Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

HOW THEN SHALL WE LIVE?                       

The perennial question.

In detective stories, the principal character, the celebrated investigator who always, in the end, nails the culprit, often lets the reader know that there is no such thing as coincidence: every occurrence, all circumstances have significance.

I can affirm this in my weekly writing: I scan a lot of perhaps useless stuff. I daily read three newspapers: The Globe and Mail, the British the Guardian, and the New York Times. Much of the writing in these three sources often seems irrelevant, yet, sometimes an article finds a place in staging my next episode of self-discovery: that’s really what my blogs are.

In these confusing times, especially for Christians, the question of “Christian Living” is a burning one. The late Harold Bloom, the famous literary critic, in his book The American Religion, states that the churches in which Americans worship, have, by and large, ceased to be Christian, now plainly evident in its leader, Donald Trump.

So, what is ‘religion?’

It reminds me of a book I have with the intriguing title, What Christianity is NOT”, written by Dr. Douglas John Hall, a McGill professor, a man I met at an environmental conference in Madison Wisconsin some 35 years ago, organized by Dr. Calvin de Witt. I discovered, having attended a few of these gatherings, that is typical for  ‘Christian’ environmental meetings, that the presenters often outnumber the attendees. This certainly was the case at this Wisconsin meeting, in a Roman Catholic Convent. By and large church people are not at all interested in matters dealing with God’s Creation because the overwhelming percentage of church-going people expect to go to heaven, away from this wicked earth.   

Dr. Hall starts his book with a short Latin sentence: Si comprehendis, non est Deus, a line attributed to St. Augustine, meaning, “If you understand it, you are not talking about God”.

 He also mentions Karl Barth, who wrote, “The message of the Bible is that God hates religion”. In that same vein Bonhoeffer writes, “Jesus does not call people to a new religion but to life”. He bases this on John 10: 10, where Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.”

I believe that the thief in this text is especially us, 21th century humans: if there ever was a rapacious and destructive being in history is us, my generation. I am writing these lines on Ascension Day. There the angels appearing at the event of Jesus leaving the earth, declared: This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.” (Acts 1: 11).  Jesus is earth-bound! Praise the Lord.

“Seek first the Kingdom”: that’s how Jesus defines his mission. That simply means, “seeking the welfare of creation, God’s work of art, for whose restoration Christ died! Not just for us sinners? The common belief?

Dr. Sabine Dramm, quoting Bonhoeffer, wrote: “Christ died for the world, and Christ is Christ only in the midst of the world. God cannot be understood without the world nor the world without the God who has entered it in Jesus Christ: Only they who love the earth and God as one, has faith in God’s Kingdom”. When did you hear that in church?

Yet he echoes what J. H. Bavinck writes in his Between the Beginning and the End: “The Central point of the gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering; rather, its entire focus is aimed at the unique and powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom.”

Bavinck’s – not surprising – conclusion is that ‘there is no such thing as individual salvation: all salvation is of necessity universal. 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 unified under the one and only all-wise of Him who lives and rules forever.”

Bonhoeffer concluded that “Only they who love the earth and God as one, have faith in God’s Kingdom”. He also wrote: “They who love God love Him as Lord of the earth as it is; they who loves the earth, love Him as Lord of the earth.

Based on this, a new look at Christianity is far overdue. Not heaven-oriented, but earth-driven. That’s why present-day Christianity is not a religion: it is ‘a way of life’, a total commitment to the welfare of creation: God’s Kingdom!

How then shall we live?

Therefore: “Seek first the Kingdom”, that means, The welfare of God’s Creation.

CHRISTIANITY: SOME OBSERVATIONS

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People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it. Amos 8: 12.

There is a Latin saying, “Si vis pacem, para bellum”, which means, “If you want peace, prepare for war”. That may have been true 2,000 years ago, when there was no force equal to the Roman Legions, trained to perfection, irresistible through their discipline and leadership. Also, life then was cheap, with an average lifespan not exceeding 30 years, and natural resources – trees, wild animals – aplenty. Now the world is so crowded, with 8 billion ever more greedy people, that trees and animals are endangered: no more room!

And where is God in all this? Good question.

God brings peace: “Peace on earth!” But now wars are everywhere, and I especially refer to the spiritual and ecological wars, both intimately connected: they really are the wars that end all wars. These ‘world-wide’ conflicts have as their most ardent combatants those who are ‘religious’, the most dangerous of mindsets. Hitler, Mao, Trump, Putin, are all great believers in a specific faith, be that ‘purity of race’ – Hitler – or superiority of the mind – Mao – or the power of money – Trump – or the idol of Patriotism – Putin: they all have their ‘religion’, and, as Jesus found out: Religion Kills.

And Christianity?

And where does Christianity come in? We have seen it in the past weeks: Religion had a front seat in ceremony and pageantry: a new pope, a new name: but where is ‘the Word of the Lord’?

Jesus was asked this question. Here’s what he answered:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.”

That sounds so familiar, that we tend to skip this Jesus’ answer, which included the total personality.

He really said: “Love the Lord with every bodily and every intellectual and every mindful part of the human entity”. He really said: “Loving the Lord is totally comprehensive”. He really said: “Loving the Lord goes far beyond the comfortably personal”. He really said: “That love encompasses especially and primarily, without exceptions, ALL of creation, all human action.

He really said: “That love concerns the chicken we eat; that love includes the water we sip from a plastic bottle; that love refers to the shows we watch on television, the ways we move our bodies, the air we inhale every few seconds, the dreams we have while asleep”.

Psalm 139 comes to mind:

You have searched me, Lord,

and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.

You discern my going out and my lying down;

you are familiar with all my ways.

And it concludes:

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.

Lead me in the way everlasting? What is it?

A little detour: When I tell people that I love Bach, or Shakespeare or Rembrandt, then my love has no personal connection, is totally different from the way I love my spouse, my kids, my close relatives or friends. My love for these great artists has everything to do with the way I love them through their works, through their artistic expressions, such as the St. Matthew Passion, King Lear, the Night Watch: as persons these famous artists may have been cantankerous, quarrelsome, and unfaithful, but through their works of art, their name and fame live on forever.

That’s too, I think, how we should love the Lord our God: through his works, the total expressions of God’s greatness. Through some quirk of pagan priority, we have distorted the totality of divine greatness, and have grabbed what is not ours by rights, and have distorted God’s Masterpiece beyond recognition. I believe that a sin against Creation is a sin against its Creator.

So…. no wonder people look for God, and fail to find him: Creation/God is seen as disposable. Romans 1: 20 tells it plainly:

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

Living in and with and through Creation, I have no excuse. Loving God means unconditionally loving Creation, just as Jesus did, offering his life for her redemption.

People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it. Amos 8: 12.

The only constant is what God has made: the world we live in, even when we have debased it to the point of planetary perdition.

THE LAST THINGS.

A recent poll found that 40% of Britons have not read a book in the last year. “The literary era has come to an end,” Philip Roth prophesied in 2000. “The evidence is the culture, the evidence is the society, the evidence is the screen.” Roth believed that the habit of mind that literature required was bound to disappear. People would no longer have the concentration or the isolation needed to read novels.

What is true for reading, is also true for ‘religion’. To use the above line: “People no longer have the concentration or the isolation needed to reflect on matters eternal.” The great apostle Paul, the author of many letters, still utterly relevant after 2,000 years, owed his learning through reading and memorizing large sections of the Hebrew Bible, and also knowing and appreciating the then contemporary authors, including the great Greek authors Homer and Plato – See Acts 19, describing his appearance in Athens, Greece. That’s why he urged in his letter to believers in Thessalonica – 1 Thessalonians 5: 21 – to “Test all things. Hold fast to what is good.”

That truth, ‘to test all things’, applies to us even more now, than to the communicants in that city in Asia Minor. It applies especially to today, in times of change, spiritual turmoil, and immense advances, both technical and philosophical. Scripture constantly urges us to be openminded, to see developments always in the light of the coming new world, the place Christ-followers see as their final destination. Yes: The Last Things!

To ‘test the last things’ means being a reader, means being tolerant and wise, means being able to discern, means being well-rounded and versed in contemporary thinking. It especially implies having a thorough understanding of Scriptural thinking, and Christ-centred knowledge, now both lacking.

When Paul addressed the recent converts to Christianity, he urged them to not just swallow his Christ-centered words, but to probe their veracity in the light of what is happening all around them, especially in a time when the aim of the Roman authorities was to proclaim the Roman Emperor as God.

Nothing new.

Today we are faced with the same aim: we see ‘economic growth’ as the overriding goal of our civilization, in spite of ecological agony and meteorological disasters. Affirming the assessments of experts in the fields of ‘nature’ studies is the required ‘Christian’ duty also for theologians as it concerns God’s Holy Creation, even though the Trump administration has forbidden the mention and publication of these studies. It is essential for all of us to read and to absorb the study of THE LAST THINGS, the significance of which appears more and more in today’s scenarios.

My outlook.

I see my life from the perspective of the future. By this I mean that I am ruled not by the past, but by what the Bible projects as “The New Earth to Come”, a state where ‘righteousness’ rules, righteousness also in regards to ecological conditions, defined by their laws.

Today we experience the backlash of our past actions: the bill for our riotous living is due, and the amount we owe is beyond our ability to repay. We can deny this condition – and we do – but that only aggravates the problem. The Western World is facing its final Reckoning, which the late James Lovelock defined as “The Revenge of Gaia”, a Christian concept.

Christians confess that God fashioned the earth and then donated it to us to develop it, reflecting his intentions. However, we followed a different path and today face the consequences of the LAST THINGS.  According to Kübler-Ross, we now in the stage of denial, even though the signs of our demise are crystal clear.

Two Immediate Threats.

Climate Change, now out of control, is well known, while AI, Artificial Intelligence, is increasingly being recognized as having the immediate potential to destroy all that lives and moves and has a being. It is developing so fast that those in the know fear that it threatens to be ‘better’ than humans at everything, at which point it is basically going to run the whole show, making us humans superfluous.

I see these developments as the full implementation of the “Tower of Babel” concept: The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. (Genesis 11:7). God will not tolerate this.

Today we again speak the same language, and, indeed, everything has become possible, including the destruction of the entire world. We, right now, are experiencing THE LAST THINGS: we better prepare ourselves. Because our generation has lost ‘religion’, has lost the God/Creator concept, the surprise will be total. That’s why– see Revelation 11: 15 – the future guarantees that:

   “The kingdom of the world has become
    the kingdom of our Lord and of his Messiah,
    and he will reign for ever and ever.”

 REJOICE!

ANY CHANCE FOR CHANGE?

New Pope, old church.

New President, old hat.

New economy, old problems.

New climate, old approaches.

There is this song:

Abide with me, fast falls the eventide
The darkness deepens, Lord with me abide
When other helpers fail and comforts flee
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away
Change and decay in all around I see
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

If there is a song, if there are lines that apply to today more than any other, they are the above cited lyrics, composed decades ago, supposedly played by its orchestra when the Titanic sank in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic in 1913.

Today, this year, this decade, the world is in its last stage of dissolution. Pessimistic? No. Optimistic, because I wholeheartedly believe, and do one hundred percent endorse, that after this terminally ongoing phase, there will be, for the sake of Christ-believers, an unexpected, all-comprehensive ending, telos, reckoning, judgement – whatever you call it – heralding the onset of the new Creation, of which numerous Bible passages speak, none more eloquently than Romans 8:

I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed.  For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the freedom and glory of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

Please note: This passage is all about creation, and her increasing suffering, evident in rapidly vanishing species, and ever shrinking natural habitat.

Back to Today.

Back to Today, where we have experienced an interesting week. A week in which 133 old men, never married, reared in purely protective portals, within the ecclesiastic exterior of basically masculine mannerisms, chose a new leader for an institution that is quickly fading in importance. After all, its entire organisational structure is totally outdated, being based on an Old Testament model that died 2,000 years ago on Calvary’s Cross, when Jesus exclaimed: It is finished. Believe me: the priestly order is finished, even though it is taking 2,000 years to achieve a degree of reality.

Why?

At that precise moment Jesus died, he did his last miracle: “The curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom.” (Mark 15: 38) That curtain separated, in the Old Testament Temple, the room where only the High Priest, once a year, was allowed to enter to make atonement. Suddenly, with Jesus’ death, atoning for all the world’s sins, this High-Priestly symbolic act was declared null and void, and with Jesus’ very final act, RELIGION received its final farewell: away with all manifest measures of ecclesiastical expressions, evident in church spires pointing to heaven, in clerical robes and collars of any kind, in ‘reverend’ designations of various grades: all gone when that curtain ripped.

Typical Conduct.

The rituals evident especially in choosing a new pope, and in church proceedings in general, where change is seen as sacrilegious, these factors are also in plain sight in other fields of human enterprise. New Pope, old church: Change has no chance.

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New President, old hat.

The new president is a comical figure, who is trying to rule his world based on flimsy notions. Impossible! The societal structures solidified into staleness over centuries, are, just as the ecclesiastical entities, ready to implode. His ‘reign’ will simply accelerate this process.

New economy, old problems.

Is there really a new economy? No. Jesus lamented that ‘The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.’ (Matthew 26: 11). The rich control the economy, and, as Paul wrote to Timothy: For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. That was true then, and is true today. Yet, we are facing a new economy, as we are entering “The Limits of Growth”, for the simple reason that we live in a Finite World. That ‘finite’ condition will dominate our financial situation, resulting in shortages and inflation. The new economy requires ‘economy’, implying wartime conditions, not seen in 80 years, since the End of World War II.

New climate, old approaches.

We are facing impossible challenges, the most glaring being Climate Change. If there ever is a threat to LIFE, it is Global Heating, which has no solution anymore: it is baked into our human fate.

ANY CHANCE FOR CHANGE?

No. Sorry.

THE FALL OF BABYLON.

“Write, therefore, what you have seen, what is now and what will take place later.”

                                                                        Revelation 1: 19

No, the Bible does not tell us what happens day-by-day, of course not. It does however, especially in the last Bible book, picture how our world will end, and how then a new beginning emerges, with the new humanity that is wise, mature and knowledgeable. This new humanity is given the opportunity to pick up where “Adam and Eve” failed. That awareness, that desire, that ‘faith’ instinct, starts now, while we still dwell in an era where God-defying people – think Trump – create the ultimate universal undoing, speeding up the process of total disintegration.

Of course, right now, we all are participants in this unfolding drama, this creation-God defying human experiment, culminating in “The Fall of Babylon”. The author of REVELATION tells us that our earth, given to us by God, (see Psalm 115:16), has become like Babylon, that God-forsaken place, to which the Israel nation, some 2,500 years ago, was exiled.

My Spiritual Journey.

We all have our spiritual journeys. For me the year 1972 was the beginning of new insights, the year when ‘my eyes were opened’. Oh, I had been a ‘Christian’ from Day One of my life: born into a devout, church-adhering family, who had been sincere believers for generations.

Before that year I was the typical, obedient, run-of-the-mill-heaven-devoted believer. Example: as a member of a book club, I received Rachel Carson’s book, SILENT SPRING, and gave it away before I ever read it: ‘nature’ simply was not something that interested me.

Then the year 1972 became a turning point.

Two friends gave me books they liked and recommended: 1. The Dutch “Sterven.. en Dan?”, (After Death… What?). That book, written by a theologian, opened my eyes to ‘Life after Death’, lived, not in heaven, but in/on God’s work of art: his creation. That radically changed my life.

In the second book: “The Limits to Growth”, Danielle Meadows and others, drawing on computer models, investigated exponential trends, spanning population, industrial production and environmental impact, and concluded that by 2025, the world would reach the limits of earth’s resources, and its economy would start contracting, no matter how much money were used to prevent this.

Then there was still another book that clarified my thinking: Dr. Barry Commoner’s book, The Closing Circle (1971) in which he outlined “The Four Laws of Ecology”:

1) Everything is connected to everything else; 

2) Everything must go somewhere; 

3) Nature knows best; 

4) There is no such thing as a free lunch. 

These four laws emphasize the interconnectedness of ecological systems and the consequences of human actions in the environment. Especially today, Anno 2025, these four laws prove the foolishness of our industrial, nature-despoiling-earth-polluting lifestyle. Memorize them!

New Times.

Today the world economy is at a major turning point, which is why we should brace for rapid changes in the economy. The world is moving from having enough goods and services to go around, to not having enough to go around. The dynamics of the economy are very different with shortages coming. The hoped-for solution of higher prices doesn’t fix that problem, because, adding more buying-power simply produces inflation. Other solutions are needed. The world economy is reaching what simply is “Limits to Growth.”

I believe that Revelation, the last Bible Book, is prophetic in this regard. To the discerning reader it indicates what the future holds. See the heading of Revelation 18: it says The Fall of Babylon. I believe that Babylon, the city/country to which Israel was banished, is now equated with our secular world. In that chapter, the fall of our creation-destroying society is foretold: There – see verses 11- 19 – our economic collapse is pictured. Substitute gold and precious stones for yachts and fancy cars, estates and glamorous women, and we talk about people like Musk and Trump, Thiel and the Billionaire Bunch now ruling the economy. “In one hour, the economy has been brought to ruin”, (Verse 19).

Economies throughout the ages have grown until their populations grew too large for resource availability. World History is replete with societies that fail. Babylon was one of them. Jared Diamond, 20 years ago, wrote COLLAPSE, How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Herelates the well-known example of Easter Island, in the Pacific, far from mainland Asia or America, where deforestation contributed to its total collapse. Other equally astute examples are the Maya cities, and, of course the Roman Empire, whose demise, somewhat arbitrarily, has been pegged at 476 AD. There too, supplying an increasing population, and decreasing resources, were factors.

Our fossil fuel age began over 200 years ago, and it now seems to be reaching its end.

Be mentally and religiously prepared.

THE  DEVIL VERSUS DIVINE DUEL

“But woe to the earth and the sea,
    because the devil has gone down to you!
He is filled with fury,
    because he knows that his time is short.”

Revelation 12: 12.

Mark 4: 39 indicates Jesus’ deity, and his continuous struggle with his opponent, the Devil. Continuous? Yes. History actually is typified by the struggle between God and the Devil. When the kings of Egypt menaced Israel, tried to eradicate her, then it was not Israel, but the ‘child’ that was the target. When centuries later Jerusalem was destroyed, and the entire population exiled, that too was all about the child that had not yet been born.

The history of the world basically is the unending duel between Good and Evil, between the Divine and the Devil, who has been pursuing Jesus from Paradise to the present.

Here is an example.

The twelve disciples were doing what they do best: Sail the rough waters of the Sea of Galilee. Experienced sailors they are, not easily frightened, they suddenly were exposed to a storm of the century, and thoroughly afraid, call out for divine help.

Divine help?

Yes, Jesus is there, asleep, so, desperately afraid – and that means something for these professionals, grown up on the ups and downs of the waves – they think they are about to drown. Then Jesus does an unusual thing: he talks to the waves and the waves oblige, because their motions were induced by Jesus’ opponent: the Devil.

When Jesus ‘rebuked’ the waves that threaten to drown him and his 12 disciples, he, actually, put a stop to the Devil and his attempt to eliminate ‘the Message’, all part and parcel of the age-old struggle between evil and good.

More intensity evident today.

That battle is now intensifying. With the Devil thrown out of heaven, and landing feet first on earth, everything in the human sphere is affected to an immense degree: Satan, banned from God’s presence, uses his defeat to start a new activity. From now on, world events will be more frightening, accelerate with greater ferocity, assume more ghastly proportions, drag millions along in a danse macabre, speed relentlessly to chaos and social upheaval.

The Almighty Human?

Today we see an immense increase in human power. It almost seems as if God for centuries has blindfolded humanity to prevent it from seeing all the planetary powers and possibilities, and then, suddenly, God rips away the blindfold, so that the one perspective after another opens up. This wild, unrestrained progress of human thought and technical prowess comes with a good dose of triumph, but also with visions of frightening nightmares. We read the harrowing words – applicable right now – “Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you.”

Enter Climate Change.

That is all too evident in The Climate. Every morning I receive an update from ARCTIC NEWS. I will share with you yesterday’s communication:

Temperature anomalies for February-March 2025 over the Arctic were as much as 20°C higher than 1951-1980, as illustrated by the image on the right.
The fact that these anomalies occurred at a time of year when little or no sunlight was yet reaching the Arctic indicates that the cause of these very high anomalies is extremely high ocean heat. 

This rapidly warming Arctic Ocean is quite shallow, and covers zillions of tons of Methane, 100 times more lethal than Carbon Dioxide (CO2). Once this is released, Global Warming will kill all that lives and moves and has a being.

That’s precisely what the Devil has in mind: Destroy, destroy, destroy. Climate Change is one way; nuclear war is another. We, the human race, now have the power to annihilate what God in Genesis 2 called ‘good’ seven times. We – with rare exceptions – are participants in this process, because the outcome for our way of life is anything but good. When God destroyed the world in which Noah lived, he promised not to repeat such an event, knowing that this time we – guided by the Devil – would do so.

Hope.

The Devil thought that when Jesus was killed, he had won the battle. And then the impossible happened: “Up from the grave he arose!”.

What was true for Jesus, will become also true for the cosmos. God loves his Son: he loves his cosmos equally well: Revelation 21 will soon become reality, because Jesus is stronger than death.

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 

There is a clear choice: the duel will end. Being the Devil’s dutiful disciple ends in death. Being Christ’s gracious co-worker brings LIFE, and that to the full.