Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

GOD, BILLY GRAHAM AND SHAKESPEARE.

January 31, 2024

In 1991 Larry King interviewed Billy Graham on CNN, and asked him, “What will happen when you die?” Billy did not miss a beat, supposedly quite ready to give a quick answer. So, what did he say? How did the great evangelist, the pastor to presidents, phrase his reply? How did this preacher, always seen with an open Bible in his hand, ready to explain the intricacies of the Christian religion, answer this secular interviewer, who was married eight (8) times, and feared neither God nor his laws? 

You’ll never guess. Billy Graham did not quote the Bible. Billy Graham did not look for a Bible passage such as Daniel 12: 13: “As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.”  None of that. No, Billy, the bold Bible pusher said, “When I die, Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God.” Wow. Wouldn’t that be something! A private audience with the God Creator, much grander than a visit with the Pope! 

Billy, his voice like thunder, “Thus says the Lord!”, could not have been more wrong. “Jesus,” says Colossians 1: 15, “is the image of the invisible God.” Even more striking is Paul’s description of God – see 1 Timothy 6: 16: “(God) alone is immortal, who lives in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see”. “Billy Graham, the great deceiver?”

God and Shakespeare: profound parallels.

Shakespeare: we know nothing of his age, his place of birth, where he died, how he looks like. His life-details are a mostly a mystery: we do know that he died in 1618; we do know that this most talented, and most celebrated playwright in the history of the literary world wrote 38 plays; we do know that his literary talents have mesmerized the theatrical world for centuries. 

But, why do I compare him to God?

Well…. Just like Shakespeare, the greatest bard in the last 500 years, we know God only by what he did: The saying goes, ‘by your actions we shall know you’. Of William Shakespeare nothing physical is known. Maggie O’Farrell, in her HAMNET, a book one of my granddaughters gave me, beautifully surmised the life of the great poet, but, brilliant as it is, it is fiction at its best.

So, I repeat, how do we know God? 

“How to know God”, asks the Belgic confession. “How to know Shakespeare”, ask the professors of English, where a play of the hero of Stratford and the Globe Theatre is required study in any university syllabus. “How to know God”, is also our perennial question, asked and explained in a million synagogues or church buildings or mosques in the world every Saturday or Sunday Morning. 

With Shakespeare the answer is simple: thousands of teachers and millions of students study the multiple plays written by this inspired man, and every year new dissertations are written, exploring a minute aspect of some play to gain a greater understanding of this literary giant, of which no photograph, no picture, no accurate biography can be found, but whose plays are better known than the Bible, which has become a forgotten book.

The simple explanation for Shakespeare’s life is through his works, his legacy, his handiwork, his oeuvre, his portfolio. 

So, back to the perennial question: How do we know God? You have guessed the answer: By and through his works. That’s why the Belgic Confession categorically states:

We know God by two means:

First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book in which all creatures,         
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God: God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20, ^“Ever since the creation of the world God’s eternal power and divine nature, invisible though they are, have been seen and understood through the things God has made. 
So, they are without excuse. All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.

Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word. 

Simply stated: We know only about Shakespeare through his literary output. We also know only about God through his works in creation, which is his Direct and Primary Revelation, through his Son, Jesus Christ. The church basically has diluted THE MESSAGE, by intellectualizing God, through solely concentrating on the Bible, God’s Indirect and Secondary Revelation. 

No wonder the church and the world are in rapid and in inevitable decline.

January 24 2024

Sex in the new Creation, and why women are more committed than men.

Sex In the New Creation? Of course. “Be fruitful”, is the first command given by God in Genesis 1, a statement made before the Fall. I wouldn’t be surprised that Eve was pregnant when she ate the Apple and then promptly had a miscarriage. 

How about the New Creation? When?

That is the ultimate question today: WHEN? When will Jesus come back? When can we expect the New Creation of which the Bible speaks all the time?

One thing we know: We don’t know “the day and the hour”. That is a fact. But we do know the signs. We do know what it entails: a climate SO hot that it will consume all there is. The Scriptures are very clear on this. Malachi mentions ‘a refiner’s fire’, an apt description because only a fire can purify everything. Peter, the apostle, the Pierre, the Rock, writes that ‘the elements will be destroyed by fire’, and Revelation too forecast a series of calamities, among which ‘the fiery lake of burning sulfur’.  

A timely warning.

Arctic News – have a look at its website – paints exactly such a picture, and places the world’s demise at our doorsteps, within the next couple of years. It sees immense danger from the methane hydrates that lurk in the shallow Arctic waters, an incalculable, immense amount of rich carbon deposits, containing gases, by some calculations 100 times more lethal than our comparably innocent-tailpipe exhausts. Once these huge amounts of gases, now tightly compacted through eons of time, burst out in the open, they expand 130-140 times in volume, and cause a sudden spike in air temperature, making the atmosphere we live in, suddenly, spontaneously, and especially lethally, inhabitable, leaving no room for any living entity. “This rise in methane concentrations alone may suffice to cause the Clouds Tipping Point, at 1200 ppm CO? to get crossed. The resulting clouds feedback could on its own cause the temperature to reach more than 18°C above pre-industrial by 2026”, to quote Arctic News. 

It also notes: “humans will likely go extinct with a 3°C rise and most life on Earth will disappear with a 5°C rise”. Please note: these are warnings given by bona fide scientists, peer reviewed.

So why do I write all this? 

It could quite well be that the world as we know it, the world in which we were born, grew up and matured, will disappear in a wink, as 2 Peter 3 verse 10, warns us. For those who are not familiar with the Bible, let me quote this passage: “suddenly, out of the blue, without warning, the elements will be destroyed by fire”. My paraphrasing.

Sex in the NEW CREATION.

So, what has this to do with SEX IN THE NEW CREATION? How does this chive with Jesus’ statement that ‘there will be no marriage there’? 

Fecundity

We identify sex with human intercourse. Actually, it’s much more than that. Thomas Moore writes in The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, “There is no reason why our surroundings should not be places of beauty, intimacy, pleasure, and desire – all sexual values.” 

Sterile Churches.

When God said, “Let there be”, he made a sexual statement. When I place seed in the ground in the Spring, that is a sexual act. “Creating” beauty is a sexual act. This reminds me of the Protestant churches, often lacking in intimacy, pleasure and desire. The church service should be full of cosmic sexuality.

Close reading of the Older Testament and God’s instructions for the Tabernacle and Temple, reveal that their walls were decorated with images of palm trees and flowers; in other words, the temple depicted the world in a nutshell, a microcosm, with the deity living at the centre. 

Our churches lack these sexual symbols, lack ‘the fruits’ of our imagination, lack the results of our artistic input. The sterility of our edifices has resulted in a general spiritual malaise, incurable if present trends persist.

Sex and us.

Yes, today we see sex strictly in bodily terms, strictly as a form of satisfying a physical desire. The entire economic world is centered on that: bodily enhancement has become a growth industry, with enticing glimpses of female nudity.

Job’s daughters are a good example of Biblical beauty.

The Bible is no stranger to female beauty. It is revealing that the book, simply called JOB, appearing just before the 150 Psalms, ends with: “Nowhere in the land were there found women as beautiful as Job’s daughters.”  The curious part in this section is that, where his sons are not named, Job’s daughters are, indicating that the Old Testament sees women as more committed than men, because they bear the means of fruitfulness. Mary, too, was a woman blessed above all. Joseph more or less acted as an appendix, fading into oblivion, just as Job’s sons, while his daughters, in contrast with the lack of female rights in those days, were full heirs to Job’s immense wealth.

Women and Jesus.

Women financed Jesus’ mission. Women stayed with Jesus till the bitter end, while the men chickened out. Jesus appeared to women first after his return to LIFE. Yes, women play a larger role in Christianity than men. True then, and true now.

January 16, 2024

THE IRONY OF WATER.

Some happenings are uncanny and unforgettable. One of them is my emotional experience, standing in front of Lake Louise, in Banff National Park. There, in a sudden, uncontrollable outburst of elation and exultation, tears sprung into my eyes, my throat seized up, and my whole body reacted to the immense natural beauty unfolding in front of my eyes. God’s Spirit through his handiwork filled my being. It to me signified that ‘nature’, God’s creation, is both us and in us.

A similar feeling, however much shorter, went through me when a dear friend, about to die, talked of his future in the New Creation that awaited him, and with him I experienced a shared feeling of felicity, that touched my very soul.

I think the proper word for these happenings is ‘enchantment’, a feeling of the divine in me, the presence of God’s Spirit, ‘chanting’ melodiously, impacting my physique, pushing teardrops into my eyes, reminding me that my body and the world around me, are mostly water.

Water?

Rivers, lakes, seas, oceans, cover 70 percent of the earth’s surface. Our very bodies consist of water in that same proportion.

 Rather than calling our globe ‘earth’ – which, after all, is only a minority stake – we should really call our world ‘water’ or ‘aqua’ by its Latin name. 

What have we done with ‘water’?

“Astounding” ocean temperatures in 2023 supercharged “freak” weather around the world as the climate crisis continued to intensify.

The Flood, in which Noah played a prominent part, was purely ‘an act of God’, who promised not to repeat his interference. And God hasn’t. It is increasingly becoming obvious that we, as the human race, have assumed God’s role of inflicting punishment on ourselves.

The watery oceans.

For millennia the sea was a mystery for the human race, unaware that ‘the universal ocean-waters’, determine the steadiness of the atmosphere, a state of affairs we now have disturbed, of which we today face the consequences. We have done what has always been seen as impossible: the trillions of tiny explosions occurring every second under the hoods of our beloved automobiles, have now heated up the incalculable universal molecules of H2O in adverse ways, robbing the atmosphere of its predictable constancy.

Our Greed for Speed 

Our Greed for Speed has accelerated the Parousia, the Second Coming. That’s the Good News. It reminds me of Yeats timely poem:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Bethlehem has come and gone. 

The Second Coming is at hand, as even the church’s stance, in its largest expressions, has turned to a new Messiah, Trump, turning the Good News – Eu-Angelist – into the Bad News – Kak-Angelist, perfectly in line with Matthew 24.

Water: An ironic twist.

Where God punished an incurably sinful world with the FLOOD, today the uneven spread of rains has brought on ‘drought’, which threatens the world’s food supply, affecting a quarter of humanity, causing food inflation, hunger and migration. Also, Global Heating warmed the entire earth’s waterbodies, an unbelievable feat, judging by its global percentage, to the extent that the world’s weather is out of kilter, as its stability has been jolted. Here again the unbelievable magnitude of our disastrous conduct spells nothing but current and near-future chaos.

I know, those are no proof of God’s existence for the sceptical minds, but for me they are real. That I live under divine protection became again evident to me a short while ago, when, in a dream I was alerted to a certain danger that could have mortal consequences, and when, the next day such a happening did take place, I was warned in advance.

Back some 80 years.

As an 18-19 years old young man, in the glorious summer of 1947, for 7 weeks I sailed the seas, as a guest on a 500 tons Coastal Vessel, paying $1.00 per day for food, traveling from Rotterdam to Exmouth in South England – where I stayed 4 weeks – and from there through the Kiel Canal to the Baltic, where minesweepers were still clearing safe paths through the  ‘Ost See’, on my way onto Sweden and Finland.

Some happenings are literally unforgettable. That ‘sea-trip’, now almost 80 years ago, has made me love the waters which cover almost all the globe’s exterior.

January 9 2024

Has my disciplined life made me guilty of manslaughter?

The Bible is big on discipline: the word appears 124 times there, most often as a reminder that the Lord ‘disciplines’ a person who swerves away from his Law, which, today, we experience in Climate Change. However, Proverbs sees it as the basis for erudition, as in Proverbs 12: 1: Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge.

In the Newer Testament, Jesus’ immediate class of students are called ‘disciples’, people, in this case all men, eager to know ‘the Way of the Lord’, making true the biblical rule for ‘wisdom’: “The fear of the Lord is the onset of wisdom.” 

 A person can have an immense amount of knowledge, but lack wisdom. AI – Artificial Intelligence – comes to mind, which, to some extent, is the  summum of all knowledge, but cannot possibly instill wisdom. To attain wisdom we need guidelines, which we find in God’s Words, coming to us in three indispensable and inter-related ways. Wisdom is a gift from God, obtained by observing creation and its structure and coherence, and seeing divinity there: that is the beginning of wisdom. Romans 1: 20 is worthy of quoting again: 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. 

In other words: observing the way of ‘nature’ is the divine directive for instilling wisdom, aided by reading the ‘written’ Word, and both deeply determined by Jesus Christ, the Word become flesh, by God becoming a human being, our example to follow. So, yes, just like in the Trinity, GOD’S WORD too, is a threefold given. 

Live by wisdom.

That’s the kind of wisdom I try to live by most of my life. By the grace of God, I should add. The entire body of mere human knowledge has led us to the ‘state of doom’ we are in, and it takes ‘divine wisdom’, to extract us from that situation. That’s not easy! Perhaps impossible.

This also indicates that we are responsible for who we are.

Yes, we are responsible for who we are. Christian parents are charged to bring up their children ‘in the fear of the Lord’, and I am thankful that my parents tried to do that through example, to the best of their ability, as their parents did for them, and I did for my children. But there always comes a time when the responsibility shifts, when maturity is reached, and the children go their own way. 

All this applies to us, creatures of the 21^st Century. We, as, the human race, also have grown up: God has allowed us to pursue a path apart from him. Deuteronomy 32: 20, makes that clear: “I will hide my face from them,” God said, “and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful”.

Note: God still sees us as his children. In a sense, we never fully mature: we always have to be open to new ideas, new insights, not going back, but forward, to the New Creation, not dependent on and glorifying in new technical stuff, almost always powered by creation-destroying carbon-based fuel, but always aiming for ever expanding insight into matters that really matter, such as ‘why we are here’.

I have been self-employed, since 1952, for more than 70 years. During these decades I have driven at least a TWO million kilometres, first as an insurance and real estate broker, and finishing my career as an accredited commercial real estate appraiser, in a region in Eastern Ontario, from Picton to the Algonquin, from Peterborough to Smith Falls, some 200 km x 150 km, often traveling 300 km a day. 

“What have I learned?”

An article in the latest Economist, entitled THE GREEN MAN’S BURDEN, tells me that I am guilty of causing death. It says, “In 2011 John Nolt, a philosopher at the University of Tennessee, estimated that a typical (North) American, born in 1960, would be responsible for enough Green House Gas emissions over his or her lifetime to cause between one or two deaths.”

Born in 1928 I certainly qualify! I wonder: “Has my business life made me guilty of manslaughter?” Yes, Ephesians 2:3 is correct: by nature, we are children of wrath. All too plain today!  

We need God’s grace, now more than ever.

January 1, 2024

2024+: THE YEARS AHEAD.

The Economist, a British weekly, still thriving since 1843, publishes each yearend, a 90 pages projection of the following year. Where they need 90 pages, I will do in less than 900 words, because I take an unorthodox approach that no one else uses: I quote Jesus. Do you trust him? 

Karl Barth, that down-to-earth theologian, had as his preaching motto: Have the Bible in one hand, and the newspaper in the other. I too will follow his rule.

Jesus, in his astonishing relay, recorded in Matthew 24, outlines how the last days will enfold. We, today, experience an amazing resemblance between what Jesus predicted 2,000 years ago, and what is happening now. Read that chapter: everybody has access to a Bible.

Take verse 6. 

There Jesus mentions wars and rumours of war. Today, more than ever, we see war in Israel/Palestine, we see it in Ukraine, we see it in Africa. And rumours of war aplenty, such as war between the USA and China, between Israel and Iran, to give just 2 examples. The current fighting in Gaza could well spread to occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank, where the Islamist group has active cells and higher levels of popular support. The risk of escalation between Israel and the formidable Iran-backed Shia faction Hezbollah to the north in Lebanon, also remains high.

The chapter continues: (verse 10) “Many will turn away from the faith”. 

That is now also happening. Churches everywhere in the West are dying. This too makes true Jesus’ words: “Will I find faith on earth when I return? (Luke 18: 8). 

In verse 11 of Matthew 24, Jesus mentions “False prophets will arise and seduce many”. 

Look at Donald Trump, who crowns himself as the Modern-Day Christ: he tells the world that he is ‘the retribution’, as if he bears the sins of the world, a blasphemy unequaled in the world’s history. He is the father of lies, the embodiment of evil. And the church-goers? Many ‘believe’ in him!  

 Look at verse 15: “So when you see standing on the holy place ‘the abomination that causes desolation’ of which Daniel speaks – let the reader understand.” 

I have a few comments there. First here Jesus calls Creation ‘holy’, because, as Psalm 24 unambiguously states: ‘the earth is the Lord’s and its total contents, including animals, trees, the seas, the air and the dry lands.’  Second: Climate change is the abomination that causes desolation. Third: let the reader understand. Only WE, of all previous generations can understand these words, because we experience these sins against God’s Holy Creation.

Today the natural world is reaching a new series of tipping points. Wildlife populations have plunged by an average of almost 70% since 1970. Today, due to unprecedented heat in the Antarctic, thousands of baby penguins are going to die. The usually stable sea ice that colonies rely on to rear their young in the Bellingshausen Sea just isn’t there, causing a “catastrophic breeding failure”. The same is happening in the Arctic with the polar bears. At both poles unprecedented heat, 39C above normal is being recorded.

The United Nations to date have organized 28 continuous years of world-wide meetings trying to stem the increase in global heating, yet each year it has become worse, even during La Nina years. Now we have El Nino conditions, and the outlook is grim.

Already with 70 percent of wildlife gone, due to forest fires, abnormal and unusual weather conditions, tell me: how long will the God/Creator tolerate such conditions in his precious and holy handiwork?

Then there is the Rapture thing: a grand LIE.  Look at verse 39 of that famous chapter. Question: Who were taken away in the Flood? Noah remained, and his family, but the sinners all drowned. The same will happen when Jesus returns: The believers remain on earth: the sinners are doomed and banned forever.

What does this mean for 2024 and beyond, the ‘years of living dangerously?’ Hebrew 10: 31, tells me that it is “dreadful to fall into the hands of the living God”. Thanks to Bonhoeffer I too see creation as God’s, as identifiable to him. That’s why our sins against creation are bouncing back to us. Creation/God is taking revenge, true to God’s own words: Vengeance is mine, Romans 12: 19 among other texts, because our sins are and always have been creational trespasses: we now have exploited God’s very earth to the edge of extinction. God has foreseen that and built-in instruments of revenge, now being employed to our unbearable pain and death.

That is our future for 2024 and beyond. By following Karl Barth’s prescription, I come to a conclusion, shorn of hype and sinful optimism. God-talk may not be very popular today, evident in the rapid and ominous decline of ‘religious faith’ institutions. That does not mean that faith is gone. The Economist has it. Every person has a more or less defined outlook for the future, based on ‘faith’.

Now, finally after 2,000 years 2 Peter 3 can be visualized in an ever-hotter world: “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.”

December 26, 2023

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” 

William Shakespeare uses this line in his play Romeo and Juliet to convey that the naming of things is irrelevant. Is it?

Does that apply to God as well? Karen Armstrong, in her latest book, Sacred Nature, writes that in the Bible there are 50 different names for God. I have noted that they often come with the annotation of “Creator of Heaven and Earth”, from which I dare say that this is how God wants to be known.

That makes sense. God wants to be known by what he has done and still does. Beware me. I am not a theologian, a designation in itself an impossibility, as God is beyond knowing. The very name ‘God or Yahweh’ is a mystery. Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, in his book, The Hidden Face of God, on the very last page, the very last paragraph, writes, “The name Yahweh probably means, ‘that which causes to be’…..There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God”.

Bonhoeffer makes the same point, actually expanding it when he writes that God and Creation are unified just as all great artists derive their reputation from their creative works. Yet, in all my readings of interviews with sincere Christian leaders during this Christmas season, the words, ‘religion’, ‘heaven’, ‘Christ’ were prominently mentioned: yet, I never read about any connection to Creation at all, which makes me wonder whether Gnosticism is still the ruling force in Christianity; after all, Gnosticism separates mind from matter, heaven from earth.

God, the forgotten God.

Today, more than in any other era, God is the forgotten factor. I was again struck by this when I saw two of my adorable great-granddaughters, 4 and 6 years old, sing about the red-nose reindeer, and Santa Claus, not a word about ‘the real meaning of Christmas’. Secularization has changed all this: God is absent. Humans are on their own, even though the rumors about God still seem to be around, but these vague utterances are no longer regarded as relevant. Perhaps, very perhaps, the onset of global natural disasters, rapidly increasing in severity and ferocity may bring about a return to reflection and self-examination, and could start a period of purer living and a hesitant recognition that the world in which we live is bigger than ourselves, infinitely larger than our mind and intellect can contain and grasp. Just imagine: our acquired mode of life, has led to a situation where we pump heat into this world, akin to a daily injection of 600,000 nuclear bombs. This infinite heat has caused the totally unimaginable warming of our earth, air and seas by close to TWO percent Celsius.

A new year looms.

We are on the verge of entering a new year, for which the omens look ominous: wars, hardening of hearts, also known as right-wing thinking, while deficits, monetary and environmental, spiritual and intellectual, are rife, and solutions increasingly thwarted by ignorance, by lethargy, by unwillingness to sacrifice today to ensure a tomorrow.

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet.” 

What’s in a name? What’s the name of the times we live in? No matter how we slice it, whether we name it Anthropocene – rule by humans – or whatever, the naming of our time is irrelevant as the condition of the times we live in is dictated by its circumstances, of which the true signs tell us that they are defined by another Greek word: TELOS, the end.  Homo proposit, sed Deus disposit, freely translated as, “If you want to make God laugh, you tell him your plans.”

We know it, we sense it, we experience it, and we ignore it that, “The Way of the Lord is taking shape”. Because we, we are his unwitting helpers: our catastrophic actions are speeding up the coming of the Kingdom!