August Twelve 2023

THE RIGHTEOUS RULE

I was curious how secular sources would explain the Christian concept of “The Kingdom”. Here is how one dictionary defines it:

The spiritual reign or authority of God. • the rule of God or Christ in a future age. • heaven as the abode of God and of the faithful after death. 

By and large, as a life-long church member, and judging by the songs of the church, the secular version shines completely through in the ecclesiastical sector as well. I have yet to hear a sermon outlining this subject in concrete details, even though the Kingdom of God resounds like a majestic chorale through the entire bible. Take Psalm 95: A mighty God is our Lord, a Great King above all gods. In his hands are the depth of the earth; the heights of the mountains are his. To him belong the sea, for he made it, and the dry land shaped by his hand.

Yet, the church sees the kingdom as ‘spiritual’, having no relevance for the reality of our day-to-day existence. That spirituality makes us ‘pious’ while keeping the earth far away, giving us Christian secularism, the actual and factual renunciation of God as the Lord of Life. This is confirmed by the reference to ‘heaven as the abode of God and of the faithful after death’. In other words, the secular definition aligns perfectly with the ecclesiastical notion. This pious secularism makes it perfect for preaching and saying nice things, gives us easy Christianity and ‘cheap’ grace.

Take the Lord’s Prayer.

In the church I attend, in each service the Lord’s prayer is cited. In that prayer, after “Hallowed be thy name”, comes “Thy Kingdom come”. I believe the two opening lines indicate their prime importance, and, yet, are totally misunderstood, are, ‘spiritualized’. These first two statements fit together: hallowing God’s name has nothing to do with God’s name as the Bible has at least 50 names of God, proclaiming the impossibility of pinpointing his personality. It has everything to do with the universe God created in his name, indicating its holiness. Unless we see this aspect of the prayer Jesus taught us, recognize the intrinsic sanctity of all creation as it comes to us in air, soil, seas, mountains, animals, trees, we cannot fathom the second line: “Thy Kingdom Come”, because that kingdom, God’s realm, his righteous rule, is God’s expression of himself through Creation. Every single aspect of what we experience as reality carries God’s name: “The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof”, Psalm 24 tells us. I suspect – but don’t quote me on this – that the ‘unforgiveable sin against the Holy Spirit’, has a creation-connection.

But… The eternal ‘but’. 

We see ourselves as otherworldly, as better than the earth, even though we read in the Bible that when God saw what he had made, God was very pleased and called it ‘very good’ (Genesis 1: 31). Yet much of what the world regards as ‘religious’, in essence expresses disdain for the earth, because we cannot bear having the earth so near, the earth that bears us, supports us, feeds and clothes us.

Our callous attitude, our disdain for matters creational, having torn up nature’s cohesion, has led to the present planetary plight. It now is perfectly plain that God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers. The kingdom, the smile of God’s good pleasure, has become akin to the pall of death.

All this brings home a terrible truth, something no church dares to admit: the central point of the gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering; rather the gospel’s entire focus is aimed at the unique and powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his kingdom, his righteous rule, where the righteous rule.

The task of the church.

The function of the church is to witness to the resurrection of Christ from the dead, and to the power of God in the new creation. Here is a statement you will rarely hear: “There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal.

Bluntly stated it means that personal salvation and the salvation of the cosmos go hand in hand: you can’t have one without the other. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again united under the one and only all-wise will of Christ who lives and rules forever.

Today the rich rule, and they have only one aim, to enrich themselves even more. But their lives end in the grave: they have had their reward. 

In the New Creation, the righteous rule forever, in total humility, in utter amazement of God’s glory. 

August 5 2023

Angels will do the weeding:

Heaven: yes, but where is Hell?

Just as I am struggling with soil that produces weeds as well as beets and onions, beans and potatoes, so too the professional Bible explainers on Sundays, struggle to produce a message that explains our time in relevant terms. I have yet to hear a sermon on Matthew 24 and the End-Times. Clive Hamilton, an Australian Professor wrote, Requiem for a Species, Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change. The church too has a similar reluctance to preach on the END TIMES and The New Creation, a theme persistent throughout the Scriptures.

The KINGDOM.

In my garden, I use cardboard between my 5 elevated growth areas to stymie the weeds, but they came anyway because that sturdy paper suffered from the rains, which, actually, were a garden blessing. The Bible has a passage where angels are the weeders. This happened when Jesus offers an explanation of the parable of the weeds – which also are a constant menace in my garden – Matthew 13: 41 gives a direct pointer to what constitutes God’s Kingdom: “The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil…..then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of the Father. They who have ears, let them hear.” The last phrase, “they who have ears to hear”, emphasizes that this is true but often misinterpreted. This also is a direct indication that Heaven, Paradise, the Garden of Eden, will be HERE where we now live. 

I repeat: Our world is God’s kingdom! 

There’s no doubt: creation, the world we live in, is clearly indicated as God’s Kingdom. We, all 8 billion of us, live, love, work, pray, eat, sleep in God’s kingdom: We are guests in God’s realm, his dominion: Guests: ‘by the grace of God’. Guests are supposed to have respect for the owner’s property, but, as Climate Heating tells us, we forgot our status as invitees and took over the whole shebang, and, sure enough, wrecked the place. 

Angels.

So, what’s the next step, the final phase, after we have made the earth basically uninhabitable? We all agree that creation, the universe, needs cleaning up, a constant UN concern. 

God wants his world back, as we failed to beautify it. John 3: 16 tells us that: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” He is giving us a second chance! Grab it!

Soon myriads of angels will receive direct commands from Christ, to weed out evil, evil persons, evil matter, evil air, evil water, soil, television, computers, engines. It is not too late to start loving God through his creation!

We went wrong. Influenced by Greek philosophy, ridiculing resurrection, as Paul discovered when he was in Athens. By and large Christianity has become Gnostic, shunning the earth, desiring heaven. We want to be like God and sit on thrones in heaven. The Bible, however, is quite explicit on that score: John 3: 13 distinctly states that nobody has ever gone to heaven.

Satan, God’s ultimate enemy, has scored his greatest triumph by selling the church on heaven, thus giving him absolute authority on earth, where his latest triumph is AI, representing the intellectual equivalent to the Tower of Babel, again an absolute challenge to God’s authority, God’s beloved   Kingdom.

But, where is HELL?

Picture the scene: let your imagination go wild! Visualize Billions of people, lined up, on earth where they lived and died. Imagine one of God’s helpers: tablet in hand: approaching a person: his screen lights up: Instant face recognition, instant life-story; Ah, ah:  A Green Light, signaling Grace, heaven on earth, a new Eden.

There’s also is Red, rejection.

Back to Jesus, who calls ‘sleep’ what we call ‘death’. What does that mean? 

Again: let imagination move in! To me it suggests that the mind/spirit lives on. During that inert corporeal state, the ‘sleepers’ are forced to review their lives, are confronted when their bodies were alive and well. Now their sins of commission and omission are revisited within them: in other words: hell. Hell is being exposed to the constant harm sinners have caused. It used to be called ‘purgatory’.

This could explain hell: in total isolation persons are exposed to their previous lives, exposed to the misery they caused, the pain and destruction they inflicted, as well as their failure to do good. 

God’s children, however, (Daniel 12: 13)

“You will go your way to the end. You will rest, and then at the end of your days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.” 

July 29 2023

Want to live long? Want to live forever?

The first question is easily answered: Follow the rules listed below.

• Eat well.
• Avoid cigarettes.
• Get a good night’s sleep.
• Be physically active.
• Manage stress.
• Avoid binge drinking.
• Be free from opioid addiction.
• Have positive social relationships.

However, to eat well is not easy, because BB-Big Business- conspires to prevent that. Roughly 60 percent of the calories in the average US diet comes from highly processed foods. Eating products such as most breakfast cereals, snack bars, frozen meals and virtually all packaged sweets, (even chocolate? Pecca Fortiter: Sin bravely!), is linked to negative health outcomes, exacerbating diabetes and obesity, and, yes, causing cancer. 

Not only that: They may have a significant impact on our minds: making us dumber. So, the question, ‘how do we eat well?’ is complicated for most, but easy for me.

Why for me? 

So far in the year, I still eat last year’s homegrown potatoes; I still enjoy each week my garden-grown beans and beets and cabbages, preserved in my freezer. I already enjoy fresh lettuce every day. Next week my first tomatoes!

Sure: it’s a bit of work, but it’s outdoors. Sure, weeding is a chore, but it’s exercise. Want to live not only long, but also healthy? Grow your own, which I also did – no, not potatoes – when I lived in the city. And now: grow vertical in your living room!

Avoid tobacco.

I did. In 1961 I had an insurance agency. One of my clients was dying from lung cancer: his only appetite was for tobacco: no food, no drink. I, then and there, quit my ‘pack-a-day’ cigarette addiction and started running, 10k each day. 

We are …..

We are what we eat. We are what we read. We are what we think. We are who we marry. We are our parents and grandparents. We are our genes. We become what we are through our total experiences. The goal in our lives ought to be that, when we die, we have become who we are. That means that we must constantly struggle to know ourselves. 

Retirement is an excellent time for self-examination. Before that we are often lived through the circumstances enforced upon us: money and employment play a deciding factor: what we start out to do may not be what we really want to do or are fit to do. 

Take me.

I came to Canada from the Netherlands in 1951, in my 23d year, never having worked a day in my life: 16 years of schooling and almost 2 years of compulsory military training. 

Then emigrating to Canada was all the rage. The Dutch economy was at a crossroads, as suddenly the automobile/mechanical age had basically altered rural life, eliminating the small-time grocer, butcher, baker, farmer, and, as Geert Mak wrote, “How God disappeared from the Village”, drastically altered employment and life that had endured for generations. 

Having no practical skills of any kind, I was swept up by the craze to try my luck abroad: I started with insurance, added real estate, and, after relocating, became a commercial Real Estate Appraiser. Curiously now, 65-70 years later, comfortably situated, in my dreams I worry how I would ever make enough to support a family. 

We now live in the final stretch of history. A poem comes to mind: 

The Second Coming 

BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Yes, believe me: the Second Coming is a fact, a fact of “faith, which is sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” Life stands and falls with faith. Signs of endings abound. I see them where others do not: scores of whales commit suicide. Why? Because their living spaces, their feeding grounds are poisoned. Animals know. Ever wondered what happens to the fauna, the deer, the birds making their habitat in the forests, now increasingly in flames? Or the small fry swimming in waters that are like hot tubs? They know. 

All these creatures too, long for The Second Coming! The book of Jonah ends with God expressing concern for the animals living in Nineveh. Then cities were basically self-sufficient: now they are deathtraps, utterly dependent on supply, often thousands of miles away, causing Climate Change, now unstoppable.

Want to live forever?

Want to live forever, in a perfect world, where our good deeds will follow us? (Revelation 14: 13). Believe in The Second Coming. Believe in Christ’s return who will make this world we live in, perfect.

July 22 2023

THE RISE OF RELIGION-LESS CHRISTIANITY

“I hate, I despise your religious festivals;

your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,

I will not accept them. (Amos 5: 21-22)

Religion kills.

The 9/11 episode involving the World Trade Center in New York, when 3,000 people died, was religion-motivated, influenced by the Crusades 1,000 years ago, a pure religious war.

The Bible, that collection of books, accumulated over a thousand years, written by a committee that never met, contains an extraordinary consistent and often an intense quarrel with religion, witness the above quote from Amos. Jesus’ slugfest with the scribes and pharisees, calling them hypocrites, blind guides, broods of vipers, (see Matthew 23), is basically a direct assault on religion, now degenerated into dogma and ritual and moral codes. 

Karl Barth, the famous 20^th Century theologian, wrote, “The message of the Bible is that God hates religion”. Another prominent Bible teacher, Paul Tillich, wrote in a similar vein: “We call Jesus the Christ not because he brought a new religion, but because he is the end of religion, above religion and irreligion, above Christianity and non-Christianity.”

And then, there is the real clincher: Revelation 21: 22 reports that in the New Creation, which I long for and which soon will come, ‘there is no temple there’. Since our current ‘trial run’ on earth, really is a proving ground for eternity, really is preparation for LIFE to come, in the New Creation, the lack of a temple, a church, synagogue, a mosque, indicates that ‘religion’ of any kind will cease to exist in eternity. This, to me, means that today, Anno 2023, when signs of the END have never been more pronounced, we must be ready for ‘religion-less Christianity.

The last days.

Yes, I repeat: There is no doubt in my mind that today we live in the last stage of the human-dominated world, what Bonhoeffer calls, “A world become of Age.” Also, a world without God. One hallmark of this is that ‘everything becomes what it is’, and religion is no exception.

So, where is religion today?

I just finished reading a Dutch book my brother Drewes sent me, with the engaging title, “Apocalypsofie’. In her 170 pages book, Lisa Doeland, a philosopher at 2 Dutch universities, one in Amsterdam, writes that the task of Philosophy is to learn how to die. In times of ecological catastrophe, we not only must discover how to deal with our mortality, but also how to handle our extinction. In her book she tries to answer how philosophy can teach us how to die.

It struck me that nowhere in this book is there a hint to Christianity. Indeed, ‘a world without God.’ It seems to me that ‘religion’ – and the Netherlands is saturated with it – has become taboo, a force of no consequence, even though, with proportional representation in parliament, there are several ‘Christian’ Political Parties, indicating a lively ‘religious’ segment, often ‘against’ something, not unlike the political situation in the USA.

The start of the Christian ‘religion’.

When Emperor Constantine presides over the first council of Nicea in 325 AD, organized religion replaced Christianity which had gained prominence through house churches and local initiatives. The building of churches, the introduction of professional clergy and religious orders were the direct consequence. ‘Religion’ became secular. 

Now Christianity is a spent force. The world runs totally without God. We live in religion-less times, which calls for ‘religion-less Christianity, a Christianity without religion, but not a Christianity without God. The mystery of God becoming human, is at the heart of religion-less Christianity, thanks to Bonhoeffer’s musings. 

This new Christianity, this religion-less Christianity, comes at the time when the world has come of age. We now discover that we have totally failed to acknowledge that God and creation are one. We now discover that life has its wellspring, its very source in God, and proceeds in turn from this world, this cosmos, back to God. Jesus did not start a new religion. He taught us ‘how to live in this world’, have a full life there. His first miracle was making WINE. 

Wrote Bonhoeffer in his last days before he was martyred, “Our relationship to God is not a ‘religious’ relationship to the highest best being we can conceive of, but rather our relationship to God is that of a new life in being for others, in participation in the being of Jesus.”

Today there are 21,000 forest fires worldwide, a warning that: “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 done in it will be laid bare. (2 Peter 3: 10).

July 15 2023.

 WIR KONNTEN NICHTS TUN. (We could do nothing)

On May 13 I wrote that “The next six months will decide the fate of the world”. Now, on July 15, it is perfectly clear that the future looks dark, very dark, ominous, downright perilous. The naked truth is that the physical earth, as we have fashioned it in our likeness, is beyond salvation, while AI is about to destroy ‘the humanity’ in us.

The recent past.

Eight years ago, when the UN Paris Accord was signed, there was a glimmer of hope that a structural change was still possible, but the world ignored the worsening weather-related events, and soldiered on as if nothing was amiss. Then we still had the false hope that the clock was stuck at Five Minutes to Twelve, seduced by the misdirected goal that ‘now is the moment when, if we act, we can avoid the consequences’, but we sat on our fat fannies, and failed to act. In consequence the atmospheric warming is accelerating; the polar icecaps are melting, the glaciers are disappearing, the forest fires are fiercer than ever, and the extinction of all species of animals continue to sadden us, while ecosystems face universal destruction. Today we live in the Apocalypse. António Guterres, the UN secretary, coined it correctly: ‘we are on a highway to hell with our foot still on the accelerator”, while all scientific reports, from whatever source, are being ignored. 

O yes, a lot of good things happen! We now have solar and wind energy; we now have electric cars and bikes; we now have better insulation and recycling, have perma-culture and carbon credits.

But the problems accelerate even faster: plastic micro-pieces poisons sea-life everywhere, even detected in the deepest ocean crevices and the highest Himalaya summits. 

My great-grandchildren.

My 13 grandchildren have grown up, still having been aware of the croaking of frogs, the humming of insects, of life before Covid. My eight great-grandchildren now live in a world where heat hovers, where unpredictable storms threaten, where gentle rains turn to floods and threaten once secure construction, where winds harbor hurricanes, where lack of rain cause crops to fail, where our human societal life more and more mean disasters, diseases, dried-out regions, inhabitable places expanding.

We now live in an era which James Lovelock labeled, “The Revenge of Gaia.”

Gaia?

James Lovelock who died last year on his 101^st birthday, was not a Christian, but he did coin a Christian concept: the earth as a living entity. Dr. Douglas John Hall, in his What Christianity is NOT, praises Dr. Lovelock for recognising that ‘the earth is a living reality, not merely a collection of inanimate substances and processes. To see the world as alive leads us to a better way of understanding both the world and ourselves in it.’ 

I have often quoted Bonhoeffer who saw creation as God’s revelation -His WORD – to us, in perfect accord with the Belgic Confession. Just as “Religion’ killed Jesus, so our actions toward the Living Creation, constituting killing Creation is a form of killing God.

A different life is needed. 

We must re-examine our life, from beginning to end. No more automatic partaking in the way of Western life, geared to consumption, geared to waste, geared to immediate satisfaction. Everything we do must be evaluated in light of eternity, where our future lies, eternal life on a new earth which is waiting in the wings. Life must be lived in total awareness of the future that awaits us: the new world, where righteousness dwells, the transition to a society where the lamb lives with the lion. 

Are we helpless? 

When the German people after the war, learned about the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered, without a public outcry, they said, “Wir konnten nichts tun”, we could do nothing. Of course, they could do something: they could have prayed, remembering that Jesus was a Jew. Praying for Jews was praying for Jesus, just as praying for Creation is praying for God.

It’s too late to change what happened. Past-history now determines post-history. Post-history means that we must live the New Life that is to come. The excuse that we can’t do anything about the ‘fate of the earth’, was not valid about Jews in 1940-45, and is not valid about the earth today. The first thing we can do is ‘pray’, pray for Christ’ return, and then, the more difficult matter, try, TRY, to live the New Creation Way, live, think, probe, assume, dream, yes, ‘dream!’, how to live sustainably, how to live the full life Jesus wanted us to live. 

Christ did not start a new ‘religion’. Religion, as we have seen, kills. Christ wants us to live, LIVE! And that to the full. (John 10:10)

July 8 2023

OUR DEAL WITH THE DEVIL.

The God thou servest is thine own appetite. (Doctor Faustus)

A deal with the Devil (also called a pact with the Devil, Faustian bargain, or Mephistophelian bargain) is a cultural motif exemplified by the legend of Faust and the figure of Mephistopheles, as well as being elemental to many Christian traditions. According to traditional Christian belief about witchcraft, the pact is between a person and the Devil or another demon, trading a soul for diabolical favours, which vary by the tale, but tend to include youth, knowledge, wealth, fame and power. (Source Wikipedia).

George Monbiot, in his book, HEAT, (My good friend George T. gave it to me) subtitled, “How to stop the PLANET from burning”, knows that the only solution is a new mentality: wishful thinking.

In it, George Monbiot, a columnist with the British the Guardian cites a play, written in 1590, by Christopher Marlowe, “The tragical history of Doctor Faustus”. Marlowe describes how Doctor Faustus draws a circle and summons the Devil’s servant, Mephistopheles, and offers him a deal: if the Devil will grant him twenty-five years in which to live ‘in all voluptuousness’, Faustus will, at the end of that period surrender his soul to hell.

So, the bargain is struck, signed in blood, and Faustus acquires his magical powers.

My immigration to Canada, in1951, my betrothed’s arrival in 1952, our marriage in 1953, and the birth of the first of our five children in 1954, coincided with the world’s most extreme era of our deal with the Devil, now, in 2023, revealing its lethal finale. I have been a willing participant.

Long, long ago….

Of course, our deal with the Devil goes back many millennia, but then, what is time?  Historic time is that short period between the Urzeit and the End-Time. Our lives as humans in the world are but a brief moment: behind us we have the horizon of primeval time and before us the now visible dawn of the end-time, and these two are identical. 

Dominated by the Devil.

The deal with the Devil is an historic event: it happened in history; it took place a few millennia ago, yet it is a supra-historical event because it had consequences for all subsequent centuries, finding its culmination in my life-time, the years we now experience. All of history can only be understood in terms of this one event when we made the deal with the Devil.

Where we are heading?

We can now see where it is heading. George Monbiot, in his book, HEAT, written some 20 years ago, may have outlined some preventive measures to avoid the final HEAT, but we know now that ‘the deal we made with the Devil’, is final, proving again the old adage: The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, or as C.S. Lewis coined it: “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one-the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” That’s us today, a world ending in God’s judgement.

This reminds me, again, of Bonhoeffer’s acute observation that it is unique to the Christian Faith to see God, the Creator and his creation as unified, just as we identify our great human artists, Bach, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, by their compositions, plays and paintings. 

The Flood then, and today’s final stretch.

God, after the Flood, promised not to repeat that event, knowing full well that this time around we, ourselves, would do the job. Deuteronomy 32: 20 is a striking example of God’s irony: “I will hide my face from them, he said, to see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful.”

‘Unfaithful’ indicates our deal with the Devil, abolishing, seemingly, God’s indictment, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food.” (Genesis 3: 19). We, for a while, could bypass that burden, using those buried carbon treasures to make travel easy, to make housework simple, to engage in agriculture in airconditioned luxury, to live in comfort year-round, no matter cold or heat. 

Our life, apart from God, abusing God’s creation, our deal with the Devil, is now turning deadly, is now literally making hell a human invention, a self-inflicted curse.

George Monbiot ends his book on a negative note. “Our campaign against climate change….is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity….. not for freedom, but for less….Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but also against ourselves.” 

Contrast this with Jesus’ words, “I have come that we have life, and have it to the full.” (John 10:10). 

The Bible ends with seas of abundance, “On each side of the river stood the Tree of Life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month”