Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

DOES THE BIBLE PREDICT CLIMATE CHANGE?

Can the Bible tell us what will happen in the weather? Yes. I sincerely believe that The Abomination that causes Desolation refers to today’s atmospheric conditions. The phrase appears in Daniel in the Old Testament, and Jesus quotes it in that terrible 24^th Chapter of the book of Matthew, where the Christ looks ahead to the very days we live in, the year of the Lord 2021. 

What is the significance of these words: Abomination” and “Desolation”?

‘Abomination’ means ‘a terrible, criminal act’, something that goes against all normally acceptable conduct. The Holocaust is an example of such an event. Desolation too has purely negative overtones: its literary meaning is, “God forsaken”. A desert is an example of desolation, or the scenery after an earthquake, or the devastation caused by a hurricane, flood or tornado. Also, both abomination and desolation, point to our agricultural practises based on (oil-based) fertilizer and pesticides, poisoning the soil in the process, our clearcutting the forests, and our ravaging the seas with bottom-scraping devices: all that too fits the bill of ‘The Abomination that causes Desolation”.

There’s no doubt in my mind that “The Abomination that causes Desolation” of which the Bible speaks twice, applies to our place and our time. The little aside – let the reader be aware – means that only when it actually happens, do we recognize it. In addition, because of the world-wide forest fires, “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give light”: that too is happening right now where I am living, another quote from that same Matthew 24 chapter. 

What this really means is that “We live in the last phase before Christ returns, the beginning of incalculable disasters.”

We, the humans of the 21^st Century, face a lot of challenges, both physically and spiritually. Physically our lives in society are threatened constantly by yielding to the factory-prepared so-called foods, laden with sugar and preservatives, and the meat products which require a lot of cereals and carbon-rich fuels before they are ready for table use. A recent study by the Rockefeller Foundation outlines how the true cost of our food is three times the price we pay in the grocery stores. The real cost is now visiting us in the form of climate disasters.

“We are what we eat”. 

Basically, this means that we eat oil, and we now realize that oil is not good for our well-being, to say the least. That is not the only obstacle to good health: our bodies also are ‘oil-driven’:  we have become lazy: ‘use it or lose it’, is a well-worn wisdom, which we fail to implement in our own lives. Spiritually the entire commercial world – including the church – is basking in false optimism and refuses to face the ultimate consequences of our blasphemous lives.

Spiritual and physical fitness is needed to weather the continuing onslaught.

I walk 0ne Full Hour every day: Every Day. Walking has been clinically proven to not only energize our life and limbs, but also to tickle the brain and make it to retain its memory and thinking capability: mere walking. I’ve read somewhere that everyone of us has continuously two free personal health assistants available: our left leg, and our right leg. 

I almost always walk on the Canada Trail which runs through the centre of my village, the old CPR train track. Once outside the built-up area it’s like ‘forest bathing’, perfectly accessible to all its inhabitants. But walking does not seem a Tweed habit: running ATVs is: for every one walker on the trail, I meet 5-10 of these motorized 4 wheelers, noisy, heavily polluting, dust-causing, exercise-preventing contraptions, truly Satan-Inspired. That’s why I have very little hope for the population at large to adopt creation-saving ways.              

Oh, the Trees! 

When trees die—by natural processes, by fire, at the hands of humans— they release into the atmosphere the carbon stored within them, sometimes for as long as centuries. In this way, they are like coal. That’s why the effect of wildfires on emissions is among the most feared climate feedback loops. Today, this very hour, the world’s forests, which have typically been carbon sinks, are now cruel carbon sources, unleashing all that stored Carbon Dioxide that causes the heating of our planet.

We see dramatic pictures of the fires in North America every day. What we don’t see are those in Siberia and other remote regions, ten times as disastrous. We all are banking on the Amazon region to remedy our addiction: false hope, because they now emit more carbon than they absorb, thanks to Brazil’s “Christian” president. It used to be that the trees of the Amazon took in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet’s forests each year. But since 2018, when Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil, he promised to open the rain forest to development—which is to say, deforestation. How much damage can one person do to the planet? A group of Brazilian scientists has now estimated that between 2021 and 2030, Bolsonaro’s deforestation would release the equivalent of 13.12 gigatons of carbon. Last year, the United States emitted about 5 gigatons. This means that this one policy would have between two and three times the annual carbon impact of the entire American economy, with all of its airplanes and automobiles and coal plants. 

The world’s worst emitter, by far, is China; the country was responsible for 9.1 gigatons of emissions in 2020. This means Bolsonaro’s policy is the equivalent of adding a whole second China to the planet’s fossil fuel problem. No, believe me, there will never be an end to Climate Change ever: it will get worse ever faster.

There is a public health impact as well: every square kilometer of deforestation produces twenty-seven additional cases of malaria, thanks to what is called “vector proliferation”—when the trees are cleared out, the bugs move in, and a new pandemic explodes.

What must we do? 

Prepare and pray. Expect an enormous earthquake! It is mentioned not only in Matthew 24 (Read it aloud!) but in numerous places in the Hebrew Bible as well. Follow the Old Testament regulation of ATONEMENT. Leviticus 16: 34 prescribes the procedure, “This is to be a lasting ordinance for you: Atonement is to be made once a year for all the sins of the people”.

No generation in the entire history of the world has sinned more than ours, affecting the very essence of God, atonement not once a year, but every day and every week amidst God’s people.  

The disasters will simply multiply: James Lovelock called one of his books, The Revenge of Gaia. Bonhoeffer states that God and creation are synonymous: hurting creation, exploiting it, is a direct confrontation with God. Malachi, the last chapter in the Hebrew Bible simply says, “The Day of the Lord will burn like a furnace”. 

Back to Matthew 24 where Jesus displays his usual bluntness when he says, “For then there will be a great tribulation, such as has not occurred since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will. Unless those days had been cut short, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short”. 

For the sake of the elect……Romans 8: 18 has something to say there, “The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed………We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pain of childbirth. We wait eagerly for our adoption… for in that hope we are saved.”

Can we use the Bible to tell what is in store for us today? Yes, a definite YES.

DEPRESSING

Last week I left my rural location, midway between Ottawa and Toronto, for the first time this year, and, thanks to my oldest daughter and her husband, who almost every week come to visit for a few days, I was motored to their home in New Hamburg, just west of Kitchener via the 401, to celebrate the 3d birthday of a great-grandson.

What a contrast!! A different world on the way! Endless streams of trucks in both directions made me wonder how we can ever change to a cosmos-enhancing society. Electrify all these highway monsters? Will we ever be able to produce and buy locally, rather than depend on China and ‘just in time production’?

On a cheerful note: on the way we visited their son’s, my grandson’s workshop, in an abandoned abattoir downtown Toronto, where he, an arborist, and his team recycle Toronto’s fallen trees to craft beautifully creative furniture for a new hotel nearby and the University of Toronto.

The car trip there, depressing, the visit uplifting.

Contrast this with times gone past.

Can we ever go back? I was born in 1928, the year before the Great Depression. In the ensuing 9 decades of my life, the world population soared from two billion to close to eight billion. During that time, I have witnessed and been initially an active, and later a reluctant participant in changing my earth from a flourishing planet to one now very close to death. May the Lord forgive me my collaboration in this development: my bouts of depressive feelings originate there.

Where the ‘old times’ better?

I have seen how a sustainable way is possible. I clearly remember my two grandfathers, both born in 1870, both also elders in the same village church, the center of life in those days, where, apart from church activities, the village also hosted an interdenominational brass band, choirs and poetry reading clubs, and thereby bolstered a stable marriage atmosphere, as courting couples knew the ins and outs of their families – and in general people created social bonds far beyond religion. 

My grandparents lived sustainable lives, did without electricity, automobiles and radio. One had a mixed farm, the cash income coming from a dozen or so hand-milked cows, while some extra funds were gained from raising chickens whose eggs my other grandfather, a small grocer, exchanged for coffee, tea and sugar.

Hard work and simple lives.

I know, life involved a lot of drudgery work, cleaning out the cow manure, pumping the water, tending the garden, slaughtering the annual pig, daily hauling the milk to the pick-up point, gathering the cereal crops, all by hand: scythe the stalks, bind the sheaves, later haul it all to a central threshing machine: all back-breaking work, yet sustainable. People then knew how to read the weather, depended squarely on the Lord’s blessing and confessed that openly.

In my lifetime all this has changed. You know it; I know it: each of us now has One Hundred energy slaves at our beck and call, allowing us to ….no, I don’t have to spell out what we have done and can do! Neither do I have to repeat that, in my life-time, I and my 500 million fellow Westerners have all but destroyed the earth, to the point where its expiry date can be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy.

The uninhabitable world.

The real depressing prospect is that I have left a black future for my thirteen grandchildren and so far, 7 great grandchildren. There’s where my down-feelings find their focus: the world they grow up in, the world my generation has shaped, the world where my criminal ways are causing this calamity: we basically have made our world uninhabitable.

I have a book with that title, The Uninhabitable Earth, life after Warming, written by David Wallace-Wells. You don’t need any further information than the title which speaks for itself, as the book’s rationale is illustrated every day on TV where we see the droughts, the fires, the floods, the heat, the shrinking arable lands, the widening pandemic, and the inevitable famine that looms. 

It’s. been a long time coming.

Already 50 years ago I saw this coming. In 1971-2, as a real estate broker, I entered a Canada-wide contest to write a 5,000 words essay involving an aspect of real estate. I entitled the essay: THE CITY, KEY TO SURVIVAL, An essay on Ecology and Urban Living.

To my surprise my essay was chosen, and published in the November 1972 issue of the Real Estate Institute of Canada Journal. The award included a substantial financial compensation plus a free trip from Toronto to its Vancouver Convention for the presentation.

In my essay I cited the Four Laws of Ecology as a possible new way to regulate city life. 

These laws, formulated by Dr. Barry Commoner, I adopted as my rules for life in the city of the future.

These ecological givens are simple: 

1. Everything is connected to everything else
2. There is no free lunch
3. Nature knows best.
4. Nothing ever disappears. 

I used these laws in my essay, of which the final sentence was: The City is the key to the future. Let us hope that the people of the city will find the door – the key is not enough.

When I wrote that sentence my thoughts went to the New City, promised in Revelation, and to Jesus who, in Luke 13: 24 tells us to enter into eternity by “the narrow door.”

Fifty years later.

Back to ‘ecology’, where today, 50 years later, these laws are as relevant as ever.

Take the first law: God has created the universe is such a way that every creature serves every other one. The soil, the air, the water, all serve the flower, who in turn, serves the bee and the butterfly, who both are pollinators for the fruit trees that serve us, while we are the TOP servant. This process is found throughout creation, as everything is connected to everything else.

Law 2.

Nothing comes free. My grandparents knew this. We did not. We have exploited the free air, free soil, free water, and now the bills come due. Also, all the free money our generous governments have created, once it appears on the balance sheet, has to be re-paid. How in the world are we going to restore the earth, the water, soil and air, to their pristine state, with 8 billion people clamoring for more?

Law 3.

We must re-learn the lesson my god-fearing grandparents knew: Nature, creation, dictates its own laws, gleaned from the laws of Moses recorded in the Hebrew Bible. They knew from Psalm 24 that “The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains,” which makes it holy. They practised crop rotating, used manure for fertilizer, gave their cows names and treated them humanely.

Law 4.

Nothing ever disappears.

We are learning that lesson the hard way. Air, water, soil pollution illustrates the obvious fact that nothing ever disappears: we live in a closed system.

Our problems are beyond our capacity to remedy. Our entire existence is at risk, and there is no solution. It’s now up to the Lord Creator to repair what we have destroyed. Jesus did that when, on Calvary, he said: ”It is finished”. 

,

In Real Estate terms we now find ourselves in that curious interim period when the final conditions have been removed, and thus the ‘sale is final’, Jesus paid the price in full, but the possession date has not yet come. That glorious event, the New Creation, is about to come! No time to feel depressed: Only every reason to rejoice!

ARE WE READY?  

I love Bonhoeffer who, ever since he came back from the USA where he had been offered a comfortable position at Union Seminary, knew that by returning in 1939, to Hitler-ruled Germany his chances of surviving the war would be minimal. The Gestapo had already curtailed his movements, had closed down the community he had established and he recognized that with the godless Nazis in power, a death sentence was merely a matter of time. And yes, he was hanged on April 9 1945, less than 4 weeks before the war ended, at age 39. 

That prospect colored his entire theology, and now, with the expiry of the world no longer in question – perhaps in no more than a decade, with the pandemic galloping globally and Climate Change unstoppable – it also deeply influences my pattern of thought. Of course, being nearly 93 may also be a factor. This means that, before the End comes, we have to be ready for Christ’s return. I struggle with that daily. From Revelation 21 I have learned that in the New Creation, of which I am a firm believer, there is ‘no temple’, indicating no church, no Bible, not any form of religion, all being human instruments. The Bible tells us that God’s law be written on our hearts. 

All this indicates that, after some 2,000 years of probing and testing, of accepting and rejecting all sorts of doctrines and religious statements, of diverse confessions and a multitude of institutions, we have come to the end of the ecclesiastical era, with signs galore that this already is happening. No wonder, Bonhoeffer toyed with the idea of ‘religious-less Christianity’, a state of affairs where there is no place for red-hatted cardinals, or white-hatted popes, or purple-hatted whatever, and no need for denominations, and church buildings and clergy. No more hot heads and cold hearts about homosexuality and celibacy, about baptism and creeds. No more marriage either, also becoming more and more the case.

Parousia.

That’s the Greek word for Jesus’ stay on earth and his return to earth. This phenomenon has consumed the church from its very inception. Right after Pentecost when the Holy Spirit visibly appeared, the community in Jerusalem lived in the full expectation of Jesus’ immediate return. The entire Bible has been written with that in mind. Peter, the impetuous Peter, damped the rash feelings a bit when he wrote – 2 Peter 3 – that with the Lord a day is as a thousand years, and a millennium like a split second – and cautioned patience, but nevertheless, through the Spirit he prophesied that “the Day will come like a thief, and the elements consumed by fire

Today these signs are there for all to see: unprecedented heat waves incinerate bone-dry forests and threaten to release gigatons of methane in the tundra and under the shallow Arctic Sea, possibly causing a sudden tipping point, and immediately implementing Peter’s prophecy, of which the June 28 ARCTIC NEWS bulletin is an enlightening illustration.

GOD’S DISAPPEARANCE.

All this goes hand-in-hand with God’s disappearance, true to Deuteronomy 31: 17, where it says, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” Well, I believe we have reached that stage in history: its final stage, where we have to cope without God’s presence. 

Of course, God is still there. He is from eternity to eternity, but that does not mean that he is still present in the world he created, and we uncreated. Oh yes, he’s still out there because his world is still out there, his legacy, his passive presence, so to say. But as an active participant, such as the direct force in the form of the Son of Man, Jesus the Christ, no, that phase has passed. We are on our own, and that is for our own good: finally, God has judged that we can stand on our own feet or, as Bonhoeffer put it, “We have come of age.”

Of course, the Scriptures are still there, as a testimony to his involvement with his creation in the past, but these writings have, to a great extent, lost their punch because for many the Bible have become the great unknown, and often misquoted and misunderstood.  Take Jesus’ words in John 17 where he says that he does not belong to the world and neither do we. Here Jesus refers to a world where not God but Satan, the great adversary calls the tune. Jesus calls him, quite correctly, “The Prince of this World”. Jesus assumes that with his departure his followers are on their own. 1 John 5: 17 simply affirms this: “The whole world is under the control of the evil one.”

The age of abandonment.

What applies to God also applies to the church: we live in the Age of Abandonment: God has turned away from us, and has left us to our fate. Of course, he is alive in my life, and speaks to my heart. But it is from our history, our society, our cultures, our religious communities, and our politics that God is absent. This also means that his word is no longer spoken, because the structures are in the way. By that I mean that, by now, the hierarchical ecclesiastical organization, mostly based on the ancient Roman army, prevents genuine reform. And, of course, there still is the ‘woman’ thing that remain unsolved, and, of course, there still is the ‘sex’ thing that plagued us: there simply are too many distractions that keep the church from bringing the message.

The Message?

That message Jesus voiced in one sentence (Matthew 6: 33) “Seek first the Kingdom and his righteousness”. That ‘righteousness’ he further explained when, in that same speech, which he gave out in the open, on the mountain slope, because he had bad experiences while talking in the synagogue, in his own church. There, in Matthew 5: 48, he used the word ‘teleios’: Be teleios, be perfect, as my Father is perfect. That Greek word ‘teleios’ we find back in our language in ‘tele’vision, and ‘tele’phone, something that comes from afar.

Bonhoeffer called himself an “Anthropos Teleios”, a person who strives for the perfection of the earth. He said this because In Jesus we are ‘a new creation’, which implies that all our actions must be done with the welfare of creation in mind. It also means that God sees us as grown-ups, as fully responsible adults, accountable for the fate of the world. 

Always remember that Jesus did not come to bring a new religion: No. He came to teach us how to grow up to become like he:  an adult Christian. That’s why the church today has only one single task: to prepare us for the return of the Lord, who now sits at the right hand of God, “from where’, says the Apostle’s Creed, “He returns to judge the living and the dead.”

“Are we ready?” 

That is the last question that concerns us all. Are we ready to live in the New Creation? Does our current way of life and our thoughts reflect being an Anthropos teleios, a person that NOW already fits into the New Creation? A person who suffers with God in experiencing the ravaging of his cosmos? 

WILL THE WEATHER CAUSE THE WORLD TO WITHER?

I was thinking – I am, therefore I think – about that book, that sold 40 million copies: The Great Late Planet Earth, and its author, Hal Lindsey. In it he writes how Rapture will take place before the Great Tribulation begins. Well, it seems to me that its birth pangs are there for all to feel: can Rapture be far behind?

Rapture, of course, is the result of a deceptive interpretation of an obscure bible passage in 1 Thessalonians 4: 17, and its explanation a product of a puerile brain, which found a fertile feeding ground amidst the no-nothing church folk, who lack a basic understanding of the Scriptures. As always, not a single text is decisive: context only is conclusive. The same holds true for the weather: a single storm means little: a change in climate means a lot, and where the climate goes, there goes the world, and where the world goes, there go the earth dwellers as well, including us, the human race. 

The whole Rapture riddle is the immediate result of Gnosticism, that pagan teaching that spirit is good and nature is bad, that heaven is heavenly and earth evil. Much, of Christianity has been distorted by that fatal heresy, which lies at the root of the Climate Crisis. 

Every day I read the lectionary for that day and muse upon a passage. Last week I read in Luke 21: 25-26: “There will be signs in the sun, moon and stars. On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea.” In that week the New York Times, still America’s leading daily, had this headline: “Climate Change Batters the West Before the Summer Even Begins.”  In that same issue there also was an item of similar import, how crops in Brazil have shriveled there under searing heat, how its immense water reservoirs, which generate the bulk of Brazil’s electricity, are growing alarmingly shallow and the world’s largest waterfall system, Iguaçu Falls, has been reduced from a torrent to a trickle. All this may set the stage for another intensely destructive fire season in the Amazon rainforest. 

We live in a quickly changing world.

We live in a quickly changing world, where the human psyche also is at risk, because “Everything is connected to everything else”. The RAPTURE crowd, not an insignificant number in North America, basically denies Climate Change and is averse to take precautions against COVID, living under the illusion that Rapture will occur before the Great Tribulation takes hold. It so happens that exactly there where this pagan faith is the most prevalent, among the Southern Baptist crowd, there it is also where the natural disasters occur, either too much water or not enough. It is as if God is punishing  the Gnostic believers, as it seems that storms and drought affect primarily the US South and Brazil, areas where Rapture reigns supreme. A bit farfetched? Perhaps.

Are there 500 year-cycles?

Every 500 years or so, we see a significant change. One thousand years before Christ, the Davidic Kingdom was established. Five Hundred years later the Israel Exile took place, and Buddhism was born. What we now regard as the beginning of the Calendar, the Birth of Christ, also coincided with the zenith of the Roman Empire, the Pax Romana, facilitating the spread of the Gospel. In the 6^th Century the Empire shrunk back and basically disappeared and the world experienced the growth of Islam and from the year 1,000 on, for 500 years the Roman Catholic faith became dominant, while Europe experienced disaster upon disaster, such as the 100 years War and the Black Plague.  

Then 500 years ago, the world changed. Not only through the breakthrough with the printing press, not only with the Protestant Reformation challenging the monopoly of Rome, not only due to the discovery of an entire new world, but more important the freeing of the human spirit. Then a Galileo saw the cosmos in a new way; then an Erasmus opened new vistas in thinking: then a Luther shook up a complacent church: suddenly the dullness of the Middle Ages disappeared and a new spirit emerged, a spirit which laid the foundations for a totally new world.

That world is now fading faster than we realize. In the early 20^thCentury Spengler wrote Untergang des Abendlandes (The demise of the West), perhaps a bit premature yet, influenced by a World War that started in 1914 and was only concluded in 1945, he did set the tone for our final mega-machine era. 

In this post-war period, started some 75 years ago, the world discovered TECHNOLOGY, energy-driven and carbon-based. Jacques Ellul saw the dangers of this machine-centered society. In 1954 this brilliant French professor wrote THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY. He, of all scientists, foresaw the information explosion and something like an Internet, as well as the biotechnology society. 

Ellul, a giant thinker! I bought that book in October 1965, and since then have acquired most of the writings of this Christian philosopher, who in his Hope in Time of Abandonment – a book dealing with the church – wrote, “It is my belief that we have entered upon the age of abandonment, that God has turned away from us and is leaving us to our fate.” In his preface he stressed, “The decisive importance of the promise, the approach of the Second Coming, the eschaton which comes.”

The Technological Society is an enormously learned and, in places, densely written book and it has a clear and compelling argument. By technique, Ellul did not mean just machines. Rather, for Ellul technique applies not just to the economy or the state, but to leisure activities, bodily regimes, regulations, psychoanalysis, management and organization, human technique, information, and etc. “Nothing at all escapes technique today.”

That’s what we are at today: the future today is the machine, replacing through AI, Artificial Intelligence, all human activities. There’s no more place for factory workers, ‘robots’ are more reliable, or farmers, as ‘mega-machines’ have replaced the human body. Even actual money – bills, coins – have basically disappeared. 

There’s one little hiccup: “Will the weather cause the world to wither? 

“Already drought, lack of water, climbing temperatures, searing heat, fires, famines looming, the methane menace”, are daily occurrences. ARCTIC NEWS writes: “there could be a huge temperature rise by 2026 and with a 3°C rise, humans will likely go extinct.” 

Think about that, for a minute: five years from now?

It’s been a long process.

This ‘dying off’ already started 6,000 years ago. Then the earth was a vast forest. Some smart people invented agriculture, and, as the population expanded, trees were in the way, so they were removed, not realizing that trees are the building blocks of life. The Tree of Life, mentioned in Paradise, simply means that trees and life are complementary: you can’t have one without the other. Not too long ago the Amazon was a complete entity: it absorbed CO2 and provided water. However, turning the forest into fields to grow soy beans to feed the pigs in China disrupted the natural rhythm, resulting in drought: Brazil, the Soy King, no longer functions. Soon the world will starve. Already the America’s West is drying out and the world’s breadbaskets go empty, and the world withers.

I love that sentence in the last Bible chapter, Revelation 22: “The leaves of the trees are for healing of the nations.” Where the weather goes, there goes the world. The end is in the beginning: “The Tree of Life” in the garden of Eden will again provide LIFE, thanks to the TREE on the hill of Calvary.   

MASKS OFF.

I sincerely believe that we, the human race, are living on the edge of eternity. By this I mean that within the foreseeable future the Lord, Creator, will return and require of us an accounting of what we have done with our lives, and how we have dealt with the world and those who live therein, including ourselves. Here’s what Teilhard de Chardin, that famous RC priest and celebrated paleontologist, despised by some as an idolater and by others idolized as a saint, wrote in his Le Milieu Divin (freely translated as The Holy Earth), almost a century ago: “One day, the Gospel tells us, the tensions gradually accumulating between humanity and God will touch the limits prescribed by the possibilities of the world. And then will come the end.” These limits are now evident everywhere.

Psalm 115: 16 clearly states that “the highest heaven belongs to the Lord (that very upper region beyond where the stars and planets dwell) but the earth he has given to humanity”. When God gave his own earth to us, there were some strings attached, such as “treat it as holy!”, because God’s name is still written on every single item. We will be judged on that criterion as well.

Judgment?

I write this word with a degree of trepidation. Judgment is not a popular topic. When the apostle Paul addressed the elite in Athens, speaking to the select gathering of its city’s foremost brains, he mentioned that word. There, right on that famous meeting ground, the Areopagus, where the most important issues of the day were discussed, Paul, missionary extraordinary, to a crowd totally unfamiliar with the tenets of the Gospel, started his ‘sermon’ by talking about judgement, of all things.

Why did he do such a thing? Why do I mention it here? Well, we all know that we are abusing the earth to the point of collapse. God, in his wisdom has built judgment into creation: treat it as holy, or else. We have been duly warned. Romans 1: 20 tells us that creation reveals the infinity of the creator: honor him by honoring creation, or face judgment.

Where is God today? What is our status vis-à-vis God?

Not a very burning question today. We all know too well that God has become the forgotten entity in society. We, the wise men and women of the West, fully versed in our so-called civilized ways, know next to nothing of Christianity, in spite of conspicuous church spires pointing to heaven on many street corners. We totally have forgotten the very purpose of the gospel: the principal role assigned to us was to ‘serve’ creation, so well expressed by Jesus when he categorically stated that “he had come to serve and not to be served”. (Mark 10:45). And that especially includes creation!

But no: We wanted ‘progress’, wanted ‘development’, wanted ‘to dominate’. Everything we have now is built on OIL. OIL is now the new OILMIGHTY. Progress? Look 500 years back: Then there was progress: America discovered; the shape of the cosmos detected; Roman Catholicism’s domination successfully challenged; the printing press revolution; new fire power for armies; banking and credit invented. And the 17^th and 18^th Centuries? They were the eras of the great painters and composers. All we have now is speed, faster and faster barreling us toward disaster. No going back: full steam ahead to a future of which we now see the storm clouds looming, soon to become a body-torturing hurricane.

What went wrong?

We have subjected creation to exploitation to the point of the death of nature. It now is becoming plain that we have lived the LIE. The most striking sign of our last days is that our masks – not the Covid ones but those that hide our true being – are being ripped from our faces and expose the true nature of our greed. Not only the masks, also the earplugs that keep us from hearing the cries of creation, and the blindfolds that bar us from observing the true picture. All this will become even more evident when the WORLD meets in Glasgow this fall.

Already small incidents are popping up, such as the 215 children’s bodies in Kamloops, British Columbia, where the RC church, in her attempt to ‘convert’ indigenous children, unceremoniously buried those who did not survive the process. The icy silence of the church does not surprise me. Years ago, I was running a 10 km race, and caught up to a fellow runner who at one time had been the head of the Newfoundland Police force and, in that capacity, had interrogated the archbishop there in connection with the sex crimes of his priests: the clergy’s persistent stonewalling had frustrated him no end.   

Questions.

What then should be our course of action in this ultimate hour? With what sort of expectation must we enter this future?

We must, first of all, admit that we, the human race in general, and you and I in particular, have screwed it up, blinded by our blatant debauchery. That admission not only calls for repentance, but also change, because change in small ways, is still possible. We can’t change the big picture, because we have become totally dependent on carbon fuel. But, in small ways, it is a 7/24 affair.

Here are a few tips: become a vegetarian, as meat requires far more energy to bring to the table than a salad. Grow your own, even in small ways. Turn off lights and shun air-conditioning. Walk or bike wherever possible. Pray. Assume a ‘eternity’ mentality. Become what you are. The very thought that our society is ‘normal’ must be abandoned forthwith. We live in the Age of Satan bent to destroy creation, and succeeding thanks to our eager cooperation.

Become what you are.

That’s what the last Bible book, Revelation, tells us. “Become what you are”, not an earth-destroyer but a preserver, a condition for eternity. Off with that mask! Don’t stand there, shaking in your boots in the midst of the last gasp of the history of the world; don’t just stand there with eyes full of fear, sore afraid of what is to come. What lies ahead can only be what already is, what has been there since Calvary, and what is at hand is nothing but light, radiating light: DAY without End. That’s why the book of Revelation, in spite of all its perplexity provoking pictures, is, in its deepest sense, a book of enriching encouragement. 

There is only one thing to worry about, and this is that we lose sight of what God in his grace in Jesus Christ has done for us, so that we, in our insecurity, will be tempted to compromise with the world and find security in an attitude of half-baked lukewarmness. That world has no future. Remember: “For this world in its present form is passing away” (1 Cor. 7: 31). And what lies ahead?

The Bible tells us that straight through the matters that are perishable we will see that which is fixed for eternity: the greatness and glory of Him who sits on the throne, and of Jesus Christ, the faithful witness, evident in the New Creation! If that is true – and it is true – then only one item is more important: “Wake up, O sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you” (Eph. 5: 14). Get rid of that mask!

KNOCK, KNOCK.

It’s no secret that churches have lost their luster and that the bringing of the ‘good news’ has become an almost impossible task. It’s no secret that churches have run stuck. It’s no secret that the most prominent buildings in the country are basically useless, except for the occasional concert.

And they are not the only ones. It’s also happening in other branches of society. Take office buildings. Suddenly, almost overnight, these emblems of the economy, these gold-cladded towers, silhouetting against the horizons, defining the contours of the urban landscapes, are also partly occupied, and thus their value have plummeted. The same with shopping centres and all of retail: empty stores galore. Sit-down restaurants? Perhaps a thing of the past as well? 

Of course, church buildings for a long time were grossly underutilized, were built centuries ago, when society had no TV, no radio, no telephone, no internet, and were then more social centres than religious ones. Then church membership also meant business contacts, and, especially in rural area, market information, weather tips, ideas for buying and selling, while, during the week, the different societies, including young people, offered a ready opportunity to find the right spouse. All that is history, has been the case for decades, but, due to the pandemic, the brutal reality has finally come out in the open: I believe that God is knocking at the church’s doors to wake the people up from their lethargy: change or die!

Actually, the early focus of the church – heaven and hell – has already been found wanting. Hell disappeared a long time ago. Heaven is still in focus, but decreasingly so. Good riddance! Yet, one look at the typical hymnbook confirms that the songs are almost all from the 19^th and 20^thCenturies, many of them ‘heaven-oriented’ and depicting a society far removed from present-day reality. 

Reality is found in the Bible: look at Genesis 9. There today’s reality is depicted. One of the advantages of today is that we see matters more clearly. God is knocking some common sense in us. True, we still see everything ‘as through a dark and distorted mirror’, but, nevertheless, some of the obscurity is being wiped away and we slowly gain a clearer perspective of what has happened and what is to come: God is knocking some reality in our reluctant brains.

Oh yes, Genesis 9.

After Noah and his family left the ark, he saw life from a new angle: weeks and months living within a real, not a virtual zoo, made him see all of life differently: he had become an animal activist. God always works historically: he used Noah’s new insight to make a comprehensive covenant with that family and, consequently with us, you and me. Through the Ark, and their close contact with animal life, God prepared the Ark dwellers for a new phase in their life, a life that included all living matter. The inapproachable God came down from his heavenly habitat and sought out Noah, representing the New Human race, and treated him and his family as equals by making a binding treaty with them, just as I did with my late spouse 68 years ago, as marriage too is a covenant between two equals. He made this covenant not only between Him and the Noah clan, but also with ALL living creatures, with all animals and plants. In that solemn treaty God included all living items as equals.

The covenant, that binding eternal contract between God and ALL living creatures, we have forgotten. Now Climate Change is knocking to remind us of that treaty God made with us. This current, universal phenomenon also called Global Warming, our direct experience with the natural elements, is warning us to live closer to nature by making us aware of our destructive lifestyle. God, in his grace, is giving us this experience so that we can learn the lesson that “Climate Change is US”.  

The church too needs to change.

The same change is happening with the church. Through the Pandemic God is knocking at those solid church doors, telling us that the old model has become outdated, that the church has reached a state of serenity resembling a cathedral in the moonlight where all new thinking had stopped: the stillness of death. God is telling us that monologues and preaching is 19^th Century stuff, an era when people were hungry for information. The onus now is on us: from placid pew occupiers, we all have to become active, positive participants through prayer and probing. Away with sermons: they only lead to more boredom and ignorance, a holdover from the Middle Ages. Thanks to God’s grace for giving us the Pandemic, we are on our own. No more vicarious believing. Never mind the numbers: they are irrelevant. The Bible tells us that they are meaningless. Gideon and his 400 soldiers defeated an army 50 times their size.

So then, what are we to do?

As always, the Bible gives directions. Philippians 2: 12 tells us: “to work out our salvation with fear and trembling.” That is a totally personal matter. Fear here means “in awe of God and his creation”; trembling indicates the awesome  personal responsibility we have for doing that. All this goes back to that Covenant Noah – and we – made with the Creator.

Fortunately, many are struggling: there is change in the air! We instinctively know that the old way of doing things no longer works. That gives us a splendid opportunity to do things differently. The Fiddler on the Roof sang “Tradition, tradition” but tradition has no longer any trade-in value. Away with it. Be radical. Back to basics. 

Micah 6: 8 defines those basics: (1) Act justly, (2) Love mercy and (3) Walk humbly with the Lord. 

                                     
(1) Act justly. The Genesis 9 Covenant is all-inclusive. Acting justly goes far beyond loving one’s neighbor and enforcing criminal laws. It is all-encompassing, all-inclusive, all embracing, involves trees and soil and air. Away with anthropocentric living: we share God’s good creation with ‘all things now living’. Not doing that, has given us our present predicament, sorry to say, now too advanced to stop, so penitence and lament is in order. “Forgive us our trespasses” as we duly recite in The Lord’s Prayer is mainly aimed at our environmental ‘sins’. 

(2) Love mercy. The 215 graves found at the Kamloops School for indigenous youngsters display a callous disregard for loving mercy. It displays the arrogance of a faith-system that has lost all perspective, only relying on human interpretations of what constitutes ‘religion’. Away with religion that bred ‘inquisition’ and ‘excommunication’ and ‘religious wars’, instead of realizing that we all have a very rudimentary idea what God requires of us.

(3) Walk humbly with the Lord. The more we learn about creation, the more we realize that we know nothing. The more we abuse it, the steeper the price to pay later, that ‘later’ is advancing with exponential speed. Walking humbly means adoring the Creator who offered his beloved Son’s life to buy it back – redeem – his creation so that his children may dwell for ever – eternally – on a planet renewed and beautified, making John 3: 16 the most important text in the Scriptures for our day and age. 

God loves us.

God loves us, that’s why God is knocking at our door. That door leads to the New Creation: it is our ultimate task in life to prepare ourselves for that final event, which is approaching with incredible speed.

Our constant prayer should be MARANATHA, LORD COME QUICKLY.