Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

IS LOVE THE ANSWER, THE ONLY ANSWER?

 “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.³³ Take heed, watch and pray; for you do not know when the time is. (Mark 13: 32-33). 

I have a good friend, a professor emeritus at several prestigious universities, who faces his own mortality. He asked me to explain ‘Christianity’ to him. Well, here it is. Somewhat.

I am a man of habits. One of them is to write a few hundred words each morning on a text of the lectionary – the prescribed daily Bible readings. Last Monday morning I selected the above text, as it puzzled me that the Father had not shared the date of THE END with the Son, in spite of Jesus’ words: “I and the Father are one.”  

The text suggested to me that Creation is a force that works independently from the Son and the angels, and indicates, that God and Creation are identical or complementary, and that Creation, has a tipping point, only it knows. 

The unity of God with Creation, is a concept new to me, and changed my concept of Christianity. If God is out there, in the air and water and soil, in you and me: shouldn’t we be a bit more careful how we live? 

About God, the Great Unknown.

Knowledge about Scripture is very important. Paul writes – 1 Timothy 6: 16 – God alone is immortal and lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see. God is the great Unknown. Just as the famous author of King Lear and Hamlet, God too, is the Great Unknown, only knowable through his creation. The Belgic Confession hits it right.

We know God by two means: 

First, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book 

in which all creatures, great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:

God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1: 20: 

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.

Second, God makes himself known through the Scripture.

Want to know about God? 

Look at Creation! Creation is God’s Primary, God’s Holy Revelation! Yes, Creation is HOLY!

And the Scriptures? 

The Scriptures are like a mining light attached to our foreheads, to make it possible to navigate inerrantly through creation: Psalm 119: 105 teaches us that “God’s Word is a lamp for our feet, and a light for our path in Creation”. 

We, however, keep on staring into the light of Scripture, God’s secondary Word, and have become blinded to the reality of God’s Primary Word, and, in the process have become oblivious to the plight of the Planet.

The Scriptures are indispensable.  

John 3: 16-17 tells us that God loves Creation so much that his Son’s life was used to buy it back. Loving Creation as God does, gives us ‘eternal LIFE’ there”. (At one point in early human history we gave our Creation’s ownership to God’s adversary, just as American ‘Christianity’ surrendered itself to Trump as the new savior). Also, the Heaven Heresy so prevalent still, has made much of the current church structure irrelevant. That’s why in Revelation 21: 22, describing the New Creation, specific mention is made of the absence of Temple and Church and Bible. 

Bonhoeffer and Richard Elliott Friedman.

Dr. Sabine Dramm, in her analysis of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s writings, concluded that Bonhoeffer presented as specific to the Christian Faith the perception of God and the world – cosmos – as one. Professor of Hebrew and Bible translator, Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, in his “The Hidden Face of God”, concludes, after 284 pages of delightful reading: “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God. (Emphasis in the original).

 “God so loved the world”, as recorded in John 3: 16,17, spoken to a Reform-minded cleric in Jesus’ time, stands out as one of the most poignant sayings of Jesus, who then already knew that he would offer his life for Creation’s redemption. By sacrificing his very body as payment for its perfect restitution, he made it possible for us to have eternal life there.

A church community that does not make this fact its cardinal centre, does not represent the Body of Christ. 

Simple faith in the New Creation is seldom mentioned in the church. To be part and parcel of God’s work of art, is seldom mentioned in the church. To call oneself a daughter or brother of the trees and birds, of the lion and the lamb, is seldom mentioned in the church. “To love the Lord with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind”, is left hanging as an empty slogan, without connecting this love to the creation in which God placed us as responsible creatures. 

My dear friend. Christianity has only one key word: “LOVE”. 

EVIL.

Nature is cruel: food for some is the death for others. There the law of the strongest rules. This past week I saw tracks in the snow, the typical rabbit foursome paw-pattern; the next day I also saw coyote marks there; the day after, no more of these distinctive, easily recognized rabbit tracks. 

I believe that all carnivore animals will be changed in the New Creation, from meat-eating to herbivore creatures, as Isaiah 65: 25 suggests: The wolf and the lamb will feed together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox, and dust will be the serpent’s food. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,” says the LORD. And that applies to us humans, as well: no more killing of animals, reason to now become vegetarian. Also, the way animals in poultry slaughter places and abattoirs are killed, is evil. 

Still: “Every knee shall bow, every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.”

Remember that, Trump!

But for now, in the USA the law of the richest rules: Musk, the money man, spent 250 million dollars to get Trump elected. The new cabinet consists of billionaires. Paul, the apostle, God’s instrument for bringing the Good News to the Western World, wrote to his protégé Timothy, as recorded in 1 Timothy 6: 10, “For the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil”. 

Trump loves money.

Trump loves money, and loves those who have it. He’s entering office as the most powerful president in American history. He is the American Caesar, unrestrained. Trump has made a threat and said, “I’m coming after people”, and he’s appointed people that will do what he wants without him having to tell them to do it.

And then there is the weather.

Through our evil, heatwaves will be worse; through our evil, floods, fires, drought, hurricanes and other extreme weather events will be worse. CO?, methane and other greenhouse gasses will rise faster than expected. The loss of coral and the die-off of the Amazon will be worse than expected. Through our evil, global temperatures will be hotter than expected, except in those places where they are much colder than expected.

Melting of glaciers and polar ice will be greater than expected. The spread of diseases like dengue and H5N1 will be much worse than expected. Through our evil, the extinction of species and loss of biodiversity will be much worse than expected. Multi simultaneous breadbasket crop failures will be much worse than expected, due to storms, floods, drought, heat and loss of pollinators.

Expect more Evil.

Expect evil to be dominant during Trump’s 4-year term, which, I predict, will be disastrous, with major setbacks in weather conditions, with economic turmoil, with rising unemployment and financial hardship, analogous to the infamous Dirty Thirties, from 1929-39. 

Then World-War II – 1939-45- brought an end to unemployment, and unleashed a manufacture bonanza. That cure is no longer feasible because of environmental constraints. Also reduced economic activity will cause ‘global dimming’ to disappear, now restraining the full impact of sunshine to warm the earth. With that haze gone, global warming will gallop and intensify the effects of Climate Change. 

O, yes, those trillions of debts, made in prosperous times, due when tough economic conditions make repayment impossible, will lead to the long overdue economic collapse. 

To parody Charles Dickens:

“It was the test of times, it was the most trying of times, the age of Trump, the age of foolishness, the epoch of errors, the instances of incredulity, the season of stupidity, the dawn of darkness, the fall of fables, the duration of despair.” 

The task of the Government.

It is the task of all governments is to protect those whom lack the capacity to look after themselves, whether that is through physical impairments, or willful actions. The rich think that the poor are poor because they are lazy and clamor for charity. So, let them be. The ruling cabinet in Washington – whose members are worth a total of 250 Billion – will see to it that they, and their fellow billionaires, will get richer. Proverbs 22: 7 affirms that the rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.

Trump, at Mar-a-Lago, mused: “In the first term, everyone was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend. I don’t know, my personality changed or something”. Those are dangerous words, coming from an ego-maniac, out to punish those who defied him.

“It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says God, as recorded in Hebrew 10: 30.

All signs signal closure: irreversible weather; increasing extinction. Evil reigns. Remember, even though the LIE is fast, in race with TRUTH it comes in last.

Pray for the Lord’s return.

MAN PROPOSES, BUT GOD DISPOSES.

“Man proposes, but God disposes” is a translation of the Latin:  “Homo proponit, sed Deus disponit”.

This well-known proverb played in my mind, when I read an article about AI, Artificial Intelligence, outlining the energy requirements powering this new phenomenon. Now Google and Microsoft are seeking to revive the Three Mile Nuclear Power Station – shut down in 1979 after a nuclear meltdown – to provide for AI’s immense electricity needs. 

Coal, too, is making a comeback: consumption of this ultra-polluting fossil fuel is now on track to rise to a new peak of 8.77bn tonnes by the end of the year – and could remain at near-record levels for years to come: we need electricity to power our toys!

How about Climate Change?

Suddenly, it seems, that Climate Change and Global Heating have been placed on the back burner, even as warming trends and unnatural weather conditions multiply. The fossil fuel industry also has their eyes on roughly three billion people, whose annual energy consumption is equal to only the yearly power use of my refrigerator. There’s a huge market out there, both for electricity use and modern conveniences, such as refrigeration and transportation. That’s how people in the energy industry calculate: they propose, but God, through his creation, has the final Word. Because…..

El Niño comes calling.

El Niño is a complex weather pattern that occurs when surface water in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean becomes warmer than average and easterly winds blow weaker than normal. These events, usually occurring every few years, can cause unusual and sometimes dangerous weather conditions worldwide, including droughts, floods and severe storms. El Niño is an important climatic happening, recognized as a factor of weather change responsible for large and varied detrimental effects. 

Now studies show that for the first time, significant loss of sea ice in the Arctic directly affects global climate extremes, including the increase in the frequency of severe El Niño occurrences. Make it a habit to regularly check ARCTIC NEWS, where climatologists post their weather warnings. It is well-known that temperatures at the Northern and Southern tips have skyrocketed in the past decade, boding ill for all of us, the 8 billion earth dwellers.

For us, even for us, the prosperous few, the news is bad.

Instead of eating a steady diet of high-quality food, we are being fed an endless stream of heavily-processed packaged foods that are loaded with extremely unhealthy filler ingredients such as high fructose corn syrup.

Sadly, many of us are also financially stressed, because the heavily-processed packaged foods are all that many of us can afford, even though, there too, prices have increased significantly.

Humanity, both rich and poor, faces a very dangerous time, exacerbated by the incoming TRUMP rule, blind to the ‘signs of the Times’. God, through his creation is speaking loud and clear, actually, is screaming to us: “Change your ways, live within the means and limits of my world, the cosmos, my first and foremost Love.”

Isaiah 11: 9 comes to mind: the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. Listen to creation’s cries! Make the 4 laws of ecology a staple of life, remembering that:

1. Everything is connected to everything else.

2. Nothing ever disappears.

3. Nature- creation – knows best.

4. Nothing comes free.

Dr. Barry Commoner coined these laws some 60 years ago, and they have stood the test of times. 

Nature is like a human body: a defect there affects our total wellbeing. We live in a closed system, from which there is no escape: carbon fuels, when ignited through our beloved transportation systems, cause GHG – Green House Gases – which heat up the atmosphere. Loving God – a direct command – entails loving his creation. It’s as simple as that. 

We now are faced with paying the ultimate price for our luxurious life. Trump’s Christians – a blasphemy if there ever is one – have so distorted “The Good News”, that total annihilation is facing us.

We have made a choice. 

We have taken the restlessness road to ruin. We have enslaved God for our (temporary) conveniences. We have subjected God’s precious possession – bought back with the Life-blood of his beloved Son (see John 3: 16-17) – to the point where Hell on EARTH has become the only remaining option. 

But God has different plans. The Bible points to the way God disposes: But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare. (2 Peter 3:10).

Yes, “Man proposes, but God disposes”.

OF COURSE, YOU WILL IGNORE THIS. 

DISARRAY EVERYWHERE.

When I, from my perch somewhere in the Western World, with increasing concern and compassion, survey the global scene, then I see disintegration, confusion, turmoil, uncertainty, indecision, restlessness everywhere. 

Examples aplenty. The USA and Trump, his boasts and threats, his egomaniacal character, his disregard for Climate Change, his appointments of deeply controversial people to key positions, assuring only more unease and anarchy, then I know that such global threats as heat, poverty, hunger, drought, will not be on his agenda. In Trump’s cabinet billionaires set the tone: immediate tax relief for them, while deficits soar.

Looking elsewhere, I see Germany politically and economically on the ropes; 

France is no better. I see the Middle East in a momentous muddle, its danger quotient enhanced by the sudden Syria turnover. Who is next? Iran? Saudi Arabia?  The world, vested on regularity and financial order, has been abandoned to hit-and-miss policies, is at a loss what to do, with environmental dangers and threats multiplying, while gold has a ride into the stratosphere. 

Of course, you will ignore this, even though…..

What really disturbed me was a headline on the ARCTIC NEWS website. Have a look. Here’s what you will see:

Did a Terminal Temperature Acceleration event start in December 2024?

Please note “Terminal”. The people who contribute to this website, are trained scientists: they have access to the latest sources and weather statistics. They carefully weigh which words to use.

Well, ‘terminal’ is defined as a condition, signaling the end of something: it also applies todiseases that lead to death, incurable. 

Looking ahead to 2025 and beyond, something often done near the end of a year, it is generally assumed that 2024 was the hottest ever recorded. With signs of increased sunspots activities, with a new El Nino on the way, with polar ice rapidly disappearing, and thus no albedo effect – less ice reflecting sunrays back – the sun heat will be absorbed by the Polar seas, dislodging the methane there, speeding – yes speeding – Global Heat.

Of course, you will ignore this, even though……

Welcome to the new World Disorder.

Welcome to the new World Disorder, and my claim is that this state of affairs while lead to ever greater chaos and an unheard state of unwinding of law and order.

Of course, you will ignore this, because ‘There is no alternative.’

“There is no alternative” (TINA) is a political slogan originally coined by Margaret Thatcher, the PM of UK some 35 years ago.

She claimed that liberal capitalism is the only viable system. Politicians used TINA to justify policies of fiscal conservatism and austerity. 

Now ‘There is no alternative’ to our ‘energy-dependent’ society, so the ‘telos’ the ‘END’ can be predicted with the utmost accuracy.

And then there is another reason: We are losing our reasoning capacity. 

In recent years, an abundance of academic research from institutions including Harvard medical school, the University of Oxford and King’s College London found evidence that the internet is shrinking our grey matter, shortening our attention spans, weakening memory and distorting our cognitive processes. The areas of the brain found to be affected included “attentional capacities, as the constantly evolving stream of online information encourages our divided attention across multiple media sources”, “memory processes” and “social cognition”.

All this brings me to “The Second Coming”, a poem written by Irish poet William Butler Yeats in 1919, influenced by the carnage of World War I (1914-18) and the Spanish Flu, which killed some 30 million people, often the young adults.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Of course, you will ignore this, because ‘There is no alternative.’

John the Baptizer comes to mind: “Prepare the way of the Lord”. Are we doing that, willy-nilly? 

A LONGTERM TREND IS COMING TO AN END.

Ah, we live in interesting times!

I know it is a Chinese curse, but still, from my perch in rural Eastern Ontario, midway between Canada’s two capitals, Toronto, its financial hub, and Ottawa its political place, matters look quite composed. The local Tim Horton always has a full parking lot. A new small coffee shop, smack in the centre of the village, does good business. Slowly ‘foreigners’ are finding their footing on our main street, with a Vietnamese running a successful new pharmacy, and a man from Trinidad reviving an auto-repair shop quite handily. So, yes, locally no complains. 

Churches? 

Not so rosy. While the local population is steadily increasing, and new housing and apartments are rapidly filling up, with the decline of mainstream religion in many parts of the world, all sorts of human needs – community, meaning – are being left unmet. It reminds me of one of my favorite Bible books, Amos. There I read, “The days are coming,” declares the Sovereign LORD, “when I will send a famine through the land— not a famine of food or a thirst for water, but a famine of hearing the words of the LORD.” 

Oh, yes, the Bible is still omnipresent. That’s not the problem: the problem is that the Word of God itself is a Trinity: (1) Creation, God’s manifest Word, (2) Christ, God’s Word become human, and (3) the Scriptures. The first two are from eternity to eternity: the last one, the Bible, will disappear in line with the fading church, as ‘religion’ is replaced with a way of life, in tune with creation. 

Trump, a passing problem.

The looming Trump administration will have a short life-span, as it adheres to an outdated premise, a mode of living based on Infinite World Resources.

It seems to me we are now experiencing the ‘stillness before the storm’. Next year looms, and, while weather volatility is certain to magnify, the US new regime is ignoring the cries of creation, where also monetary deficits are slated to soar. The US DEBT clock stands at an all-time high: debt per citizen close to $107,000, as the national – Washington- induced debt exceeds $36 Trillion. That means that the average family of 4.2 is responsible for close to $500,000 in National Debt, not counting mortgage, credit card and personal monetary obligations.

Cookie Jar.

I compare the world’s total resources – air, water, soil – of being contained in a simple jar, full of goodies, such as cookies, but the freshly baked delicacies are gone, and, what is left, are the crumbs, some still quite sizeable. With demand still growing, and supplies diminishing, the fight for the remainder will become intense. FIGHTS? Yes wars, all wars, are for natural resources, now also centering on foodstuff. 

Coffee, for instance. Or oranges.

Your morning – and afternoon – coffee is the latest staple threatened by climate chaos: the price of quality arabica beans shot to its highest level in half a century last week amid fears of a poor harvest in Brazil. It follows warnings that orange crops have been wiped out by the catastrophic floods in Valencia, Spain; and then there is the soaring cost of olive oil in recent years, as the southern Mediterranean has sweltered. In southern Africa drought has deprived the simple folk there of their basic staple: corn.

The messy Middle East.

It seems to me that, as civilization started in the Middle East, it also might end there. Once the presumed site of The Garden of Eden, Paradise, the reigns of Persian Emperors, its prominence has long been lost due to extreme exploitation.  Where, at one time a person could walk along Africa’s north shore entirely in the shade of towering trees, from Morocco, on the Atlantic to Syria on the Mediterranean, all these regions have turned into arid deserts. At one time the Sahara was fertile land, with savannahs supporting an abundance of wild life: now 70 percent of large animals are gone.

THIS LONGTERM TREND IS COMING TO AN END.

This phenomenon has become true for much of the fauna and flora. We, humans, are next in line, with the USA, as usual, leading the way, thanks to Trump’s triumphant victory. However, his feat leads to nature’s defeat, a form of vengeance, Holy Vengeance, I should add.

Debts and Death.

The problem with debt is that it has a deadline, is due at a certain date. That also holds true for environmental debt. Debt and Death are similar: both are unavoidable and spell trouble in the form of drastic curtailment of commercial and financial activities. 

I see a similarity between the desert-creating process during the preceding 10,000 years there, and the current Oil-exploitation there, causing the entire world to suffer fatal heat. This long-term danger has now become immediate. 

Be Prepared.

WISDOM AND LOVE.

There is one line in Dr. Sabine Dramm’s book that keeps me awake at night. She thoroughly analysed Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s thoughts, and her final conclusion was:

What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one, and the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God.

I am not a very analytic person. It has taken me a long time to grasp the meaning of this sentence. The first part is plain to me: God and the world are one. That is a tremendous leap. Just imagine: God is identical to his creation.

 I imagine, I could compare God and Creation to Johann Sebastian Bach and his music. Perhaps as a person, Bach was not the most pleasant of man: quarreled easily, very opiniated, but his music is still unequalled. I believe it was Sir Ernest MacMillan who wrote a biography on Bach, based entirely on his musical oeuvre. 

But God is beyond understanding, that’s why we have Creation and God’s mandate to love it, and treasure it. The well-known text: The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Wisdom, comes to mind. I interpret this as “Being in awe of Creation is the onset of Understanding its Maker”.

But.

We, 21^st world citizens, have exploited natural resources for our exclusive benefit: sinning against Creation is sinning against God. 

Dramm continues”: “the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and in turn proceeds from this world back again to God.” 

What does this mean? 

My thought: God is the origin of all life and it is our task in life to acknowledge this and honor God as the creator, and, I may add, to love creation as God did: by sacrificing his Son, God bought Creation back with his blood.

Dr. Dramm is not alone. There also is Dr. J. H. Bavinck.

Yes, my sleep is haunted by another line, found in another book that makes me tremble. It is written by Bavinck: Its title is, “Between the Beginning and the End”, subtitled: A Radical Kingdom Vision. This Mission Professor says: “The Central Point of the Gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering, rather, its entire focus is that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom… There is no such thing as individual salvation: salvation of the person and salvation of creation go hand in hand.”

In other words, it’s not Me and God: it is Me and God and Creation: I repeat: salvation of the person and salvation of Creation go hand in hand. It is in Creation where we will spend eternity: that ‘salvation LIFE’, starts now. Jesus did not only die for our sins: Jesus – see John 10: 10 – brought us LIFE and that to the full. There’s where WISDOM starts!

Global Heating.

The implications of Romans 7: 19 suddenly dawned on me: For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. 

Society, at large, has placed me in a straitjacket: no matter what I do, my actions affect creation, that’s why we all will suffer the consequences of our sins against Creation, sins against the Creator.

God created this world with built-in defense mechanisms. God often punishes us through Creation, as is evident from the 10 plagues in Egypt, before the Israel Exodus: water turning to blood, frogs, lice, flies, livestock pestilence, boils, hail, locusts, darkness, and the killing of all firstborn of humans and cattle, all punishments ‘creation-oriented’.  When Israel as a nation, turned to idols, drought resulted.

Thanks to our fossil fuel consumption, the average global temperature anomaly for the first 10 months of 2024 (January to October) is 0.71°C above the 1991-2020 average, which is the highest on record for this period and 0.16°C warmer than the same period in 2023. This year is almost certain to be the hottest ever recorded globally, with floods and heatwaves roiling the climate crisis, wrecking harvests by extreme weather, unpredictable rains, and driving up food prices.

How will 2025 be? 

Permafrost thaws across the globe are destroying housing and infrastructure, and disrupting ecosystems. These slumps are also harbingers of a cascading environmental catastrophe: there is twice as much carbon locked up in permafrost as in the atmosphere. But the Trump regime ignores all this: Trump and ‘his Christians’, deeply influenced by Rapture and disdain for the earth, are totally ignoring God’s ultimate LOVE for his creation.

Heed the teaching of the TWO WISE MEN: God’s foremost love is for his creation: love what God loves, and have eternal life.