Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

October 19 2022                                 

THE DEATH OF A SINGLE TREE.                                 

Nobody can escape death, yet we all try; 

Trees are life: we kill them and we die.

Death is part of life: just look at ‘fall’, when trees, in multi-colored shades, say so long to summer and embrace the winter death, awaiting re-birth in spring, followed by the soaring of summer and the glory of fall. 

Trees signal life, evident how the Tree of Life occupies a prominent place in the Garden of Eden. That singular tree makes me believe that every tree is the Tree of Life, and that by cutting them down indiscriminatory, we abet death. So, why did Jesus kill a tree? Why?

Jesus was hungry. He looked around for a snack, and saw a fig tree. Mark 11: 12-14 relates the story.

“He went to find out if it had any fruit. When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs.”  Then, quite unreasonably, he cursed the tree, and it died almost instantly. 

I wonder, was there a special reason why Jesus did this unusual act?

I believe, Jesus had an ambiguous relationship with trees. He knew that his death would happen while hanging on a tree. He also knew that on the “Tree”, eternal life depended: “do not eat from this tree, because if you do, you certainly will die”, says Genesis. We did eat from the tree, but when Jesus tried to still his hunger, there was no fruit, ‘because it was not the season.’ How strange a happening: it looks totally bizarre.

Consider: Jesus healed the sick, made the lame walk, resurrected the dead, fed thousands from scratch, but when he himself was hungry, he barked upon the wrong tree. 

What happens here? 

A couple of things come to my mind: first, Jesus, with his divine hindsight and foresight, perhaps visualized both the Garden of Eden in Genesis 1-2, and again in Revelation 22, telling us that “on each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month.”  Perhaps Jesus, hungry and overtired, imagined himself already in the new Eden, where trees continuously bear fruit.

Trees and us.

We dwell in world where trees are seen as a highway to halt hunger, rudely aborted to grow soybeans to fatten pigs. Also, trees are wantonly slaughtered to provide building material, so they vanish everywhere, causing earth’s wildlife populations to plunge by an average of 69% in just under 50 years, as we continue to clear forests, consume beyond the limits of the planet and pollute on an industrial scale.  

Deuteronomy 20: 19 warns us that even in times of war trees must be spared. However, we now have come to the point where they, rather than absorbing our poison, now breathe out CO2 through fires. No longer is the Amazon a carbon sink: the opposite.

So why did Jesus deliberately destroy one tree for no obvious reason?

The Tree as an example.

All trees are symbols of God’s grace. It could be that this fig tree represented humanity in general. It stood for us, for you and me. Jesus, as the ultimate teacher, uses graphic examples to make a point, the point being that we must bear fruit, serving God in and out of season, live to improve and heal God’s creation, bear fruit for eternity, failure to do so means death. 

Unreasonable? 

When Paul spoke at the world’s most famous debating place, the Areopagus, where the ‘wise philosophers’ debated the issues of the day, (See Acts 17: 28) he postulated that, ”For in him we live and move and have our being,” a well-known thesis for these Athenians. We tend to spiritualize these words, pointing to God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit in all sorts of pious ways, but I believe that these words apply directly to creation, where Paul sees creation as an expression of God, making Bonhoeffer state that: it is specific to the Christian faith to equate God with creation, that life has its wellspring in this world in God and so bounces back from this world to God.”

The tree is a symbol of life. 

The Bible starts with a Tree, has a Tree pounded into the Golgotha Hill, and has the Tree at the end. The Bible ends with these beautiful and reassuring words: “The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” 

“When Jesus reached the tree, he found nothing but leaves.” 

And then, is there a connection between the leaves of the Trees in the New Creation, and the leaves on that Fig Tree Jesus cursed? Are both healing agents? Did the death of that single tree become his cross, and healed us all?

October 12 2022.

DEMENTIA

Dementia, the word, is pure Latin, used by Cicero and various Roman authors, indicating senselessness and insanity. Its root is ‘mens’, also Latin of course, meaning ‘mind, reason, and understanding’. Our own word ‘men’, designating our humanity – now outdated as too male-oriented – is derived from that Latin word: did we ever live up to being understanding? My good Jewish friend, the late Dr. Harold Goldsman, told me that the Yiddish word ‘Mensch’ does describe a compassionate and honorable human being. 

On growing older.

This week I have become 94 years old: not young, but old, but physically in good shape, walking one hour every day, almost always in a forest setting. Garden work too. I believe that I am born to live, and therefore must promote physical and mental health, be God-fearing, strictly adhering to that well-worn Latin saying, “Mens Sana in Corpore Sano”, a sound mind in a sound body.

Becoming 94 is no longer exceptional. My paternal grandfather, Opa Hielema, small grocer, broke the 90-year barrier when he died in his 91^st Year. My maternal grandfather, Opa de Haan, a life-long farmer, continued his high cholesterol diet in his retirement, and died of a heart attack in 1940, at the age of 70: I was 12 then: my first brush with death.

Closer to home.

Two years ago this month, my wife of 67 years died in her 93d year. I had known her since we both were 4 years old!  I remember the circumstances: her father had become the new minister of our 1300-member church. After his installation service, her parents hosted the church council and their offspring for coffee and ‘cigars’ (1932!). There’s where we met, playing hide-and-seek, together under the marital bed!

I have tried to imagine how my life would have evolved without her, and the thought alone fills me with terrible dread: she (re)formed me. However, before she turned 80, she developed dementia, common, especially in women. We both suffered from her mental deterioration for more than 12 years.

 I have often wondered why women are twice as likely to suffer from dementia, even though, generally, they live longer. Men die younger because they are often foolish: take unnecessary risks, die in car accidents, suicides, have unhealthy living habits, but measured from, say 75-90 years, their life expectancy is similar. 

I guess that the greater incidence of dementia in women, stems from their traditional role, of being subject to men. No hard evidence. No statistics. Just a notion. 

I remember her telling me that, as a teenager, she wanted to study, but her older sister told her mother, “She will marry anyway.” It is possible that mental anguish, perhaps unconsciously, from this denigration of which so many females still suffer, may have been a contributing factor in becoming dement. Will it decline, now that women are gaining in all fields? 

Also, my wife was child number 8 in a total of 12 children, losing her father when she was 9. She, I suspect, lacked some maternal attention, which could also have been a factor. I also think that, being married to me, or perhaps having married at all, might have contributed to it. I admit, initially I often made decisions without consulting her. She took a lot of courses, became a graphologist, even gave group lessons and wrote a newspaper column. But still she developed dementia. 

Is there societal dementia?

I believe our society suffers from that condition. In spite of increasing signs that our carbon addiction is wrecking the planet, we prefer short-term gain, knowing full-well that we are suicidal. That indicates dementia for which there is no cure.

We are an aging society, I being a good example. The extra expense of coping with Climate Change, of caring for frail old people, of increasing expenditure for military purposes, of rising interest rates, will cause immense financial pressure on government’s budgets. These staggering costs and diminishing economic growth will bring “stagflation”, the very condition Revelation 18 talks about. 

Revelation 18? 

You do well to read that chapter. It portrays a rich, opulent society, in a deep economic recession. The way we live, the way Father State is called upon to finance everything broken, hurricane damage, inadequate pensions, increasing health liabilities, ever higher cost of living, galloping unemployment, more military expense, will lead to collapse. To expect the government to cover all our deficiencies, is demented thinking. 

That is not pessimism: that is pure reality. A dement society can no longer see the Truth: Verse 17: “In one hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin.” It was all stolen from the Creator’s creation anyway.

Fortunately, it does not end there: Chapter 21 describes a new start: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth”. 

 October 5 2022

 BOMBS.

Some commentators, Tocqueville and Fukuyama among them, tell us that society needs religion, because, they say, its absence advances anarchy and despotism. Religion, supposedly, teaches us direction and purpose and pursues aims beyond personal gain.

There is truth in this, but also danger. The Russian Orthodox Church wholeheartedly supports Putin. Bolsonaro’s and Trump’s most ardent supporters are Church members. Nothing is more insidious than distorted religion, seeing Creation, God’s precious handiwork, as an enemy to be exploited to enrich oneself. It now is clear that Putin’s religion has brought this world, God’s world, to the edge of nuclear annihilation. 

The Fall of Babylon: OUR WORLD!

Dr. J. H. Bavinck, professor of Missions, in his book on Revelation, written 60 years ago, claims, in Chapter 18, that Babylon – our world TODAY – will be destroyed by a nuclear bomb. 

He writes: “Babel – our current civilization – bombs itself into oblivion, destroys what it has built, commits suicide. World history is a self-killing enterprise; world history is a leap into the abyss. That is what humanity does without prompting: God does not have a hand in all this.” 

It reminds me of Deuteronomy 32: 20, “I will hide my face to see what their end will be.” Well….

Bavinck continues, “John – the author of the last Bible Book – sees this quite clearly. This verdict erupts from the bottom up. It is pure self- decomposition, pure self-destruction. Humanity causes its own downfall. We really have no idea that, behind all this, behind our foolish thinking, stands God. That same God whom humanity has scorned, has forgotten; yes, this same God allows humanity to destroy itself.”

The apostle Peter, in his letter, expecting Jesus’ return, tells us to live holy lives, lives that tell us to be in tune with creation, so that our transition is smooth.

What does holy living entail?

I am not a psychologist, a word which contains two Greek words, Psyche = soul, and Logos = word/science/God. Neither am I a biologist – bios=life – a person concerned about ‘all that lives’, mostly plants and animals. I am also not a humanist. Humanists are defined as persons who use their intellect to explain their lives, rather than relying on religious belief. I am not a humanist, because my ‘Christian faith’ dominates my life.

What does my faith tell me?

I believe that at a certain point in history, some 12,000 years ago perhaps, God selected out of the existing humanoid race, 2 persons who had great promise, and infused them with God’s Spirit. 

Psalm 82: 6 affirms that we all are ‘gods’, children of the “Most High”. God wants us to investigate the Earth’s potential and grow in wisdom and knowledge by studying the Infinite that resides in God’s Creation. 

Being ‘human’ means searching, probing, trying, crying, investigating, learning, failing, marveling, praying, lamenting, singing, and the list goes on. Oh, yes, I should include ‘laughing’. I ‘laugh’ a lot at myself: my thoughts can be so foolish and absurd: laughing at my ineptness and stupidity is part of me being human. 

In final analysis, being human really means getting ready for the New Creation.

So, what IS happening TODAY?

Let me take a look at our times. If there ever was a society under stress, it is ours. In our stupidity we have passed all the limits of survival: destroyed the old-growth forests, killed off large numbers of species, poisoned the atmosphere, depleted our mineral resources, eroded the fertile soil, polluted water and the atmosphere, set the planet on a path to irreversible warming, and a few more little things, including having deployed a sufficient number of nuclear warheads to wreck the ecosystem and kill everybody. And we haven’t renounced our beloved habit of making war against each other. Repair has become impossible: a New Earth is needed, and is coming! 

I just finished reading David Wallace-Wells book, “The Uninhabitable Earth, Life after warming”. Somewhere toward the end, he writes, Pleasure districts like Miami Beach, built just decades ago, will disappear.

This prophecy has already become reality. In an eyewink, billions of Real Estate in that region, have been destroyed by a man-made bomb: the weather, now an unending story, identical to the nuclear danger, where one bomb brings another, brings another. MAD we are: Mutual Assured Destruction guaranteed. Our bombs obliterate us.

John 3: 16 – God so loved the world – clearly indicates that the express purpose of Jesus’ birth, life, death and resurrection, is to restore the Garden of Eden. He taught us how to live! He came to bring us a new earth and a new humanity: all our efforts to remedy the present plight, will fail. 

Sorry to say: as humanity, we have really bombed.

September 28 2022

VENGEANCE

The oceans are angry; the earth is boiling with rage.

When sailors first approached the American shores, the fish were so plentiful that lowering a bucket into the salt waters would yield a teeming catch. Today that same haul would see millions of plastic fragments: no wonder the oceans react violently against our sacrilegious acts. And the earth, where our footprints lie? That same surface also is shifting from friend to foe. It reminds me of Hebrew 10: 30-31, “Vengeance is mine: It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” Yes, creation represents the living God!

Vengeance is exactly what we are experiencing today, because God is what he does. Psalm 24: “The earth is the Lords, and all it contains.” That includes the 70 percent of seas and oceans, and the solid ground which we call our home, now increasingly under extreme stress, either burning or desiccated. 

Of course, we have inflation, never to let up. Of course, prices will accelerate, as the very base on which we live, dries up, becomes desert, and unyielding. Of course, food will become hard to grow, and the already hungry masses, will starve. Upping interest rates will only aggravate the economic situation: it will not restore depleted soil nor fill up the empty seas. What worked yesterday is ineffective today: the entire world has changed.

The weather used to be an independent force, not subject to human intervention, a phenomenon that was largely predictable, stable, with summer heat and winter cold, both with moderate temperature differences, and with spring and fall that eased us into the higher or lower fluctuations. 

Ice ages.

We know for sure that the earth experienced both a Big and a Little Ice Age. The Big one ended about 10,000 years ago when much of the northerly part of the globe was ice-covered, while the oceans were 120 meters lower than today. There also was a Little Ice Age from about 1450 to 1850, when the average temperature was about 1 (0ne) degree Celsius lower. Why these century-long cold snaps happened, is still a question. They had nothing to do with human interference. 

Just recently scientists have suggested that the human mind emerging from the Big Ice Age, was fundamentally different from earlier anthropological versions, now having, what I call, a spiritual dimension. What these findings do not mention – and what my biblically-influenced mind whispers to me – is that the human pair mentioned in Genesis 1-2, was of that unique, fully formed species infused with God’s Spirit, a man and woman emerging from the then existing humanity, yet with a particular trait not existing before, call it spiritually inclined, aware of God as Father and Creator.

The Little Ice age too saw a different humanity, evident in its artistic expressions, never since experienced in such a pronounced manner. For example, during these 4 centuries we saw Michelangelo, 1475-1564, Luther, 1483-1546, Shakespeare, 1564-1616, the great painters, the van Eyck Brothers, Rembrandt, and the still unsurpassed composers, Bach-Handel, 1685-1750, just to name a few. Today’s great names are technicians, such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs, the inventor of the Mac Computer. The machines they made were mere extensions of the abacus, an ancient tool used for thousands of years.

Where has that inventive spirit gone? The unequaled greatness of a Mozart, the daring of a Martin Luther, the vision of a Nietzsche?

How will it all end?

I have long wondered how the apostle Peter’s prophecy will play out. In 2 Peter 3 he writes, “The Day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear like a roar; the elements will be destroyed like fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.” 

That, for me, is a mystery no more. The answer lies in the Arctic Ocean, a shallow sea resting on a foundation of methane, that hundred-fold more dangerous greenhouse gas. For many millennia it was safely secured in the cosmic freezer where it lay undisturbed, and largely forgotten. Now the freezer is gone, replaced by a furnace: Global Heating is nowhere more pronounced than exactly there where all these destructive gases are buried. 

There are also more aggravating elements at work: this past week two hurricanes, one between Alaska and Siberia, and another between Baffin Island and Greenland, have pushed hot ocean water into the very polar regions where these explosive gases are situated.

Arctic News has warned us, and predicts that the methane release there, will cause an EIGHT (8) Degree Celsius rise in global temperature, obliterating everything alive.

Vengeance?

The oceans are angry; the earth is boiling with rage.

“Vengeance is mine. It is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” 

September 21 2022

THE END?

The past week was an emotional one, dominated by the late Queen Elizabeth II. It reminded me of another queen, Victoria, who on January 22 1901, died at the age of 81. She passed away at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, including the future King, Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany.

Then teletyped telegrams whirled throughout the world announcing the death of the British Empress, a heyday for the multiple newspapers throughout the globe. Then, as now, wars, royal weddings and the funerals of royalty were, and still are, the most spectacular sources of news. 

Queen Victoria had lost her husband, Prince Albert, at a young age, and for years she had withdrawn from the public scene in an endlessly extended period of mourning. Then too, a war raged: the Boers in South Africa, fought for independence.

Its funeral procession featured the German Kaiser on his proud horse, as well as the Russian Czar, also a relative of the deceased. That same Kaiser would die in exile in 1941, in Doorn, the Netherlands, banned there after Germany’s defeat in 1918. In that same year the Czar and his immediate family were brutally murdered.

That year 1901, also was the start of the CARBON era.

The historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his book, The Age of Extremes, noted that TEN percent of humans, alive on January 1 1900, died an unnatural death in the next 50 years, due to TWO World Wars and ONE horrendous epidemic.

Today, 121 years later, it’s Queen Elizabeth’s turn to end an era. She too mourned the death of her husband. Her grieving too, hastened her death, but, unlike her Great-grandmother, Victoria, she remained engaged almost till the very day she died.      

The late queen represented continuity, security, certainty. But Britain today, and the world at large, faces a cost-of-living crisis, faces soaring national debts, faces a looming recession and a chronic productivity problem, faces Global Heating, and untold other problems. We are at the threshold of a new era, unprecedented, with a population, pampered and unprepared.

A look back.

For 2,000 years we have counted ‘progress’, by the number of people living. It had taken the world at large till the year 1,800 to reach the One Billion Count. When Queen Elizabeth was born in 1926, thanks to our Carbon-based life, that number had doubled in 125 years, but during her 70 years reign it grew to Eight Billion, an impossible number. 

A new book, An Inconvenient Apocalypse, by Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen, tells us that in today’s depleted state, the earth can support no more than TWO Billion. They write, “No existing ideology or culture is going to provide us with a template for dealing with what lies ahead, a world of fewer people consuming less energy.” 

That means that the Carbon Age has ended: a New Era dawns.

I believe that the death of this queen, who reigned from 1952 to 2022, 70 years, signals the end of an era. 

It was the age of carbon; it was the age of material welfare; it was the age of spiritual decline; it was the age of untold increase in human numbers; it was the age of Big Government: it is no longer sustainable. 

At the Queen’s two church services, viewed by 4 billion people, something miraculous happened. The prophecy of Matthew 24: 14 came true: “The Gospel of the Kingdom was preached to the whole world”, signaling the end of an era!

Already each day brings on new disasters. Each day another ‘earth’ event makes headlines. Each day another food item rises in price, some of them going to absolutely ridiculous levels, as floods and droughts foster famines in multiple places. 

Our world is changing, without warnings, in wild and un-wielding ways.

The thousands who lined the paths in London to see the Queen’s coffin, and the billions who followed the proceedings on TV, sensed that they lived in a time period that will never return. The slow-motion, many-hours-queue to bid farewell to their queen, suggested to me that people were reluctant to accept that the Age of Abundance had died with her. Gone now is this short, oh so short, era of erotica, as it were, of effortless extravagance, of luxury at the switch of a finger.

And yet…..

How beautifully timely was the final reading at her funeral service, from Revelation 21, “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away.”

Not only the end of an era: the old world as we know it, has passed away.

September 14 2022

EARTH AND CHURCH: EARTHER AND CHURCHER.

One of my readers – and a good friend – sent me this question:

“My question to you is how do you see Earthers moving forward. How do you see Earthers learning from each other, gathering, where, when, and what do you see as the purpose of being together – if you see one at all. I am asking that you go further in your explanation, beyond the statements of how bad things are, what happened and get on to what we do next, how do we establish ourselves and how do we demonstrate our values and beliefs.”

 Here is my view on LIFE, my world-view if you like.

1. I see my life as a prelude to eternity. Yes, a trial period, after which I am judged – oh, that terrible word! – whether I am fit to enter the perfect world to come.
2. That condition colors my life. It has made me an ‘earther’. I deeply believe that I will spend eternity right here, on Terra Firma, the earth God created and called good seven times.
3. I also believe that at some point God deeded this earth to humanity, giving us full authority to act according to our wisdom. Our cultural mandate is found in Genesis 2:9, where the TREE was described as “Pleasing to the eye, and good for food.” This indicates that we are charged to retain and enhance creation’s beauty, its purity, its pristine state, its perfection, its immense richness, simply so astounding with its abundance of various creatures. A closer look shows how everything on earth is somehow harmoniously connected to everything else, how one species influences the other and the one creature depends on the other. Plants cannot exist without the earth that feeds them. Animals, on the other hand, cannot function without plants. And so on…
4. However, in Genesis 3: 6 there is a sudden change, something very different, a complete reversal: “The Tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye.” Food before beauty, economics before aesthetics: greed emerged, and wealth acquisition gained priority. Beautification was pushed back, and personal gain achieved dominance. 

That first attempt to commercialize the world, ended in the Flood, with only Noah’s family and the fauna surviving.

• But God did not give up: he made a new beginning with Noah, and sealed that in a new Covenant. Genesis 9 relates how God specifically singled out Creation, with the totality of living species. Miraculously, God made a covenant with the very cosmos he had created, and acknowledged that from now on Creation would be equal to his divinity and operate as such independently from the deity. Yes, God made Creation equal to himself: that’s what Covenant means, like in marriage! Now venerating creation, the cosmos, loving it, takes the place next to worshipping God, who is invisible: yes, loving Creation has become the entrance to God’s favor.
• However, humanity did not want this sort of thing. Even though another Covenant was made, this time with God choosing a particular tribe as his own, that too was to no avail, and God resigned to the human lot. Among God’s last words to Moses were: “I shall hide my face from them to see what their end will be. (Deuteronomy 31: 17, 18). We are experiencing this today.
• Still God did not give up. Again, God relented, and sent the Son, Jesus Christ, God become human, and affirmed in John 3: 16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son as payment to buy back Creation. Believing the Son’s sacrifice gives us eternal life.”
• Jesus taught us how to live, but religion killed him.

EARTH AND CHURCH: EARTHER AND CHURCHER.

This confronts us with a choice in this late hour of human history. Both the earth and the church are on life-support. Both are destined to die, and only the Earth, will be revived. 

The church, as all ‘man’-made organisms will totally fade away. Revelation 21: 22 specifically mentions that in the New Earth there will be no temple, for God’s law will be embedded in the hearts of his people: that means ‘no bible, no church’.

Jesus was killed by religion, by the church of his day, therefore we must be very conscious of the dangers of religion. The earth is God’s primary, direct and ever-lasting Word; the Bible, pointing us to Christ and his sacrifice, is, nevertheless, God’s secondary, indirect, and disappearing Word, necessary, as Psalm 119: 105 tells us, to be: A lamp for our feet and a light for our path (in creation). We have to be careful that staring in that light does not blind us to experiencing the real Word.

Kathryn, does that answer your question?