Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

ANOTHER ‘TOWER OF BABEL’ EVENT IS AT HAND.

The New God.

The old world is dying,” Antonio Gramsci once wrote. “And the new world struggles to be born.” In such interregnums, the Italian Marxist philosopher suggested, “every act, even the smallest, may acquire decisive weight”.

The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

Genesis 11: The Tower of Babel Story

I greatly admire Ezra Klein, columnist in the New York Times. He interviews knowledgeable people, and is a master in eliciting interesting information.

This past week his topic was AI.

Here are his words.                                                                      

“Let me zoom in on that. I’ve covered these A.I. companies for a long time. I covered the Anthropic guys when they still worked at OpenAI.

And that is how they all used to talk about it — that it is a race to build superintelligence, the one A.I. that will rule them all. (That refers to The Lord of the Rings, I might add)

Alloway: To build God.         

Klein: Yes, to build the machine God.

So far this dialogue.

Alienated from this earth, the world needs a new God.

Let me quote again The Tower of Babel verdict.

The LORD said, “If as one people speaking the same language, they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them.

My question: the Lord stopped the building of the Tower of Babel. How about AI? Will the Lord tolerate competition? No. Then what?

A bit of a detour.

I am rereading BRAIDING SWEETGRASS. When I reread a book, I always discover items, overlooked in my first reading. In this book, written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, an indigenous woman and professor of environmental biology, she records how a question to her 200 students, revealed that they consider humans and nature to be a bad mix. Asked whether they know about any positive interaction between people and land, their response was ‘none’. (This question was directed to third year students in an environmental protection course.)

That brings me to Christianity. Throughout the Scriptures, when God is referred to, God is described as ‘Creator of Heaven and Earth’. I am writing this in the days leading up to Christmas and New Year, and the newspapers I daily read have their pious pieces, outlining the views on Christianity, invariably seeing ‘heaven’ as the goal. Even the most devout among the many Christians I encounter, share that view.

However, this anthropocentric – human oriented – view grew directly from the philosophy of Aristotle’s teacher Plato, who focused his philosophy on separating humans from nature while popularizing the feel-good notion that humans have immortal souls. Basically, this makes the ‘heaven’ faith a pagan notion, exploited by the most godless of humans in power today, Donald Trump, who daily advocates ‘sins against creation’. In my opinion this is equivalent to ‘the sins against the Holy Spirit’, for which there is no forgiveness.  

When God finished creating, he called creation ‘good’ seven times. That’s why God wrote: “you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for earth you are and to earth you will return.” Genesis 3: 19.

When my wife of 67 years was buried in the Anglican cemetery, overlooking the Village of Tweed, now more than 5 years ago, the only words I spoke, were: “Earth we are and to earth we shall return”.

How do I tie these yearend ramblings together?

We today live in a new ‘Tower of Babel’ event. The God/Creator has become an unknown quantity. The time of ‘one language rules them all’ has reappeared: AI- Artificial Intelligence – is the new God. That God has revealed itself in Creation – John 3: 16 – is ridiculed: heaven is the preferred destination, giving us licence to destroy the earth which God called ‘good’ seven times. Religious movements thrive, the one more charismatic than the other. The BIBLICAL truth is that Jesus died to restore creation: this means that salvation of the now universally polluted cosmos and our personal salvation, go hand in hand, are the two sides of the same coin.

The first Tower of Babel resulted in world-wide development. The second Tower of Babel has led to THE MACHINE, Man the Machine.

The time is short. Another “Tower of Babel” event is at hand. This time the earth is saturated with people. This time we are ‘over-developed’ to the point of overheating. This time the only solution possible is outlined in Revelation 21:1:

Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,” for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea.

DON’T SHUN WORDLY WISDOM: Test all things.

Dr. Barry Commoner defined the four laws of Ecology some 70 years ago. They have stood the tests of time. To me they rate as biblical.

These four laws are easily understood, and memorized. I see them as ‘gospel truth’.

Here they are:

1) Everything is connected to everything else (interdependence),

2) Everything must go somewhere (conservation of matter/energy, no “away”),

3) Nature knows best (human intervention often causes harm), and

4) There is no such thing as a free lunch (all actions have consequences). 

So, what is so biblical about them?

These principles highlight the interconnectedness, their cyclical nature, their limits, and costs within ecosystems. Actually, they emphasize that humans are part of God’s Creation, and that we must believe and confess and experience its holiness.  

Total Interdependence.

J. H. Bavinck, in his The Riddle of Life, points out, years before Dr. Commoner formulated his laws, that “We live in an interdependent world, in which the butterflies serve the flowers as much as the flowers serve the butterflies”. He writes: “These little plants cannot think beyond their nature. They have no inkling that they serve just as much as they are served by others. They serve the miniscule seeds they now carry and that later will form new plants. They serve the animal, looking for food, or they need to help other plants using them as a crutch to climb higher.”

In manifold ways they serve other creatures that require support or shade or nourishment or moisture.

God’s entire creation serves this way.

The entire creation is all about serving. Jesus himself said that “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” (Matthew 20:28).  Writes Bavinck: “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. Without that law nothing else can be. This serving, therefore, is not a sacrifice, is not a duty, but an inborn act, without compulsion, without intent. Each single creature is there according to its nature, but everything together is so oriented that the existence of the one supports the other and maintains it.”

That’s what the first law tells me. How about the second one?

2) Everything must go somewhere.

In other words: Nothing ever disappears. It will take on another form, show up in a new combination, but we live in a closed system.

Take our beloved automobile, and the fuel it needs to propel it at a good speed, making long distances disappear. That same fuel is burned, and then re-appears, broken into GHG, the abbreviation of Green House Gases. The same happens to what we do and think, and write: Nothing disappears: All our actions are written in God’s book, and someday – soon I should add – we will have to give account when God reminds me – written on black on white – what we have done or failed to do.

3) Nature knows best.

There is an important text in the Bible, pointing to God’s Primary Love. I cite – again I should add – John 3: 16: “God so loved the World”. The Greek word for ‘world’ is COSMOS, the all-comprehensive entity, including everything we experience and observe, often through giant telescopes.

It is ruled by God’s grace, and it is our task to love it, with God’s example – God so loved – always in mind.

Basically, this world represents God for us, in the same way Shakespeare’s plays portray him to us. (We are what we do). That is why we must listen to “Nature”, now, in agony, because we have compromised its divine origin.

4) There is no such thing as a free lunch (all actions have costs/consequences). 

Again, the similarity with biblical givens. The Bible pulls no punches: “The wages of sin is death”, says Romans 6: 23. The word ‘judgement’ appears numerous times in the Bible. All our actions are recorded: a celestial camera follows us wherever we go: an instrument far beyond AI, because this divine instrument also records our thoughts and intentions. It does all this stealthily, without us having an inkling.

Revelation 20: 12 says at all:

And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.

Now that we are approaching the End Times, it also signals the zenith of human achievements, both positive and negative, witness our engineering marvels, but also our cosmos destroying devices. The Bible is quite explicit that not God, but we will cause the ultimate holocaust.

Don’t shun worldly wisdom: Test all things and hold fast to what is good.

(1 Thessalonians 5: 21)

IT WILL HAPPEN. SOON?

Her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her crimes.
                                                                        Revelation 18: 5

This week I reflect on, what the Bible calls: The Fall of Babylon. Why Babylon, that city/state long ago reduced to rubble? Desert sands have covered its ruins with carpets of oblivion, yet Israel’s collective memory still shudders with anxiety at the mention of this name, the city where the bloom of the nation was banished 500 years ago before Christ.

The Bible and future history.

I suggest you dig out your Bible, and start reading Revelation 18, with the present circumstances in mind. Take verse 5 – quoted above – and look out of your window, and recall Climate Change: yes, our sins are piled up to heaven.

There are other, equally relevant pointers in that chapter, such as verse 3: “All the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries”. Our economies and their leaders, have done exactly what Jesus refused to do: Bow before the Anti-Christ, and so seal our sure demise. World history is, surely, suicide, is a leap into the abyss. That is what humanity does, without prompting: God has no hand in this.

How apt.

The unfolding of our economies has caused untold number of species to disappear, and resulted in the ascent of a mad man such as Donald Trump, elected on the MAGA slogan, now fast becoming MACA – Make America Collapse/Corrupt Again. I foresee a Depression scenario, such as happened in 1930, about a century ago, when most Americans still had access to rural – self-sufficient relatives, now all gone, making ‘collapse’ fatal.

When things go bad, leaders will make it worse.

I read some disturbing news about the next war, which certainly will come. I can well imagine that the USA, with Satan in charge, and its technical advantage disappearing, may strike a preventing stroke against China, this ancient country, which now too, has the capability to destroy the US.

Trump is doing exactly the opposite of what today is required, leading the world into Armageddon, that dreaded situation that spells the end of the world as we know it. The current news is quite disturbing, and, I think that responsible US senators will discuss, in utter secrecy, ways and means to rid the USA of its mentally disturbed president, a man beyond irrational, and a certified lunatic.

Back to the Bible.

I am a Bible reader, a book that tells me, in grand outlines, how God created, how we fought him time and again, destroying his handiwork, and how God’s Son gave his life to renew the Cosmos, ensuring eternal life for his faithful.

The Latin saying, Si vis pacem, para bellum – if you want peace, prepare for war – is not true anymore: preparing for war, leads to war, and this time, unlike all wars before, nothing and nobody will be spared. In the new face of war, swarms of robotic aircraft work in unison to find and kill targets without any human oversight. Advanced cyberweapons can immobilize armed forces and shut down electrical grids across the country. A.I.-designed bio- weapons can be engineered to kill only those with certain genetic characteristics. All-out war – All-out destruction.

Economic growth an impossibility.

Our economic system is based on continuous growth: a total impossibility in a finite world. AI and the power sources they require are also based on this assumption. AI’s appetite for energy, in whatever source, its ever-growing requirements for water to cool their heat generating operations, is another factor in failure.

Can we still live ‘holy lives’ today?

Yet, the Bible urges us to live holy lives. Of course, Paul meant sexual purity, but I include overall purity, a lifestyle that does no harm to God’s beloved creation.

How, today, do I live a holy life? It is my considerate opinion that very few, if any, are able to do so, as our entire existence depends on polluting. Since that is the case, the time for Parousia is near.

Her sins are piled up to heaven, and God has remembered her crimes.

Sins against creation are suicidal, are self- punishing. Peter, the apostle, saw our future in stark terms. But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything done in it will be laid bare.

That’s what our greed for speed leads to. People know the score: Make haste, slowly; hatez-vous lentement; haast u langzaam; festina lente: the given is well-known. We look forward to eternity, where perfection is the rule.

Now that eternity dawns, not only for me, aging human, but for all humanity, the challenge today is to learn to live the life of eternity: that’s our human task. Somehow Christianity has re-learn this approach.

As always: Maranatha, Lord, hasten the Day.

NOT A TRINITY BUT A QUARTET?

But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father. Matthew 24: 36.      

I am mystified by this text, which is contrary to Jesus’ words when he said: The Father and I are one (John 10:30): there appears to be a split in the divine relationship. What’s going on here? God knows the score, but Jesus does not?

Allow me to pursue this mystery: in that (in)famous chapter, Matthew 24, Jesus tells us about ‘The End of the World’ – a topic that fascinates me – but confesses ignorance about its exact time, while God knows it. Why the split between Father and Son?

From my, so human perspective, I can grasp the reason, because it would entail predictions of such magnitude – think the H bomb, think AI, think Climate Change, think 9 billion people, think WWW, think 2,000 years of development – that an explanation would be impossible to grasp for his contemporaries. I also realize that all these developments are necessary for us to experience, in order to avoid their negative aspects once we live in the new creation, which has to last forever. Even so….

May I go where Jesus refused to go, or cannot go? I believe that the Bible tells me so.

To do that, I have to think ‘outside the box’, which forces me mention marriage again – or the lack thereof.

Jesus did say something about marriage, and our sexual orientation. At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the angels in heaven. Matthew 22:30. I can see the wisdom of this new arrangement between male and female: it guarantees full equality, and does away with the different sexual orientations.

Yet, there still will be marriage: Humanity will marry creation. Revelation 21: 9: “Come, I will show you the bride, the wife of the Lamb.”

So, marriage will not disappear: Obviously, here the Bible speaks of marriage between a woman, the bride – personifying Creation, God’s work of Art – and the Lamb, the groom – representing the human race, the Redeemed of the Lord. In other words, “We, the chosen by the Lord, will become one, united in marriage, with Creation!

Where do my thoughts go? They imagine something controversial. I believe that I don’t know what I am thinking, until I have read what I have written.

And what did I write?

I allowed my fingers to do the talking, and wrote: “why not describe creation as God’s female personality, God’s woman-like expression, a character that has assumed a will of her own, and a path in life, so distinct, that she acts independently: that’s why Jesus does not know when her expiry due date is, even though, through Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, creation is totally renewed.

Could that be the ultimate explanation of John 3: 16? Jesus, her brother, God’s Son, gives his life for his sister, God’s Creation-daughter, about to be married!

Just as Jesus is God’s son, Creation could be seen as God’s daughter.

Isn’t that a beautiful thought?

Obviously, the Bride is the New Creation, fertile, innovative, a personality all of her own.

I tend to believe that Creation, God’s maternal expression, knows the Limits to Growth, is aware of its finality, so to say, and, just as her brother Jesus, sacrifices her life – which we are busy doing – in order to be reinstated and resurrected as the Mother of all things.

Once again: But about that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

That text contains a mystery, and, I believe, that in the End, all will be revealed. The word ‘reciprocity’ has been in my mind for a time, meaning that two parties provide the same help or advantage to each other. Does this mean that, while I explore the Scriptures daily, the Scriptures reveal their secrets to me? Perhaps.

The matter of creation being female, is quite plain. That she has a divine origin, thus holy, is also truly acceptable. That she, God’s Creation, like Jesus, has been given to us for our use and care, our trust and stewardship, is also clearly established. That the current situation, has an expiry date, and knows exactly her exterminating date, is also guaranteed.

So, my hesitant conclusion?

Creation is God’s female expression, has a personality all of her own, just as Jesus has, and thus, there is not a Trinity, but a Quartet, a four-sided expression of the Holiness of God: Father, Son, Daughter, Spirit.

Well, I will throw this out, as a possibility, trusting that, sometime in the future, “All will be revealed”.  Maranatha, Come Speedily.

BE ADVENT-UROUS

I am not a theologian, and therefore must look at matters religious from a non-theological point of view. By observing, what we commonly call, the Church, I have concluded that organized religion is stuck in a certain modus operandi, that has remained the same since the Reformation in 1517, while the world has changed immensely.

When Martin Luther affixed his 95 theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, Germany, on October 31 of that year, he set into motion a revolution, culminating in the Thirty Years‘ War, fought primarily in Central Europe between 1618 and 1648, that became one of the most destructive conflicts in human history.

But the Ecclesiastical Reformation did not change a great deal in the way the church operated. True, the Lutheran movement abolished the papacy. True, the money racket which the church had become, was abolished. True, the Rome church organization was simplified, but, basically, God’s WRITTEN WORD, the Bible, remained the central vocal point in the Christian movement, prompting Guido de Brès to write a concise confession, the so-called ‘Belgic Confession’, composed in 1565 in Antwerp, Belgium, with a dual emphasis: Creation and the Bible.

In it the young Guido asked: “By What Means is God Made Known?”

Here are his answers.
First:

We know Him by two means: first, by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God, namely, His eternal power and divinity, as the apostle Paul saith: For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So, they are without excuse. All which things are sufficient to convince men, and leave them without excuse.

Secondly, He makes Himself more clearly and fully known to us by His holy and divine Word; that is to say, as far as is necessary for us to know in this life, to His glory and our salvation.

Please note the priority:

What comes first? What did he see as the church’s priority? Creation. What did the church do? It saw the Bible as the only source of divine knowledge.

Advent is coming: Not the arrival – advent – of the baby in Bethlehem, but the grown-up Jesus in his Second Coming. And he will take with him not an updated version of the Bible, but a ‘renewed’ Creation. And, says the last chapter of the Bible, I am coming soon. Repeatedly I should add, taking with him a New Creation!

Trees!!

This world today has a rapidly decreasing number of trees, and an increasing number of church-denominations. But the new creation is described as “And there was no temple there”, no church, no Bible. But trees galore: trees, miraculous trees.

The Bible starts with The Tree of Life. In the centre of history stands, The Tree of the Cross. Into that tree, symbol of all trees, Jesus’ flesh was pounded, from which Jesus’ blood dripped into the earth, making it too, forever holy.

Trees. Ever heard a sermon on trees? Ever gone, as congregation, to a forest, and wonder and wander there, and soak up the aroma of The Trees. Yet the Bible starts with a Tree, the Tree of Life, has at its centre the Tree on Calvary, and ends with the Tree that feeds the new creation.

ADVENT-URE

We must more see ADVENT as an ADVENTURE into the new world to come, in the wonderous world of TREES, those marvelous miracles of the ecosystem that regulates the natural world, the creator of clouds, the master of the atmosphere, the maker of rain, the organizer of organic compounds and the miner of minerals, ‘the leaves – the leaves! are for the healing of the nations’ – and…. the list goes on.

The Bible and the church will disappear, never to be resurrected again. Creation, God-made creation, will last from eternity to eternity: it is God’s Primary Word, now and always. That is the world – and the Word! – we will inherit.

That’s the reason why our emphasis in life and on religious assemblies must change, fitting more and more into a mode that is God-ordained. That calls for deep reflection and constant reorientation. Perhaps large gatherings, filling the parking lots, should be fitted with small house assemblies, where neighbours and secular friends can meet and discuss.  Now the carbon-age dominates the church.

To become ready for the New Creation -now rapidly approaching, as the Old World is digging its grave – we need a new orientation, from advent to adventure, imagining and daring to think outside the box, the four walls of a church, and orient ourselves to prepare for the New World to come.

That is our future: START LIVING IT NOW. Be ADVENT-UROUS

 “Where there is a dead body, there the vultures will gather.”

Luke 17:37                  

The greater majority in the Christian Church believes in two heresies: either in Rapture, the belief that, at a certain point in history, God fetches his people to directly fly to heaven, wherever they are. This is mostly a Southern Baptist notion, based on Hal Lindsey’s book, The Late Great Planet Earth, and the “Left Behind” Series. Or, a close cousin, is the almost universal belief that believers go to heaven upon death, forever leaving that wicked earth. Both cater more to Greek Paganism than Christianity. No wonder that the late Dr. Harold Bloom, a secular Jew, called America a “religion-soaked country that has ceased to be Christian”.

Jesus: listen to him!

Jesus disputes this notion repeatedly, pointing to Sodom and Gomorra, where Lot and his family were saved, and the sinners destroyed, or, in Matthew 24, mentioning the Flood, the sinners were drowned and the Noah clan survived. Nevertheless, the HEAVEN HERESY remains deeply ingrained in the Christian Religion. This antibiblical stance, allows Trump to follow his flagrant Anti-Christ = Anti-Creation policies, the complete opposite of the Cosmos-loving stance of God’s Son.

Why then have I singled out this gruesome text, a repeat of Matthew 24: 28, where the footnote says: “The coming of Christ will be as obvious as the presence of vultures around a dead body”. Why does Christ use this example?

As is often the case when Jesus speaks, the Kingdom, God’s precious cosmos, is on Jesus’ mind. His plaintive cry, ‘Will I find faith on earth when I return” – Luke 18: 8 – bears that out. Jesus always gives priority to the Kingdom, always, always, no exception. This also applies to the text quoted as my topic. A church without Kingdom ‘faith’ is dead: dead like a corps, dead as a carcass, dead as in devoid of all life, while its officials benefit from its organization and structure, like vultures devouring a corps.

This is totally in line with Matthew 23, where Jesus vehemently agitates against the then church officials, the scribes and Pharisees.

Why is this heresy so universal?

It is so much easier to go to heaven, and leave the earth behind, with its mandate to ‘love’ all that God has created. I know, I know: in almost every one of my blogs, I quote John 3: 16: “God so loved this cosmos”, and by loving it we get eternal life there. Where? Here, here, here.

The anti-Nazi Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was hanged by Hitler’s henchmen shortly before his concentration camp was liberated, often said, “Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”

Bonhoeffer calls this cosmos-despising stance: Pious Secularism.

I believe that the dead body in this text is the church, and the vultures are its office bearers, the paid staff, the legions of clergies in all denominations, about which James 3 warns: “They who teach will be judged more strictly”.

Fortunately, there still are churches proclaiming “LIFE”, and that to the full – Jesus’ message – John 10: 10.

And the deceived?

And the deceived are the widows with their penny donations, the innocent mass, who are still among the faithful, who want to be told the truth, and long to hear it. They would gladly accept it, but the Truth is not being told, and that Truth is the Good News of the Kingdom, is the New Earth to come.

The author of ‘Against the Machine’, Paul Kingsnorth, was interviewed by Don Douthat in the NYT, confessing that he was a Christian, but failed to spell it out in Kingdom terms, and there too is where the entire church is failing miserably, in the process becoming a dead body.

And I am still a member of this body, am still supporting it with my presence and money. Well, that’s life, but not the life Jesus wants us to live. So, life goes on, while awaiting LIFE in capital letters.

How then do I see Christianity?  

Christianity is not a religion. Religion excludes – it did Jesus! Christianity includes: Christianity is a way of LIFE. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. That line concludes Psalm 139.

Christianity is the continuous struggle to live in the way everlasting on God’s Holy Earth.That is our future. Live it today and every day.

Since today ‘living without polluting God’s beloved earth’ has virtually become impossible, is the reason why the Parousia, Christ’s return, is imminent.