tell session sponsored by the New York City Preppers Network. One by one, they stood in front of the room and exhibited their “bug-out bags,” meticulously packed receptacles filled with equipment meant to see them through the collapse of civilization.”

I emphasize the last line: “To see them through the collapse of civilization. I guess I am not the only one who thinks that we live in the most perilous period of history.

The Bible, both in the Old- and the New Testament tells us to: “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues, for her sins are piled up to heaven…”  (Revelation 18: 4-5).

It is my opinion that we no longer physically can opt out: it is too late for that. Still the question “How then shall we live?” must be asked.

My tentative answer comes in two parts.

(1) We should live so that we are mentally/spiritually prepared for the collapse of civilization, which is a prelude to the return of Christ, described in the three last chapters of Revelation, the very last Bible book. That, I think, is the easy part.

Christians always have looked forward to Christ’s return, reason why the entire New Testament is written with Jesus’s immediate return in mind. Acts 2 relates how the first Christians shared their possessions: they expected His return in a matter of weeks or months, not years.

There is a reason why Christ has taken his time: we had to discover the boundaries of creation: the boundaries of science – splitting the atom; the boundaries of nature – Climate Change; the boundaries of commerce and trading- how the lust for money is the root of all evil; the boundaries of space – satellites – and other boundaries, such as what to eat – vegetarian I believe, perhaps also the boundaries of organized religion and formal marriage. This knowledge and much more, is needed to avoid mistakes in the new creation where everything has to be perfect.

The Bible is not a history book: it is the book of salvation, but it gives hints of the future, such as in Matthew 24 and Revelation 16 and 17. These passages don’t paint a pretty picture. Already there are abundant signs of looming disasters, and judging by history and human nature, little or nothing will be done to prevent matters from getting out of hand. No wonder ‘collapsitarianism’ is all the rage.

When will Christ come back? A distant relative of mine – Harold Egbert Camping (My first name is Egbert) tried to fix the date, but we know that is impossible, yet Jesus gives numerous pointers:  Matthew 24 Verse 14 says that before Christ comes back, the ‘Gospel of the Kingdom’ has to go world-wide. Not just the Gospel. Jesus is very specific: The KINGDOM Gospel, which means the good news that the New Creation is about to come: here the World Wide Web is the most likely medium. Matthew 24: 15 gives another indication: the planetary plague of pollution: “So when you see standing in the holy place (that is God’s holy creation!), the abomination that causes desolation – yes, that refers to Climate Change and world-wide pollution- let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.”  The annotation ‘let the reader understand’, indicates that the warning applies to both the destruction of Jerusalem, which happened in A.D. 70, and the end-of-time, when Christ returns, preceded by enormous disasters, both natural and man-made.

That same recent New York Time article also said this:

To the unprepared, the very word “prepper” is likely to summon images of armed zealots hunkered down in bunkers awaiting the End of Days, but the reality, at least here in New York, is less dramatic. Local Preppers are doctors, doormen, charter school executives, subway conductors, advertising writers and happily married couples from the Bronx.”

There is indeed a wide-spread fear that there’s something seriously amiss in society. The “prepper” meeting took place in a church, but Christians are not mentioned among the “preppers”. Satan’s most successful deception has been that believers go to heaven even though the Bible never mentions this. It actually says the opposite: nobody can see or approach God. (1 Tim 6: 16.) It does state that God, the earth and the human race belong together forever. One of my friends once said: “God made no junk and will not junk what he has made.” That’s why the question: “How then shall we live?” is so important because the earth is our habitat for ever.

(2) My second part of “How then shall we live?” involves love. 1 Corinthians 13 is all about love. It says that if we don’t have love, even if we have faith to move mountains, it amounts to nothing. Traditionally we have applied this love to humans only, but that is not enough: our love has to be total, and must include everything God created. John 3: 16 very explicitly states that God’s love is in the first place aimed at his creation: “God so loved the cosmos.” We have to move away from ‘man’ centred loving, so-called anthropocentric love and embrace everything that lives. We need to practise the sort of reverence for all life found in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, as well as in the teachings of Saint Francis of Assisi and Albert Schweitzer. We need to learn to value other species for their own sakes, and not because we expect to use them for our own economic goals. That may be a lot more difficult, because for the last 500 years we have acted as if the earth’s resources were infinite, and have mercilessly exploited nature and animals, indeed ‘dominated’ the earth, rather than lovingly ‘serve’ her, as Genesis tells us.

Especially the tribal traditions of the native populations emphasize the importance of harmony with nature. Before we can enter the New Creation we must learn how to be one with creation. Here is a quote from “Land of the Spotted Eagle” by the Lakota (Western Sioux) chief, Standing Bear (ca. 1834-1908):

“The Lakota was a true lover of Nature. He loved the earth and all things of the earth… From Waken Tanka (the Great Spirit) there came a great unifying life force that flowered in and through all things, the flowers of the plains, blowing winds, rocks, trees, birds, animals, and was the same force that had been breathed into the first man. Thus all things were kindred and were brought together by the same Great Mystery….Kinship with all creatures of the earth, sky, and water was a real and active principle. For the animal and bird world there existed a brotherly feeling that kept the Lakota safe among them. And so close did some of the Lakota come to their feathered and furred friends that in true brotherhood they spoke a common tongue.”

I know this sounds difficult to achieve in today’s urbanized world, where everything is geared for profit, including all of nature. Yet, if I read my Bible correctly, then that sort of virgin world is our future, a place where everything is in harmony. Call it ‘paradise.’

How then shall we live?

My grandparents – born in the 1870’s – had no trouble with that question. Their lives were totally in tune with God’s earth. We now live in a time where we are harvesting what James Lovelock calls “The Revenge of Gaia.” A good example is the current practice of “fracking” and ‘oil at any cost’ which will only make nature’s problems worse.

Matthew 5: 48 combines the two parts of the answer. It says: “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” The Greek word for ‘perfect’ is ‘teleios’, of which a better translation is ‘holistic’, embracing matters from beginning to end. Teleios comes from the Greek word ‘telos’ which we find back in ‘tele-phone’, tele-vision’, something we hear or see from ‘telos’, from ‘afar’. Telos means ‘end’. So when we are ‘teleios’ we keep the ‘end’ in mind, the New Creation, where everything will be perfect, Jesus message of The Gospel of the Kingdom. Only holistic living does that. It takes a lot of prayer and community support to even begin such a life style. Our aim is to become anthropoi teleioi people who live for the coming of the Kingdom.

My constant prayer is: Lord, have mercy on me, because I fall so short of these goals.

Next week: an exploration on “The Lord’s Prayer”. In January 4649 people visited www.hielema.ca/blog

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Our World Today

Posted on January 27, 2013 by Bert Hielema

January 28 2013

OUR WORLD TODAY.

When the GOOD NEWS is not seen as good news.

1 John 5: 19: “The whole world is under the control of the evil one”.

Ever looked closely at Jesus’ 12 disciples? They were supposed to be Jesus’ support group, especially Peter, James and John. But were they? Here’s what I gather from the gospels.

When Jesus told them that he had to suffer, their reaction was one of outright denial.  When Jesus wanted to talk to them about the events leading to his death and resurrection, the disciples switched the topic. They completely refused to entertain the reality of his death, and closed their minds to that possibility, that’s why Luke, in a fit of exasperation, wrote: “The disciples did not understand any of this. Its meaning was hidden from them and they did not know what he was talking about.” (Luke 18: 34.) They had their own ideas about what should happen with Jesus and what Jesus should do. Their reasoning had no room for the raw reality of the cross. As unsuspecting children they went along with Jesus on the dark road that ended in death. When in Gethsemane the night of utter terror began to descend upon Jesus, they not only failed to assist or comfort Him in any one way; instead they repeatedly caused extra trouble for him. In that garden, in that frightful hour of surrender to God’s will, the disciples were found sleeping; when the soldiers approached to arrest Jesus, they started to fight back, taking the risk that at any moment  this quiet, nocturnal garden would become the place of a horrendous murder scene. Later on they completely abandoned him. The Good News that Jesus had to die was for them no good news at all. They did not want a dead Jesus: they wanted an army general Jesus who would lead them as a King David to chase out the Romans and make the disciples the leaders in a new nation.

What has this to do with today? The dozen disciples then is the church today. Jesus’ constant mission has always been to announce the coming of the kingdom, the new creation. It was misunderstood then, and it is misunderstood now. Jesus plea to “Seek first the kingdom”, that is to strive for the welfare of the world that God loved so much, is almost universally ignored by the church. The GOOD NEWS that the kingdom’s arrival, the coming of the new creation, is at hand, is simply not popular, because it involves immense inconvenience. That Jesus had to go through death to achieve life is well understood, but that his beloved cosmos too has to suffer death to become liveable again, is often simply ignored: to go to heaven is a much easier option.

The bible says that “the whole world is under the control of the evil one”. Think about that for a moment: not God but Satan calls the tune. Jesus died to bring the world under his control again, but that will only happen when he returns. The bible tells us that before that takes place, Satan will turn the screws on us: the ‘good news of the kingdom to come’ is not good news for our current comfortable conditions. The disciples did not want to hear the bad news about Jesus in their time: the church today is no different, in spite of Revelation 18: 8-9: “Therefore in one day her plagues will overtake her: death, mourning and famine…. The kings of the earth- the G 20 – who committed adultery with creation and shared her luxury, will weep and mourn.”

Secular authors are not so shy to say the sad news. Clive Hamilton in his book Requiem for a species: Why we resist the Truth about Climate Change, writes that the prospect that our children and grandchildren will live a life of insecurity, misery and suffering within a few years, is difficult to imagine and even harder to accept. Of course we too don’t want to see the ones we love face death, mourning or famine, but the Bible pulls no punches, because 1 John 5: 19 says that “the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” The evil one’s only aim is to do and bring evil.

Frankly we all have been his willing co-workers in a 500-year-long planet-wide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the Earth, killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. Now the bills are coming due: our ever-increasing economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse. Even as our economic and environmental systems are disintegrating – we just experienced the hottest decade ever and the longest recession – it is impossible to quit our quest for economic growth. All the world’s economies only have one mantra: drill, drill, grow, grow: simply insane!!

Yet in doing so, we only follow the patterns of history, because civilizations have a bad habit of destroying themselves. Anthropologists such as Joseph Tainter in his The Collapse of Complex Societies, and others, such as Ronald Wright in “A Short History of Progress” have outlined the familiar patterns that lead to systems breakdown. They cited the examples of empires, the Roman, the Mayan and Easter Island, to name a few. The difference this time is that when we go down, the whole planet goes with us: that’s the trouble with acting globally. All signs point to a final collapse, because there are no new lands left to exploit, no new civilizations left to conquer. We’ve are at the end.

That’s what secular writers tell us time and again. And so does the Bible. Of course: none of us, myself included, can possibly go back to a life style without a carbon foot print, without making Climate Change worse. So the inevitable outcome is collapse. That is the God’s Truth. Societies tend to collapse quite soon after they reach their period of greatest magnificence and prosperity. It looks like that moment is imminent.

We have set in motion an industrial machine of such complexity and such dependence on expansion that we do not know how to make do with less, or move to a steady state in terms of our demands on nature. When I was born in 1928 there were 2 billion of us. Now there are more than seven billion of ever more greedy customers. What we consider as normal is totally abnormal in a finite earth. The last half-millennium has been completely unreal, an anomaly, something not in tune with the laws of creation. It now looks that we will come to the point where large parts of the Earth will experience crop failure resulting in mass starvation and breakdowns in order. That is what lies ahead because of our failure to deal with climate change.

Only the Christian gospel tells us the truth, and that truth sometime happens to be painful. Once the Lord comes back, we have to do it differently: so get used to it and start that process now.

The disciples refused to deal with the reality of Jesus’ crucifixion. By and large the church also fails to deal with the reality of the pending death of the earth. Our world has to die because it is in the power of the evil one. Somehow we must refuse to be his willing helpers. I believe a discussion on that difficult issue is in order, because refusing to acknowledge our destructive ways means aligning ourselves with the Enemy.

Indeed sometimes the Good News may look like bad news.

In next week’s column I will explore “How then shall we live?”

Keep on exploring my blog: www.hielema.ca/blog which last week had 1229 visitors.

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Posted on January 20, 2013 by Bert Hielema

OUR WORLD TODAY

January 21 2013

The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

(Revelation 22: 2.)

The most astounding happening in the last 100 years has been how Hitler in 7 short years, from 1933-1939, rose from a relative nonentity to the greatest threat of the 20th century. Now it certainly looks that the 21st Century will be dominated by Climate Change, which already in 2012 has become a world-destroyer. When the oldest trees in the world suddenly start dying, it’s time to pay attention.

Here’s what is happening. North America’s ancient alpine bristlecone forests are falling victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. Last year in urban Texas the prolonged heat there killed more than five million shade trees, and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, prolonged severe droughts are killing many billions more in the rain forests. Trees also fuel Australia’s fires during this year’s record heat. Every tree that dies or burns adds to Global Warming.  Dying trees mean a dying planet. There is no doubt in my mind that ‘the creative destruction’ of capitalism will persist to its bitter end, when money, the all-consuming mammon, will have accomplished what has been Satan’s aim from the beginning: to destroy God’s creation. Just as Jesus had to go through death to achieve life, the Bible tells us that creation too has to go through death to achieve life, and this time we humans are the cause.

The New Testament, in 2 Peter 3: 10, makes clear that the days of the world are counted and that the end will come unexpectedly: “But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”

My particular emphasis this week is on that poetic sounding sentence in the Bible’s very last chapter:

“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

Let me start with ‘nations.’ When in Matthew 28: 19 Jesus gives us the Great Commission, the same word ‘nations’ is used. It actually does not refer to individual countries, but to everything connected to people, such as races, sexes, ethnic and faith communities, economic classes, families, and tribes. Thus “the leaves of the trees are for the healing of all humans in the world”, and that healing also applies to the world itself, because humans and earth are one.

The last two chapters of the bible, Revelation 21 and 22, picture a world where, as yet, no humans are present. But there are trees, lots of them.

The Garden of Eden had an identical development: everything there had to be in perfect shape before humans could appear. It is my argument that prior to the saints’ arrival in the new creation, the presence of trees will be instrumental for them to enter a virginal, pristine, unpolluted planet. I believe that the earth must first go through a recuperating process with trees as the primary agents of healing, because, basically, there is nothing wrong with God’s world that time – and the absence of sinful humans – cannot heal. And time is immaterial for the Lord for whom a day is as a thousand years.

We know about forest fires: they are a natural phenomenon, needed to rejuvenate forests, because a fire will kill the old and sick and bring to life the buried seeds. Peter was right about the all-consuming fire. For the new creation to come, our worn-out world needs a total conflagration to reveal the new to come, and trees play an enormous role in this process.

For that purpose a closer examination of what trees do is necessary.

We all know that trees are the lungs of the world. For humans to have one hundred percent pure air and ‘live forever’ a totally clean environment is required: hence the need for the new world to be fully filled with forests of trees.

But trees are more than oxygen providers. The tree’s underground system is as important as its foliage: the roots and its capillaries are just as essential for the welfare of the earth as the more visible branches, because a tree stands in its own decomposition. Much of the tree sheds its own weight many times over to earth and air, eventually becoming grass, fungus, and promoting the life of insects, birds and mammals. It is the cooperation of these many ‘by-products’ that make a tree so rich – they exist because of the tree, belong with it and function as part of it. Birds nest, squirrels burrow and eat fungus, and insects prune and assist in decomposing the surplus leaves and activate essential soil bacteria. Animals are messengers to the tree and trees act as a garden for animals. This is an excellent example of life depending on life. A tree is a total being that involves minerals, plants, animals, debris and life. All of these elements make up the ‘tree cooperative’. All this has to be in place before the saints are coming home.

“The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the human population and for the earth itself.”

The leaves absorb the CO2 that has now made our weather so unpredictable and even deadly. The new earth, covered with healthy trees will completely heal the earth and clean the air, making it the perfect place for the ‘redeemed of the Lord, who will enter singing’ (Isaiah 35: 10) on the way to embrace their new abode.

So what about these leaves? Leaves have twice the specific heat capacity as soil, meaning plants can be about 9 degrees Celsius warmer than their surrounding environment. Consequently trees moderate extreme temperatures and humidity so it is tolerable enough to accommodate life. The leaves catch the rain, some of which the tree absorbs, and the remainder returns to the air through evaporation. Any rain that falls through the canopy has, on its way down, collected plant cells and nutrients and is much richer than regular rainwater. This through-fall is then directed to shallow roots, and serves all the needs of growth in that forest. Therefore trees use, collect, enrich and properly direct water so it can best be used in the forest system without human intervention.

Trees are not just here to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen for us to breathe. Their purpose reaches much farther. Trees fight drought, prevent soil erosion, stabilize earth, shade us from sun, are key in the conservation of water, provide us with heat, control the effects of wind, provide shelter for animals and encourage biodiversity and nutrients for soil. God created trees because the trees are life: Bottom of Form

Yes, the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

Trees are not only for the earth: the seas too benefit as do the inland streams. Revelation 22: 2 again: “at each side of the river stood the Tree of Life.”  Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrives, so does the rest of the food chain. Fishermen have planted trees along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.

Before the humans return to paradise, trees have to clean it for them. Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of soaking up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phyto-remediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution: indeed the leaves of the tree are cosmic healers!

So it makes perfect sense that the Bible starts with the Tree of Life, ends with the Tree of Life and has at its centre the Tree of Golgotha where our eternal life was assured. These three ‘trees’ are symbols of all trees explaining that simple sentence in the last chapter of the Bible which says:

“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

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See ‘www.hielema.ca/blog’ for more essays, books and columns, going back more than a decade.

Next week: When the Good News is not good news.

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