Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

JUNE 1 2020

THE PATH OF LIFE ETERNAL

See that I follow not the wrong path and lead me in the path of Life Eternal. (Psalm 139: 24).

Life is making choices: wrong path, right path; wrong food, right food; wrong partner, right partner. Today all of life conspires to push us in the wrong direction, with life-threatening consequences. Not Jesus: he came to teach us ‘how to live correctly’, how to live as human beings in God’s earth; that’s why he came with a dual purpose, not only to save us but primarily to restore creation to her pristine state.

Fortunately, there is an awakening out there: we are experiencing a sudden jolt that might just work as a catalyst for change. And change we must, not easy because we are creatures of habit: we have our routines: wake up, grab a cup of coffee, have a bite of something, and back to the grindstone, because: “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.”

Well, for millions that routine has suddenly stopped. We still owe, but for many the ‘work’ part has been deleted. We suddenly have time on our hands, time to reflect, or time to riot?

Time to change?

Ecclesiasticus 3 points to change:

To everything there is a season,

and a time for every purpose under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to break down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to search and a time to count as lost,

a time to keep and a time to discard,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

I believe that NOW is a time to mend, a time to kill the old order, a time to uproot what has become a destructive regime, benefitting the rich and killing the poor and fatally wounding creation. 

We are seeing the World Health Organization as irrelevant, we are seeing the United Nations as non-effective, we are seeing the European Union as fragile, unwilling to help Italy and Spain to fight to VIRUS. Instead borders are sealed off, while power has reverted back to national and local authorities.

And then there is the USA. Thanks to meat shortages President Trump has decided to open slaughterhouses, endangering the workers there: money trumps lives. My question: how essential is meat in our lives.

Fast Food Nation

This past week I have been reading, Fast Food Nation, and the astonishing rise of McDonald’s and other fast food outlets in the last 50 years. Their closure has led to a surge in ‘home-cooking’ and ‘home-baking’ and ‘home-gardening’, while farmers are forced to stop the factory farming of cows, pigs and chickens.

Eating meat is embedded in our culture, even though animal agriculture is a leading cause of global warming. Will the Covid-19 open the door to more healthy eating and greater awareness of Climate Change?

Yes, the path of Life Eternal is intimately connected to our eating habits. We now know that we cannot protect our environment – creation – while continuing to eat meat regularly. If cows were a country, they would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world after China and the USA.

For too long, especially in “Western civilization,” we have nurtured an opposition between “mind” and “body”. Even worse, we have held the body hostage to the mind. What the mind wanted, came first; what the body needed, came maybe second. This radical dismemberment of our very being has been at the root of so many of our contemporary illnesses. Even the treatment of illness follows this same duality: medications may be prescribed, but without psychological therapy. It is now more important than ever to let people’s minds become re-assimilated to their bodies, to restore balance. The church is no help there: it separates Nature from Grace, Heaven from Earth. The same split is evident in Human and Animal. The current pandemic is the result of our anthropo-human-centric life: we are seen as more important than the animals God created from the same soil, even though the abuse of animals is at the very centre of the pandemic.

Jesus taught us to be the servants in chief in creation, a service that includes animals.

Eating a plant-based diet is the most important contribution an individual can make in reversing global Warming: Following ‘the wrong path leads us away from the path of Life Eternal’. Life Eternal is exactly what it says: it means the earth being permanently capable of sustaining LIFE, because right here on terra firma we will spend eternity.

C. S. Lewis was right when he wrote, ““Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts”

Oops, that hurts. Our farming system is a road to hell, permeated with misery. Today’s chickens have been so genetically modified that their very bodies have become prisons of pain even if we give them their freedom. Turkeys are bred to be so obese that they are incapable of reproducing without artificial insemination. Mother cows have their calves ripped from them before weaning, resulting in such acute distress that we can hear this in their wails, while cattle are imprisoned neck-to-neck in feedlots and brutally slaughtered.

The road we are on leads to PANDEMICS: if some part of creation hurts, we all become victims, with the USA being the leader in animal cruelty and with Brazil openly encouraging rain forest clearing. Both are now Coronavirus champions: two countries led by presidents who call themselves Christians.   

Go vegetarian.

A 2015 study found that a vegetarian diet is $750 a year cheaper than a meat-based diet. It’s also healthier: less fat, less heart disease, less antibiotics in our diets, as its overuse is leading to reducing its healing powers.

There is a lesson here for eternity. The Bible tells us so. See that I follow not the wrong path and lead me in the path of Life Eternal. (Psalm 139: 24).

What is ‘the path of Life Eternal?”

And here I open up another animal aspect: a can of worms. The Path of Life Eternal leads through vegetarianism.  We cannot do God’s will by abetting animal cruelty. Today we eat the ‘Devil’s Brew’, born and slaughtered in pain and cruelty, saturated with growth hormones, with no regard for the animal’s wellbeing. In the very last text of the book of Jonah, God expresses concern for the welfare of the domesticated animals in Nineveh. God cares about them, and so should we.

Sorry to repeat my mantra about heaven: we won’t go there, ever. Our eternity will be lived – to the full, I should add – here, right here, on God’s precious earth. Life Eternal will be enjoyed, perfectly – in full loving care and symbiosis with ALL ANIMALS and ALL OF NATURE.

For our sake, our eternal welfare, now that we are on the threshold of a new phase in human history, now that we are at a historic moment in the tortuous tale of humanity, God calls us to reconsider how life should be lived. The path of Eternal Life leads through animal welfare and effective love for creation.

In a world threatened with famine, especially in Africa and South-East Asia, it is unconscionable to eat a product that requires close to 10 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat, not counting the untold calories in refrigerated trucking to bring it to the table.

I may add that my wife and I have been vegetarian ever since we read 45 years ago Francis Lappé’ s book, Diet for a Small Planet.

EARTH

“In the beginning”.

I am going to examine the very first text in the Bible. I am afraid it will involve some speculation, because only God was there, but his great apostle, Paul, encouraged me in 1 Thessalonians 5: 21, to “Test, investigate everything, and retain what is good”. Paul, after all was the most educated of all God’s immediate followers, and a great scientist in his own right, as well as a literary giant: just read again 1 Corinthians 13.

“In the beginning”.

With these three simple words the Hebrew Bible starts. No speculation about the number of years ago. No indication where and how: just “in the beginning.”

Then the next line:

Now the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the
surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the
surface of the waters.…

These past days I have struggled to fill these words with meaning. Try to imagine the scene: total darkness, pitch-black everything. Not a star to illumine, no point of light anywhere.

Yet in that utter nothingness – I believe that I was there!  Not as my being as I type these words, yet I was there. I was there, among the thousands of trillions of random substances, in this light-less swirl of untold many objects, bouncing off each other, changing shape in the process, a scene that nobody ever has seen or could see or has seen, a seemingly chaotic cauldron of bits and pieces of floating something.

Here’s what J. H. Bavinck writes about that period:

“We are left with the core idea that the time in which we stand, the time is which history takes place, can never be understood in terms of itself. If we want to understand that—if we want to grasp the sense of history—we must go back to primeval times, to the events that took place before the ordering of this world. It was precisely then that the foundations were laid on which the structure of history rests.

    It is truly remarkable that this same primitive thinking that is always engaged with the happenings in the Urzeit is at the same time interested in what will happen in the end?time. The gods and the powers at work in primeval times fashioned our world as we now experience it. However, the existence of this world is no more than a brief flash between two abysses of deep darkness. Soon, at the arrival of the end-time, our world will descend to the state it was before, when everything will revert back to what existed in the Urzeit: just as death is close to birth, so the down­turn is not far from the upswing. Just as all that has been neatly ordered stems from chaotic disorder, emanating from the fog of the Urzeit, so the cosmos will disappear again in that same undefined state. The end?time is nothing else but the return to the Urzeit.”

That’s why Ecology and Earth systems, from which all life flows, should be at the heart of learning and preaching.

Bavinck needs requoting, “Just as all that has been neatly ordered stems from chaotic disorder, emanating from the fog of the Urzeit, so the cosmos will disappear again in that same undefined state. The end?time is nothing else but the return to the Urzeit.”

J. H. Bavinck calls that era, the URZEIT. Sorry, there is no English equivalent for that concept. My dictionary defines it as, “An unspecified time period extremely long ago, prehistoric times”. We usually label this time-slot as primeval.

All churches, and all educational systems, have utterly failed to make ‘living’ the center point of all teaching. Especially churches have completely fallen short there, because contact with the earth is the essential element of life. We are taken from the earth, we belong to the earth, and we live through the earth. Our bond with the earth is so strong that we cannot for a moment imagine existing apart from the earth.

Oh, that utterly lamentable heaven hoax: it has been the church’s main doctrine ever since not Christ but Aristotle became the ruling force in all religious expressions: anthropocentric, rather than ‘earth-centered’.

Nietzsche, the great Nietzsche, the much maligned Nietzsche, who pulls no punches, whos father and 2 grandfathers were Lutheran ministers, and who also was slated to follow in their footsteps.

Here’s a quote from Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s famousbook, available on line,  

I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of super-earthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not.

Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!

Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfullest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

Yes, in most evangelical Christianity of all stripes ‘heaven’ has been promoted, misleading the flock. That’s why “non salus extra ecclesiam”, no salvation outside the church, is not true. If this is what the church teaches, then the opposite has more weight: no salvation inside the church.

Today, fortunately, we are discovering that our dependence on the earth is elementary. That’s why John 3: 16 is one of the most significant texts in the Bible, if not the most important one. It bears repeating,

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Once, in a Bible study session I asked a participant what the word “world” included. The answer was ‘people only.’

That’s indeed the popular explanation. The Greek word for ‘world’ is ‘cosmos’, which any dictionary defines ‘anything that lives or moves or has a being.’ It generally refers to the earth and all it contains, including the stars and planets. That’s the world the Lord loves, as any great artist loves his own creation.

Jesus came to buy it back, buy back the cosmos, THE EARTH, he loved so much.

That’s the message to church still misses and is at the root of our troubles. That’s why we must ‘examine everything, and keep what is good.’  (1 Thessalonians 5: 21).

I also love John 1: 1:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

There, “In the beginning”, the foundation of all that exist, men, woman, animals, trees, everything, all of us, alive and dead, The Earth, in short, was made.

We, thanks to fraudulent theological views, have hastened EARTH’S demise. Jesus is returning to undo our disastrous deeds when he returns.

Soon I hope. 

Postscript.

Last week I was admitted to the regional hospital to discover that I had double pneumonia. After 4 days I was discharged on the promise to take it easy. I now recall that for years a dull pain in my chest was a harbinger. This time it was fits of chills and fever that set off my seeking medical advice.  

May 10 2020

IS RELIGION STILL RELEVANT?

God’s peace be unto you.

On March 10 1965 I bought Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, new, for $1.45. It’s now a tattered copy, held together with black tape.

That was 55 years ago!

Buying that book then shows my thinking and my reading habits way back when I was a young 37 years of age, married for 12 years, a father of 5 young children, living in a newly constructed multi-leveled home, with a built-in office, chairing the steering committee charged with organizing a four day convention for some 3,000 CRC – Christian Reformed Church – young people from all over North America – a special train came from Chicago-land with 1,000 teenagers – an elder in a large CRC church, operating my insurance agency, and being brand-new real estate broker.

That huge church, seating 700 people, then full twice on Sundays, is now closed!

Is Religion still relevant?

Yes, it’s an altogether a-religious age now. Then young people still went to church and attended societies; then church attendance and weekly church-related activities were part of daily life. Now?

Now?

“You are the salt of the earth”, Jesus stated in the Sermon On the Mount.

Re-reading Bonhoeffer’s book last week I was struck by his statement, “That salt sustains the earth: the world exists for the sake of the disciples”.

That needs some explanation.

When Jesus said this, the 12 disciples constituted the entire church. They were then ‘the salt of the earth’. That humble flock of fishermen kept the earth intact. Bonhoeffer again, “In casting out the disciples the earth is destroying its very life.”

In other words, once the salt loses its ‘saltiness’, the earth implodes.

Is that the case today? Has the church failed in its essence?

Bonhoeffer thinks so.

Bonhoeffer, when in prison, awaited a trial that never came. Without any jurisdictional preliminaries he was hanged 75 years ago, his grave never found.

While in the Gestapo prison he had lots of time to ponder the fate of the church and the state of religion. In 1944-5 his isolation resembled our isolation, unable to gather with fellow believers.  Now our only ‘Christian Community’ contact is through telephone or Zoom or Skype or Internet. Then Bonhoeffer’s only link with the outside world was through letters with a believer-guard facilitating that process.

In these letters Bonhoeffer explored the state of the church. He gave as example something then current: in his days his (and my) parents and grandparents had a ‘best room’ that had nothing to do with work, everyday life and normality. That’s how he saw the church, a sugar-coated faith for Sunday services that turned Jesus into some moralistic figure – if he is mentioned at all. He wrote, “Christ has been banned completely from the house of life and confined to the temple and the church.”

And then this key statement,

“Christ does not call us to a new religion but to life…….Religious trappings go very much against my grain, often to the point of instinctive revulsion, and that is certainly not good.”

We do well to bond with Bonhoeffer here, because he was a visionary, a person who in prison found not a grain of religion among his fellow detainees, detected not a trace of faith in God there. That made him to write, “God is either 100 percent real in the world or not at all: there is no third possibility. God’s reality cannot be divided into religion on the one hand and reality on the other……It is impossible to experience the reality of God without the reality of the world, or the reality of the world without the reality of God…..Worldly existence and Christian existence are not simply two sides of a coin but they are at one and the same time the whole coin. If this is not the case the church degenerates into a ‘religious society’ (or, as my church calls itself, ‘a religious organization’), fighting for its own existence, and thus automatically no longer God’s church in the world……Without God, without humanity we lose the earth: God, humanity and the earth belong together”.

Yes, a religious organization stands on its own, apart from God and apart from the world: a mere human movement. A church should be a God-fearing, Earth-enhancing Community, because God, Humanity and the Earth belong together. J. H. Bavinck affirms this when he writes that redemption of humanity and redemption of creation – the world – go hand in hand.

That brings me back to The Salt of the Earth. That salt has now become defunct, and with it the earth ceases to be, something we experience today.

As I see it from my limited perspective: All churches, all ‘religions’, separate faith from day-to-day LIFE. And now it is no longer possible to live so that God, Humanity and Life are united. The church, seen as a ‘religious’ organization’ stands apart from life and thus separated from God: the church is there for itself, in spite of its pious utterances.

The VIRUS

The VIRUS we are experiencing is the result of a humanity living without God, without regard for John 3: 16, love for the cosmos. Loving the cosmos has become impossible, even though we must persist.

The Virus is the direct result of us forgetting that the earth must remain inviolate, that we, humanity, the earth and God belong together. By cutting down the forests everywhere, we disturb nature’s balance, and the animals’ viruses become ours. Even though we may find some sort of vaccine today, tomorrow an even more dangerous disease will emerge, because our ‘religion’ prevails, ‘the SALT’ has lost its flavor, sealing our doom. But ‘religion’ still lives on!  

The optimism, the youthful enthusiasm of the 1960’s, is gone, and with it our future. But ‘religion’ lives.

May 1, 2020

We know that our alteration of the atmosphere is leading us into a mass-extinction event, but we don’t want to change our habits: we are addicted and our lack of faith accelerates the disintegration, even though this disease can kill anyone on the planet: it’s invisible; it spreads because of the way we move and congregate. It now looks that in the choice between economic activity and health protection, the drive for the dollar has priority: we always choose death over LIFE.

Be assured that this is the first of many calamities that will unfold throughout the coming years. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel. This is just a dress rehearsal. Wait till Global Heating fires up: bound to come. Wait till the world runs out of potable water: bound to come. Wait till crops fail and famine stalks: bound to come. Wait till electricity ceases and the Internet is interrupted: bound to come.

All these are baked into the situation we’ve already created, in part by ignoring warnings that scientists have been issuing since the nineteen-sixties. Some shocks will be local, others regional, but many will be global, because, as this crisis shows, we are interconnected as a biosphere and a civilization.

The Salt has lost its favor: irrelevant religion is still alive but LIFE is dead, because we have separated God from creation and creation from LIFE.

Christ did not come to bring religion: that’s a manmade affair. Irrelevant. Christ came to bring us LIFE, Eternal Life, Life to the FULL.

Postscript.

On May 10 2020 it is exactly 80 years that the German army entered the Netherlands and for Five Full Years I lived under the cruel German Occupation.

MAY 1 2020

FORTUNATELY: THE END IS NEAR.

My closest birthday is 92. I can unequivocally state that ‘my end is near.’ I may have a few years left, but I am a finite being: someday, perhaps soon, my perishable life will end and I will die, and will be resurrected imperishably: life without end. Amen. My daily prayer is Maranatha, Lord, come quickly.

Our earth too has a finite problem. The globe itself will always remain, but human life won’t. We all will die in one gigantic fire.

Sounds awful. It is. I go by what the Bible says in 2 Peter 3:

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 as you anticipate and hasten
the coming of the day of God, when the heavens will be destroyed by fire and the
elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with God’s promise, we are looking
forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

Just as the Coronavirus appeared out of nowhere, so too THE DAY OF THE LORD will come totally unannounced: could be tomorrow.

A riddle solved. Perhaps.

For a long time I had no idea how this would come about: now it has dawned on me that we ourselves will be the perpetrators. When the then known world drowned, the ARK was there to save a remnant. Then the Lord vouched never to initiate such an act again. Not necessary either: today we all can visualize life’s extinction. We see it all around us: we already live in a dying world judging by the disappearance of species. Someday, perhaps this year, 2020, Global Heating will reach the trillions of tons of METHANE, stored in the shallow waters of the Arctic Ocean. That will do it. METHANE is some 40 times more lethal than the GHG (Green House Gases) we emit whenever we ignite the engine of our adored automobiles.

The current VIRUS phenomenon is sure sign that the world population has outgrown its resource base. Returning to the 2019 economic enterprise will merely speed up faster disintegration.

Don’t expect that the UN or the USA or the European Union will magically devise a solution to the world’s plight. It’s not that we don’t know what to do: the recent close-down of some activities saw a rapid decrease in pollution. No, it’s not that the END is inevitable, but greed always triumphs: rain forests will still be leveled; carbon fuels will still find new applications; the rich will still be getting richer and the poor poorer; the weapon industry will still strive and infrastructure deteriorate: no, more of the same is not the answer, because it simply will push the economy farther along the route toward collapse.

The Bible tells us so.

No, I am not one of those fundamentalists who use the Bible as a guide to history, but the Bible, in a few words, tells us that God is the Creator, that humanity wanted to be like god, switching allegiance to God’s opponent, that Jesus, perfect human, perfect God, bought creation back, and will deliver the goods once humanity has succeeded in ending all life.

Yes, we are the culprits.

In Paradise we ended creational harmony with the most ominous results. We broke up the Kingdom! We distorted creation with disastrous consequences. “Cursed is the ground because of you” Gen. 3:17 tells us, with Monsanto monstrously magnifying that momentum.

Once sin affected just one portion of that beau­tifully holistic order, it infected its totality, slowly ruining the entire earth, because God, in his wisdom and humility allowed it to be sub­ject to destruction: Deuteronomy 31: 17, 18 expresses this without a grain of doubt, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”

God himself took this fateful step because we, humans, we wanted to be kings, because we refused to live in a world, even in God’s marvelous Kingdom, that wants to be subject to him alone.

So here we are.

We now live in a world without God. Now we are ‘gods’: we call the shots, echoing John Milton: “better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven”.

Now people like Trump and Boris Johnson and Putin and the Saudi Princes are in charge. And with them in control we daily exper­i­ence the terrifying consequences.

We now see God’s work of art embroiled in the power of demons. Satanic forces have thrown themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation.

And the church?

That’s something the church has never grasped. 1 John 5: 19, (located somewhere far in the Bible who very few read anyway) plainly says that “We are God’s children, but the entire world is in the power of the Evil One.” Sad, but true.

Jesus, of course, knew this, as is evident from John 17, where he tells his Father in heaven that ‘we don’t belong to a world ruled by Satan’, but the church has seen this as a sign that we are heaven bound: Christ’s followers belong to His kingdom!

Jesus saw the influence of Satan everywhere. When his disciple Peter’s mother-in-law suf­fered from a fever, Jesus “rebuked” the illness and “it left her” (Luke 4:39). When Jesus and his disci­ples were at sea and a severe storm endangered the ship, Jesus “rebuked” the wind and said to the sea: “Be still!” (Mark 4:39). The forces behind that storm and behind that fever are Satanic; the world of hid­eous demons plays a blasphemous role in these phenomena. Yes, the Coronavirus is a Devil’s tool!

Jesus shows us here a scenario regarding life in general—awesome storms, Climate Heating—and what will affect us in particular—mysterious diseases, Pandemics— replete with omi­nous con­se­quences. No longer is our universe one of simple beauty and harmony, but, especially in our days, one of unpredictable powers which threaten us with annihilation from all directions.

Demon-possessed.

The world in which we live is dominated by demons. Every hour we experience the terrible influ­ence of this satanic situ­a­tion.

It is impossible to visualize the immense difference between the majes­tic, harmonious unity of creation- God’s Kingdom! – as it emer­ged from God’s hand, and the frantic, demon?dominated planet in which we, the cursed human­ity, dwell after the fall into sin.

The horrible truth is that God’s Kingdom is in shatters: creation groans. That is the profound tragedy con­fronting the life of the world, the brutal and cruel consequence of the Satanic rule.

History in a nutshell.

There you have it: world history in a nutshell: God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse it and destroy the Kingdom that comprises all things, all plants, all animals, all people, all angels. Yes, God’s King­dom, synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God, in harmonious vene­ra­tion, this Kingdom is being destroyed, is coming apart at the seams: is close to death! Deuteronomy hit it in the nose: with us in charge there is decomposition, brokenness, frag­men­tation, enmity, contra­diction, meaninglessness, darkness, death. Everything that once was beautiful is now to be pitied and without hope.

Oh: we are so powerful.

Yes, we can do mighty things; yes, we can penetrate the secrets of creation, but all that no longer makes sense because we can never build a harmonious world; we can never restore its disorder, because our war against nature is destroying its existence: our oceans are acidified; our soil is polluted; our rainforests eradicated. All our effort and care are reduced to rubble under the weight of the curse that threatens all human life. There is no escaping it. 

Just like we, our earth has a finite problem. The globe itself will always remain, but human life won’t. We all will die in one gigantic fire. The Bible calls it, correctly: a purifying FIRE.

Fortunately our world is pregnant with a new earth: time for its delivery is imminent.

APRIL FOOL’S MONTH (3)

THE END IS IN THE BEGINNING

This is how the Bible starts: “In the beginning…. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

Will the END have similar features?

J.H. Bavinck calls the beginning the URZEIT, the primeval period, the primordial time that preceded humanity’s appearance. He writes, “The URZEIT was when all things were put into place. What happened, then, became the measure for everything that would happen afterwards. In that era the basis was laid on which all subsequent events rest.”

Will the END see the same features?

A bit later in his Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision, he continues, “It is truly remarkable that this same primitive thinking that is always engaged with the happenings in the URZEIT is at the same time interested in what will happen in the end-time……..Soon, at the arrival of the end-time our world will descend to the state it was before, and everything will revert back to what existed in the URZEIT, just as death is close to birth…………The end-time is nothing else but the return to the URZEIT”.

So there you have the Bavinck prediction, written as long as 70 years ago in the shadows of two world-wars and the dirty Thirties’ depression.

Put it another way: human history is a tiny island between the two immense oceans of URZEIT and End-time. We, you and I and the entire human race ever born, live and die between these two enormous entities, between a pollution-free and ideal conditions in the Garden, and Judgement in the End, followed by The Eternal New Earth.

Earth we are.

Genesis, the first Bible book makes it abundantly clear that we, with every atom and molecule in our bodies, are part of this earth: God formed us from the earth. That’s why we humans are adam, and belong to adamah, the life-bearing earth. That’s why our destiny is intimately intertwined with the fate of the earth. Genesis 3: 19 plainly tells us that “earth we are and to earth we shall return.” We and the earth are on identical paths: the state of the earth reflects our physical and mental state.

The VIRUS

The appearance of the VIRUS is no accident, is the result of us abusing creation. Now there are two destructive elements at work: (1) the COVID – 19 VIRUS destroying human health, and (2) we, humanity, destroying nature: We are the VIRUS and The VIRUS is us. Both bode ill for the future, and both lead to the sort of CHAOS that ruled IN THE BEGINNING.

To the world’s economy the Viruses are like the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. Don’t think for a moment that we can go back where we left off last year. The world’s economy is strained by at least three tremendous burdens: one is the increasing costs of production of mineral resources (don’t be fooled by the current low prices of oil: prices are one thing, costs are another). Another is pollution, and the third is accelerating Climate Change, the heat melting poles, already weighing on the economy. These three factors define the condition called “overshoot,” occurring when an economic system is consuming more resources than nature can replace.

Sooner or later, an economy in overshoot has to come to terms with reality. It means that it can’t continue to grow: it must decline. The VIRUS is that last straw.

An accelerating crisis.

It all started very early in human history. Something happened in Paradise, in the Garden of Eden, that caused its initial idyllic situation to stop: the Bible story centers on the taking of a fruit which God had singled out as a no/no. Whatever.

The result was our world, of which Cain became the prime mover. Jacques Ellul in his The Meaning of the City, writes that “Cain built a city, the city as opposed to Eden. The city is the direct consequence of Cain’s murderous act and of his refusal to accept God’s protection…….. The city is called Enoch, which means a new beginning….Creation is seen as nothing, and now a new start is made and it is no longer God’s creation, but a human concoction. Cain –we – takes possession of this world and uses it as he wishes, and the result is the CITY which represents the ultimate rejection of God. Today even the most remote places in the world are part of the City: the entire earth has become The City”.

Yet, Ellul sees The City of God as our final destination.

Extraordinary times.

Today these viruses are threatening the entire world. There is no antidote and the carnage goes on because WE will not change. On the contrary, even though ‘the lust for money is the root of all evil’, we pour money into the economy at a torrid pace never seen before. Last week I discovered that the Government of Canada had put $580 in my bank account, without ascertaining whether I needed it or not.  

April is April Fool’s month.

We fool ourselves when we think that we can pick up where the Pandemic started in 2020. There’s never a going back. The previous decade was the final ‘normal’ one, in which we thought we could have the cake and eat it too. Now the cake is eating us. Our exploitive actions are backfiring. We are forced to retreat, and retreat leads to defeat. Creation is mightier than we; the universe is uniting against us. The Poles, both North and South, band together to choke us by dispatching deadly methane and melting glaciers and ferocious winds our way.

We are mere mortals. “Who can endure the Day of His Coming?” laments Malachi, as the End ends in chaos, and the End is like the Beginning: an earth devoid of life, an earth depleted of essence, robbed of all sanity, deprived of LIFE.

Trump is tricking and treating his know-nothings “Christians”, his unaware ignoramuses, his overfed and undernourished followers, who now have become ready prey for the lurking Virus.

Yes, disaster is on the doorstep, with so far this year the hottest ever in the world, with the real heat yet to come, with only 13% of the oceans basically intact, and, with all the arable land, 40% of the earth’s surface, kept artificially productive, eroding the soil, poisoning the end product, famine looms: CHAOS is in the cards.

In the great scheme of Creation, God has given us, humans, a great degree of authority, subject however, to acting in harmony with the only wise will of God: as God loves his creation, our entire lives must mirror that devotion. Not doing this, not acknowledging God’s ultimate decrees, has disturbed the creation order and is leading to universal dissolution, from decay to total collapse.

The history of the world is determined by our never-ending attempt to establish a human empire, totally apart from God: simply another attempt to build a new Tower of Babel, and, just as the old one forever remained unfinished and led to complete confusion, so today it leads to CHAOS.

The real miracle is that straight through all these strivings to arrive at a human-dominated empire, God re-establishes his eternal and unequaled Kingdom.  

Yes: THE END IS IN THE BEGINNING, THE BEGINNING IS IN THE END.

APRIL FOOL’S MONTH (2)

CRISIS

The word ‘crisis’ is pure Greek. It means ‘decision’, it means stop and choose: going one way or another.

By now most of us know that the old way of burning carbon and so disrupting ‘nature’, was wrong. But is a new direction possible?  

The VIRUS was no accident: it was a direct result of our ‘way of DEATH”. Ordinary life before the pandemic had already caused a deluge of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality. Will the Virus change all that?

Crisis also means ‘opportunity’. We can make a new beginning.

I am a Christian. Let me explain that, because the term needs qualification today. To me the concept is captured in Jesus’ simple saying: “Love God above all else and our neighbor as ourselves”. To me loving God is expressed in loving his creation, taking the cue from John 3: 16, “God so loved the world, the cosmos, everything that lives and moves and has a being; and that God bought it back with the ultimate sacrifice: the life of his beloved Son.” He bought it back from THE EVIL ONE. See 1 John 5:19. It means that Jesus died to reclaim creation, Paradise, not just us.

THE VIRUS IS US.

Yes, the VIRUS is a result of us following THE EVIL ONE, God’s arch-enemy, who has taken possession of God’s world: temporarily I should add. This CRISIS is the result.

I see it as my CHRISTIAN duty to oppose THE EVIL ONE because I believe that my life is divided into two stages:

1. A short – 90 plus years perhaps – life under trying circumstances, on this side of eternity, and
2. Eternal life under perfect conditions, in the New Earth under New Heavens, cleaned of all pollution and space junk.

My current life I could call my “proving ground”, my ‘testing period’, which determines my ‘after life’.

Ever heard that before? Of course you have: the Apostles’ Creed says it plainly: “I believe in the resurrection of the BODY and LIFE everlasting. But……….

We have been fooled.

April is FOOL’S DAY month. Ever since in 1972, when I read Dr. Telder’s Sterven en dan? (After Death, What?), my life has changed. Suddenly I saw that HEAVEN was a myth, a Greek fabrication, based on Socrates and Plato, who saw death as an escape from a sinful earth and believed that death provided a means to be with the Greek gods. These Greek philosophers, these ‘wise men’, saw spirit as good and matter as evil, the earth as disposable and heaven as perfect, a teaching now recognized as GNOSTICISM. Implied in this ‘heaven’ belief is that humans are no longer part of the natural world and can create an autonomous ecosystem, separate from the rest of the biosphere. Covid-19 is telling us we cannot.

Yes, going to heaven is a hoax: a pagan Greek invention. John 3: 13 unambiguously states – “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven–the Son of Man”.

We have been fooled.

We fooled ourselves and this has led to our current situation, which will only get worse: our sinning against creation spells death.

I am writing this during the so-called HOLY WEEK, commemorating Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. In my opinion there is no such thing as one Holy Week: all weeks are Holy: all of life is Holy. To set aside 7 days per year as Holy smacks again of Gnosticism.

Love Creation

J.H. Bavinck, in his book Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision basically says that personal salvation and restoring the earth go hand in hand: to be a Christian means ‘loving God’s Creation’. Period. When we love creation and humanity, then we will be assured to inherit the KINGDOM, God’s restored PARADISE: perfection in a renewed world. Not heaven, for Pete’s sake, but a pollution-free, a totally cleaned cosmos, fit for eternity.

Why? Because we have been created for LIFE

We have been created for LIFE, and that to the full. Jesus came, not to found a religion, not to start a Christian church, but to teach us how to live. His opponents called him a ‘glutton’ and a ‘winebibber’. Jesus lived life to the full: his first miracle was making wine, ‘wine that cheers the heart’, said Solomon. These Pharisees and theological theorists, the Scribes, burdened the people of Israel of Jesus’ time with stupid rules and regulations and were so convinced that they did God’s work, that they killed Jesus when he flouted their ‘religious’ ordinances. They saw a stipulated religious life as one that could earn eternity by following the prescribed path. There still are denominations that follow these same principles: follow the rules and the church assures entrance to heaven. They even claim that ‘Nulla salus extra Ecclesiam’, no salvation outside the church. The VIRUS has other ideas. Now, perhaps for months, we will be unable to attend church services. Is the Lord teaching us a lesson here?

In the church’s erroneous claim that we go to heaven, the “KINGDOM” has totally fallen by the wayside, in spite of Jesus’ priority: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).

That spells it out. In our foolishness we have totally neglected that God’s Creation is his ‘beloved’ KINGDOM. By seeking its welfare, by promoting the well-being of ‘the natural world’, we also will gain everything else we require to LIVE. That is God’s promise, believe it or not.

So suddenly LIFE is different: a crisis is upon us!

The texture of everyday life is altering. A sense of fragility is everywhere. It is not only society that feels shaky. So does the human position in the world.

Crisis means decision time. Deuteronomy 30:19 says it so beautifully,

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.

Choose LIFE. Decision Time. Obey the rules of God’s Holy Creation – Holy because God made it. Obey God’s law of love.            

Bonhoeffer was right when he wrote:

 “Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient is a believer.” (Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Hitler regime on April 9 1945, 75 years ago)

Obedience means living in such a way that CREATION thrives: that’s how we honor THE CREATOR. Acting differently spells doom, causes PANDEMICS, results in CLIMATE CHANGE.

That’s what this CRISIS is all about! The Lord called “The Heavens and Earth as witnesses against us”. They are now testifying. God knows that the fate of the Heavens and the Earth is the most affected because our sin is against CREATION. Our disobedience is against God’s handiwork.

Please note: the Lord treats the heavens and the earth as living entities. A sin against these is a sin against God. That’s what this CRISIS is all about.

(By the way: The Bible recognizes three heavens: (1) The area under the Ozone Layer where we live, (2) the place where the stars and planets are and above all that (3) there where God dwells. See 2 Corinthians 12.)