Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

July 27 2022

THE FOUR HORSEMEN.

Or should I write: the Four Horsepersons? Or the Four Equestrians? Let me stick with the male denomination, and warn you that they are out there in whatever form.

It is the popular notion that the four horsemen are the most striking symbol of the days preceding the END of the world, which, if the Bible is correct, will come totally unexpected. 

We know all that, but we really don’t want to know: life is too comfortable. We also know that Climate Change is unstoppable. We also know that it will lead to our annihilation. We know all that, but we blithely ignore it, even though the Bible repeatedly mentions the End of the World, even tells us to be “Ending-Minded  – see Matthew 5:48, where the translation of ‘perfect’ misses the point: the Greek word ‘teleios’ there has ‘telos=end’ as its root.

Actually, when we pray, “Your Kingdom Come,” the so familiar words from the Lord’s Prayer, we pray for ending our present world and ask for the arrival of a renewed cosmos.

So, what do these horse-riders tell us?

The White Horse.

Take the first horse, a white one, with the rider holding a bow and arrow. White is the robe of Pope Francis, illustrating holiness. The explanations for this long-range weapon vary. The professor of Missions, J. H. Bavinck, in his book on Revelation, pictures the rider on the white as the bringer of the Good News, but by different means. As we approach ‘the end’, witnessing becomes difficult – Covid plays a role here – so, this learned Christian foresaw the electronic way as the most effective method to evangelize, and he interpreted ‘the bow and arrow’ as ‘the Internet’, similar to the shooting of an arrow: a hit and miss affair.

Thus, the White Horse is the bringer of the Gospel, which reaches the entire world before the End: Matthew 24: 14 affirms this. 

The Red Horse.

The second horseman carries a sword and rides a red horse, the symbol of blood and war. Today wars come in two versions: (1) The war against creation, all destructive, impossible to stop, hinting at 2 Peter 3: 10, “the elements will be destroyed by fire” of which we already have a foretaste, and (2): The hot war in Ukraine, involving most of the Western World, with an increasing risk of nuclear danger.

The Black Horse.

Its rider carries a weigh scale indicating measurements, in this case pointing to poverty and inflation and hunger, as the world withers, as droughts and floods, hurricanes and heat affect our food supply and brings on:

The Pale Horse.

This beast concludes the horse parade, culminating in death, universal death as we have poisoned the seas, the oceans, the air, the soils, so that only total death, a total cleaning can pave the way for complete renewal.  

Conclusion.

Today the Four Horsemen are universally present. They are:

Climate Change

Inflation

Covid-19 and other Pandemics

Ukraine.

As never before: these four phenomena affect us everywhere, including the war in Ukraine. All four have the potential of total destruction. All four pose a global threat. All four derive their impetus from human action. All four are beyond remedy, as Covid is becoming endemic, followed upon its heels by the monkeypox, followed by whatever, as Climate Change, due to forest fires and disappearing trees, and a warming ocean, now threatens to unleash the methane in the Arctic, 80 times more lethal. Inflation has its base in Climate change as well, with drought decreasing yields. Inflation too, will accelerate: with the world hitting 8 billion people this year, their mouths are ever becoming bigger, and its thirst for what THE WEST has to offer, ever more enticing. Yet, the agricultural base is quickly shrinking due to drought, floods, erosion, growing soil-degradation, which means that famine is guaranteed.

Is there a remedy? Is Escape an option?

Not a very encouraging scenario. When the Flood came, a direct act of God, Noah was promised that such a divine act of revenge would never happen again. Not necessary either: it now is obvious that we are totally capable of causing our own demise. Even if all carbon emission would stop today, Climate Change will gallop unimpeded, due the momentum of stored poison. 

ARCTIC NEWS – have a look at its website – tells us that rising temperature in the Arctic has the potential to unleash the trillions of tons of methane with the potential to drive humans extinct as early as 2025.

Is there hope? 

Yes. Repent and believe that Christ died for the redemption of all created matter, including us humans. Live the life of permanency now: that is our future.

July 20 2022

THEY KNOW!

A while ago I spoke to a young man and mentioned the disastrous consequences of Climate Change. He is a vibrant fellow, full of ideas and also successfully implementing them. His short answer was: “I know.”

My youngest brother, born 9 years after his nearest sibling, when my

mother was 46, the 9^th child in my birth family, grew up in a different ecclesiastical time than his 4 sisters and 4 brothers. When maturing, his only company was an aging father and mother, very conservative and set in their ways. He felt totally alienated from their beliefs, left the church and embraced socialism, becoming an elected council member of the Labour Party. He suffered marriage breakdown, smoked and drank, and died at 69. Yet, when I talked with him, just before he died, he saw himself a Christian, and meant it. He knew.

I found an astonishing passage in an essay by Johan Herman Bavinck, a Missionary, entitled, “Religious consciousness and Christian Faith, where this eminent scholar wrote, “I have the impression that Tertullian puts his finger on one of the most remarkable phenomena in religious studies when he points out that pagans in their rare moments of existential fear, forget all their own gods and scuttle their cheap myths as the call out to God.”

In their times of deepest dread, they bow down to the God-Creator. They know. 

So, what do they know?

That brings me to Romans 1: 20, and also to the Belgic Confession. First Romans: “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.”

The Belgic Confession – now mostly a forgotten declaration of faith – uses this very 

passage to tell us about God:

“We know him by two means: first, by the creation, preservation and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God, namely, his power and divinity, as the apostle Paul saith, Romans 1:20. All which things are sufficient to convince men, and leave them without excuse.”

The secondary source is the Bible, of course.

The curious part is that, due to the all-pervasive influence of Gnosticism, that Greek Pagan belief, the church has been majoring in minors ever since the year 320 A.D., when it became a world-force by associating with the institutional powers, solely concentrating on the Bible, God’s indirect word, while neglecting, as largely irrelevant, God’s created or direct word.

Here too, as with all matters today, the truth is that even the church is becoming what it is, just as our economy, based on fossil fuels, is rapidly becoming what it is: a lethal enterprise, with world annihilation as the result.

People know that the church, by narrowing its focus on the Bible, has become irrelevant, and have abandoned the church. The church’s failure to acknowledge that creation is of divine design – Psalm 24 unambiguously states “The earth is the Lord’s – echoes another Psalm -105 – They see, but do not see.

Paradoxically: the church, as instrument of salvation, is increasingly becoming a hindrance to achieve that salvation, now especially, as the globe is governed by unbearable heat, as drought prevents agricultural growth and so fosters famine.

They see, but do not see. 

James Lovelock correctly entitled one of his books, The Revenge of Gaia, Gaia being his name for the living earth. Just as Bach, the great composer, just as Shakespeare, the great playwright, are immortalized by their inspired works, so God, the creator should be honored for the world he made. When Paul, the great missionary, appeared at then the world’s foremost forum, the Areopagus, and addressed the elite gathered there, he started with, “The God who made the world and everything in it, is the Lord of heaven and earth.” He used the same opening words elsewhere.

What has happened?

“God has hidden his face”, says Deuteronomy 30.  God, in his wisdom, has surrendered the ‘fate of the earth’ to his creatures who are a very talented lot. Why? ‘To see what their end will be’. We now see what’s happening when WE are in charge. 

What really happened?

1 John 5: 19 is quite to the point: “Not God, but the evil one calls the shots now.” His goal, in his unrelenting hate, is to destroy God’s creation. We have been his willing allies, and now, Anno 2022, we are approaching ‘the end’.

We all know, even as we don’t want to know. Today the planet speaks in a roar impossible to ignore. 

July 13 2022

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” — C.S Lewis

TRUTH VERSUS COMFORT

Looking for ‘truth’, you will be rewarded. Looking for ‘comfort”? 

Well: read on. 

“Everything becomes what it is”: the basic message of Revelation, the last book in the Bible. The Greek word for Revelation is Apocalypse, now a term that has become synonymous with disaster and the collapse of ‘civilization’. 

Babylon.

The Bible book, ‘Revelation’ devotes a few chapters. to “The Fall of Babylon”. Babylon was the city of ancient times, to which the elite of Israel was exiled some 2,600 years ago. In an effort to assimilate these leaders of God’s people to its culture, the victors started to change their diet and progressed from there to civic rule and religion, recognizing that life is a unity.

In Revelation, the author of the Bible’s final chapter, 2,000 years ago, used Babylon as a template of what is at stake in the final episode of humanity. He used that ancient metropolis as an example of luxurious living. Also, the immorality of that once prominent empire had made a tremendous impression on Israel, while its opulent lifestyle had been carved into its historical consciousness. After all, Babylon, in the year 570 or so before Christ, was the World’s cultural Capital, enjoying the summum of luxury and ease, the dominant global economic center, with enormous riches, fabulous structures, grandiose gardens and the world’s finest cuisine. Comfort was the goal: the end? 

Sudden fall.

Babylon’s end came totally unexpected. Belshazzar, the emperor, was presiding over a sumptuous banquet, when suddenly a mysterious finger wrote an even more mysterious message on the wall, eternalized today as: ”the writing is on the wall”, indicating imminent demise. It spelled doom, sudden doom. (You find the interesting details in the Book of Daniel).

A similar episode is found in Revelation 18, also describing the Fall of Babylon, also totally unexpected, also abruptly ending in chaos and mass ruination: pure economic collapse.  Revelation 18, in verses 16-19 relates, how “Babylon is ruined within a single hour.” 

A warning for today.

Both the Old Testament and the New Testament relate these events as a warning that we too will experience an unexpected tipping point, indicating total collapse of the world economy, suddenly, in a single hour. 

Pure fiction?

Oh, you may dismiss this as pure fiction; after all the Bible basically is a book that tells us how creation came to be, perfect in all aspects, how we shattered its harmony and how Christ healed the breach. 

Curiously, both Daniel in chapter 9: 27, and Matthew in 24: 16 mention “the abomination that causes desolation”, with the unusual annotation of ‘let the reader understand’ – which indicates that this can only be correctly interpreted when it actually happens, which is now: pointing to world-wide pollution and Climate Change – so, yes, the Bible does mention future happenings.

C.S. Lewis writes: If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.” 

He also wrote:

The safest road to hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

We are on that road to hell, to utter human misery. The road of temporary comfort, the road of wishful thinking, is now signaling famine and despair for billions, because we have made the wrong bet.

We have gambled on one energy source: OIL. We now fail to understand that the world economy is powered by energy, highly polluting and finite. The easy stuff is gone, the ‘hard to find’ oil causes inflation. If the energy is suddenly much less available, there will be a huge problem. For over 200 years we gradually created a service industry, giving each of us 100 personal servants: light, heat, cool, at the flip of a finger, and speed at a pressure of the foot. No longer feasible. 

Back to the more creative and sustainable 16-17^th Centuries? When there were less than ONE billion people? 

Fossil fuel powers the economic engine of civilization. With a minor disruption in the supply of fossil fuel, crops wither and supply chains crash. With a major disruption, a humanitarian apocalypse engulfs the world. Events of the past few months have made this clear. Without energy, civilization dies.

In choice of truth versus comfort, we opted for comfort and ease: we now face despair and death.

July 6 2022.

THE AMERICAN RELIGION.

The USA has its own religion. No other country can claim such a feat. There is simply no such a thing as a German, or French or Asian Religion! Only America has its very own God-centered enterprise. 

What happened?

When Dietrich Bonhoeffer left the USA in 1939, returning to Hitler Germany and certain death, in his parting words he said that America has had some great preachers, but, unlike Europe, it had not experienced a Reformation: that’s why its basic religious beliefs go back thousands of years. 

So, what are they?

In my study bible, in the introduction to John’s three short letters, the editors thought it wise to remind their readers that John wrote his epistles to warn them of Gnosticism. Here are their words:

Gnosticism’ central teaching is that spirit is entirely good and matter is entire evil. … The Human body, which is matter, is therefore evil…. Salvation is the escape from the body, achieved not by faith in Christ, but by special knowledge (gnosis) hence GNOSTICISM.

Dr. Harold Bloom, world-famous Shakespeare expert and Hebrew Bible translator, is the author of THE AMERICAN RELIGION. He writes, 

“We are, alas, the most religious of countries….. and the American Religion seems to me irretrievable gnostic…..The emblems of it are the flag and the fetus…..The fetus must not be aborted, but whether the infant starves or not seems a very secondary matter. 

Bloom argues in his book that the American Religion, masks itself as Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian. Why? The American Religion is a direct descendent from pagan Greek thinking, which separates spirit from matter: heaven is in; earth is out.

The Supreme Court.

The Supreme court of the USA has become an excellent example of The American Religion. The majority of its judges are fanatic adherents of the American Religion, and their unfiltered devotion is not to justice, but to their ‘religion’, which was in full display this past week.

In a move that will seriously hinder America’s ability to stave off disastrous 

Climate Change, the US Supreme Court has sided with Republican-led states that demands the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) be limited in how it regulates planet-heating gases from the energy sector. 

A closer look at the composition of the Supreme Court, reveals that the six judges who voted to destroy God’s Creation even more, are devoted “Christians”. I cite that word Christians in quotation marks, because their stance to further allow the cosmos to be mortally damaged, reveals their gnostic faith that has ceased to be Christian and has fully converted to that antique Greek dualism, promoted by Plato and Socrates.

There you have it: the earth, being matter, is evil, destroying it is purely permissible, even advisable, under The American Religion.  

Today’s greatest danger.

By now we know that, in an era of crises, global heating increasingly stands out as the single greatest emergency humanity faces. Global heating is going extreme, causing drought and flooding in the US and around the world. It’s driving wildfires and ecosystem collapse, and is already contributing to famine and warfare. Crucially, this is all worsening day by day, and it will continue to deteriorate until we end the fossil fuel industry, which will never happen, of course, because we can’t do without it.

Just imagine: The court’s conservative majority voted 6-3 in favor of leading coal producer West Virginia, in a lawsuit with challenges originally brought by 20 other Republican attorneys general, who sued for the EPA to have less regulatory power over existing power plants without express authorization from Congress under the Clean Air Act. Coal: The most polluting black substance there is!

The essence of Christianity.

The essence of Christianity is found in John 3: 16: For 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.
The word ‘world’ in that text is ‘cosmos’, encompassing not only our globe and all it contains, but all extra-terrestrial matter as well. 

Jesus came to us for a single purpose:  I have come that they may have life, and 

have it to the full.” John 10:10. That ‘life’ is symbiotic, is totally involved with creation in loving relationship.

And Religion?

Jesus, very openly, acted against the stipulations enacted by the Pharisees and Scribes who regulated the Jewish religion. Since he had a great following, the religious authorities were afraid that his teaching would threaten their status: so, they killed him.

His last miracle coincided with his death: the parting of the heavy temple curtain separating the Holy from the Holy of Holies, effectively erasing formal religion.

If we call ‘The America Religion’ “Christian”, then the term “Christianity” has to be redefined. “Earth-centered? Creation Regained?

June 29 2022

 Compounding Confusion.

I grew up in simpler times, when there were only male and female, both recognizable as different, something the French celebrated by coining: Vive La Différence. Today we have expanded possibilities:

LESBIAN: Usually refers to a woman who has a romantic and/or sexual orientation toward women. 

GAY: Used in some cultural settings to represent men who are attracted to men in a romantic, erotic and/or emotional sense. Not all men who engage in same-gender sexual behavior identify as gay, and as such this label should be used with caution.

BISEXUAL or BI: A person who experiences sexual, romantic, physical, and/or spiritual attraction to more than one gender, not necessarily at the same time, in the same way, or to the same degree.

TRANSGENDER: A person whose sense of personal identity or gender does not correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth, or does not conform to gender stereotypes. Sexual orientation varies and is not dependent on gender identity.

All this is causing confusion. 

Not only confusion, but also feelings of concern, accompanied by anxiety, uncertainty, misunderstanding, unhappiness, until a modicum of stability is attained.

It’s difficult for me to understand all this, because, basically, I am not a very intelligent person. You could categories me as a B- guy. I am quite slow in analyzing matters and coming to a conclusion. However, a long life has been an advantage, giving me time to acquire some literary skills, but more important, I have learned to be more tolerant, more understanding, more focused on what really matters, and, since I love the Lord, I have gained a perspective that especially takes his creation into account and sees humanity in its follies and fumbles and foibles, its state of unbelief and aimless searching, as it has abandoned ‘biblical’ directives and failed to find the true focus. 

The church?

The church has been right in its “Rapture” stance, predicting the world to end, but wrong in its interpretations, forgetting or ignoring that Noah and his family – all believers then and now – were saved and remained on earth, while the ‘sinners’ then and now were taken away. 

That basic mix-up alone has made the church a failed institution. Dr. Lynn White was right when he blamed the church for our climate crisis, outlined in his 1965 essay: The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.

 Also, the church’s intolerance on sexual matters and gender inequality has alienated many, including me.

How then should we live?

The perennial question. Fifty years ago, a book, The Limits to Growth, greatly influenced my thinking. It predicted that by 2022, the world would go beyond repair, unless carbon consumption was curtailed. That has not happened, causing one of the original authors to write: “We are now in overshoot. Managed decline has not happened; collapse is in our future.”

For the young people this compounds their confusion. So, they search for answers, and, in their mixed-up state, which is shared by many, try to find focus, and not finding it. 

As for me?

I see this life as a proving ground for eternity: we all are in a learning stage. Life is discovery, and the gender issue and sexual orientation are part of that experiment, I believe. We have to find our true self, whether that is emotional, intellectual, sexual, or physical and spiritual. In a way, life is an experiment, a road to explore how to fit into eternity.

I was – again – struck by this when I read Galatians 3: 28 in my morning devotions. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Jesus Christ”.The footnote there says that unity in Christ transcends ethnic, social and sexual distinctions. Perhaps ‘sexual’ here is meant ‘gender’, a common error. In contemporary parlor we could read: There is neither black nor brown, pauper nor billionaire, lesbian nor straight, for we are all one in Jesus Christ.

Compounding confusion is coursing through the masses. We all know or sense that something is amiss, that economic and ecological and religious conditions are beyond remedy: it’s now so purely plugged into contemporary life, that it can no longer change: we simply must manly – not an acceptable word anymore – carry on to the fiery finish.

I live by Jesus’ words, “Seek first the Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given as well”. (Matthew 6: 33). 

I see the ‘kingdom’ as central to my life, and interpret it to mean, seeking the welfare of creation, so, when the New Creation comes, we fit right in.

That’s why Jesus continued to say (verse 34): Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.”
 Those rules do away with confusion. 

June 22 2022.

BORN TO WOE: 

the 14^th Century compared to our 21^st Century.

”Born to woe”, that’s how Barbara Tuchman heads her chapter on the 14^th Century, in her book, A Distant Mirror, the Calamitous 14^th Century.

Seven Hundred years ago, everything was different: then, ‘Life of the Spirit and of the after-world was superior to material life on earth”, she writes. Today this would be totally untrue. Yet, today, as a testimony to that faith, Europe still have its magnificent cathedrals, many of them built during the 12^th and 13^th Centuries, a distinct symbol of the religiosity of those bygone years, including the Martini Church in my hometown Groningen with its 100m tower. However, all are now stripped off their innards, their believing adherents.

The previous years.

The centuries prior to the year 1400, had been very productive, with great advances in art, technology, building, exploration, universities, cities, banking: they were the high Middle Ages, when the compass, the windmills, the spinning wheels, made life more interesting and prosperous. People felt good and secure, and its population expanded rapidly.

Then the weather turned. 

Sounds familiar! “A physical chill settled on the 14^th Century at its very start”. The Baltic Sea froze over twice, in 1303 and 1306-7; the cultivation of grain was curtailed: a shorter growing season heralded disaster for the population that had rapidly grown during prosperity, so quickly that already then it had reached a delicate balance.

Today?

Today we see similar signs: not cold, but heat is making agriculture and horticulture a hazardous enterprise. In 1315 the rains came so incessant that crops failed all over Europe, and famine, the dark horseman of the Apocalypse, became a familiar feature. Today….

Then, “Born to woe” accelerated 30 years later. Then, after the workers’ riots in 1346-47 which plunged Rome into anarchy, a fearsome earthquake shook the European mainland, accompanied by the PLAGUE, now labeled the Black Plague, that killed an estimated 50% of the European population. 

That same Pandemic was back in the news this past week when researchers, after decades of probing, found the plague-causing bacteria in graves in Kyrgyzstan, a country just north of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Then too, the One Hundred Year War was waged, coinciding with religious strife that saw two Popes vying for dominance in the church.

Today?

In many ways our era resembles the 14^th Century. We too, are engaged in what constitutes a perpetual war against creation where thousands upon thousands of species are disappearing, where once fertile lands are washed away or resort to desert-like conditions, where not cold, is on the 14^th century, but human-induced heat is increasing, and melting glazier and disappearing North-and South Pole ice, make the weather increasingly volatile.

In contrast with the universal Catholic Church, dominant 700 years ago, we now see decreasing church attendance and increasing conservatism, centering especially on human sexual behavior, condemning the Lesbian-Homosexual-Bisexual-Transgender conditions, while Jesus’ life of magnanimity and tolerance is pushed away, replaced by stark rule upon rule. When the current Pope dies or resigns, the most likely scenario is a recurrence of the TWO POPES event, based on the unbridgeable divisions in the largest Christian block.

The Bible.

I know: the Bible is not a history book. But I do recommend you read Matthew 24 aloud. All 51 verses apply to today, painting a picture that eerily resembles both the 14^th and the 21^stcenturies: ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ occurring in the holy place, the earth in which we live, and which we have desecrated. It also mentions the lack of good preaching, the frequency of famines and earthquakes. And the list goes on: the similarity painted then, and what is happening today, is uncanny.

Also, both the Old and New Testament frequently mention an unbelievably large earthquake that will destroy one third of the earth. This past week a new report specifically pointed to the likelihood of such an event happening along the North American Pacific rim.

History tells me that disasters are contagious, that natural mishaps like company. Revelation 18 tells us why: “All nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries”. In that same chapter it says that “The merchants of the earth will weep..” because stagflation will stop the sale of luxury goods and homes. 

Stagflation, a combination of inflation and economic stagnation, is now the forecast, plus withering weather-woes: both signs of a dying civilization.

The 14^th Century was ‘born to woe’’. That woe grew worse through indigenous destruction and genocide, through further church turmoil, the holocaust, through world-wars killing hundreds of millions, and now, in the 21^st Century, through the crime of all crimes: the death of nature, God’s precious earth. This final woe which will carry its own punishment: sudden global death.