September 9 2023

Veggies for humans; rights for animals.

Then God said, “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. Genesis 1:29.

In paradise, God prescribed a special diet for Adam and Eve: strictly vegetarian. Jumping from the first chapter of the Bible Genesis 1, to the very last one, Revelation 22, describing the New Creation, or, the restored Garden of Eden, I read something similar: “the Tree of life bearing twelve crops of fruit every month”. Again vegetarian! 

What does this mean for us?

It has long been my thesis that our present existence is a proving ground for the REAL life in the new creation, a theme that dominates the Scriptures. I sincerely believe that a vegetarian life is the Biblical option: It has been mine for many decades.

But…

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were vegetarians, eating only from the plants and trees. Later, with Noah, this changed. It seems to me that meat was then used on special occasions: Abraham provided (Genesis 18:7) the Lord with meat from a calf, tender and good. The same happened when the Prodigal Son re-appeared. Jesus ate fish. So, what do I conclude? 

For me, the likely benefits of being vegetarian, both for my health, the environment and reducing animal suffering, outweigh the minor inconveniences. So, perhaps optional: no black and white situation. 

There also is that Job text.

But ask the animals, and they will teach you; or the birds of the air and they will tell you; or ask the plants of the earth, and they will instruct you.  Job 12: 7-9.

The above text points to integration, points to intimate relations with ‘the natural world’. Yes, we are a unity: soil, animals, humans: they belong together. That’s why many people are convinced that animals are sophisticated mental creatures who have beliefs and desires, memories and expectations, who feel pleasure and pain and experience emotions, and like us, animals have a basic moral right to be treated in ways that show respect for their independent value. 

As an aware Christian I believe that we should welcome the days when chickens revert back to their natural pecking order and contended cattle roam the vast expanse of the prairies where they belong.

But back to my question: Do animals have rights? Yes, they do. Do chickens and other incarcerated animals deserve rights? Yes, they do. Just as the people in Bangladesh and elsewhere have the right to be housed decently, and live comfortably, so, if my Bible is true, animals too have the right to exercise their freedom of movement. Job’s words thousands of years ago are still relevant today. What we have lost is the wisdom animals can teach us. We no longer have the ability to understand what the birds are trying to tell us. We no longer know how plants can enlighten us. We are paying lip service to the knowledge that in God’s hands are the life of every living being – animal, birds, plants – and the breath of every human being. 

Does that include trees? Do they have rights?

Some time ago I read Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I was struck by one sentence, “I entreat you, brothers (and sisters), remain true to the earth”. Another sentence stayed with me: “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence”. I wonder, “Is that the sin against the Holy Spirit?”

So how about trees? 

I have long maintained that our original sin included taking fruit from a tree without asking permission. I too, when I accidently brush against a tree, I ask the tree for forgiveness. I see trees as my neighbors, and love them as such. Trees really matter: no trees, no LIFE. Dying trees mean death for humans. Forest fires indicate the approach of hell. Nietzsche was right: “By killing creation we are killing God.”

 

It always strikes me that, when in Genesis 2 trees are described, the beauty aspect is mentioned first (Genesis 2:9). That also points to our original mandate of beautifying creation. It is my considerate opinion that the early humans mentioned in the Bible lived so long because the main cover of the planet was trees, breathing out super-rich oxygen.  

Luther once said, “even if I knew that the Lord would come back tomorrow, I still plant a tree today.

We need ever closer contact with creation. Dying trees, forest fires, earth quakes, violent storms indicate a broken relationship with creation. 

The Bible tells us that God, creation and the human race form an organic whole. That wholeness includes animals and trees.

Yes, animals and trees do have rights. 

September Second 2023

Inflation, more Inflation, then Explosion.

Inflation is much more than an increase in the cost of food and other consumption items. Take Putin, the Russian dictator: he represents inflation because war always leads to higher prices, armed conflict always destroys dwellings, always burns trees, always wounds and kills people and animals, and always causes fires: Climate Change does the same!. Putin, personally, suffers from super self-esteem, Hubris, the word for overweening pride, a form of inflated ego, something the entire Western world also suffers from. We behave as if earth’s finite resources are infinite, now disappearing in fire and smoke or smothered by too much water or not enough, causing foodstuffs and other essentials, such as potable water, to disappear, the source of extreme inflation: welcome to the Age of Extremes.

Global Boiling.

Of course, Global Boiling brings inflation, because Climate Change boils down to being a war on Creation. Just as war is waged to cause regime change – at a colossal cost, and often not achieving the initial goal – so the battle to ameliorate the effects of Climate Change may actually do more harm than good. The Electric Vehicle phenomenon is a case in point: some 400kg of scarce natural resources, often ripping up precious forests in Africa and elsewhere, cause irreparable damage to fragile ecosystems. Also, much of the raw material needed to build the batteries at the heart of these new motors, is controlled by China, now the world’s leading EV manufacturer.

Face it: the major factor of increasing inflation is the changing climate. Suddenly the whole world is up in arms. God is hiding his face and withdraws his presence; God sits back, and watches what’s happening on the earth with its eight billion human beings, now all of them fully aware that the earth and the fulness thereof is no longer able to sustain all that lives and moves and has a being. Everything and everybody is under stress and unable to maintain itself, while the resources, water, air, soil, are shrinking and the available basics are disappearing, causing inflation and unavailability at any price. 

Wartime conditions.

I am old enough to have lived, as a teenager, through the years of war – 1940-45 – in German-occupied the Netherlands. Then suddenly all imports ceased, oranges, bananas, coffee, tea, simply disappeared, including TOBACCO, yes, that poisonous item, became more precious than gold! All foodstuff was rationed, all new clothes disappeared and fuel was basically non-existent, while electricity was only sporadically available: barter was the key to staying alive, as money could no longer buy the essentials. 

Of course, these conditions did not appear overnight: it took months and even a few years to bite with a vengeance. Today the situation is the same, but world-wide. The poor in tropical countries already feel the effects: that’s why they risk their lives to come to the paradisical West to find out that there too Paradise is Lost. For us, the reckoning too, will come, will come sudden and abrupt for most. 

Will humans change? No way: Each day I do my 6,000 steps on the Canada Trail bisecting Tweed. I often am the only walker, but not the only user: for every walker there are 4 ATVs, dusty, noisy, polluting: for these operators the tipping point will come as a total surprise: sudden, unexpected, out of the blue. 

The near future: Change

The coming years will have no equal. They will be drastically different. They will not replicate the experience of the 1920s or the 1940s. The idea that we can recover from the fiscal and monetary excesses of the past decades without economic pain — at a time of political polarization and geopolitical conflict — seems historically implausible. The only thing constant is change. It’s not just that hard things happen without adequate notice and in a short period of time; it’s that a lot of things happen without adequate notice in a short period of time. 

Given all this, prepare mentally and spiritually for a steadfast change. The new situation we face – shortages, even collapse – forces us to focus on what we can control and let go of what we cannot.

Not surprisingly Revelation reveals inflation too as a hallmark of the last days, indicated by the rider of the black horse (Rev. 6:5) who carries a scale, and says: “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages.” Both that scale and these words signify poverty, hunger and inflation. The prices mentioned here are about eight times the prices normal in those days, explains the footnote.

Our economic system is based on stability. Our war against creation wrings its neck, tightens its noose, kills the goose, leads to explosion and clears the deck for Christ’s return.

August 26 2023

God, the earth and humanity belong together.                                   

There is a new Trinity, more easily comprehended than the theological construct of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Why? Because we daily experience this concept, its failure causing calamitous Climate Change, because God, the earth and humanity belong together. 

My thoughts are the fruit of life-long reflections, shaped by such insightful people as Johan Herman Bavinck, three of whose books I have translated, published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids. I have also been deeply influenced by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

I am engaging in a sort of reverse theology, my invented term. Customary theology examines God from our point of view. In reverse theology, it’s the other way around: how God speaks to us and about us, fully realizing that theology is a very dangerous enterprise, in which we deal with something unique, something unnameable, something beyond knowing. Just think: We cannot even start to understand ourselves, our spouses, our children, let alone dealing with God, who is beyond all knowledge and understanding. 

I read somewhere that any Christian Creed should be whispered, not shouted, and that includes any ecclesiastical confessional standard. Paul, who knew a bit about the gospel, having shaped what we now call ‘the Christian church’, at that famous encounter with the intellectual elite of his days on the Areopagus, called God “the unknown” (Acts 17: 16-17). Even the word ‘theology’ borders on blasphemy: theo- meaning ‘God’; logy – from ‘ogos’, word or science. How, possibly, can God be a subject of investigation?

Yet, impossible as it is, we have to deal with theology, thinking, venturing, probing, evaluating, the concept of ‘God’. We all have to be ‘theologians’, trying and exploring and examining the ultimate reasons for life. When we do that, we end up with God, or our concept of God. 

Frankly I am fascinated by a sentence in Dr. Sabine Dramm’s book on Bonhoeffer, where she writes: “What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one”. She adds, and I paraphrase, ”Life has its wellspring, its origin, in God, and bounces back from there to God.” 

I know, I know, I have quoted these lines before, still trying to understand their implications. Today we are discovering that without God we are losing the earth and ourselves: God, humanity and the earth belong together: eliminate one and we lose it all. The fall in paradise affected us and the entire earth. That’s what we see today!

Aware observers realize that the extreme weather conditions around the world are interconnected and insidiously self-accelerating. The Arctic is warming four times faster than the rest of the world, altering the fast-flowing air currents high above the planet known as jet streams, which then cause wild fluctuations of temperature and precipitation. As temperatures rise, conditions are increasingly occurring that make it hard, if not impossible for many species (including humans) to survive, even at relatively high latitudes.

What has gone wrong? 

We don’t want to acknowledge that God, the planet and humanity form a trinity, unbreakably connected, welcoming Dr. Barry Commoner who formulated the four laws of ecology.

Everything Is Connected to Everything Else

It reflects the existence of the elaborate network of interconnections in the ecosphere: among different living organisms, and between populations, species, and individual organisms and their physicochemical surroundings.

Everything Must go Somewhere

This is, of course, simply a somewhat informal restatement of a basic law of physics—that matter is indestructible. Applied to ecology, the law emphasizes that in nature there is no such thing as “waste.”

Nature Knows Best

The third law of ecology holds that any major man-made change in a natural system is detrimental to that system. 

There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

Today the bills are due, apparent in Global Heating.

These laws are so important that we must memorize them and sing them everywhere: yes, even in church:

A song celebrating the laws of Ecology.

(Everything is connected)
All people that on earth do dwell,
sing to the Lord, his ways foretell.
Remember God, earth stars and sea
Are all a part of you and me.

(Creation knows best)

Creation knows the ways to go
God bred it in its natural know

We therefore must inquire of her
To see where we go right or err.

(Nothing disappears)
Nothing will ever disappear
It lingers on, it is now clear
The oil we burn creates much ill
And causes universal kill.       

(No free lunch)

There is no free lunch to be had
The bills are due: they will be bad
We now must pay this immense debt
Which robbed us of our safety net.

God, the earth and humanity belong together. Leave out one of this Trinity, and collapse is assured.

August 19 2023

THE MAKING OF ME.

Had I been conceived a second later, a different me, with the same name, would have been born some 9 months later. Now, after almost 95 years, I am a worrier, worried after reading the August 15 edition of ARCTIC NEWS, which suggests to me what 2 Peter 3 predicts: “The heavens will disappear like a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire”, as trillions of tons of methane suddenly surge to the surface.  

It’s time to take stock. Time for digging into my own self. Time to ‘know thyself’. The Greek philosophers said: “Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom.” The Bible tells us that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. Both are right.

The Proverbs, that ‘wisdom’ book following the 150 Psalms in the Hebrew Bible, is attributed to Solomon, king of Israel. It was composed to give ‘prudence to the simple, knowledge and discretion to the young and make wise men wiser’. Attaining wisdom and discipline”, is a line repeated numerous times in the book. 

I believe that today we literally live in the last days, as ARCTIC NEWS points out, in frightening detail. Time is running out to get to know ourselves, so I follow Psalm 139: “Search me God, and know my heart.” Whatever we ask God to do, we must do ourselves.

So…….

Looking back on my long life (I hope to celebrate my 95^th birthday in October amidst my extended family of five children, their spouses, numerous grandchildren, great-grandchildren, brother and friends) I cannot quite pinpoint when these two facets, wisdom and discipline, become dominant in my life. Perhaps a beginning was made in 1961 when I quit smoking and started running, never quite reaching the marathon level, but repeatedly participating in 10km runs, training 4 times each week, and often galloping around the block in my rural area, along highway 37 in Tweed, going south, taking a left on Lynch Road, turning onto the LaBarge road to the Bridgewater, along mostly wooded stretches, back to highway 37 – a distance of 14 km. I once, running early, saw a lynx/bobcat standing on the edge of the forest, following my steady progress. 

In 1986, now 37 years ago, I started another routine, writing in longhand, in Journeying through the days, a daily entry of 400 words each weekday and 800 words on Sundays. I did that until the Upper Room publications in Nashville, Tennessee, ceased printing those beautiful journals, in 2013. Each entry had a bible text based on the Lectionary, on which I commented. I now do this routine on my laptop, writing 500 words each morning, right after breakfast, also based on the Lectionary. 

In 1986, initiating my journal, I wrote the following: “I really appreciate the format of this diary, as I had already kept a daily record for 6 years.” Yes, in 1980, now 43 years ago, I started a diary, which I ceased when Covid emerged, and my daily doings became routine. My wife of 67 years died almost 3 years ago, and since then I, basically, has been confined to my home and village, venturing beyond these limits only in company.

My holy duty.

I see it as my God-given task to treat my body with the utmost respect, sincerely convinced that God has given me my body as the seat of the HOLY SPIRIT, as a personal treasure to properly nourish and maintain. I also believe that in my body dwells spirit and mind, all three forming a unity that makes me a whole person. My body is more than flesh and bones, is more than nerves and sinews, more than blood and brains: it’s all of these. It is my divine duty to develop that totality within the place of creation where I find myself. Also, I have been very blessed in my marriage where my wife of 67 years has greatly beneficially influenced my personality.

So, how then do I live?

Movement is the key to my long life, combined with diet and reflection. I daily walk close to an hour, or 6,000 steps. I have been vegetarian for some 45-50 years, eat mostly homegrown and organic food. Two meals a day. No alcohol; have an afternoon nap.

In 2 Peter 3 the apostle writes that ‘everything will be laid bare’, including the Trump mentality, the aims of Capitalism, the often ineffectiveness of the church, the futility of AI, the disastrous consequences of the Technological Society. 

And me… what have I learned?

Perhaps a little patience and greater capacity for tolerance and forgiveness, and some insight into human folly and stupidity, including my own. I am looking forward to perfection in the New Creation, finally finding wisdom and discipline.

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.”