Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

DECEMBER 28 2019

THE STATE OF THE WORLD (2)

This is my 1000^th blog. From the year 2,001 through 2010 I wrote a weekly column in the Belleville daily, The Intelligencer, about 800 words each. I then combined two of them for publication in the Christian Courier every fortnight. They both paid me.

I quit writing for them in 2010, and expanded my weekly blog to 2,000 words, with the totally unrealistic and basically utopian aim to reform the church and also the world: an ongoing, never-ending and impossible project, which I will assume again in February, DV – which stands for Deo Volente or the Lord Willing.

Here’s my prediction for the 2020s.

I believe that the coming decade will be decisive for humanity. The Lord said in Matthew 24 that we can’t pinpoint the day and the hour of COLLAPSE, but he also mentioned that there will be definite signs to herald his coming again.

It’s all there in verses 15-16, “So when you see standing in the holy place the abomination that causes desolation spoken of through the prophet Daniel – let the reader understand – then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.”

That’s happening now. So open yourself up to some prophetic proclamation as predicted in this Matthew passage and be painfully prepared to experience the events described in that text.

Here are my comments on this Bible passage.

1. Standing in the holy place refers to God’s creation in general, as Psalm 33:9 tells us, “He spoke and it came to be”. God, upon completing the world and all that lives there, called his handiwork ‘good’ seven times, and placed humanity there to make it even better. By and large Christians have failed to see creation as God’s holy place, and have done exactly the opposite to God’s intention.
2.  “The abomination that causes desolation”, refers to Climate Change, an absolute abomination, directly offending God’s creative act. That it causes desolation is all too evident in Global Heating.
3. “Let the reader understand,” applies to a time frame that can only be understood when the event occurs. Nobody 100 or even 50 years ago could have imagined the catastrophic changes now taking place in the seas, the landmass, the air, and in human beings.
4. “Flee to the mountains”. This tells us to get out of those places where the panic will be the greatest: the cities. As Jacques Ellul has pointed out in THE MEANING OF THE CITY, Cain built the city as a defiant answer to Paradise. He wrote that the city – human domination of creation – represents the ultimate rejection of God.

Collapse.

Back in 1974, Henry Kissinger said in an interview:

I think of myself as a historian more than as a statesman. As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. [Emphasis added.]

History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy. As a statesman, one has to act on the assumption that problems must be solved.

Gail Tverberg, a prominent actuary who writes a blog, OUR FINITE WORLD, in her latest edition, quotes Revelation 18: 11-18. Here is that passage:

And the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her, because there is no one left to buy their cargo— cargo of gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls; of fine linen, purple, silk, and scarlet; of all kinds of citron wood and every article of ivory, precious wood, bronze, iron, and marble;  of cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, and frankincense; of wine, olive oil, fine flour, and wheat; of cattle, sheep, horses, and chariots; of slaves and souls of men:

   “The fruit of your soul’s desire

has departed from you;

    all your luxury and splendor have vanished,

never to be seen again.”

The merchants who sold these things and grew their wealth from her will stand at a distance, in fear of her torment. They will weep and mourn, saying:

   “Woe, woe to the great city,

clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet,

adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls!

     For in a single hour

such fabulous wealth has been destroyed!”

Every shipmaster, passenger, and sailor, and all who make their living from the sea, will stand at a distance and cry out at the sight of the smoke rising from the fire that consumes her. ‘What city was ever like this great city?’ they will exclaim.

Notice the suddenness of the collapse: In a single hour!

Once collapse comes, it comes as a total surprise: fast, ferocious and fatal.

Gail Tverberg disputes the common economic theory that when oil becomes more difficult to find and more expensive to distill, prices will go up. It’s her contention, and I agree, that “the market” will not tolerate higher prices of oil products, because stagnant wages prevents the consumer from paying higher prices. Thus the oil industry is caught in a real bind: they need higher prices for oil products because the easy stuff has been used up and EROEI = Energy Return of Energy Invested is higher.

Here what she wrote,

“The question of whether prices will rise to allow future energy extraction is another problematic area. If we believe standard economic theory, prices can be expected to rise when resources are in short supply. But if we look at Revelation 18: 11-17, we find that when Babylon collapsed, the problem was low prices and lack of demand. There were not even buyers for slaves, and these were the energy product of the day. The Great Depression of the 1930s showed a similar low-price pattern. Today’s economic model seems to need refinement, if it is to account for how prices really seem to behave in collapses.”

The 2020’s?

I believe that the 2020’s will be the most disastrous ever experienced by humanity. ARCTIC NEWS, administered by top climatic experts issued this warning:

“The above image (not shown here) depicts how humans could go extinct as early as 2020. The image was created with NASA LOTI 1880-Nov.2019 data, 0.78°C adjusted to reflect ocean air temperatures (as opposed to sea surface temperatures), to reflect higher polar temperature anomalies (as opposed to leaving out ‘missing’ data) and to reflect a 1750 baseline (as opposed to a 1951-1980 baseline), with two trends added. Blue: a long-term trend based on Jan.1880-Nov.2019 data. Red: a short-term trend, based on Jan.2009-Nov.2019 data, to illustrate El Niño/La Niña variability and how El Niño could be the catalyst to trigger huge methane releases from the Arctic Ocean.”

El Niño.

There’s an El Niño expected next year, based on the high water temperature in the Pacific. It invariably ups the heat everywhere, especially in the Arctic, where its rise has been double of that elsewhere. When the methane buried there is released, a gas up to 25 times more lethal than CO2, world-wide collapse is certain. 

OK: I have tried for 20 years.

For the past 20 years I have spun my yarn, in a sense a unique kind of writing because I don’t know of any other essayist who has combined contemporary information, and placed it in the context of the Bible.

I believe it was the great theologian Karl Barth who said, and I paraphrase, “sermons must be delivered with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” Well, I have done that, and next year February I hope to continue this venture, because that’s what it is: an exploration into the unknown.

I love Jacques Ellul’s writings. In THE MEANING OF THE CITY he states that “(It’s in the city) that the desire to exclude God from his creation is most evident…The cities of our time are most certainly that place where humanity can with impunity declare themselves master of nature. It is only in an urban civilization that we have the metaphysical possibility of saying, “I killed God.”

That is the State of the World, 2020: by killing nature, by saturating the elements with carbon content, by uprooting the decomposed vegetation buried deep into the earth, for times untold, we are the instruments of our own demise.

It seems to me – and this thought has tortured my mourning mind for a long time – that when collapse comes, it will be sudden and comprehensive: ecological, spiritual, financial, physical, geographical, economic, political, augmented by earthquakes and (un)natural disasters: totally total: not an area excluded, a convergence of all possible ills, including money, the desire for which is the root of all evil, certainly evident today.

Talking about money: There’s something crazy going on in the finance field. Over the course of 2020 $4,665 TRILLION of US Treasury bills (USTs) will mature and need to be rolled into new USTs. During 2019 the US budget was $1,022 Trillion in the red. The 2020 new deficit is already pegged at a minimum $1,183 Trillion. That means that the US Federal Bank has to monetize or print about $6 Trillion.

Again at a time of low oil prices, the then Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, on August 14 1998, said “There will be no ruble devaluation……….. The situation is entirely under control.”

Three days later, the Russian ruble dropped more than 60 percent. When this happens in the USA the US economy will crash much harder.

My historical religious basis.

I love the psalms: I read one of them aloud every morning at breakfast time. Take Psalm 115. I remember my paternal grandfather, at meal time start his prayer with the opening words of this psalm: “not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory.”

Not to us, O LORD, not to us,

but to Your name be the glory,

because of Your loving devotion,

because of Your faithfulness.

Why should the nations say,

“Where is their God?”

Our God is in heaven;

He does as He pleases.

Their idols are silver and gold,

made by the hands of men.

They have mouths, but cannot speak;

they have eyes, but cannot see;

they have ears, but cannot hear;

they have noses, but cannot smell;

they have hands, but cannot feel;

they have feet, but cannot walk.

They cannot even clear their throats.

Those who make them become like them,

as do all who trust in them.

That’s the sort of god we are worshiping continuously. Our gods are useless. Our ‘money’ god is a blimp on the screen nowadays. And we have made it a god. When money collapses, and it is merely a phantom, no longer ‘silver and gold’ which had real value, but any one number we type in, we collapse with it: our mortgages, our stock market, our fancy toys, our credit cards, our office towers, our cities.

Such is the STATE OF THE WORLD, A.D. 2020. A.D. stands for Anno Domini, in the year of the Lord.

Last week I quoted Deuteronomy 32: 17-20. It has a line referring to the State of the World, 2020, “And my anger will burn at them in that day, and I shall leave them, and I shall hide my face from them….and shall see what their end will be.”

The word ‘end’ here does not mean their finish, but rather their distant future, a future that has arrived, a future that is NOW, a society without God. And, indeed, the End is here. Not many people will like this sort of ending.

But it is not the ultimate End. Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5: 48, asked us, “Be Perfect.” That word ‘perfect’ in Greek is ‘teleios’ which is derived from ‘telos’ as in telephone, telepathy, television. It means ‘far’ or ‘the end’, the ‘distant future’. That ‘distant future’ is NOW.

Yes, the decade 2020 will be tumultuous, to say the least: it could quite well be the decade in which Christ returns.

Bonhoeffer called himself an “Anthropos Teleios”, a person who with every action tries to gauge the end-result of his action, and so be ready for eternity.

That too should be our aim in 2020 and beyond.

Nevertheless I wish you a blessed year.

DECEMBER 21 2019

THE STATE OF THE WORLD, 2020 (1)

I used to subscribe to the World Watch Institute publications some 30 years ago, buying its annual world survey, “The State of the World 1990” etc. but stopped after a few years. I had the sense that the World Watch organization was there to prolong its own existence by seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, with an eye to its corporate donors.

Well, I might as well say it outright and explain later: “The State of the World, 2020” is that God has abandoned us: we are on our own. For our own good, I might add.

I base this partly on Geert Mak, a well-known Dutch author, who wrote a book entitled: “How God disappeared from Jorwerd”. (I translated the Dutch title, of course.) Bonhoeffer too has influenced my thinking.

Jorwerd was –is- a village in the heart of Friesland’s farming country, a province in the north of the Netherlands, a region with its own language.

Some of my ancestors stem from this neck of the woods (no woods there, though, mostly meadows and lakes), as my surname suggests. The book traces the advent of the car-culture, and the effect of agricultural mechanization on rural towns such as Jorwerd in Friesland. Of course the carbonization of society has affected similar rural areas all over the western world, including Tweed in Ontario where I have lived since 1975. Our mechanical slaves have taken the heart out of all small municipalities everywhere and forced cities to mushroom.

How, you might ask. The car brought exurban development, with city people buying second residences, with farm hands becoming superfluous and drifting to the larger centres, and especially, with long commutes from country-side or suburbia, to employment opportunities far away. All this is now ingrained everywhere across the globe. This development has disrupted faith communities, killed off the local shops, created box stores, with enormous parking areas, severed ties with families and friends, and has brought us Trump, who promised to bring back the past.

The point Geert Mak – himself a lapsed church goer (his father was a minister in the Reformed church) – really made was that “God disappeared from Society”. And with God abandoned, our future too has disappeared.

We have no future in the sense that my grandparents had a future:  a future dependent on carbon use, however refined and technically clever, is no future, as we now are discovering.

Yes, we are a society without a future. The State of the World 2020 is one of death: no future, no life. We have no future because we have never dealt with the problems that arose: we always pushed them off to tomorrow, which now has come, and we are stuck: no way forward, no way back.

It reminds me of Barbara W. Tuchman’s book, A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14^th Century.

In its introduction she writes, “ (The 14^th Century’s) disorders cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoof prints of more than the four horsemen of St. John’s vision, which had now become seven – plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrection, and the schism in the Church. All but the plague itself arose from conditions that existed prior to the Black Death and continued after the period of plague was over.”

Now in Century 21 and the year 2020, the curse of the Seven Horsemen of Judgement also applies to today. Already evident are similar fault lines, such as famine (Southern, Eastern Africa), soil erosion (China, Iowa), forest fires (Australia, California), floods (everywhere), but also identical problems: war, bad government, schism in the church, as well as increasing incidents of earthquakes, hurricanes, and related natural disasters.

What struck me on page 96 of Tuchman’s book were two items I have mentioned before: “As if the world was indeed (1) in the grip of The Evil One, its first (black death) appearance on the European mainland in January 1348 coincided with (2) a fearsome earthquake that carved a path of wreckage from Naples up to Venice,….. and the destruction reached as far as Germany and Greece….The chronicler wrote, ‘And in these days was burying without sorrowe and weddings without friendschippe.’”

The second quote is to me an eerie reminder of the prediction made in Revelation 16: 18 of an enormous earthquake and related disasters.

Fact is that we have no future and that’s why Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro are seen as redeemers: they promise a fictive future, to gullible followers.

The only possible future is the past. It has been exactly the elimination of human labor that has created the current chaos in the world, brought on by our carbon-crazy society. This has necessitated COP 25 – which stands for “Conference of the Parties”, UN sponsored, a fruitless effort to stem and reverse the carbon age.

For the last 25 years this world body has met, and, with the last one just completed, has been unable to deal with our carbon addiction age and the resulting climate crisis.

In the Western world the three hold-outs are Australia, Brazil and the USA, three countries where ‘Evangelical’ Christians head the government. It is quite understandable that China and India, with some 40 percent of the world population, have not budged: they still want to match the Western world in prosperity and life style. Good luck!

Tragically, thanks to the “Christians” we are doomed. Take Brazil: its new motto is the 3Bs: Bible, Beef and Bullets.

Bible.

Bolsonaro sees the Bible as providing a mandate to dominate creation, influenced by the real American Religion, Gnosticism, which sees matter as evil. The same is true for Australia, also led by a “Christian” Prime Minister, and the USA, with ‘born-again’ Pence and Pompeo in charge.  

Beef.

Brazil loves Beef: it is seen as more important than trees, so destroy the Amazon.

Bullets.

Bullets are useful to exterminate the native population: they are godless heathens after all.

In other words: just as the church in Jesus’ days crucified him, so today’s ‘evangelicals’ crucify creation and so kill God by expanding carbon use and accelerating the race toward oblivion. The largest polluters, the USA and China, even refuse to hold the line, let alone reduce carbon emission, and so the future has disappeared and God help us, which he won’t do, because we are on our own.

Bonhoeffer.

In his Christmas 1942 letter to his fellow anti-Nazi conspirators, Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked, ‘Are we (Christians) still of any use?’  He wondered, “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; … experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men.”

I should add that the German Lutheran Church fully sided with Hitler and the Nazi regime, which explains Bonhoeffer’s question, just as American ‘evangelicals’ worship Trump. Do you know of any church that has taken an effective and confessional stand against Carbon and its war on God’s Holy Creation?

Later Bonhoeffer wrote: “Humanity has come of age”, and suggested that God will leave us, because God wants to see us grow up and observe how we will end up.

It’s all in the Bible, of course!

Deuteronomy 32: 17-20 has a line referring to this, “And my anger will burn at them in that day, and I shall leave them, and I shall hide my face from them….and shall see what their end will be.”

The word ‘end’ here does not mean their finish, but rather their distant future, a future that has arrived, a future that is NOW, a society without God. And, indeed, the End is here.

All this is pedagogically correct.

We humans need a period of divine hiddenness, must leave the manifest presence of God, so that we can become all that we can be.

I myself had to go through this phase: I had to emigrate, to be away from my conventional parents and family, my oh-so orthodox church and develop my own religious way in life. Once I have become what I am, I shall be able to meet God in Jesus.

Fortunately there are some stirrings. The world is waking up. Wise people see the writing on the wall. Look at the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. Last week it had an interesting article.

Here is its caption:

The climate crisis is like a world war. So let’s talk about rationing.

“It’s time for mandatory cutbacks on the kinds of consumption that threaten all of us,” writes Eleanor Boyle, a Vancouver-based writer, and author of High Steaks: “Why and How to Eat Less Meat, and her forthcoming book Mobilize Food! Wartime Inspiration for Environmental Victory Today.

She starts: “It’s too bad meat is so tasty, driving so convenient and airline travel so desirable. Because those all create large amounts of greenhouse gases and worsen the climate crisis. We know it, and some of us feel guilty getting on a plane, hopping in the car or eating burgers. But how are we to cut back when we’re not sure what level of a high-emission behaviour is sustainable – and when everyone else is doing it? Some environmental activists and leaders suggest we should practise moderation, take the bus, eat veggie burgers. But voluntary measures just can’t deliver when the problem is this big and time is so short. That’s why it may be time for mandatory cutbacks on the kinds of consumption that threaten all of us. It may be time for rationing.”

Let me stop her there. The article goes into details of rationing in the past and how populations – especially in Great Britain – complied.

I know all about rationing. I was 12 in 1940 when Germany invaded the Netherlands, and right away rationing was introduced, because the occupiers took the locally produced food and brought it to feed their own population, causing shortages at home. The first items to go were tropical fruits, as imports were impossible. Soon after that coffee, tea and, horror of horrors, tobacco disappeared. In some ways, cigarettes became the new currency. I remember sailing in 1947 from England, where cigarettes were in abundant supply, en route to Sweden, via Germany – for 6 weeks I was a paying guest on a 600 ton coastal vessel. In Kiel, Germany, I bought a glass of tepid beer for ONE cigarette.

Rationing remained in force in defeated Germany for years after the war ended, and also in Great Britain. It took years before it disappeared.

I believe the Globe article is timely. Wartime conditions will create the worst of all worlds: fearful food inflation, frightful asset deflation, and stagnant wages. The portents are everywhere. Our economy was based on the ‘free’ use of air, water and soil: the bills are due in real money, because the banks have created free money out of nothing: “nothing comes free!!”  is one of the laws of Ecology.

How are we going to cope with the looming shortages? Will rationing be the solution? I vividly remember the coupons for candy, for clothing, for sugar, for tobacco. How about access to electricity and natural gas? What about fuel for cars for the millions that live too far from stores?

If all carbon-based products are banned, because they are the root cause of the crisis, what about exurban and suburban housing, now totally dependent on automobiles, especially in the winter with snow and ice?

The questions multiply, and my next blog will deal with that. It also concludes 20 years of weekly blogs: an even 1000.

Postscript.

I will take off for a while, certainly one month. It is my intention to write a series of skits or short plays based on Bible stories for performance in our church: that’s how centuries ago the gospel was conveyed to illiterate masses. The old is new again, this time with the help of CDs and power point.

DECEMBER 14 2019

HELL IN HEAVEN; HELL ON EARTH.

The Bible gives a picture of heaven that is totally at odds with the portrayal I received when I was a kid, steeped in all things religious. I went to a Christian Kindergarten and Christian elementary and prep school, attended church youth and young adult clubs, sat faithfully in church twice on a Sunday, services lasting at least 90 minutes, churches always packed to capacity, at least 800 faithful, exposed to sermons where heaven featured prominently, always touted as the most desirable destination.

A word about heaven.

The Bible often speaks about heaven in the plural: heavens. Why? Because it recognizes three of them. Paul in 2 Corinthians 12 writes that he was caught up to the THIRD heaven. It sees the FIRST heaven as our domain: the atmosphere below the Ozone layer, the SECOND heaven as the place where the stars and planets dwell, while the THIRD heaven is for God and the angels.  

And God? 1 Timothy 6: 16 tells us that “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody has seen and nobody can see”. It reminds me of Billy Graham, the man who paved the way for Trump. I hardly ever watch TV but when the great evangelist decades ago, January 1988, was interviewed by Larry King on CNN, upon the release of his book, “Facing death and the Life After”, I watched the discussion. Larry, blunt Larry, asked Billy what would happen when he died. Billy, the pastor to presidents replied, “Jesus will take me by the hand, and bring me to God.” The poor man, now in the grave, did not know his Bible: nobody can see God.  

Back to my Heaven exploration.

Look at the book of Job. There’s that mysterious Satan figure floating around in heaven, reminding God that this rich guy, with his spoiled kids, his immense fortune, must be a fake. And God agrees, sort of.

And then there is Revelation 12: 7. It depicts WAR in heaven. WAR, bloody war, CIVIC WAR, the most cruel mode of all wars: angels fighting angels, total chaos, making hell out of heaven.

War is not war if there is no blood and wounded and death. For heaven’s sake! What’s going on up there! Satan, who had a free hand in heaven, acted there as an accuser, then wanted to be God himself: a step too far.

Satan created HELL IN HEAVEN.  “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in heaven,” was Satan’s motto, according to John Milton in Paradise Lost.

No, heaven was not the peaceful place so celebrated in my old church – today still buoyant, still flourishing, still attended by some of my relatives – where one of the hymns I remembered went like this: “Get in line, get in line, then follow the ‘to heaven’ sign.” Another had this refrain, “In heaven it’s so good, always singing in the best of mood.”

Just imagine the atmosphere in heaven, prior to open warfare: a vicious hostility, open division between the pro-God and pro- Satan adherents. None of that open comradery that was evident in the fields of Bethlehem when Jesus was born. Two parties: no compromise possible, either for or against, until it all came out in the open. Something like that’s going on now in Britain, either pro Brexit or against Britain leaving the European Union, or in the USA: for or against Trump, but worse, far worse.

 No, heaven was a terrible place to be in! No wonder John 3: 13 tells us that, “No one has ever gone to heaven, except the one who came from there: the son of Man.” Please note the term “Son of Man”. Jesus did not identify himself as God’s son, but as a member of humanity. That suggests to me that Jesus is eager to come back to earth, where his real KINGDOM will be: “seek first the kingdom, the welfare of creation”, is Christ’s foremost commandment: Service, rather than dominion.    

Yes, there was war in heaven, and the Devil and his gang were defeated.

Michael and his angels are named here as their great opponents: Michael, an archangel, one of the generals among the celestial army. His name is actually a question: mi-cha-el?, which means “he who resembles God?”

So what triggered the war in heaven?

It started because the basic situation had changed, because Jesus Christ had ascended to heaven. Jesus had left, and Satan thought that now was his chance to take over the world and they who live there.

This is how the Bible informs us: “The dragon and his angels fought back: fought! With all the devilish devices at their disposal! But the Devil army was not strong enough and they lost their place in heaven”.

The dragon, in spite of all his pretensions and his filthy slander, was kicked out of heaven, shorn of his power and deprived of influence there: house cleaning in heaven. No longer was he able to stand before God’s throne with clenched fists and make accusations against God’s elect as he did with Job. He simply had lost his foothold. Totally powerless he was banned from heaven and thrown out as quickly as lightning. “He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him,” says the Bible.

And here he is, next door to you and me.

Yes, here he is, and his untold number of devotees. Here they are on the earth where you are born and I made a living, the earth where Jesus Christ himself cried as a baby, preached, performed his miracles, suffered and died, the earth that saw his resurrection, the earth from where he ascended to the place from which He came.

On this earth the dragon and his army landed, feet first. Here they are making this cruel, grim earth, this rebellious earth even more difficult to deal with, as we experience this every day, with worse to come. Now Satan has dominion over land and sea: earth’s remotest regions today his empire be.

The Satan and his cohorts know how precious the earth is to its maker, because God made it and loved it as his dearest possession, this very earth has now become a demonic world, because the battle is not over: the hell in heaven has become the hell on earth.

The Bible tells us this in somber notes: “But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! Filled with fury, because he knows that the time is short.” (Revelation 12: 12).

Woe to the earth and the sea! Filled with fury!!

Beware! Hell on earth. As Dr. Andrew Glikson, Earth and Climate Scientist Australian National University wrote in last week’s ARCTIC NEWS,

“Given amplifying feedbacks from land and oceans triggered by rising temperatures, the concept of an upper limit of warming determined by limitation on carbon emissions alone is unlikely, since, under a rising high greenhouse gas concentration, amplifying feedbacks triggered by methane release, bushfires, warming oceans and loss of reflectivity of melting ice, temperatures would keep rising. As an example, findings show that warmer ocean water is melting hydrates and releasing methane into the sediment and waters off the coast of Washington state, at levels that reach the same amount of methane from the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Carana (2019) finds a potential for abrupt warming of 18°C or 32.4°F.”

Yes, you read that right! An abrupt warming of 18°C or

32.4°F !! 2 Peter 3 comes to mind.

That means HELL ON EARTH!

That’s the situation TODAY!!

From now on world events will be grimmer, more frightening, accelerating with breathtaking speed, continuously assuming more ghastly proportions, dragging millions along in a maddening “danse macabre”, undermining all old established morals, speeding relentlessly to chaos and social upheaval. This world, indeed, has become possessed.

All factors that somehow acted as brakes to stall this development are pushed aside; now that this process is in motion it speeds up disastrously, and nothing can stop it.

Just look around you: everywhere in the world trouble reigns: war, discontent, strikes, demonstrations, repression….

Michael won the war in heaven, but Satan rules the world with lie and slander.

The naked reality to come.

It is here where we are confronted with the history of the world. It is this extremely remarkable phenomenon that matters are not yet what they are, that everything still looks different than it is in reality. The haze of untruthfulness hovers like a curse over the world and in that haze of uncertainty history marches on, and so does the TRUTH.

We are blind.

We are in a bind because we are blind: we don’t want to see the real state of the earth. COP25 is still deliberating. The number ’25’ tells volumes: this is the 25^th meeting where the fate of the earth is discussed, and each time the atmospheric news is worse.

The Arctic again.

The “entire Arctic” now emits more carbon than it absorbs, a fact that can only be described as worse than bad news. “Given that the Arctic has been taking up carbon for tens of thousands of years, this shift to a carbon source is important because it highlights a new dynamic in the functioning of the Earth System,” says Susan Natali at Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts (Source: Thawing Permafrost Has Turned the Arctic Into a Carbon Emitter).

How did this happen?

Developments were manageable until about the year 1800. In the last 200 years Europeans expanded upon vast and thinly peopled regions of the world, carrying with them their crops, animals, weeds, pests and diseases, devastating native flora, fauna and human populations in large portions of the world, and succeeded in establishing “neo-Europes” in regions of North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, bringing their missionaries, singing “Christ – we – shall have dominion over land and sea”, expressing faith in the illusion of unlimited growth.

The industrial revolution and discovery of fossil energy sources further sustained the belief in infinite growth, still the reigning philosophy.

The Bible pulls no punches. 1 John 5: 19 states that “The Evil One is in control”, and he makes us believe that we are the superior race.

But human domination of nature is an oxymoron, for our “control” of nature can only be achieved by understanding its laws and subordinating ourselves to them.

Sorry to say: many religious leaders, like many politicians, actively resist the insights of ecology, for these ideas entail a fundamental reformulation of both liberal public policy and humanist belief in our contemporary world. Clearly there is much work for theologians to undertake in re-examining the received tradition.

That’s what it is: world-wide war against creation, under the direction of The Evil One, who rules the world with lie and hate. 

Actually, God wants to speed matters up, eager to establish the Kingdom, for which the Son already gave his life. The whole world is yearning for deliverance, for being freed from the pains inflicted by the human race. Romans 8: 22 tells us that “all of creation has been groaning, as in child birth”. And that was written 2,000 years ago…..

God wants to accelerate the process. God too is in agony for the suffering, the torture, the debasement of his creation, so, as many places in the Bible indicate, he allows the eclipse of the sun to take place, meteor showers to appear, and destroy those who have destroyed the earth (Revelation 11: 18).

And to show God’s personal involvement, Revelation 16: 18 says: “And there was a great earthquake, such as there had not been since man came to be upon the earth, so great an earthquake was it, and so mighty. The great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell.”

Hell in heaven; hell on earth. Trump may ridicule Greta Thunberg, TIME’s person of the year, for speaking out for creation, but as the Lord has repeatedly stated, “For we know Him who said, “VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY.” And again, “THE LORD WILL JUDGE HIS PEOPLE. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrew 10: 30-31)

“Yes, I am coming soon.” The very last words of the Bible.

DECEMBER 7 2019

ARE YOU RAPTURE-READY?

Am I Rapture-Ready? I hope so, but first something personal.

I am a creature of habit, among them thrice-weekly exercise: every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, between 4-6 pm. In the winter I run on my treadmill, bike on my stationary bike and do pushups on my EVER GLIDE PLUS machine. In the summer I bike to town for groceries almost every day – 12 km.

Exercise has been proven in countless studies to improve mood, alertness, memory and happiness, as well as physical wellbeing. Age – whether 21, 41 or my 91 – has little to do with it.

I quit smoking in 1960, and started running. Over the years I have reduced my distance from 15 km to 10 to 8 to 5 and now to 3, but have increased the variety of exercise, keeping it roughly at 3 x 1 hour per week. Clinical trials have established that running – not biking, not walking – extends life expectancy: one hour of running adds 7 hours to your lifespan, to a maximum of 3 years. I have long exceeded that 3 year period.

Another habit is writing my blog: by the end of this month I have concluded my 1000^th: 20 years of weekly writings, from 2000-10 for the regional daily, the INTELLIGENCER, and thereafter my weekly blog.  It keeps my brain functioning, and that brings me to the topic of the week: RAPTURE and its website: RAPTUREREADY.COM.

Any minute now.

The Rapture clock on RAPTUREREADY.COM shows the 23.55 hour, 5 minutes before midnight, which means that, according to this website, Christ will return any minute now and whisk believers away to join the righteous dead in heaven. From there, they will have the best seats in the house as the unsaved perish in a series of spectacular fires, wars, plagues and earthquakes. I sense some ‘Schadenfreude’ there, a very unchristian trait.

The website “raptureready.com’ advises the soon–to-depart to stick a note on the fridge to brief those left behind – husbands, wives, and in-laws – about the horrors in store for them.

The Rapture ravers are correct to some degree. The current civilization has an expiry date, a point in time only God knows who created the cosmos and installed a tipping point in its plan. The proverbial “It’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back”, applies to this situation. The earth is finite and the laws of creation certainly apply: rules of life we discard at our own peril.

So, what are these laws?

Dr. Barry Commoner, a long time professor of biology, has condensed them to 4 rules:

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

I see a lot of biblical truths in these rules.

In THE RIDDLE OF LIFE Dr. J.H. Bavinck writes about this interconnectedness: (My translation)

”If the sun had a mind of its own, then perhaps it would muse: I shine because that’s my nature: I delight in it; it’s the joy of my life. But it knows not that a Hand mightier than the sun has included it in the beautiful law of serving. Because, unknowingly, that so superior sun serves the tiny, tiny plant that full of life expectancy courageously stretches its stem to absorb its rays.

That little plant cannot think beyond its nature. It winks at the

sun and dreams of the joy that awaits it in a life of light and sunshine. But it has no inkling that it serves just as much as it is served by others. It serves the minuscule seeds it now carries and that later will form new plants. It serves the animal, looking for food, or is needed to help another plant using it as a crutch to climb higher. In manifold ways it serves other creatures that need support or shade or nourishment or moisture.

“When we look around us with open eyes and minds, then there

is one thing that time and again touches us to the core: it’s all about serving. The law of serving is at the heart of every creature: it is the overarching purpose for every being. That law makes it possible for the entire world to exist. Every creature may think that it is there only for itself, but in the final analysis it is nothing else but a servant for others. To be alive, to exist at all, finds it destination simply in serving others. Without that law nothing else can be. Yet that law of serving is remarkable in more than one way. What is so truly amazing is that, as a rule, no creature is there for the sole reason of serving, as they all think that self-help is their sole goal, but all that serving goes automatically, and thus is simply an unconscious act. It is as if a mighty hand brings all this into motion and, in spite of itself, stimulates this self-less serving. This serving, therefore, is not a sacrifice, is not a duty, but an in-born act, without compulsion, without intent. Each single being is there according to its nature, but everything together is so oriented that the existence of the one supports the other and maintains it.”

And we, humans?

We are on top of the ‘service’ society, following Christ’ rule, as found in Matthew 20: 28, “just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve”.

We not only must serve each other: we, as physical, spiritual and moral beings, we must be servants for all of creation: we must not only serve all created entities: our mandate, the law for us is to enhance all that lives, to make all that exists more beautiful.

Let me elaborate on the other three laws:

Nature knows best

Nothing disappears

There is no free lunch.

God has instilled in creation, in nature if you like, irrefutable laws. The relationship of everything to everything else is evident in opposite ways as well: our greed, our polluting, our wasteful ways, is backfiring on us, because it also applies in negative ways: just as ‘good’ is pervasive, so is ‘evil’. Today ‘evil’ connects everything to everything else. We are sadly discovering that nothing disappears and that the free water, air, soil we have abused, now comes with the final bill: a bill too steep to repay, meaning collapse.

The COP 25, now meeting in Madrid, the 25^th gathering on Climate Heating, now cries out in ever more desperate intonations: “listen to the cries of creation”; “mend our sinful ways”; “abandon greed”; “live within the means of the earth”, and the warnings become ever more pronounced, because “NOTHING DISAPPEARS and THERE IS NO FREE LUNCH.

Jesus told us, “The wages of sin is death.”

RAPTUREREADY.COM, the favorite website of the majority of the people that call themselves evangelical Christians preaches a different gospel, a very dangerous gospel, and today its two most prominent proponents are Michael Pence, the USA Vice-President, and Michael Pompeo, the USA Secretary of State, the person in charge of USA foreign policy.

 

One look at the raptureready website and it is striking to see that “Israel is the Key to All End-Time Prophecy”. That’s why the current administration in Washington fully sides with Israel: it sees the Palestinians as the Philistines, Israel’s arch enemy of old. Both Pence and Pompeo are admirers of the ARMAGEDDON belief, the place, a bit south of the Lake of Galilee, in the plain of Jezreel, where, supposedly, the last battle is to be fought.

Here is their reasoning: The apocalypse is both an end and a new beginning. In the Christian tradition, the world is created perfect. Then there is the fall into sin followed by a long period of moral degeneration. This culminates in a decisive final battle between the good (the returned Christ) and evil (The Anti-Christ). Good wins, of course, and the New Jerusalem is established and with it the 1,000 year of reign of King Jesus on earth.
This is the glorious millennium that millenarians await so eagerly.

Is Rapture biblical?

The Rapture proponents rely on 1 Thessalonians 4: 17: meeting Christ in the air. The Greek word here, ‘apantesin’ is the same word used in Matthew 25: 6 and Acts 28: 15. It simply means ‘meeting somebody coming from afar. And, as Acts 1: 11 attests, we will see him in the air coming down, the same way he departed: promise made, promise kept.

And the ”left behind” assumption?

The real clincher there is found in that scary chapter of Matthew 24 with its heading, “Signs of the End of the Age.”

It mentions one text that the church has never really understood, because it has never come to grips with The Kingdom, which is God’s creation; the Gospel of the Kingdom is all about the New Creation to come. When verse 14 says that The Gospel of the Kingdom will be preached in the whole world, then it does not point to church or bible. It also has nothing to do with missionary work and sermons. The gospel mentioned here is the Gospel of the EARTH, which is screaming loud and clear. It has everything to do with God’s Created Word, his Direct or Primary Word. That’s why the Belgic Confession tells us that we know God FIRST by his Creation, calling it the most beautiful book.

We now experience – and COP 25 in Madrid speaks volumes – that abusing God’s name – and that’s what we have been doing from way back – leads to destruction. As the TEN Commandments tell us: (Exodus 20: 7) You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.

Polluting the earth is misusing God’s name, fully in line with Romans 1: 20, For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.  

Oh, yes, RAPTURE.

Back to the Bible and Matthew 24. Am I RAPTUREREADY? Because there will be rapture. Matthew 24 plainly says so: “Until the Flood came (verse 39) and took them all away”. That is Rapture, not a word the Bible uses. It comes from the Latin verb ‘rapio, rapui, raptum’, meaning ‘to snatch away. Our word ‘rape’ has the same origin.

So, who are taken away? Am I? No. Is Noah: no, he was safely tucked away in the Ark.

So, who were taken away? The sinners were taken away!! They all drowned!! And says the same chapter, “So it will be when the Lord returns.” The sinners will be raptured – will be taken away: they don’t belong on God’s Holy Earth, but the saints, the followers of Christ, will remain on the earth, for, says Genesis 3: 19, “For earth we are and to earth we will return.”

Are you RAPTURE-READY?

G.K. Chesterton wrote that original sin is the “only part of Christian theology which can really be proved.” The believer and atheist alike can agree that there is an undeniable brokenness to the world, a sickness that needs remedy.

Original sin at work: that’s what we are experiencing. Christ died to take that away. Sin spoiled Paradise. This means that Paradise must be restored. And Jesus did that. That was his mission. When he died, he exclaimed, “It is accomplished: Paradise regained!”

And now comes the hard part. The church has been totally ‘anthropocentric’, has seen only human salvation as its core message. That is wrong! The church has totally failed in its mission, because personal salvation and the salvation of creation go hand in hand: you can’t have one without the other.

The Biblical truth is that going to heaven is mission impossible. God created the world and called it ‘good’ seven times. There’s where our destination remains: being fully human in a perfect world.

That’s why we must become cosmos-ready, because John 3: 16 unambiguously states that God so loved the cosmos that he gave his Son to regain it. Believing that gives us eternal life.

Christ taught us how to live. We again need to learn ‘how to live on the earth permanently,’ because our final destination is God’s earth.  

NOVEMBER 30 2019

WE ARE TOAST

This past week a scholarly article in ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS via The Automatic Earth kept me thinking. I read it a number of times, and, although it struck me as utterly reflecting our current situation, one of grave danger and immense peril, its final paragraph threw me off. Here it is:

We are desperately in need of a set of guideposts and principles that include not only ecology but also biology, psychology, physics and emergent behaviors. This discipline will focus at least as much on ‘what we’ll have to do’ as on ‘what we should do’. And it will apply the evolving knowledge of experts with a view to the maps and charts made by generalists. Ecological economics was shaped as a next step from earlier classical ideologies so as to consider the inclusion of sources and sinks. Over the next 30 years, ecological economics must be both torchbearer for a systems economics and midwife to a smaller flame.

In other words, the experts, the scientists, will provide the answers. I maintain that it is too late: nothing can save us from total collapse and the demise of the world’s population. Nobody, not a single source, can now deal with the terrible outcome and the disastrous consequences of what is on store for us. Only Dr. Guy McPherson, the Arizona university ecology professor emeritus, the originator of ARCTIC NEWS, directly confronts us with the global holocaust we are facing when – not if – the methane stored in the shallow Arctic Ocean, is released. And that could happen soon.

We always hope for the best, but….

We are great in deceiving ourselves. A new study on EV – electric vehicles – shows that, although its tailpipe emissions are zero – there is no tailpipe on these cars – the equivalent CO2 comes from the electricity making colossi, the smokestacks of the generating stations. We are marvels at deceiving ourselves, but the weather is not so readily hoodwinked.

Yes, there is the increase in global temperature, but there too a lot of deception goes on. The UN uses the average global rise, but, as ARTIC NEWS reports, the temperature in the Arctic is more than double that of the Rest of the World.

These far higher values and the resulting melting of the ICE there, have major consequences for climate change – such as the melting of the permafrost and the release of the far more dangerous METHANE, and do not represent the seriousness of the climate crisis.

And then there is bad news about bad news.

The article in ECOLOGICAL ECONOMICS looks at the world situation also from a personal perspective, taking human nature into consideration. Here is what it says,

“For good evolutionary reasons (short life spans, risk of food expropriation, unstable environment, etc.) we disproportionately care about the present more than the future, measured by economists via a ‘discount rate’. The steeper the discount rate, the more the person is ‘addicted to the present.’ Unfortunately, most of our modern challenges are ‘in the future’. ….When asked to plan a snack for next week between chocolate or fruit, people chose fruit 75% of the time. When choosing a snack for today, 70% select chocolate. When choosing a movie to watch next week 63% choose an educational documentary but when choosing a film for tonight 66% pick a comedy or sci-fi.”

In our words, we have great intentions for the future, until the future becomes today, then we chicken out. In other words, “We are emotionally blind to long-term issues like climate change or energy depletion. Emotionally, the future isn’t real.”

That’s bad news for all of us, including the church which is supposed to deal with death and the hereafter.

Our reluctance to look ahead and plan accordingly reminds me of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who, when he was 26-27 years old already had a double doctorate in theology. He, in 1932-33, just before Hitler came to power (who killed him in 1945), gave a series of talks on Genesis 1-3 at the University of Berlin where he was a lecturer. They were later issued under the title, CREATION AND FALL.

In his introduction to this 200 page book he wrote, 

“The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”

He then quotes Isaiah 43: 18-19, “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing.”

Bonhoeffer continues, “The new is the real end of the old; the new however, is Christ. Christ is the end of the old. Not the continuation, not the goal, the completion in line with the old, but the end and therefore the new.”

Bonhoeffer – biblical scholar he is – wants us not to live in the present, but concentrate on the end, and what comes after that: the new beginning with Christ.

That is something no scholarly article will dare to suggest, even though the messages out there are becoming more ominous by the day. The nations of the world –not the largest polluters, the USA and China – solemnly pledged to reduce CO2 emissions in the Paris Accord four years ago, but this past week the UN reported that we are pumping more Green House Gases than ever.

And that is something this article confirms for the simple reason that we have become addicted to carbon and its death-enhancing aspects.

We are enslaved by our slaves.

Take a barrel of crude oil. It can perform about 1700 kW hour of work. Compare that to a human laborer who can perform about 0.6 kW hour in one workday. Simple arithmetic reveals it takes over 11 years of human labor to do the same work potential in a barrel of oil.

This energy/labor relationship was the foundation of the industrial revolution. Most technological processes require hundreds to thousands of calories of fossil energy to replace each human calorie previously used to do the same tasks manually.

My grandfather was a farmer who milked a dozen cows, some 90 years ago. Consider milking a cow using three methods: manual (human labor energy only), semi-automated electric milking machines (1100 kW h per cow per year), and fully automated milking (3000 kW h per cow-year). The manual milker, working alone, requires 120 hours of human labor per year per cow; semi-automated machines require 27 hours of labor; and full automation, 12 hours.

That meant that physically my grandfather could only look after 12 cows to be milked, plus pigs, chickens, calves. Today one of my brothers in law, with two robot milkers looks after 200 head of cattle, milking some 160.

This same ‘energetic remoteness’ applies to many key resources, including water, lithium, and food. We use around two calories of fossil fuel to grow one food calorie in our modern agricultural system – but we use 8–12 additional fossil calories to process, package, deliver, store and cook modern food.

It’s actually worse than that. Almost 20 percent of the food we buy in North America, we throw away. If that is true – certainly not true for our own ‘war-time’ conditioned eating habits – that means that we need perhaps as much as 20 CARBON CALORIES to give us ONE FOOD CALORIE.

In the natural world, this is unsustainable, because organisms that require much, much more energy to find food than the food contains, will die. We only get away with this because our institutions and policies treat the energy subsidy from fossil hydrocarbons as interest, not principal.

That means that everything we do will become more expensive if we cannot reduce energy consumption of industrial processes faster than prices grow.

Prepare for massive inflation and war-time food conditions with rationing and growing famine.

This same principle increasingly applies to most modern industrial processes: we save human labor and time by adding large amounts of cheap fossil labor.

Although modern industrial output is energy inefficient it is extremely cost efficient because fossil energy is much cheaper than human energy. Thanks to the “fossil subsidy”, companies make large profits and cause wages and standards of living to be considerably higher compared to previous civilizations.

“Today the average human in 2015 produced 14 times more GDP than a person in 1800 – and the average American 49 times more!”, says the article.

However, these windfalls come with a downside. Industrial profitability is vulnerable to energy price increases. Remember that oil is a finite product: we have tapped the easy, low hanging fruit. Now comes the hard part.

In 2018, the global economy ran on a constant 17 trillion watts of energy – enough to power over 170 billion 100-watt light bulbs continuously. Over 80% of this energy, was the 110 billion barrels of oil equivalents of fossil hydrocarbons that power (and is embodied in) our machines, transportation and infrastructure. Even at 4.5 years per barrel, this equates to the labor equivalent of more than 500 billion human workers compared to ?4 billion actual human workers in the entire world.

In other words, every person, woman or man, in the work-force, in Europe and America, in India and China, had 125 energy slaves at their beck and call.

These fossil ‘armies’ are the foundation of the modern global economy and work tirelessly in thousands of industrial processes and transportation systems. We didn’t pay for the creation of these armies of energy workers: that happened millions of years ago: we only facilitated their exploitation.

What ‘Economic growth’ means.

Someday soon the entire world economy will suddenly grind to a halt. As last year’s CO2 count illustrated, more people being born, more people wanting more, more people living in the ‘now’, more people refusing to look to tomorrow, means more energy use, means faster, a much faster arrival of D Day, Depletion Day, Depression Day, because there simply is no substitute for carbon energy.

Energy is needed to create and transform all material inputs and energy can only be substituted by other energy. Forget about solar and wind. To manufacture them needs energy as well. To transport and install them and maintain them, also needs energy.

We can’t go back, but going forward means disaster. So we ignore all signs. That’s human nature: “carpe diem” the Romans said, “seize the day” while we can, but that is not the answer, certainly not for those who profess to be followers of Christ.

Bonhoeffer was right. “The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”

He then quotes Isaiah 43: 18-19, “Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing.” Bonhoeffer continues, “The new is the real end of the old; the new however, is Christ. Christ is the end of the old. Not the continuation, not the goal, the completion in line with the old, but the end and therefore the new.”

That’s the message the world ignores, and the church is loath to proclaim. Revelation 21 comes to mind. There it affirms Bonhoeffer’s advice. There it says that “Christ will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Yes, our economy with its built-in death culture will vanish: totally. Not a trace left. Yes, we are toast: we are in for death and disease. That is a given. But there is a promise the world cannot give. It is found at the end of the Bible.

“And the One seated on the throne said, “Behold, I will make all things new…..I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End.”

The world, the scientists, the political and economic systems do not have the solution. Nothing human will help us.

In the beginning Christ created but we un-created. Christ died on the cross to restore creation to its original, unaffected, pure state, because he so loved the cosmos.

We can be part of that New Creation when we love Christ and show that in loving his creation.

All is well that ends well.

NOVEMBER 23 2019

THE GOSPEL FOR DUMMIES.

First thing to know is that ‘the father of lies’ is in charge of this world: the Bible is correct, (and today’s evidence overwhelming) when it states in 1 John 5: 19 that “The Evil One rules this world”. It’s still God’s world, of course, but today Satan calls the shots and Jesus knew this when in John 17 he prayed to his Father: (verse 15) “You protect my followers from the Evil One…(because) they are not of his world,” a world belonging to Satan.

And that is true: the followers of Christ don’t belong to a world dominated by evil, by fraud: they belong to “the world to come”, where righteousness is the norm.  

However.

The second thing to know is that the heaven adherents have misinterpreted this to mean that they don’t belong to the earth: that their destination is with God in heaven, even though the Bible explicitly states that “God lives in inapproachable light: nobody can see or has seen God”, (1Timothy 6:16), or that John 3: 13 plainly tells us that nobody ever went there, and that “we are soil and to soil we shall return (Genesis 3: 19).

The heaven fable reminds me of Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The heaven heresy is so ingrained that it has totally distorted the MESSAGE: it is so anchored in the church that when I once suggested in a church periodical that going to heaven is a hoax, a letter to the editor called me a heretic.

The problem is that the Heaven dogma is so human: it allows us to have the cake and eat it too. We can fly anywhere, burn fuel in abundance, after all heaven is our destiny. The heaven adherents find polluting even helpful, because it will bring on Armageddon, the final battle, Rapture, the fetching up to heaven, preceded by the conversion of Israel. No wonder the US Secretary of State, the American Foreign Minister, approves of Israel expanding its territory into Arabian-held lands. After all, so they say, the Bible tells us so.

FRAUD, persistent fraud, is everywhere.

The biblical truth, the gospel for dummies, is that, “The salvation of creation – nature – and personal salvation are two sides of the same coin: you can’t have one without the other.”

To exclude creation from redemption, from being bought by the blood on the cross has led to a fraudulent interpretation that has done immeasurable damage to God’s world. Today it so deeply influences American policy, that it promotes pollution and war, promotes cosmic destruction, fully endorsed by Pompeo and Pence, both claiming to be Christians.

I dare say that any church that preaches heaven at the expense of the earth is a fraud. Bonhoeffer is correct when it calls this ‘pious secularism’.

I dare say that polluting is defrauding God, because we defile what God, when he made it, called ‘good’ seven times.

Fraud everywhere.

Fraud is everywhere today, reaching especially into the boardrooms of the cream of the crop in the corporate world and in government circles. Volkswagen comes to mind with its diesel deception and Boeing with its 737 Max flying machine.

A higher loyalty.

This week I am reading James Comey’s, A HIGHER LOYALTY, Truth, Lies, and Leadership. Comey’s customary 10 year appointment as Director of the FBI to ensure total political neutrality, was abruptly terminated when he refused to pledge loyalty to Trump.

We too have a higher loyalty, not to economic growth, but to honoring God in his creation. That is another facet of “The Gospel for dummies”.

The Bible repeatedly states that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. The church is great in befuddling this concept. It simply means that we must be in awe of God’s creation. From the rising of the sun to its setting, we must deeply love the natural world around us: that is the fear of the Lord:  that is the gospel for dummies. That’s why John 3: 16 – God so loved the cosmos – is today the most important text in the Bible: loving creation ensures eternal life. We must follow God’s love by loving creation with all powers within us: our eternal destiny depends on it. That’s the new gospel for dummies! It’s as simple as that! Once we conduct life with this basic principle in mind we have the beginning of wisdom, have secure footing to build LIFE.

But……

That’s why this 19^th Century hymn is more current than ever:

Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.

Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see—
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.

Don’t despair.

I sincerely believe that in these last days – and we are rushing head over heels into global disaster – remedies too will emerge: we will discover how to live properly: there will be a remnant, a tiny trickle of humanity that will see the dangers ahead and pursue policies that reflect permanence.

So, what are the dangers ahead, dangers enhanced by FRAUD?  

I know the world is becoming aware of the looming perils, except, apparently the USA, the world’s largest polluter. But have measures taken so far, reduced Climate Change?

No.

CO2 emissions for all countries, in total, have been spiraling upward, year after year. Population growth and increased world prosperity have caused CO2 to outpace GDP. That’s understandable. Of course people in Africa and Asia want to copy us.

While population in the US+EU+Japan Group grew by 11% between 1997 and 2018, in that same period population growth in the Remainder Group grew by 35% thanks to improved sanitation and basic medical care. These people too want homes with indoor plumbing and electricity, and love cars.

And then there is Deforestation, a continuing global problem.

High Income Countries keep pushing deforestation to the poorer, heavily indebted, parts of the world. This is causing a Carbon Bomb. A new report shows that deforestation released a shocking 626 percent more CO₂ between 2000 and 2013 than previously thought. This new research shows that we should be taking much better care of our last great intact forests because doing so has remarkable climate benefits. If we are going to stay on top of the runaway growth in CO₂ levels in the atmosphere, this needs to change.

Will we change? That is the cardinal question today.

The key insight of the study indicates that our unaffected, still intact forests, are packing ever more carbon into the living matter, deadwood and soils on each acre of land. Taking all large forest areas into account, and to a lesser extent some other still pristine ecosystems like grasslands, this so-called “sink” removes fully a quarter of all humanity’s carbon emissions each year, free of charge. It’s simply mandatory that this remains the case.  

If we stop this sink from doing its job, most of that quarter will remain in the atmosphere (with a little of it dissolving in the sea), increasing the rate at which CO₂ levels rise each year by a third at a time when we need to be pulling every lever at our disposal to lower carbon dioxide. It would be like yanking out the plug whilst trying to fill the bath.

The study also revealed the fallacy of forest fragmentation. You don’t have to clear a forest to reduce its ability to act as a sink; you just have to damage it. By looking at the millions of acres across the tropics that were damaged during 2000–2013, the study tallied up the extent to which pressures like fires, logging, and drought along new forest edges reduced the carbon stored and absorbed long-term by previously intact forests. These figures were six times worse than conventional estimates that only look at outright forest clearance.

Climate impacts aside, many other environmental services are also put at risk by this damage, including biodiversity, watershed protection, rainfall patterns and the survival of some of the world’s most imperiled cultures. 

An article in THE NEW YORKER of November 11 had some distressing news. Entitled BLOOD GOLD, it relates how in Brazil – which now has a Climate Change denying president – indigenous people and illegal miners are engaged in a fight that could well decide our future.

In the Amazon region the threats are set to worsen. Losses had accelerated by 2016 and will continue to grow in the future, with 25 million kilometers of new road expected to be built by 2050, much in intact areas, and increasing global demand for timber, minerals and food.

The tropics are not the only places to suffer, as few intact forests survive in the temperate belt. Even in the northern boreal zone they are in rapid retreat.

What is to be done? Ultimately the damaging processes need to be reined in. We must plan new infrastructure so as to avoid the most critical areas, the fragmentation by farms and fires must be curtailed, and the overhunting of ecologically critical animal species must be brought under control. But with greed always at work, and Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new president, deeply influenced by a powerful lobby there, called the three B’s: Bible, Bullets and Beef, the Amazon and the tribes there, faces the greatest threat ever. That threat is truly global, enhanced, if not founded on the wrong interpretation of ‘dominion’, mentioned in Genesis 2.

Christ –and by implication we – came to serve everything created. That is another aspect of the gospel for dummies.

The world’s intact forests, though embattled, are still vast, and at 2.5 billion acres (one billion hectares) represent one the greatest treasures nature has given us. If we are to have any hope of stabilizing our ailing climate, action at every level from international treaty to local community is needed to keep that treasure safe from harm.

ARCTIC NEWS.

You do well to pull up ARCTIC NEWS. Up there, in the far North, in the shallow Arctic Ocean, in the Siberian tundra and Canada’s North vast regions, trillions of tons of METHANE are buried in the no longer permafrost.

Arctic News warns us that another El Nino is on the way, a special weather phenomenon that enhances global temperatures, especially in the more northerly regions. Should this happen then this may prove disastrous, releasing megatons of methane, a far more a potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

That sudden release could accelerate Global Heating within a few years, killing all life on earth, including us, of course.

That this will happen is a Biblical given. That LIFE on earth will cease ( and cease suddenly) is foretold in many bible passages, including 2 Peter 3. Here it is:

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.

To conduct ourselves in holiness and godliness means more than                             praying and bible reading and attending church. It means to taste the holiness of creation, to live to see all living matter as God-given and thus sacred: that is the essence of the new gospel for dummies.

Arctic News may have the dates wrong, but it serves as a warning, because as Jesus – see Matthew 24 – has repeatedly told us, “The Day of Lord comes unannounced, totally out of the blue.” Ultra-clear signs are out there: the unalloyed fear of the Lord is the integral part of the gospel for dummies.