Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

May 25 2022

THE FOUR GALLOPING HORSES.

The last Bible book, Revelation, is big on horses: horses of different colors, white, black, red, pale. They are feared because they foreshadow the last days of the world we live in, and warn us that before the end comes, terrible disasters will take place. That’s why these four horses are called apocalyptic. Their different colors, too, have different meanings, and warn us that The End is near, almost always totally ignored by us.

THE WHITE HORSE

The first horse is white, and the rider carries a bow and arrow, and wears a crown. White indicates ‘holiness’. That’s why the Pope’s official attire is white. The Pope, just like this horse, is charged to bring the Good News, and the arrow to me suggests that, in the last days, the bringing of the gospel resembles the random shooting of an arrow, which yet finds its intended target, something that happens when we browse the World-Wide-Web. 

THE RED HORSE

The book of Revelation does not see the rider on his red horse as a normal phenomenon, not as something that belongs to the usual course of events. Here God himself dispatches this rider, as he starts his journey from the heavens.  The Red Horse has the mandate to “take peace from the earth.” (See Revelation 6: 4). It indicates that God’s no longer restrains the forces by which humanity will destroy itself. 

Wars have a tendency to spread. We already see that the war in Ukraine has become a world war, as many nations are directly involved in supplying weapons to that beleaguered country. This also means that OUR WAR AGAINST CREATION, is pushed from the headlines, as hot wars intensify this conflict, making climatic disasters grow worse, and excessive heat, historic drought, floods, unheard-of storms become the norm. All these, too, are part of the Red Horse curse.

THE BLACK HORSE

After the red horse always come the black horse. War always brings scarcity, so prices always go up. A war sucks out so much raw materials for destructive purposes that shortages are the inevitable result. Today’s inflation is only the beginning. While the Environmental War greatly diminishes yields, causing hunger, hot wars, with the two-fold disasters of destruction and the need to manufacture war materials, always accelerates the price of goods.

THE PALE HORSE.

The Pale Horse represents death, pure and simple, magnified by the likelihood of more pandemics, overtaxing an already stressed medical system. 

A LOOK BACK.

Of course, wars, weather events, terrible pandemics, have been the makers of history. But then, these happenings – the ‘Calamitous 14^th Century’ comes to mind – were more or less regional, occurring before the Americas, Africa and Australia were discovered, and before the world population ballooned from millions to billions in my lifetime. Today all events are global and totally intertwined: that too, indicates the End.

For all the efforts of various activists, and promises by governments to restrain dangerous global heating, carbon emissions leapt world-wide last year as we reverted back to the polluting status quo before Covid lockdowns. Wildfires are now a year-round menace to the US west and especially to Siberia. Last week Friday, May 20, it was 51C in Pakistan, while India baked in such extreme, record heat that dozens of people died and birds were falling from the sky. And the real heat has yet to come!

ARCTIC NEWS regularly points out that: once the buried methane in the shallow Arctic Ocean is released, a sudden flareup will cause total global death.

As the food “apocalypse” approaches, the poorest peoples will suffer, as they always do, while we, in the wealthiest part of the world, may be insulated for a little while longer. When, not if, that happens, we will see extreme political turbulence, humanitarian crises, instability and geo-strategic rivalries across a hungry world. Already the USA is a deeply divided country, where LIE and Political Untruth is rampant, where guns abound, steroid deaths are skyrocketing, and, in general, the mood is bordering on desperation.

Of course.

Natural disasters and the human condition go hand in hand. Religious thinking is totally opposite of biblical givens: Rapture and Heaven feature prominently in the ecclesiastical world. Churches are pre-occupied with abortion and related issues, while Christ’ return to reclaim creation as his own, is ridiculed as heresy.

In all this, the words of Revelation 18: 10-17, will come as a total surprise: “In one hour your doom has come……….in one hour such great wealth has been brought to ruin.” This passage signals STAGFLATION, now expected to happen, before the sudden end. That great wealth is concentrated in North America and Western Europe! It points to us, you and me.

The Parousia, the Lord’s Coming, will come as a total surprise: no advance notice: only the signs, now everywhere.

May 18 2022

WHERE IS GOD?

“Where is God?”, Jesus wondered when he was dying. “Where is God”, people ask, when they see a senseless war in Eastern Europe. “Where is God”, we wondered, when the future of the most talented people was cut short in the Holocaust? “Where is God”, is today the perennial question for us, the dreading disaster, living in fear, humanity?

I could also ask: Where is Bach and his music, or where is Rembrandt and his paintings, or where is Shakespeare and his plays? We would have never heard of these marvelous creators if they had lived their lives in Leipzig or Amsterdam of London and had not been given their abilities free reign. They did, and the world is richer because of their works of art. 

So, what has all this to do with God?

Simple. God would not be there without his creation. No Matthew Passion without Bach. No King Lear without Shakespeare. No God without Creation. Why then, I ask, why do we not honor God the same way? We pay untold many millions for a Rembrandt. Bach is still the standard by which all music is judged. But God, His creation, His marvelous act of making this world, still, the subject of all our investigations, and the basis of all that lives and moves, and has a being, what have we done with it? That is the ultimate question facing us to day.

Where is God? 

“I shall hide my face, to see what their end will be,” says Deuteronomy 32: 20. God has disappeared on the corporate level. 1John 5:19 tells it all: The Evil One reigns, and his aim is to destroy creation, even though God is still there for you and me. 

And the Bible?

We call the Bible Holy, but my reading how the different books in the Hebrew Bible, and their origins create many questions about when and where and how and who wrote the different books, makes the holiness of the Bible a question. That does not mean that I value the Scriptures less, but it does mean that these inspired books are infused with human thoughts and their inconsistencies. But creation is – was – perfect.

Where is 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. Secondly, he makes himself more clearly and fully known to us by his holy and divine Word, that is to say, as far as is necessary for us to know in this life, to his glory and our salvation.

So, what does Romans 1: 20 say?

 For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse:

The above is a direct quote from the Belgic Confession, a standard of many Reformed Churches.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer has drawn the logical conclusion, as summarized by Dr. Sabine Dramm, in her book, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an introduction to his thought. 

Her conclusion is, actually, quite striking: “What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one.”

This is fully in line with Romans 1: 20, That’s why Revelation 11 is a direct condemnation of our generation, the 21^st people. Here’s what it says:

The time has come for judging the dead,
and for destroying those who destroy the earth.”

The time has come for destroying those who have been “Destroying the earth”. That is a clear indication that destroying the earth is an unforgivable sin, unless we confess and change our ways. We have to admit to ourselves that creation is holy, is akin to God, something the indigenous people have always regarded as such. We have to believe that Jesus died to restore creation to the state before Adam and Eve fell for Satan’s wiles. Of course, he also died to forgive our sin.

We must constantly, without letup, see that the world and all it contains, plants, animals, trees, stars, sun and moon, air and oceans, is of divine origin, and reflects God’s wisdom and unfathomable greatness. 

Where is God?

We find him in Creation, just as we find Bach in his music, Shakespeare in his plays. Creation is our final destination. Its renewal is at hand.

May 11 2022

EYES HAVE THEY, BUT……

I love the Tweed Library. It is new, it is spacious, the staff is superb: I can order any book not among its extensive volumes. I can read the periodicals to which I don’t subscribe and that’s how my eye fell upon the extra issue of MacLean’s with the bold – too bold- prediction, THE YEAR AHEAD, 2 0 2 2.

Predictions are ‘dictions’ or ‘sayings’, foretelling happenings before they occur. A risky game. We take ‘Weather’ forecasts or predictions with a grain of good humor, yet we consult them every day. Insurance Companies always have high salary actuaries, who project, after complicated computer calculations, the chance of this or that to happen. A risky game.

Oh yes, MacLean’s was basically on the ball with the obvious: weather, inflation, but with a few weeks into 2022, the Ukraine Affair messed it all up, totally: Putin spoiled all predictions! 

Gone is optimism. Gone is stability. Gone is, sad to say, the future. We live in the NOW, afraid for tomorrow. We have become a deeply pessimistic people, who feel alone, marginalized, hopeless, who believe our families face a dark future. For the first time, the significant majority of us feels our children will not be better off than we are. 

Is that really the case? Yes.

I believe that writers, poets, artists in general, are better ‘forecasters’ than computer-inspired projectors. Books, where pandemics wipe out, where nuclear bombs wipe out, where natural disasters wipe out, are on the best-seller lists. Doom and gloom are in.

Take Emily St John Mandel, who wrote on series on how people cope after emerging from the wreckage of a world-wide upheaval: both in Station 11 and Sea of Tranquility people are trying to rebuild after a flu has decimated the world’s population. Even traveling to and occupying the moon enters the picture. 

The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. The book details the grueling journey of a father and his young son, after global calamity.

Then there is Kim Stanley Robinson and his The Ministry of the Future in which he outlines the challenges facing our planet.

All writers are great in describing the terrible consequences of our lifestyle, especially Elizabeth Kolbert in her The Sixth Extinction.

But we need Seers!

Seers? What are they? Seers are visionaries. The Bible is full of them. They were called ‘seers’ not because they could see into the future, but because they could see the truth, could understand the deeper meaning of life and have a holistic view on events. In other words, seers do not major in minors, but grasp the true consequences of the day’s happenings, and the deeper spiritual message of the present moment.

A seer sheds unblinking light on the pain and injustices of the present. By doing so he or she links heeding to hearing and action to understanding.

Thus, a seer is not an extraordinary gifted person who knows the unknown, a sort of fortune-teller who magically foretells what is to come. No, a seer is first and foremost a believer who refuses to nostalgically wallow in the past, but is convinced that a new coming age requires new thinking and different approaches.

A seer is first and foremost a believer who openly and unabashedly dares to look at what is happening ‘out there’ and, as a consequence, rings the alarm bells: the End is near.

A seer is first and foremost a believer who from his or her perspective on contemporary life dares to look to the future where, through our relentless creational abuse, a sudden spike in temperature, will wipe out all that lives.

A seer is first and foremost a believer who by seeing Scripture as a lamp for their feet and a light for their path in God’s wonderful creation, knows that Christ, as the Son of Man, the Ben-Adam, the Son of the Soil, will return to make all things new. That’s why a seer, in spite of all the sin and evil in this world, looks to the future with full confidence.

A seer is first and foremost a believer who now already can visualize what this future will be like and thus can critically evaluate the present in the light of the glorious future that is coming, as Isaiah told us, a future, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart has conceived, that is what the Lord has prepared for those who love him and his creation.”

The harm we have done to creation is irreparable, dooming all that lives. That’s why God, in his grace, and Jesus by his sacrifice, will soon wipe out the old system and bring in a new system, populated by people who have learned how to live eternally. 

We all have eyes, but only the biblical seers, see.

May 4 2022

HEAVEN AND HELL.

Every May I am reminded of May 1945, when my city, Groningen, the Netherlands, was freed from German occupation, after a battle that destroyed a major portion of its historic centre. On May 5 1945, a peace-deal was signed, changing ‘5 years of hell’ to ‘heaven’: a despotic and cruel regime replaced with a viable democracy, and a new future.

However, this week’s theme of ‘Heaven and Hell’ deals not with heaven in contemporary terms, or hell experienced in many places, but concerns the eternal state, expressed in biblical concepts. Today’s ‘heaven concept’ is colored by ancient Greek mythologies, forever living in the presence of gods, while hell is seen as their absence. Both are ideas derived from a “meme“.

A ”meme”?

A ‘meme’ is a small unit of information that can easily move from one human mind to another. It is the virtual equivalent of a virus in the sense that it “infects” people and influences their behavior. “Heaven” is a good example. The idea that we, upon death, join God in heaven, is so ingrained in church and society, that it has become a ‘meme’, a fact without any foundation. 

When Jesus had a conversation with that aristocratic theologian, Nicodemus (who later lent his own grave-sepulchre for Christ’ burial), Jesus told him that ‘nobody has ever gone to heaven, except the one who come from there, the Son of Man.” Yet, the notion of ‘joining one’s loved ones in Heaven’, reigns supreme.

That same chapter (John 3) also tells me that, “God loved the cosmos (the world we live in) so much that he allowed his Son to be the sacrificial Lamb to buy it back from the Devil”. 

That’s why our humble earth is and forever will be our home.

I have experienced this ‘meme’ theme in real life. For 10 years I wrote a weekly column for a daily newspaper. My editor liked my writings, but the publisher did not, because I often was critical of religion, and he was a devout Roman Catholic. When I wrote that the greatest win Satan ever scored, occurred when the church adopted ‘heaven’ as the saints’ ultimate destination: that was the last straw, and he terminated my tenure.

The Presbyterian Record once published an article in which I explained my ‘heaven’ views. In a subsequent issue, ‘a letter to the editor’ called me ‘a heretic’. 

Heaven is an easy sell.

Of course, heaven is an easy sell: regarding Creation as HOLY and live accordingly, is difficult and clashes with our ruling religion, Capitalism, now the very source of our climatic ills.

I hardly ever watch TV, but somehow, I did see Larry King interview Billy Graham. In it, Larry asked: “Tell me, Billy, what happens when you die?” Billy: “Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God.” 

The famous Billy, still Christianity’s leading light, conveniently forgot 1Timothy 6: 16, “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody has seen or can see.”  Yet the belief that we go to heaven when we die, has so penetrated secular and religious thinking, that, I believe, “Climate Change” can be directly traced to this erroneous belief: “Why care for the earth when we leave it anyway?” Had the church insisted on Earth’s Holiness, Global Heating may not have taken place.

And that brings me to HELL.

If Heaven is not our destination, where does that leave HELL?

That is a tricky question. Jesus mentions it, so, yes, there is such a concept as ‘hell’. Where is it? It reminds me of 1 Samuel 28 where King Saul consults a medium, the Witch of Endor, who saw a Spirit coming out of the ground, Samuel, the priest. 

This makes me suppose that, after death, the Spirit lives on, either awaiting full life in the Lord, or facing hell with personal recollections where ‘in the spirit’, our flagrant sins committed against God’s creation and God’s creatures, are recalled. It makes the PURGATORY premise more plausible. This period, asleep as Jesus calls it, also gives us time to reflect. To a Hitler and a Stalin, this entails a constant review of the innocents killed by their actions, for others to become what they are: ready for the New Creation.

In short: heaven is being with Christ on this earth, living and experiencing LIFE TO THE FULL, as Jesus taught us in John 10: 10, “I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full. Going to heaven is a take-off from Greek paganistic thinking, modeled on Socrates and Plato, while hell takes its cue from the Greek ‘Hades’ concept. While Hell could well be a painful reliving of one’s life, in isolation, and varying in severity for each person.

April 27 2022

TIME IS RUNNING OUT.

Ugo Bardi, a chemistry professor in Florence, Italy, UC Berkeley trained, member of the Club of Rome, last week, wrote:

“The Roman Philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca lived in difficult times, not unlike ours. Then, as now, a Great Empire was starting to follow a road that would eventually lead to its final collapse. That was clear for those who could see beyond the veil of lies that pervaded everything, then as now. 

Seneca could never really face the ultimate consequences of what he was seeing, but sometimes he peered into the future, and he saw a better world that was to come. In his “De Ira” (about rage), Seneca wrote “Dandum semper est tempus: veritatem dies aperit.” (There is always time, and the days disclose the truth). 

Seneca was also a contemporary of Jesus Christ. It is likely that neither knew of each other, but they shared one thing: the need for truth. Christ went beyond Seneca when he said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Seneca was still a man of the past: Christ was the future. 

There will be a moment when the mass of lies that surround us will collapse and fade away. On the day of resurrection, the day of Easter in Christianity, truth is revealed, and we might discover that it was always in front of us.” 

Writing is deleting.

In my weekly writing, I always make a lot of changes, both in the heading and in my script. I once read that “writing is scratching”. In our new days ‘writing is deleting’, something that cannot be done when translating from Dutch to English, of which I have done a lot.

 I translated three books by Johan Herman Bavinck, a professor of Missions at the Free University in Amsterdam.

Here is a passage from his book on REVELATION, the Bible’s last book in which our very own situation is described. The book ends with ‘The arrival of the New heavens and the New Earth.”  Here is a passage that points to today’s INFLATION.

Immediately after the second horse, right after the breaking of the third seal, the rider of the black horse arrives. About his intention we too need not dwell in ignorance. Its rider carries in his hands a scale, and while he proceeds, there is a voice that says: “A quart of wheat for a day’s wages and three quarts of barley for a day’s wages.” Both that scale and these words signify poverty, hunger and inflation. Money loses its value and the costs of the normal daily needs go higher and higher. A quart of wheat was about what one person needed to stay alive, which meant that a laborer by working could only earn enough to keep himself from starving, but not his family. 

Yes, I do believe that TIME IS RUNNING OUT: we live in apocalyptic times.

Apocalyptic times.

There’s no doubt that a prolonged war in Ukraine will sap Russia’s manpower and matériel, while sanctions will throw the nation into an economic depression and undermine its ability to produce more precision-guided munitions and conventional arms. As this war and its consequences slowly weaken Russian conventional strength, Russia likely will increasingly rely on its nuclear deterrent to signal the West and project strength to its internal and external audiences.” Putin’s aggression is “reviving fears” of a more “militaristic Russia.”

Today there is a great deal of apocalyptic writing. The word ‘apocalyptic’ means ‘revelation’. The overriding theme of the biblical book Revelation, is that ‘everything becomes what it is.’ There are three current phenomena that reinforce this symptom: “Climate Change”, “The war that ends life on earth”. People understand that we could lose everything, that climate could change everything, that nuclear war could end everything, that a “Pandemic” also could end everything. And yet, it seems impossible to act.

Gail Tverberg, an astute actuary, in her latest blog on Our Finite Earth, ends with: “It becomes clear that many of us will not live as long or well as we previously expected, regardless of savings or supposed government programs. There is no real way to fix this issue (of running out of fuel), except perhaps to make religion and the possibility of life after death more of a focus.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been a beacon of light in my life. He taught me to see life from the perspective of eternity. He called himself an Anthropos Teleios, (Matthew 5:48), a human being always keeping the ultimate END in mind. I, with my whole heart, believe in a New Earth under a New Heaven. That prospect is always on my mind and evident in my actions. Joyfully, every morning, I wake up and thank the Lord that I am a day closer to the Parousia, the Day of the Lord. Yes, TIME IS RUNNING OUT.

APRIL 20 2022

THE PUTIN PUZZLE.

We see his face everywhere: no smile, conventionally dressed: just an ordinary bloke, clean shaven, no beard, no mustache: Joe Doe in person, and small at that. Meet him on the street, and you wouldn’t give him a second glance. 

Yet in his hands lies the fate of the world. He, and he alone, started the war in Ukraine. Why? A small man with big ambitions? The restorer of the Great Russian Empire? If that his goal, he’s off to a bad start, with possibly ominous consequences. 

A strange man, this Putin. He is often portrayed sitting at one end of a huge 10+ meter narrow table, isolated and alone: brooding, solitary, afraid of intimacy, afraid of being afraid, always right, always correct, always decisive. 

Will history repeat itself?

I am reading Barbara Tuchman’s classic, The Guns of August, describing in minute detail how World War I unfolded and how especially the English agonized before committing themselves to war, then expected to last a few months. Now many historians assume that this conflict was only concluded 31 years later, in May 1945 with Hitler’s suicide in Berlin.

I am reading this book with fast-rising feelings of foreboding: is it possible that we are facing another world war? The war to end all wars? Will it coincide with our war against Creation?

For a long time, I have postulated that we, the human race, are fighting God through killing creation, taking in stride the floods, the heat, the hurricanes, the forest fires. I also think that battling God’s earth is mentally preparing us for worse conditions to come, as the hot war in Ukraine may soon engulf the entire world, just as the Spanish Civil War in 1936-39 was a prelude to World War II.

I am afraid, sore afraid, that Putin is the personification of evil: doesn’t laugh, doesn’t scold, shows no emotion, shows no feelings.

The opposite of Jesus.

We read how Jesus wept. We read how Jesus loved. We read how Jesus is portrayed by his opponents as a glutton and winebibber, because he enjoyed the fruits of the earth; he also openly defied temple rules and religious ordinances. Jesus taught us to live, and that to the full.

And Putin?  

He reminds me of a little poem:

“Whenever God erects a house of prayer           

The Devil builds a chapel there;                                 

And ‘twill be found upon examination                

The latter has the largest congregation.”

                                             Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman.

Here’s a line I never expected to write: much of what is seen as Christian has become the opposite: The Russian Orthodox Church fully endorses Putin; The American Southern Baptist and many Roman Catholics fully agree with Donald Trump; The Brazilian largest Protestant segment, Pentecostalism, is fully behind Bolsonaro, the destroyer of the Amazon.

Poor man. Putin is on his own and consumed by the past, trained and shaped as an agent of the Soviet Secret Police, he acts not on facts but on fiction, not on proof but on fabrication and suspicion.

What’s wrong?

What is there in contemporary Christianity that thwarts humanity’s attempts to find itself? Just as Psalm 2 portrays God laughing in heaven at the feeble attempts of earthly rulers to rule, so Satan wherever he is, is delighted at the twisted situation the church finds itself in, as the greater mass of church goers has elevated Christianity to a ‘religion’, as if formality, church attendance, and vicarious confessions can redeem us.  

Putting Putin’s position in perspective is placing Capitalism also on the weigh scale. Capitalism may have a more benign appearance, but its true face is becoming more evident each day through so-called natural disasters.

I wonder, is American Capitalism, in which we all are enmeshed, any better than Putin’s pledge to pursue the ancient Greater Russian Dream? Aren’t both the American and the Russian aims the same: Creative Destruction of the Planet? 

True, Putin embodies the Devil at its worst, but Capitalism embodies the Devil at its most insidious: under the cloak of a blessing, both systems abuse organized Religion for their own ends.

The Putin Puzzle solved.

Where Jesus wants us to be fully human, Putin is the total antithesis. I am inclined to think that the Putin – Trump – Bolsonaro triumvirate – fully endorsed by much of the ecclesiastical establishment – represent the Trinitarian Anti-Christ.

Just as religion in Jesus’ days, killed him, today the embodiment of these three politicians, in league with their denominations, is killing creation, is, in essence, killing the Creator by being true lackeys of The Evil One, whom Jesus called, The Prince of the World. 1 John 5: 19 confirms this, “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the Evil One.”