Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

July 25 2020

LOVE: IMPOSSIBLE?

I have been thinking about LOVE lately. “All we need is LOVE”, the Beatles sang.  C. S. Lewis, in his “The Four Loves”, said that some people are glad the English language uses both the words “love” and “like.” He says his own generation was told not to say “I love strawberries,” but to use the work “like” in that instance. Lewis talks about loves in terms of Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity. His true message is that the four are almost always intertwined and that they are at their most intense and satisfying level when they are connected to a love for God.

That is the angle I want to explore, and I have come to a startling and disconcerting conclusion, so disconcerting that I hesitate to come to a final verdict. It most certainly remains a point of debate.

Love and Like. Biblical examples.

 Thanks to my classical schooling – Latin for 6 years and Greek for 5 years – I can read the New Testament in its original Greek and distinguish the four kinds of LOVE: Agape, Philo, Eros, Caritas, two of them evident in John 21.

When Jesus, after his resurrection, met with his closest followers on the shore of The Sea of Galilee, related in John 21: 15-17, he specifically addressed Peter who had denied him three times. This passage illustrates two types of LOVE in the Greek language, perhaps best translated as Love and Like. Jesus, pointblank, asked Peter, “Do you love me”, using the AGAPE – the unconditional ‘love’ verb. Peter answers Jesus with a different verb for love – philo – which expresses the love one has for a friend, sort of ‘like’, have affection for. Jesus, the second time uses ‘agape’ again (do you really, really love me) and Peter again answers with philo or ‘like’. Jesus then too switches to philo and Peter confirms this. The tempestuous Peter has become temperate.

How do we love God?

“God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them”. (1 John 4: 16). Jesus in Mark 12: 30, spells it out: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”. Jesus here echoes Deuteronomy 6: 5 which has exactly the same wording. In both instances the equivalent of AGAPE is used. Jesus tells us that loving God is an all-consuming matter that’s why the ‘all’ ‘and’ is repeated three times.

This begs the question: HOW DO WE LOVE GOD? There is a definite creation-love connection, based on John 3: 16,”For God so loved (agape) the world that he  gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” I believe that this is the only other instance, apart from declaring his love for his Son, when God expresses this utmost emotion: love, in this case love for his creation.

Of course, there is 1 Corinthians 13, that famous chapter on LOVE.

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, (Agape used throughout) I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal.  If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.  If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not love, I gain nothing.

And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love.

Words come cheap: deeds are decisive. When we say we love God, then this needs clarification, hence a little detour. I have a Van Gogh biography, a most depressing book. He and his father, a Protestant minister, were constantly in conflict, especially because of his aim in life: to become a fulltime painter. He tried to follow in his father’s footsteps, becoming an evangelist worker in London of all places, but that did not last long. He was as stubborn and stupid as his parents were. However today we don’t treasure ‘Vincent’ – that’s how he signed his paintings – because of his character – depressive – and his living habits – he killed himself – but because he produced marvelous artwork, now trading in the tens of millions of dollars.

All great artists are valued by their works: Rembrandt, Bach, Shakespeare: we couldn’t care less about their personalities. God too, is and remains a mystery. The Old Testament depicts God as very human, caring, forgiving, but also vengeful and angry, but in the New Testament God is pictured differently: he is ‘invisible’: “God lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.” (1 Tim. 6: 16). Yet we must love him, unconditionally, the AGAPE way. So how do we love him? We love him, the invisible Creator, as we love all great artists, by his works: his creation is the utmost in everything.

Practical Implications.

Back to 1 Corinthians 13.

Paul, in his letters, always warns against backsliding to the Jewish rituals, outlined in the Mosaic ordinances, such as circumcision and temple worship. He brought a new message: not LAW but LOVE. We, too, prefer the easy way out: we still want to go to heaven so that we can abuse the earth. Forget it: that’s 19^th and 20^th Century stuff, basically Gnostic Paganism. Jesus died to make a New Earth under a New Heaven possible, because God so loved the world, the cosmos, the universe. We too must love what God loves, that really means LOVING CREATION the AGAPE way, unconditionally, without any hesitation, whole-heartedly, with all the power and intellect and human strength we possess.

That is my conclusion, and I wonder whether that is still possible. Today, whatever we do, from birth to death, from our rising in the morning to our resting at night, we do the opposite of God’s love commandment in regard to creation.    

The problem  is that loving God and loving his creation is the key to eternity: that is my ultimate conclusion, but that has tremendous implications, scary and impossible.

“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION, I am only a ringing gong or a clanging cymbal. 

If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have absolute faith so as to move mountains, but have not LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION, I am nothing. 

If I give all I possess to the poor and exult in the surrender of my body, but have not LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION, I gain nothing.
 

LOVE FOR GOD AND CREATION is the key to eternal life, the key to THE NEW COSMOS. Jesus died to regain PARADISE, the Garden of Eden. Love for creation extinguishes the boundaries between all religious expressions: Islam, Judaism, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Hinduism, Buddhism, even the atheist, perhaps especially the atheist!

Impossible? A pipedream? Difficult today? Yes, but it explains Jesus’ words, “Many are called, few are chosen”, (Matthew 22:14) and “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8), because today it is impossible to live totally in line with ‘perfection’. Matthew 5: 48 tells us, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”. The Greek word used for perfect is ‘teleios’, meaning that in all we do we must keep the ‘telos’, the far-away ‘end’ in mind, a word we daily use in ‘tele-phone’, ‘tele-vision’, and ‘tele-commuting.’

LOVE: STILL POSSIBLE?

“Work out your salvation with fear and trembling”, (Philippians 2: 12). Salvation is not something to take for granted. Jesus gave his life to buy back creation. Is salvation still possible today?

Lord have mercy! Pray without ceasing. Live to do the impossible. Save creation. Ora et Labora.

July 15 2020

 PREPARE YE………

Our world is in an overshoot situation. Overshoot? Imagine a car that missed a turn and is now precariously suspended over a cliff where at any moment it can clatter down, as the slightest movement could cause a tipping point, demolishing the automobile and killing the occupants.

So? Worried about the overshoot state of the world? Well, maybe we should just in case, because such a scenario usually is fatal.  

At any rate, that’s how I picture our plight now. Why? Because we simply have too many people on earth, using more water, more soil, more earth, more energy than the earth can provide and tolerate. At a certain time, a moment nobody knows, there will be a tipping point when, just like that car, nature collapses: the treasures, the raw materials, the air, the water we extract from ‘nature’ are simply too much, and soon the earth will refuse to accommodate our wants.

All old news of course. It reminds me of Cassandra, daughter of King Priam of Troy. She was given the gift of prophesy by Apollo, but when she spurned his advances, he ordained that her prophesies would not be believed. That VIRUS is a wake-up call. The weather is another, but the Cassandra curse still counts.    

That VIRUS? Truly a case in point: One minute everything is normal: the next minute nothing is. That’s what we face as conscious citizens, as people who have no excuse, as earth-dwellers who have unlimited access to news sources and relevant information on any topic, but refuse to listen and absorb. Christians especially cannot plead ignorance, because the  BOOK, that age-old document on which Christianity is based, repeatedly, constantly, without letup, repeats the theme of creation, fall, redemption, of birth, of maturity, of death and resurrection, not only of all that lives, including us humans, but also of the entire living world.

We need to change drastically, but we won’t, of course, just like Noah’s contemporaries who saw him for decades building the Ark, and not heed his warnings. Noah was known as a straight shooter, an upright artisan, a master builder, and even when that long file of animals came traveling in pairs and entered the Ark, and all sorts of birds came flying in, curiosity did not change into action, so they all drowned. We have similar warnings in reverse: species are disappearing at an alarming rate; weather is freaking out; pandemics in humans and animals a sure sign, but still we go our merry way.

Enter John, who is not a Baptist, but a Baptizer, famous for telling us to “Prepare ye, the Way of the Lord”; a line used in the Godspell musical, starting this masterpiece by repeating it 8 times. Mark 1:3 says, “A voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way for the Lord, make straight paths for him.'”

I’ve been thinking about this man, his message and the musical all week. It’s easy to sing that catchy tune. It’s easy to repeat it numerous times so that it’s grafted in our memory, but today the reality remains, “A voice crying in the wilderness,” commonly indicating an almost hopeless task, where the only hearers are the trees, the birds and the wild animals.  

As you may know, my constant quest is, “How do I prepare a ‘way of the Lord?’ Should I see it as myself becoming ready to face the Lord when he returns? Or does it also have a broader context, a missionary goal? Or both? How did John himself see it?

John the Baptizer preceded Jesus by preaching at the river Jordan where he instituted baptism by immersion, symbolizing the washing away of sins. A radical person he was, a true environmentalist, living off nature’s gifts, wild honey and locusts, himself a pronounced example what it means to ‘prepare the way of the Lord’, totally living in tune with creation, practicing what he preached. His body demeanor spoke as loud as his verbal language.   

 From his very beginning he realized he was a person of destiny, a man of God, a true outlier, a pronounced prophet, always aware of his mission in life, a man of nature, born of devout parents, a miracle child, an outspoken speaker, condemning Herod, Israel’s ruler for living in sin, which caused his death.   

Is that how we too must prepare the ‘way of the Lord’, just as The Baptizer? Must we too be radical in living habits and condemn our way of life which we know kills creation?

Jesus knew him quite well as their mothers, Mary and Elizabeth, were intimate friends. Jesus commented on him, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet whoever is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Matthew 11:11). A bit of a hyperbole, this statement about his greatness, I think: how about Moses and Elijah? Perhaps Jesus referred to those born in his time.

And then there is that Kingdom thing!

Does that mean that a person like me, a tiny cog in the Kingdom, is greater than this immense personality who was brutally murdered because he criticized King Herod, the ancient equivalent of President Trump? I think John the Baptizer lacked a Kingdom vision. He was of the old Jewish school: look at the Psalms: many imply that dying is the end. Jesus, by his resurrection, as Paul repeatedly emphasized, conquered death and made the same possible for his followers. John was one of the old school.

Still I see John as a model for me: he, the forager, the un-compromiser, close to nature, having a defined goal in life to prepare Israel for the Lord’s coming, just as I see as my task in life to tell the world that the Parousia is imminent, that Jesus’ second coming can happen any day now.

My question: Was John really a prophet? Luke 9: 19 suggests that the people in Israel saw John as such.

What then makes a person a prophet? Let me throw out some thoughts.

A prophet is not an extraordinary gifted person who knows the unknown, a sort of fortune-teller who magically predicts what is to come.

No, a prophet is first and foremost a believer who openly and unabashedly looks at what is happening in society and sees it as his or her responsibility to point out the immense challenges facing us in a quickly changing world. 

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who courageously and critically looks at the church and her doctrines, to test them on their relevance for today and tomorrow.

A prophet is first and foremost a believer who dares to look to the future and tries to keep creation viable for our children and grandchildren and also strives for a church in which these young people feel at home.

A prophet 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 prophet, in spite of all the sin and evil in this world, looks to the future with full confidence.

A prophet 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. 

So, was John a prophet? Am I? Are you?

July 5 2020

WHAT TO EXPECT AND WHAT TO DO.

“The Harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not (yet) saved.”                                                 Jeremiah 6: 20

This anguishing outcry portrays our isolation and exile. It signifies our anxiety stemming from our despair for an uncertain future with ever expanding planetary pandemic pockets, with accelerating atmospheric heat and no feasible solutions to solve the intractable need for carbon energy. These perils encompass us all. It’s not like the plagues in Egypt when the Jacob tribe was excluded. Today the plea in the Lord’s Prayer, “Don’t put us to the test”, goes unheeded, because no person, rich or poor, of any possible color or orientation, is excluded from the current wave of tribulations.

Sorry RAPTURE crowd, there won’t be exceptions for you either: all will be LEFT BEHIND to endure the unbearable heat, predicted in Malachi 4, “Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a fire.”

That “Christians” around the world will be taken up into heaven prior to the unleashing of these cataclysmic events that most associate with the end times, is pure poppycock. Those images of empty piles of clothes and rudderless cars whose drivers had suddenly disappeared, are outright nonsense, plainly contradicted in Matthew 24. There Jesus is quoted, warning us about the Last Days, “As it was in the days before the flood people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the Ark, and they knew nothing about what would happen, until the Flood came and took them all away. That’s how it will be at the coming of The Son of Man.”

In other words, God’s people are The Left-behind-Crowd: those who, like Noah, believe in God’s deliverance.

In 1974 I bought a book by Dr. Robert L. Heilbroner whose textbook I used taking Economics 101 at Queen’s University. In his An Inquiry into The Human Prospect, he concluded, “If then, by the question ‘is there hope for man?’ we ask whether it is possible to meet the challenge of the future without the payment of a fearful price, the answer must be: No there is no such hope.” 

The Fourth Turning.

I have been re-reading a book I bought 20 years ago, The Fourth Turning, with as subtitle, An American Prophecy: what the Cycles of History Tell Us about America’s Next Rendezvous with Destiny.

Written in 1997 the two authors, William Strauss and Neil Howe, apply their generational theories to the cycles of history and locate America in the middle of an unraveling period, on the brink of a crisis. (Remember this was written 20+ years ago.) They specifically mention the year 2020 as being at the center of The Fourth Turning.

The authors convincingly demonstrate how history like the annual seasons, like a human life, has 4 stages called Turnings. The most recent First Turning corresponds with the era from 1946-1964, the American High, followed by the Second Turning, which the authors call, The Consciousness Revolution, from 1964-1984. The Third Turning comes with a question mark Culture Wars from 1984-2005? because this was written in 1997-8. It is now clear that the real ending of the Third Turning was 2008, when the great financial collapse took place and governments pumped in trillions to rescue the banks. This indicates that we now, since 2008, are in the midst of the Fourth Turning.

I am the great under-liner in my books, mostly an odd collection that nobody else would want anyway. Here’s what I emphasized: “The spirit of America comes once a saeculum (a life-time) only through what the ancients called ekpyrosis, nature’s fiery moment of death and discontinuity. History’s periodic eras of Crises combust the old social order and gives birth to a new.

Ekpyrosis explained.  

Ekpyrosis is Ancient Greek: ekpýr?sis, “conflagration” and is a Stoic belief in the periodic destruction of the cosmos by a great conflagration every Great Year. (The time frame of destruction was never defined or given by any of the Stoics).

Here’s a relevant quote:

On the Earthen floor of the rounded hogans, Navajo artists
sift colored sand to depict the four seasons of life and time.
Their ancestors have been doing this for centuries. They
draw these sand circles in a counterclockwise progression,
one quadrant at the time, with decorative icons for the
challenges of each age and season. When they reach the
end of the fourth season, they stop the circle, leaving a
small gap just to the right of the top. That signifies the
moment of death and rebirth, what the Hellenists called
ekpyrosis.

Back to the make-up of The Fourth Turning, some excerpts.

“Eventually, all of America’s lesser problems will combine into one giant problem….. the product of all the wrong choices…. The more we endeavor to defeat nature, the more profoundly we are at the mercy of its deeper rhythms … We cannot avoid history’s last quadrant….The epoch that began with VJ Day (in 1945) will reach a natural climax and come to an end.”

The book continues, “An end of what?”

“The next Fourth Turning (Now in progress, I might add), could mark the end of man. It could be an omnicidal Armageddon, destroying everything, leaving nothing.”

Let me leave it by that.

WHAT TO EXPECT AND WHAT TO DO?

I have repeatedly hinted at what to expect.

The Bible is quite clear on this point. 2 Peter 3: 10-11 pictures reality and also hints at the solution: 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 its works will be laid bare. Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to conduct yourselves in holiness and godliness. 

“Conduct yourselves in holiness and godliness”.

That concerns our personal behavior. We need a new mindset, a ‘metanoia’, a different approach, an attempt to live a totally creation-friendly life, because we now must assume the life-style of eternity to (sort of) qualify. Prayer is not enough. God made creation: we un-made it: that has to change.  When we are asked ‘to conduct ourselves in holiness and godliness’, then this also applies to our conduct vis-à-vis creation, because God made it and this means it is holy.

If you believe in God and The Son of God and the Holy Spirit, and believe that our future is upon a new earth, then now is the time to assume the ‘Life Style of Eternity’.

I know this is next to impossible, so pray, pray for enlightenment, spiritual insight, and pray for forgiveness, because we all are implicated in the disastrous situation we find ourselves in, and all are guilty. The Lord’s Prayer, that so often mis-explained and misunderstood prayer, has the line “forgive us our trespasses”. Trespasses occur when we invade someone else’s property to cause harm. That’s why I understand that phrase to refer to us abusing nature, something we constantly do. That’s why I see John 3: 16 – telling us how much God loves the earth – is for us, today the most important text in the Bible.

“The Harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not (yet) saved.” The Fourth Turning is upon us, and ‘ekpyrosis’ is rapidly approaching.

Ora et Labora, Pray and Work.

JUNE 30 2020

THE VERY LAST DAYS?

Gail Tverberg, an actuary, always writes an interesting and insightful blog, under the telling name of OUR FINITE WORLD. She sometimes quotes the Bible. I remember her citing Revelation 18:11 twice, “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore”.

I believe that the last Bible book, Revelation, often depicts today’s circumstances! Today lots of merchants, lots of store-owners, lots of service workers, lots of tour operators, lots of large corporations are desperate, because suddenly their markets are gone, and that means deflation: nobody buys their inventory anymore.

That is just one sign. There are multiple others, of which the Pandemic, Locusts and Climate Change are just the most obvious.

Welcome to a New Economy!! Welcome to a New Church Scene. Welcome to a New Life-Style. Welcome to New Way of Living. Welcome to a new Virus-festering society. Welcome to The Very Last Days.

The Last Days?

Yes, I believe that the world is approaching more than a ‘fin de siècle’, more than just an end of an era: it’s approaching the END. Period.

Already we are thrown back to a more primitive status, almost each on their own. Will we ever go back to ‘normality’? Can we go back?

This begs the question, “What is normality?”

The word ‘normality’ has as its root the word ‘norm’, which indicates ‘the accepted standard’, which, in the last 100 years has seen drastic changes under the enormous increase of carbon fuels. The ‘normal’ has become ‘abnormal’. Suddenly we are confronted with ultimate questions, involving the essence of life, involving also the entire concept of ‘inclusivity’.

For centuries we white Westerners, have regarded the world as our exclusive domain. Everything revolved about our wishes, our desires, our goals and ambitions, to the exclusion of everything and everybody else. Actually we have gone further: the white face of humanity was seen as the preferred segment of society. That’s now changing, fortunately, to some extent, but we still exclude creation from our life. Our ‘normal’ includes global exploitation, totally part and parcel of business. Our ‘HEAVEN HERESY’ is at the root of our wrong approach. We love Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount but gloss over his words that ‘the humble will inherit the earth’. One translation of ’humble’ reads, ‘those who claim nothing for themselves’: we want everything.  

Love Creation.

Dr. Barry Commoner coined the four laws of ecology decades ago. I have cited them often, but they bear repeating:

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

These laws are gospel truths, in line with the principal Law of the Lord, which also bears repeating, “Love God – and his creation – above everything else, and our fellow humans as ourselves.” Loving God is not something abstract, uttering a few words of endearment: no, it is fulfilled concretely in loving his creation with – as Jesus put it – “all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and all our strength”. In other words: our entire human endeavor should be geared toward loving creation. God made it and thus it is holy. God made it and thus it is God’s Primary Revelation, his Direct Word. The Bible is God’s Secondary Revelation, his Indirect Word, of equal value, inspired, necessary to explain our faith and Christ’s mediation, but a human book nevertheless. The Scriptures will disappear: Creation will not. We have built our entire ecclesiastical enterprise on this wrong assumption.

Our ‘norm’, our life’s daily conduct, should be based on God’s Primary Word, but having failed the ‘love’ test we have sealed our doom and brought on our now looming demise and “The Last Days”.

The Bible repeatedly refers to The Last Days, not only Jesus in Matthew 24, but also John in Revelation, where a good portion is devoted to the global disasters preceding the final days, with earthquakes, pandemics and famines specifically mentioned.

Jesus tells us to always be on the lookout, because there will be definite signs, such as “the Great Desolation”, which we certainly are experiencing today in multiple manners, of which Global Heating and world-wide pollution are sure indications. Already earthquakes and volcano eruptions are increasing dramatically. Overall, there have been 2,267 earthquakes in California and Nevada over the last 7 days, and that is definitely alarming. Farther south along “the Ring of Fire”, Mexico was hit by a magnitude 7.4 earthquake last week.

Yet the End will come as a complete surprise.

Back to Revelation 18, and what it says of today.

The heading is The Fall of Babylon. In the Bible Babylon is seen as the world apart from God. The elite of Israel was exiled to the ruling empire of their days, Babylon, where they were forced to worship their gods. Those who refused were killed.

Today we all live in Babylon, and today we experience its Fall. Don’t for a minute believe that we can go back to ‘normal’. The ‘normal’ has directed us into the current abyss. The economy already was in poor shape, with many predicting a recession or worse. Then the VIRUS came along, the direct result of our riotous routines.

Revelation 18 directly speaks to us today:

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!           

She has become a lair for demons
and a haunt for every unclean spirit,
every unclean bird,
and every detestable beast

All the nations have drunk the wine
of the passion of her immorality.
The kings of the earth were immoral with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown wealthy
from the extravagance of her luxury.”

Then I heard another voice from heaven say:
“Come out of her, My people,
so that you will not share in her sins
or contract any of her plagues.
For her sins are piled up to heaven,
and God has remembered her iniquities.”

All these words directly apply to us today. I find it striking that this passage mentions unclean birds and detestable animals. The African Swine Flu and Bird Flu figure prominently in today’s pandemics.

Today all signs point to a Global Economic Depression, aggravated by Global Heating and abrupt Climate Change, witness the tropical heat in Siberia and Arctic Canada. There the world’s largest store of METHANE is about to erupt, 28 times more lethal than our carbon-generating economy: that alone will seal our doom.

Add to the normal economic crises an angry planet, evident in earthquakes, volcanism, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, pestilence, wildfires, and, perhaps, a pandemic or two, and we reach a tipping point, exceeding the earth’s capacity to absorb punishment. Today the difference is that these multiple catastrophes will affect already badly crippled economies and stressed societies. This time governments poured in the money, but tomorrow their wallets will stay closed.

No, there won’t be a return to ‘normal’, because we have abandoned the ‘normal’ thanks to our God-Eclipse. Normal is living according to the ‘norms’ of creation, as captioned in the Laws of Ecology, and Jesus’ dictum of ‘Loving God.’

We have been sucked into a Satanic trap.

How do we climb out of it? Can we still do that?

That is the topic of my next venture into the ‘unknown’.

JUNE 20 2020

WAR               

My views are biased: what I write comes from a certain perspective: I call it a Christian liberal point of view, not a doubting stance, not fundamentalist, not stagnant, but always expanding, and open to interesting interpretations. Writing a blog helps me to explore new ideas.

I do believe the Bible, keeping in mind that many explanations are possible, witness the great diversity in denominations. I also am convinced that no particular church or no particular person has the correct view, influenced as they are by ethnic traditions, history, clericalism, and especially deep-seated religious ignorance and persistent apathy.

With that in mind, I have a shot at REVELATION, the last Bible book, and particularly Chapter 12.

“And there was war in the heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon and the dragon and his angels fought back”.

War.

This really reads like a fairy tale, something from Lord of the Rings, or the Harry Potter series. But, no, this is raw reality, not some fantasy. It strongly suggests that heaven and earth are very similar. War, in heaven or on earth, means death, wounds, anger, hate, is a result of creeping resentment. War in heaven took place because the Son of God, always Jesus Christ, came to earth, the Son of Man, always human, was born there, lived, was killed, but then victoriously rose from the dead and ascended to heaven: the dragonish devil was unable to prevent all this, although he tried, continuously.

If all else fails: make war. And this ultimate conflict started in heaven. Heaven? Where God lives? War in Heaven? Yes, you read it right. So the Devil was defeated there, but not vanquished. He escaped. Where did he go? Not to some distant planet, no, he knows the Bible better than you and me. He knows that “God so Loved the World, the Cosmos.” And there’s where he went, next door to all of us, even right where we live, to continue WAR: peace in heaven but war on earth.

But first some backtracking.

Throughout history, right from the very start in Paradise, to the very end on Golgotha, Satan’s aim was to get rid of the Son, but when that misfired, he went after God himself and his precious creation. That’s what’s happening now.

How is it possible for the dragon, and its demonic power, to show up in heaven? What sort of status did he enjoy there, how could he even be there in the first place, a festering force amidst the holy angels?

I don’t know, but what I do know is that the insidious Satan, once there, conducted a constant recruitment campaign to dethrone God! And, amazingly, he found a lot of discontent there! He discovered that God wasn’t all that popular in heaven, just as he is on earth, as we well know.

It was plain that a substantial devil-crowd freely moved around in the heavenly realm, a designation so glorified in our pious hymns. Isn’t that strange? We’ve always been told by our ‘religious’ leaders that heaven was our ultimate goal: perfection guaranteed.

And now we read that even there, in God’s vicinity, evil lives!

From the Bible we know that the devil or Satan appears in the Bible always under two personas.

• He is in the first place the great seducer who tempted both angels and humanity right from the very start in paradise. Here, in Revelation 12, John calls the Satan the one “who seduces the entire world” (verse 9). Jesus depicts him as the ultimate deceiver, the “father of lies” (John 8: 44). He twists human thought in the web of delusion and conjures before the human eye the mirage of salvation and grandeur and drags the people, caught in the grip of falsehoods as an easy prey to their perdition. He is the king of conceit, the royal champion in mind bewilderment. Sounds like Trump!
• But the Bible also depicts this same Satan as the sly informer, who accuses the helpless, disoriented humans before God’s throne. That’s how he, as a prosecutor, appears in the first chapter of the book of Job in the meeting of ‘the children of God’. Scoffing cynically he hisses his poisonous accusation: “Does Job fear God for nothing?” He dissects the disintegrating human life, he picks it apart, he grinds it to pieces, until there’s nothing left but ruin and garbage, and then he triumphantly brings all this to God’s throne to show God that everything in this world has gone to pieces.

1 John 5: 19 paints the true picture:

We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.

The Bible says it like it is: The Evil One is in charge here, right here!

We, our houses and our world are saturated with satanic toys, all ‘war’ toys, all combatting the cosmos. We have become Satan’s devoted soldiers: willing workers in the war waged against God’s precious planet. 

This war contaminates the universe in all its spheres, and infects all facets of creation.  

War in heaven becomes war on earth.

Here’s Satan’s boast:

“This world, God, your own world, over which you at one time pronounced that it was ‘very good’, now this world, this same world, is, in my possession, distorted into dire destruction, everything in her is in pieces, is poisoned, is on the verge of collapse.”

That’s the Satan, the tireless accuser of all God’s servants. He is the one that carries the title of “the great accuser of all our brothers and sisters”. So, in that capacity, as the accuser of the human being, he has access to the heavenly realms. That’s the case because there is so much truth in his accusations, because, as a matter of fact, he has us in his grip. Satan has, to tell the bitter truth, truth on his side. The facts show that, indeed, we humans are completely corrupt. God is in no position to deny him that truth; God simply cannot ignore this as pure fiction.

The earth in the Balance.

“It is only a matter of time before a coronavirus that is far more lethal and contagious than this one emerges to ravage the world’s population,” says Prof. Dr. Haseltine, a respected epidemiologist. “When that happens, we will no longer be talking about a global death toll in the ‘mere’ hundreds of thousands.” He suspects the world is overdue for a deadly influenza outbreak capable of removing one to two billion people from the planet.

That’s just one example, because Satan’s ultimate aim is to destroy God’s creation. And, indeed, we are in an impossible quandary: thanks to that wonderful elixir, that magical potion that fuels our adored automobiles, and our ingenious flying machines, and feeds our entire food chain, we are toast when we keep on trucking, and toast when we stop.

Thank you Satan: you have been successful: you lost the war in heaven, but we, the earth-people, the God-Crowd in particular, have, by and large, been receptive to your wishes. Will you succeed here?

Fortunately your victory on Calvary was short-lived: PEACE prevailed! There is an ancient Dutch hymn, celebrating Easter. My translation is just that: a feeble effort. Here’s its last verse:

Want nu de Heer is opgestaan
Nu vangt het nieuwe leven aan
Een leven door zijn dood bereidt
Een leven in zijn heerlijkheid.

Now that the Lord rose from the dead
A sign of our new life ahead
Prepared by his three day’s demise
Forever in earth’s paradise!

JUNE 10 2020

HAS GOD DISAPPEARED?

Perhaps this time I may be overreaching, because God is the ultimate mystery, but I take Paul, the great apostle, at his word when he wrote, (1 Thessalonians 5:21) “Test everything and retain what is good.”

I am, however, emboldened by Bonhoeffer when he writes, “We must live in a world, and must indeed do so, “etsi deus non daretur”, as if there were no God.”

Years ago, I wrote, Day without End, a book wherein I envision Eternity. Jesus plays a prominent role therein, but somehow God never enters into the picture. I did not do that on purpose: that’s how the story enfolded. It is available on the web at a small charge, or free upon request.

One of my favorite books is The Hidden Face of God, written by Richard Elliott Friedman, a professor of Hebrew at the University of California, San Diego.

I bought it September 12 1998, and have often re-read it.

In The Hidden Face of God, Dr. Friedman traces God’s slow disappearance: “Gradually from Genesis to Ezra and Esther, there is a transition from divine to human responsibility for life on earth. The story begins in Genesis with God in complete control of creation, but by the end humans have arrived at a stage at which, in all apparent ways, they have responsibility for the fate of their world.”

He then describes how Abraham argues with God, while, with Lot fleeing from Sodom God says, “Flee quickly, because I cannot do a thing until you get there (Genesis 19: 22)….Humans are not independent of God here, to be sure, but, let us say, that the human voice in the story is certainly growing louder.”

Jacob struggles with God: it is a story of a man having a fight with divinity! Humans are confronting their creator, and they are increasing their participation in the arena of divine prerogatives.

That is confirmed already in Genesis 3: 22, where it says, referring to eating the fruit, “Here the human has become like us”. Later, Moses is singled out: “Now Moses speaks with God, the way a man speaks to another man”. (Exodus 33: 11).

The most remarkable event takes place with Joshua: He calls out for the sun and moon to pause in the sky – and God complies!

“Have we become of age?”

Both Bonhoeffer and Friedman pose this question, “Like children growing and separating from their parents, is the biblical story about the growing, maturing, and natural separating of humans from their creator and parent?”

Friedman, at the very start his amazing book, page 1 of Chapter 1, writes, “Among God’s last words to Moses, the deity says, ‘I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.’ (Deut. 31: 17, 18; 32:20). By the end of the story God does just that.”

So, is that still the case? Has God left us? It seems to me that this is the case: the current situation tells the story: we simply have to live with the consequences of our actions.

But really, nothing is lost: here’s how Dr. Friedman concludes his book, “There is some likelihood that, as some of the conscious matter of the universe, we are created more in the divine image than we have suspected. There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.” (Emphasis in the original).

Other sources confirm this.

Twice in the past week something popped up in my reading (both originating  from Dutch sources, sent to me by my brother Drewes in The Hague, a retired engineer) that touched on God’s presence in the universe, confirming the Friedman-Jewish perspective: (1) from a Protestant point of view and (2) from a secular source.

The second instance I found in a dissertation by Dr. C. Stam who wrote, “De Opstanding van de Doden” (The Resurrection of the Dead).  (I have translated four books, all published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids and Cambridge, so I am no stranger in that field.)

Dr. Stam, under the heading of “God makes himself known as Creator”, concludes that, “God has made our world visible as expression of his being, his essence.”

That to me suggests that, to get to know God and to honor him, we must also rely on creation, must honor and love it as a pure expression of His being.

The third source is taken from Civis Mundi, an online Dutch academic magazine. In its latest issue I found a synopsis of a book by Prof. Dr. K. van der Wal. I was struck by three observations, and I translate:

• He first discusses the pre-modern reality and its description of nature in which stories or myths concerning gods, spirits and ancestors are central. These higher powers have fashioned the world and still influence it. J.H Bavinck makes the same point in a book I have translated published as, “Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision.”
• Van der Wal quotes Sir Arthur Eddington: “Nature is not only odder than we think, but odder than we can think”.
• He also cites Albert Einstein: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

I believe that these three quotes are religious statements: creation is beyond human understanding. Only a God Creator is behind it all.

Can we know God by his works?

Can we deduce God’s greatness from his creation? Well, Sir Elliott Gardiner has done the same with Johann Sebastian Bach. He wrote a 600 page book on him, solely based on his music. He writes: “Bach had normal flaws and failings, which make him very approachable. But he had this unfathomably brilliant mind and a capacity to hear music and then to deliver music that is beyond the capacity of pretty well any musician before or since.”

Has God disappeared?

Yes and No. We read in the Bible that “God lives in unapproachable light: nobody can see God and nobody has seen God.” (1 Timothy 6:16). Basically, for all practical purposes, yes, God has disappeared, and he is and will remain the grand mystery. But just as Bach’s personality can be deduced from his music, so God’s being is present not only in his creation, but also in his Son, because fortunately, Jesus has become the embodiment of God.

One of the finest instances of revealing language is found in Colossians 1: 15-20:

Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all
creation.  For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens
and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions
or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him
and for Him.  He is before all things, and in Him all things hold
together.  He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the
beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will
come to have first place in everything.  For it was
the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in
Him,  and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having
made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I
say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

Jesus embodies the perfect humanity. Jesus Christ, God become human, will be physically with us in THE GARDEN OF EDEN to come.    

Has God disappeared? Yes and No. No: He disappeared to prepare us for eternity. Yes: I sincerely believe that today He comes to us both in creation, (that’s why it is holy!), and through the Son who restored Creation, makes eternal life possible.

Today the church must encourage us to pray for the coming of the New Creation, and set an example for this to happen, because our HOPE, our only hope, is Christ who died to regain CREATION for whose coming we must pray without ceasing. John 3: 16.