Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

APRIL FOOL’S MONTH (1)

MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL….

A long time ago when media songs still had some sing-able content, “Money is the root of all evil…..take it away, take it away,” was quite popular. Of course I know that money in itself is not evil: it’s the desire for money- greed – that is the real culprit, but, OK that’s how the lyrics went.  

I always have a song spinning in my mind. Perhaps it originates in a habit I have: Every morning, just before breakfast, I read a Psalm or a portion thereof, aloud. I’ve done this all my married life – 67 years. Psalm 119 has 176 verses, and is divided into some 10 verse sections, so it takes me some 17 days to read them all. But most Psalms are short, so it in less than a year I go through the entire Psaltery.

I read them in the GRAIL PSALMS version, a new translation. It’s a singing version, and now that I am alone – my wife being in a care facility – I, at times, sing them. Another reason I like the Grail Psalms is that it comes with short introductions. Take Psalm 14. It deals with THE FOOLS: “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” Here is what the introduction says,

“The “fool” in the Bible is not an ignoramus, not a theoretical atheist or agnostic. He has his values all wrong and is encouraged by past experience to behave as if God would never take action.”

Well, I sincerely believe that this applies to us! We are the fools! We have our values all wrong. For the longest time God has allowed us to muddle, to screw things up, to, by our daily habits, dig ourselves deeper and deeper into a situation from which now there’s no escape. Now Creation is revolting.

I have become more and more convinced that for us God speaks through his creation: creation tells us about God the same way the Bible does. Just as we know Bach, Rembrandt, van Gogh, through their artistic acts, so we know God through his ultimate creation act: THE COSMOS. The Gospel of John opens with these majestic words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” No Bible then: only God’s CREATING WORD. Psalm 33: 9 confirms that: “God spoke and it came to be.”

The Bible is open to all sorts of interpretations – witness the HEAVEN HOAX – while creation speaks with one voice: we either LIVE when we love it as our origin, our mother, or we DIE, when we foolishly exploit it for monetary gain, the root of all evil, including the CORONAVIRUS.

Yes, the desire for money is the root of all evil. Governments everywhere have decided that we can vanish THE VIRUS with trillions of dollars, pounds, euros: FOOLISHNESS, PURE FOLLY: Curing evil with more evil, expanding the money tower beyond its carrying capacity, risks collapse.

Jesus and money.

Jesus had a decidedly disdain for money. When He came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:

“It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay,

And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay”.

No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. Curiously the fastest growing Protestant movement in the USA is the WEALTH GOSPEL, the theology of prosperity, which promises material success as well as eternal salvation.

I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy and this probably was one reason why Jesus did not like money.

We will recall that Jesus’ betrayal, suffering and death was directly associated with money: 30 pieces of silver, the price of a slave. How would we react if we’d start to realize that money would eventually kill us, as is the case now? I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money.

This is what I believe: “money killed Jesus, the WORD become HUMAN; money is killing God, the WORD become CREATION”. Of course God is greater than his creation.

Today all governments act like God: creating money ‘ex nihilo’, out of nothing. The trouble is that money, once in existence, becomes real: it has to be paid back. The same is true of ‘nature’. We take from it, but someday soon we have to pay back what we have borrowed, a very painful process, and there is a way.

Dr. Barry Commoner formulated the FOUR LAWS OF ECOLOGY, outlined in the first chapter of his book, The Closing Circle.

These are:

1) Everything is connected to everything else;

2) Everything must go somewhere;

3) Nature knows best; and

4) There is no such thing as a free lunch.

The first law states what Commoner called “a simple fact about ecosystems” – all healthy ecosystems are interconnected and self-stabilizing: if any part of a natural ecosystem is damaged or overstressed it can trigger far wider problems. For example, the burning of fossil fuels is overloading the global carbon cycle, which in turn is triggering dramatic changes to climate, global ice cover, weather patterns, ocean acidification, farming yields, sea levels, government budgets and worldwide refugee figures. Cutting down forests – for money! – leads to PANDEMICS.

Any society that ignores Commoner’s first law – that everything is connected to everything else – invites ecological and social turmoil, so evident today.

Of the second law – everything must go somewhere – Commoner said: “One of the chief reasons for the present environment crisis is that great amounts of materials have been extracted from the Earth, converted into new forms, and discharged into the environment without taking into account that ‘everything must go somewhere’. The result, too often, is the accumulation of harmful amounts of material in places where, in nature, they do not belong.”

Commoner’s third law of ecology – nature knows best – is not an example of naive, green romanticism, but a rejection of what he called “one of the most pervasive features of modern technology … the notion that it is intended to ‘improve on nature’”. Rather, he said: “Stated baldly, the third law of ecology holds that any major man-made change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.”

Commoner said he borrowed his fourth law – there is no such thing as a free lunch – from economic science: “In ecology, as in economics, the law is intended to warn that every gain is won at some cost. In a way, this ecological law embodies the previous three laws. Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to overall improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis and the CORONAVIRUS are warnings that we have delayed too long.”

MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL….

We all have ignored these laws because we foolishly wanted to make a quick buck. We, fools, now pay the price.

At the root of this PANDEMIC is MONEY, monetizing God and his creation, greed in other words. It is making fools of all of us.

More about this later this month.

SPRING 2020

COUNTDOWN

Before a satellite leaves the launching pad there always is a countdown: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, lift off. And whoosh, amidst noise and flames, smoke and explosions, an enormous projectile is pushed into the blue yonder.

There also in a countdown to The Lord’s Return. There is some similarity: it too will be a noisy affair; it too will involve flames and fire; it too will be dramatic. Malachi, the last book in the Hebrew Bible, comes to mind: “A refiner’s FIRE”…The earth will burn like a furnace”, with the fire coming down from heaven.

 That Countdown, that Cosmic Countdown, is not a simple reciting of a number: 10 days, 9 days, or 10 years, 9 years……… That countdown is more like 10 millennia, 9 millennia….. and just as changes in these previous 1000 year time periods were almost imperceptible, now, when ‘change and decay in all around I see’, suddenly the countdown to the Day of the Lord is like a rocket descending on us.

I was just talking to my wife, in isolation in a Nursing Home. She just said, (by phone) “Today it is good to be old. We have had the enjoyment to see kids and grandchildren. What is their future?”

REVELATION means just that.

The last Bible Book allows us to visualize the increasing pace of global deterioration. In Revelation 15: 5 till 16: 21 – look it up if you have a Bible – the last things are set into motion. The picture John, the author, provides us with is an accelerating succession of disasters, not unlike what happened in Egypt during the ancient Pharaoh regime, when Moses pleaded with the king there to ‘Let My People Go.’

Then the 10 plagues affected only the Egyptians, with the final calamity the death of all first-borns. This time also the liberation of The People of God is at stake, but now the disasters are not local, but universal and cosmic, much more intense and dangerous, and the people of God are victims as well.

But, as the Bible relates, for their sake God will speed up the COUNTDOWN. (Matthew 24: 22).

It’s not only the Bible that warns of imminent doom. Secular sources have come to the same conclusions, witness Yuval Noah Harari, the now famous Jewish professor and author of Sapiens. In a long article in a recent issue of the New Yorker (all articles there are long) he writes that “humanity faces three primary threats, “Nuclear War, Ecological Collapse, and Technological Disruption.”

Evidently his article was written before The Coronavirus appeared.

ARCTIC NEWS, which monitors the situation in the Far North, maintains that a sudden spike in temperature is possible. It writes that the trend indicates that 2°C was crossed in February 2020, and looks set to keep rising and cross 3°C in 2021, more specifically in January next year, which is less than a year away.

A 3°C increase means total disaster, means we all will burn to a crisp. That respectable scientists, whose life work is to study climatic conditions, offer this opinion, is more frightening than the Coronavirus, because it affects us all.

The appearance of the humble locust, swarming in their billions – as is happening now in Africa and the Middle East – is a symbol of evil and harbingers of change in the social order: see Exodus 10:1,4, 12-14.

It is all too evident that today the entire universe is implicated in the final demise of all of creation, because everything, everywhere, has become contaminated and despoiled by humanity: all the oceans are saturated with plastic and acidification of the waters are widespread. Even the highest heavens are chockful with satellites and other space junk. That’s why a total cleansing is needed, a process that might take thousands of years. But then “a thousand years are like a day” in divine terms.

Just imagine Noah – the ARK BUILDER – waking up: to him it would feel like he died yesterday. And so would Abraham and David and J. S. Bach and my grandparents………….

THE BIBLE IS NOT A HISTORY BOOK.

I know, the Bible is not a history book and neither does it provide a timetable for the future. It does, however, give us clear hints.

I see the current pandemic as a clear sign that we approach the End. Already the Coronavirus is a pandemic and produces panic in the planet’s population. Deadly droughts, hellish heat, and locusts devastate crops world-wide, indicating the onset of widespread famine.

It seems that everywhere the earth itself has become unsteady: storms, earthquakes, are rapidly increasing. In Revelation 16: 18 a dire prediction is made: “The culmination of the natural disasters and the pinnacle of pain are caused by an earthquake: “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.” The seismographs in the capitals shake wildly and record numbers beyond any ever registered. And the houses tumble, the high rises collapse. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.

In the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate from above, that find their source in nature, and there are those that are the result of human action. Today both are evident.

It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as our own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against us the tormentors. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become the enemy and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity. And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, her marvelous technical prowess, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now in a total humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.

The COSMIC COUNTDOWN is upon us. Revelation 11: 18 comes to mind:

The nations were angry, and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your people who revere your name, both great and small. (The time has come) for destroying those who destroy the earth.”

MID MARCH  

THE BLACK SWAN

The Black Swan.

I have a book by that name, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The subtitle is The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE. The sudden appearance of the Coronavirus qualifies as completely unusual, totally outside the realm of regular expectations: in other words: A Black Swan!

The most influential weekly in the world, is the British THE ECONOMIST. As its title suggests, it mainly focuses on financial matters. Each year, in January, it publishes an extra issue, looking forward what will happen in the coming year.

Its excellent editorial staff have usually been substantially correct, even though a famous baseball coach, Yogi Berra, once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Yet, nothing in that otherwise excellent issue, some 150 pages, with the presumptuous title, THE WORLD IN 2020, will pan out as these highly paid authors, the best of the world in their field, predicted, because THE VIRUS has emerged and the economy suddenly has stagnated: it now wobbles, and falls, with ominous consequences for us all.

Eric Hobsbawm, a well-known historian, in his book The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, asserts that the 19^th Century ended in 1914, when, 100 years after Waterloo, a conflict began, now known as World War I. He also stated that the 20^th Century was short, only 75 years, ending in 1989, when The WALL in Berlin tumbled down.  

I agree with him on the 1914 date but not on the second statement: after the collapse of the old Soviet Union in 1991, the world continued on its capitalistic path, even expanded its reach to embrace the entire world, especially China, which today has more billionaires than any other country. I now maintain that the 20^th Century ends this year, in 2020, with the sudden – Black Swan – emergence of the Coronavirus, throwing the entire global situation for a loop. This PANDEMIC forces us to radically change everything, from manufacturing, relying on ‘just in time’ delivery, to debt service as payments are due while production has stalled, to air travel and cruises. Boeing, already on life support – the USA biggest exporter – may well crash entirely. Any bets on the stock market or gold?

Back in time.

Pandemics tend to cause sudden lasting changes. That’s why history never is a gradual affair. It is prone to jump.

In THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY, Rodney Stark, a professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, relates how Christianity found general acceptance during a PANDEMIC in the year 260 in Rome. While the pagans fled the city, “the Christian Community nursed the sick and dying and even spared nothing in preparing the dead for burial.”

Such action caused Christian growth. This PANDEMIC was instrumental in Christianizing the Roman World.

Something totally different happened more than a thousand year later, which Barbara Tuchman describes in her A DISTANT MIRROR, the Calamitous 14^th Century. The Black Plague PANDEMIC killed perhaps as many as 30% on Europe’s population. Then the church, with its humble beginnings after Pentecost in Jerusalem, had become a supreme power. She writes, “The plagues accelerated discontent with the Church at the very moment when people felt a greater need of spiritual assurance………Human conduct was found to be ‘wickeder than before’, more avaricious and grasping, more litigious, more bellicose, and this was nowhere more apparent than in the Church itself.”

As the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his HERFSTTIJ DER MIDDEL EEUWEN relates, the period following the Black Death in Europe turned out to be the “WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES”. For him, the real story was not just the economic aftereffects of a PANDEMIC; it also put paid to the mysticism, irrationalism, and xenophobia that in the end brought an end to a basically ecclesiastical culture. Thus the Black Plague PANDEMIC paved the way for the Reformation.

Likewise, it looks entirely possible that COVID-19 will open the door to the “Waning of Capitalism”.

I believe that it took until the first two months of 2020 for the long Twentieth Century – 1914- 2020 – to come to an end. History jumps from one disastrous system – Capitalism – whose aim has always been ‘Creative Destruction’ in which it succeeded by destructing itself.

This will be the decade when the majority will come to understand that things are never going back to “normal.” Our bills are due: environmental, financial, ethical, social, even religious.

Capitalism.

For all of us Capitalism has become a quasi-religion: we, all of us, are paid-up members of the Church of Capitalism, whose creed is to “Shop till you drop.”

True, we greatly benefit from its products, from orange juice first thing in the morning, to television at night, touting the wonders of the current age. Not for a moment are we free from its influence. The Bible tells us “To pray without Ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), but for most of us our real adherence, all the time, everywhere is to “Consume without Ceasing”, to the point where, for every calorie of food, we expend 10 calories of climate-wrecking carbon substances.

The Bible tells us of instances where parents sacrificed their children to appease the gods: we have gone a step further: we sacrifice our very lives on the altar of Capitalism.

And that is about to come true.

The Black Swan of a PANDEMIC rears its ugly head. Just as in the Third Century Christians willingly sacrificed their health and life in the service of their neighbors, and so caused to Good News to spread, just as in the 14^th Century the opposite happened, and a pandemic was instrumental in church reform, so now, in Century 21, a PANDEMIC will break the idol of Capitalism, and teach us the lesson how God will not be mocked, will not be taken for granted, teach us the lesson that creation is holy, is the apple of God’s eye.

Psalm 19 comes to mind:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of His hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they reveal knowledge.

Without speech or language,

without a sound to be heard,

their voice has gone out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world…..

      The Law of the Lord’s (creation) is perfect

Reviving the soul.

We have silenced that voice.

The Lord is coming back to reclaim the creation he paid for with his life (John 3: 16).

“THAT is the Ultimate Black Swan.”

END OF FEBRUARY 2020

THE TWO WITNESSES.

The Lessing Version.

We must remember that Creation – God’s handiwork – always wins: Jesus’ death resulted in resurrection; Creation’s death will bring total cosmic renewal.

For my blog I often rely our divine guidance. This happened again now when I randomly took from my book collection Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s short stories, and discovered that there is more to Lessing than I thought: she also is a prophetess. I then read her short story: Report on the threatened City, and I was right away reminded of Revelation 11, which describes the fate of the TWO WITNESSES.

Doris Lessing must have used this Bible passage as her template, because there are too many similarities for it to be coincidental. With Doris the two witnesses come in UFOs, in a machine barely visible to the human eye. They come to warn the people in the city to relocate, because in 5 years it will be destroyed by an earthquake: they know that.

These spacemen are keen observers: They notice right away something they already had suspected:” the older these humans get, the less open they are to new thought material.” They kept on telling them the bad news of the coming disaster, but “their warning was like pouring a liquid into a container that has a hole in it”.

Generally, the feelings in the threatened city are best interpreted by a song a female vocalist has composed,

We know the earth we live upon is due to fall.
We know the ground we walk upon must shake.
We know and so…..We eat and drink and love,
Keep High, Keep Love, for we must die.

The spacemen also discover that the earth people have become so dependent on machinery that they have lost confidence in their own powers of observation. These two ‘witnesses’ (that’s really what they are) notice a lot about the psyche of these bi-pedal creatures because the two extraterritorial invaders can read the minds of the earthlings and have concluded that the young are in a state of disabling despair and “that society is indifferent to death and suffering.”

In the end, when the curiosity factor has vanished, their message causes hostility: “The mob was angered to the point of wishing to kill us….. so the mission must be regarded as failure.” And they returned in their UFO to their home.

The Biblical Version, found in Revelation 11.

Here also two missionaries, sent expressly from heaven. They are dispatched to warn the earth’s inhabitants of catastrophic happenings. The footnote in my Bible suggests that the two witnesses may symbolize believers who testify in the final period before Christ returns. That sounds credible, because I can hardly imagine that visible to the naked eye – and that today means appearing on TV – two celestial creatures descend from heaven, and start warning the people that THE END IS NEAR. What their coming does suggest, is that the church’s function is over: the two come because the bringing of the Good News by traditional ways no longer works, something that is now quite evident.

What both stories make plain is that we live in a time of apostasy, of chaos, and dissolution. Amidst this witless and disoriented generation people arise, such as Doris Lessing, an atheist by the way, and such respected scientists managing such websites as ARCTIC NEWS, and numerous books and articles, that warn us of our imminent demise– without much effect, I might add, as we keep on pursuing our carbon-rich path to perdition.

At this stage of history, by the Grace of God, contemporary technology can bring God’s message to the utmost ends of the world, and be read throughout the most distant countries, precisely at a time of immense insanity in an era speeding to complete collapse. Will these mini-sermons give new hope to a generation that is so tired and has lost its foothold? Will the Biblical truth that only Jesus Christ is Lord, and that in turning to him there is salvation, be proclaimed? Will a generation, totally estranged from the Gospel, still be able to adopt a new mindset?

Similarities

Exactly as in the Doris Lessing tale, in Revelation 11 too people, in their blind hate, will try to kill the bringers of the ONLY Good News. They won’t accept the truth that Christ will return to undo the environmental damage and renew the earth.

Why? The people of today cannot accept that message because it is too old-fashioned, too opposed to their deepest and most secret thoughts. After all these witnesses say things that have been heard from time immemorial and already then rejected as useless. These messengers bring something to the fore that, for centuries, has been repeated and already then seen as impossible for to embrace.

In both stories the witnesses come through as upright and strong, but the message is simply seen as dated, as belonging to earlier times. Their words convey strength but what they say has so often been heard before that it falls on deaf ears. No, even though they are well-spoken and their holy zeal impressive, the earth people refuse to become Christ’s disciples.  

The carriers of the very last exhortation on behalf of God, will vanish in the end, just as the words and warnings spoken by so many other prophets and apostles before have gone unheeded.

Revelation 11 also relates how the TWO WITNESSES are killed, their bodies publicly displayed: “For three and a half days people from every nation, tribe, and language will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because those two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth …………Then they went up to heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on”.

Both versions end in an enormous earthquake, so gigantic that a third of the earth is affected, with more disasters to follow.

Get used to it: The CORONAVIRUS pandemic is just the beginning!

FEBRUARY 15 2020

JUDGEMENT DAY

Believe it or not – and chances are you are not going to believe it – we are on the final countdown approaching JUDGEMENT DAY.

You may know that when the apostle Paul was in Athens, Greece that is, and made his way to the Areopagus, where the city’s  intellectual elite gathered, of all the topics in a the Bible he could have talked about, such as creation, or the place of the Jewish people in history,  or even the coming of Jesus, as Son of God, he chose JUDGEMENT DAY. Acts 17: 31-32 records his words, “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to humans that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed.”

That really means that there will come a time – and I believe it is not far away – when the Lord will act. Up till now he has allowed Satan, the Evil One, to call the shots. “He will judge the world in righteousness”, which simply means that he will set the crooked straight.   

My question, “Why would Paul, the most effective and experienced missionary the world has ever known, approach the then intellectual cream of the crop, with that particular topic?”

The Greeks then, and the church today, really does not believe in a ‘physical, living life’ hereafter. When Socrates, as recorded by Plato, drank the poison, he welcomed death. In “The Trials of Socrates”, Plato depicts Socrates’ last moments before his death. Plato quotes Socrates: “I’ll no longer stay put, but will take my leave of you and depart for certain happy conditions of the blessed”.

Socrates is certain that he’s on the way to heaven, and even says a prayer to the gods after drinking the poison: “‘One is, I suppose, permitted to utter a prayer to the gods – and one should do so – that one’s journey from this world to the next will prove fortunate”. Socrates died to celebrate death.

Here’s what was the result: when Christianity was sweeping over the “Greek” world, a dualistic heresy emerged: GNOSTICISM. It taught, following Socrates’ example, that matter and spirit are separate and not reconcilable. Socrates and Gnosticism taught that the spiritual world was pure and eternal, while physical reality was transient and an irredeemable ‘evil!’. Yes, creation is seen as evil!

Based on Socrates’ example, the church invented the Heaven Escape, and has adhered to that heresy ever since. Paul, when he mentioned ‘resurrection’, the unification with body and spirit, was chased from that market place, with the result that the Gospel according to Socrates has prevailed until this day.

Paul found no hearing in Athens, the intellectual hub of the world 2,000 years ago. Today the Socrates doctrine still rules the church, so it is not surprising that CREATION is seen as sinful, either openly or by tolerating its abuse. We sing, “This is my Father’s World,” but we act as if Socrates and not God’s Spirit is to be obeyed. If there ever was a generation that is guilty of murder, theft, habitat destruction, and almost any other sin, it is ours.

The Bible tells us how God created the cosmos – making it holy – that we uncreated it – commonly called SIN – and that Jesus’ sacrifice restored creation: we call that ‘redemption’. The overwhelming interpretation of Jesus’ death is that he died to save sinners. Not quite true. He died to restore Paradise, the Garden of Eden, that truly perfect world, that humanity defiled.

GOOD: SEVEN TIMES.

In other words: Creation equaled Perfection.

When God looked back on what he had done, when his beautiful creation was completed, and everything was there to serve everything else, a perfect example of how we too should live, a life of total service, God called his masterpiece ‘good’ seven times.

A while ago a demented man defaced one of the world’s most famous paintings: he was arrested and judged. Of course, that makes sense. Now a demented humanity repeats this act: dement because we are destroying the very earth on which we depend for LIFE.

 Do you really think that God will condone us polluting, poisoning, and rearranging the earth to suit OUR needs?

Well, in the thousands of years since creation was pristine, we have managed to do the seemingly impossible: we now are on the verge of total creational destruction caused by us humans. The church in Jesus’ days killed the Christ. We in our age are on the verge of killing God and his creation. That cannot go unpunished. Judgement day is the logical consequence.

Refiner’s Fire.

George Friedrich Handel, that great composer, a contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach, is best known for his oratorio THE MESSIAH, a perfect piece of music that is not only a symphonic masterpiece, but also a great exposition of the gospel. One of the most moving lines is a quote from the prophet Malachi, the last book in the Hebrew Bible, in Christian parlance known as The Old Testament.

Here is that haunting aria: 

“But who shall endure the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? For he will be like a refiner’s fire.”

Malachi, Chapter 4, has as heading, The Day of the Lord. It too pulls no punches: “Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire,” says the LORD Almighty. “Not a root or a branch will be left to them.

Paul’s effort to bring the gospel to Athens, met with failure: Gnosticism proved stronger than The Good News. The sad truth is that ‘The Heaven Heresy’ prevailed. No wonder that Jesus is quite pessimistic in his assessment of The Last Days: “Many are called, few are chosen,” he laments (Matthew 22: 14). He’s even more emphatic when he wonders, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18: 8.)

All this makes me wonder whether churches today have become obstacles to the COMING OF THE KINGDOM, Christ’s re-entry into creation.

FEBRUARY 1 2020

TELL ME IF I AM WRONG……

But first…..

Mere hours, after I had posted my 1,000^th blog, I fell ill: a confluence of burn-out ( I had looked after my wife, suffering from dementia for more than a decade), and a potent stomach bug that lay me flat for a week, dehydrating me completely,  lowering my blood pressure to a dangerous level of 90/60 for days. (My normal is about 140/65). No fever, no pain, just fatigue. It took me more than 4 weeks to regain a level of energy.

I had great intentions for the year 2020. As usual I had bought a diary – I’ve kept a diary for more than 40 years – and intended to write a daily journal based on the Bible Lectionary. None of that happened: for the first time in decades I have not recorded one line in either book.

In the meantime the local Long Term facility – only 10 years old – phoned that there was an opening for my wife. In less than a week she was to move out and into an institution. After more than 66 years of marriage, this still takes a lot of emotional adjusting. That too has now happened – a bit of dying for both of us. Fortunately her room is light and airy, facing south, looking over forests. Our five children, from far and wide, came for various lengths of stay, to ease the transition.

MOIRA PLACE with 128 beds, and employing 150 full-and part timers – is less than 7 km away, making it possible to bike there, even though at time of writing, in the heart of winter, and still recovering, this seems remote.

My time of illness drained me also intellectually: my mind – always active – was closed. Yet my unconscious remained focused, helped by a book I read on and off, written by Jacques Ellul, MONEY & POWER, which proved disappointing. Usually I am a great fan of Ellul, but here, trying to determine the real poor in the world, I don’t think he offered a solution. I believe part of the reason is that it was written 70 years ago. The afterword of 1980 did not help.

DOUBLE OR NOTHING?

But, in a negative way, it made me concentrate on what the real poor are today, and I discovered that I am among the poor, even though by worldly standards I am rich.

That calls for an explanation. “Blessed are the poor in spirit: they shall inherit the kingdom…..Blessed are the meek, they shall inherit the EARTH.” (Matthew 5, the opening words of THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT).

Over the years the conviction has grown in me that we must completely reorient our religious thinking: from catering to the ‘inner man’ to embrace the entire personality. This has been forced upon me by a new concept of salvation I found in J.H. Bavinck:

“Personal redemption and the redemption of creation go hand in hand.”

That pure revolutionary! But John 3: 16 affirms this: “God so loved THE COSMOS: all that is, and moves, and has a being………”

You cannot have personal salvation without consciously working for the full restoration of the natural world. The entirety of Jesus’ most famous speech must be seen in that light.

I see ‘the poor’ as those people who see Jesus’ death on the cross not only as redeeming them, seeing Jesus as their savior, but with equal force and conviction believe in and act for the restoration of CREATION, the process thwarted by humanity in the GARDEN OF EDEN.

To them – to me – the continuing and accelerating destruction of the cosmos is becoming such a source of agony that it is resulting in mental anguish, being ‘poor in the spirit.’

The ‘meek’, or as some translations have it, ‘those who claim nothing for themselves’, see polluting the air through airplane trips and automobiles as sin– and ask for forgiveness each time they engage in these polluting actions.

The totally misunderstood and much maligned Friedrich Nietzsche, a former cavalry officer in the Hapsburg Empire, and a full professor at 22, completely lost his mind when he witnessed a horse being whipped to death. He embraced that dying creature, and for 12 years prior to his death in 1900, never uttered a word again, or penned a line.

Nietzsche was a devoted environmentalist, totally at odds with the church. In ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA he wrote, ”I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.” Another sentence stayed with me – also decades ahead of his time: “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence…” Nietzsche truly was ‘poor in the spirit’, a man who knew his bible as no other: both grandfathers were bishops. He too was trained to become a minister like his father, but was so turned off by their ‘heaven’ talk that he totally turned against organized religion.

Because of the church’s unilateral approach to salvation – brother are you born again, or any variation thereof, catering only to ‘the inner man’ – the church today resembles a car without functioning rear wheels, without a functioning creation – preserving/enhancing policy. Pushing on the accelerator – concentrating on ‘the soul’ – results only in digging itself deeper in the mire.

The German church under Hitler fully endorsed this Nazi monster even though he killed 6 million of God’s Chosen People. Today the US church widely sides with Trump, the professed killer of creation.

Salvation means double redemption, is both personal and creational, but organized Religion has a vested interest in the personal aspect only: its entire structure prevents change.

Jesus knew that. His last act, just before he died, involved ‘religion’. “At that moment the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked and the rocks were split”. (Matt 27:51).

That indicates to me the end of religion: all religion. The earthquake affirmed this. Religion killed Jesus. Religion is killing God’s creation.

Jesus taught us ‘how to live’, how to enjoy life to the fullest. That’s why his first miracle was making the best wine possible. His opponents called him a glutton and a winebibber.

Religion is the curse of humanity. The Crusades; the entire Middle East is at odds because of religion. The most disastrous European war in the early 17^th Century pitted Roman Catholics against Protestants. India is still at odds with Pakistan because of religion. Capitalism, still the reigning economic religion, is now dying, because it has killed all natural life.

Of course, especially the apostle Peter stuck with the Jewish rituals until God showed him. Now we are on our own: no divine intervention. It takes guts, but with divine help…………..

Creation is crying! The church is dying! Should we not be trying? TELL ME IF I AM WRONG…… TELL ME IF I AM RIGHT……

(From now on I will post a shorter blog once a month.)