Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

August 7 2016

BOMBS: THE PLANET’S POSSIBLE BATTLE PLAN

But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish in the sea inform you. Job 12:8

Even the stork in the heavens knows her times, and the turtledove, swallow, and crane keep the time of their coming, but my people know not the rules of the LORD. Jeremiah 8: 7

We are smart in some ways, and dumb, very dumb in others. Actually technology has made us quite stupid. Anybody can learn how to drive a car or finger a computer, but handling a team of horses is a different matter. It means that we have to read their minds, get in touch with the horses’ inner voices, and relate to them on their level. There is a reason why there is an expression: horse sense. Our love for machines, for the artificial, for the man-made stuff, has alienated us from God’s Primary Word, his creation.

Question: Have you spoken to the earth lately, except, perhaps in curses? “Speak to the earth” Scripture advises us. That really means that we engage in dialogue, study its ways, ask questions, show deep concern, but considering what’s happening out there, it is apparent that, rather than treating the earth as an equal we are downright discriminating against it.

Treat the earth as an equal? What sort of nonsense is that?

In Genesis 9 it is recorded that God, the creator, made a COVENANT with the earth. You know what that means? It means that God made the earth AN EQUAL PARTNER.

No wonder Nietzsche wrote that: “Sin against creation is the greatest sin.” A sin against creation is a direct affront to the CREATOR. When we say we love God but treat Creation with utter disdain and neglect, even abuse it continuously, our love for God is highly questionable. It is high time to acquire an acute earth-awareness. That mammals disappear because of our actions, that fish vanish through overfishing, that more birds die through insecticides to promote Monsanto poison, that we further and further remove ourselves from touching base with our fellow creatures, not only humans, but trees and plants as well, all this is a direct slap on the face of the Maker of it all.

Our fascination with matters mechanical stems from the notion that we are to dominate creation, from high-functioning animals down to the lowly amoebas. I don’t want to downplay progress. But the fact is that it has come at the expense of everything and everybody, and all this has spurred our spiritual insanity.

PROGRESS

For most of human history, economic progress moved at a crawl. According to the economic historian Bradford DeLong, from the first rock tools used by humanoids three million years ago, to the earliest cities ten thousand years ago, through the Middle Ages, to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1800, living standards doubled (with a growth of 0.00002 percent per year). Another doubling took place over the subsequent period to 1870. Then, according to standard calculations, the world economy took off, thanks to the use of carbon fuels.
From 1870 to 1970 growth skyrocketed thanks to carbon fuels. According to (Dr.) J. R. McNeill in his AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH-CENTURY WORLD: “No other century in human history can compare with the 20th for its growth in energy use…. My very rough calculation suggests that the world in the 20th Century used 10 times as much energy as the 1000 years before 1900.”
In the first stage of THE PLANET’S BATTLE PLAN we only have experienced the opening salvos. Much, much worse is yet to come.

RAIN BOMBS

Rain bombs are a new breed of severe storms. Ten to fifteen cm of precipitation, or even more, pours down in a mere hour. Such storms can destroy infrastructure in a matter of minutes. This happened in several place across the globe. In the US, Texas and other southern states suffer from never-before-seen flooding. The west of the country is soaring in heat. The east coast of Australia has been repeatedly hit by rain bombs, while Tasmania had to deal with never seen flooding. Everybody has seen the pictures of flooded streets in Paris. The Loire region got six weeks of rain in three days. In Germany the region of Baden Wurttemberg was been hit by torrential rains.
This is what we have done by burning Carbon fuels in untold quantities: we now have overwhelmed the climate by overloading our poor planet with a gigantic growth of untold trillions of tons of energy calories. Not even a total stop of all carbon-based energy use will now stop the destruction of God’s precious earth.

WIND BOMBS

We also experience more and more tornadoes, which are WIND BOMBS. They suddenly form in the sky and traverse with nuclear force on unsuspecting and unprepared regions. There is no antidote for these angry utterances who no longer are sporadic but ravage the earth with increasing ferocity.

POLITICAL BOMBS

Then there are POLITICAL BOMBS. Donald Trump is an excellent example of this new political expression, the man who can’t say SORRY, who, seeing already that he’s not going to become President, now says the game is rigged, a man spoiled from infancy, who simply cannot cope with a degree of adversity, upset by a baby crying. Cry-baby himself.
In Britain nobody expected that a majority would vote for Great Britain to leave the European Union. Other elections are coming up in Europe, which might further detonate the status quo.

STUPIDITY BOMBS

Not for nothing Television is called THE BOOB TUBE. Neil Postman in his AMUSING OURSELVES TO DEATH has been very prophetic there. Television not only leads to intellectual stupor, but physical death as well.
Gone is any commonsense; gone is a mature opinion on matters religious, political, natural or material. It now is becoming plain that a world out of kilter through distorting the climate also has infected our minds.
The entire world is a unity: with one part in chaos, everything else and everybody else has become contaminated. Polluted air and polluted water leads to polluted minds.
Proverbs 29: 18 hits it on the nose: WHERE THERE IS NO VISION THE PEOPLE PERISH. Harold Bloom in his THE AMERICAN RELIGION calls the Fundamentalists the KNOW-NOTHING Christians. That in the USA education is funded locally, where poor areas are deprived of decent schools and qualified teachers, has caused entire regions to suffer from a mental deficit and has seen a large segment of the population flock to TRUMP, taken in by his demagoguery, a man who even praises his adherents for their lack of mental skills. Unbelievable!

YES, WE LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES THANKS TO CLIMATE CHANGE.

Sociologists call it implicatory denial. The reason why Republicans never ever uttered the word CLIMATE CHANGE during their convention (which I watched from the beginning to the end, and where my loathing for that party increased exponentially) was that uttering the word CLIMATE would imply that something be done about it. That would mean government action – taboo for the TRUMP Party – so the word CLIMATE was banned from the vocabulary.

I see a similar situation in the church, where the KINGDOM concept too is avoided, because making it a priority – as Jesus recommended in SEEK FIRST THE KINGDOM – means that we must deal with its root-meaning.

Actually the two concepts: CLIMATE CHANGE AND KINGDOM SEEKING are intimately connected.
But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish in the sea inform you. Job 12:8

Ever heard a sermon on that passage?

There is a close correlation between the disappearance of animals – birds, mammals, fish – the warming of the earth and the seas and Gospel preaching. God, when he created the cosmos, made a perfect world. He gave the seas the exactly correct temperature, the right size of forests, the perfect CO2 count in the air. But in the last 200 years – with the excessive use of oil and coal – matters changed and with it the human perspective. J. R. McNeill, in the book I mentioned above gave it the subtitle: SOMETHING NEW UNDER THE SUN. There is indeed something new that has not happened before in history: massive die-off of species and massive temperature change. Somehow the church has failed to see creation as GOD’S PRIMARY OR DIRECT WORD, while the Scriptures, the church’s sole interest, is GOD’S SECONDARY OR INDIRECT WORD. No wonder matters are screwed up.

THE WAR IS HEATING UP: LITERALLY

And that is just the beginning. The stage is set for all sorts of long vanished diseases to suddenly emerge and for which all resistance is long gone. All these and more are:

THE UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES OF THE CARBON AGE

Five weeks ago, thunderheads exploded into the skies, raining more than 330,000 bolts of lightning down upon the European continent in the course of just 8 hours. The blasts hammered a wide region stretching from Portugal through France and the UK, into the Alps, Italy, Germany and Denmark and on through south western Poland.
BROILING OCEANS
Ocean surface temperatures over a zone stretching from the Equator to Alaska now range between 1 and 6 C above late 20th Century values. A gigantic blob of hot water in the Pacific is feeding the growth of a powerful atmospheric wave. This will lead to new record hot temperatures to explode all over the US West coast and Canada. Of course, extreme events do happen from time to time. Such storms are supposed to happen once every 500 years or so, not in fast succession.
Don’t for a minute think that Climate Change will ever stop.

METHANE IS THE PLANET’S NUCLEAR THREAT.

We may complain about the heat in North America. It is well-known that overall we are experiencing the hottest year so far ever! Yet, this is nothing compared to the increase in overall temperature in and near the Arctic. Widespread Arctic melting means that potentially dangerous amounts of methane are pouring into an already toasty atmosphere. Permafrost stores about double the carbon that the atmosphere does. The better the bacteria there do, the more carbon joins the sky, the warmer earth becomes. We call that for some reason ‘positive feedback’: the process feeds on itself.
A heatwave that hit Siberia this summer has unleashed a horde of long-frozen bacteria that now threatens the entire world. An outbreak of anthrax in western Siberia has so far claimed the lives of 1,500 reindeer and made scores of people sick. There frozen carcasses defrosted and released the long-dormant bacteria. Siberia and Northern Canada, the entire region around the Arctic is a powder keg.

Where is the methane coming from?

Take China, with its massive methane belching coal mines and coal burning facilities. Or try Mongolia and Russia, with their leaky gas fields. Then there is the Middle East and Europe which burns high-methane brown coal. Indonesia also, where tropical forests are burning down, as well as the Amazon and the US where fracking has greatly increased methane emissions, and especially the Arctic where the permafrost spreading over many millions of square km is thawing.
But the real threat comes from the Arctic. In total, more than 1.300 billion tons of carbon is locked away in the permafrost soils. Much of this carbon is in the form of the frozen ice-methane called hydrate. That is now coming on stream. It’s like nuclear bombs exploding everywhere.
There was a warning, outlined in Deuteronomy 30: 15-17:

“Now I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord, to walk in his ways… then you will live and the Lord will bless you.” In other words, treat the earth as an equal.

“But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn to other gods-money, economic exploitation and growth- you will certainly be destroyed.”

JULY 31 12016

B & B and another B

Bombast & Baloney? Bed & Breakfast? Bach & Beethoven?

Yes, the B & B stands for two people whose names start with “B”: not Bach and the other guy, but Bonhoeffer, Dietrich and Bavinck, Johan Herman.
Both Bonhoeffer and Bavinck have given me new insights which I want to share with you because we live in an age of acrimonious agitation and obdurate obfuscation, making it difficult for people to find the TRUTH.

Fact is that we all must rely on others to find out what is really important in this day, where confusion is so common and where even those in authority in state and church, simply do not know where to go and what to do. That’s the problem with the approaching END TIMES, where the status quo has expired and the terrible new has not yet come.
I trust these men. They speak eternal truths, are literally down to earth and have the right perspective for the future.
The lives of these two “Bs” overlapped: Bavinck was born in 1895 in the Netherlands and died there in 1964. Bonhoeffer was born in 1906 in East Germany, now Poland, but lived most of his life in Berlin. He was hanged by the Nazi Regime in 1945 after about a year in prison.
They did not know of each other, yet their thoughts on Christianity, their views on the Kingdom and the earth, their ideas on eternity were strikingly similar.
Why have these two persons played such an important role for me? What’s so significant that they shaped my life?

They made me feel fully human. They gave me a view of eternity that moved me to tears. They gave me back my personhood. That was necessary because I was raised in a very ‘heaven-oriented’ family and church. Both men taught me not to look up, but to stay firmly with my feet on the ground.
Bonhoeffer writes that “The Kingdom of God is a purely eschatological concept.”
What does that mean? This means that the Kingdom of God will come after the ‘eschaton’, when this world has run its course, when we humans have almost succeeded in destroying this planet, and Christ returns and brings with him The Kingdom, the New Creation.

Here’s something that brings tears to my eyes. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes that “It is only out of the future (from the perspective of the coming of the Kingdom) that the present can be lived…We are children of the future.” In other words: “We don’t belong to the world dominated by evil (1 John 5: 19).”
Bonhoeffer was much younger than J. H. Bavinck when he made his most significant statements. I think that he realized that his life would be cut short. Also he was not an official in the church, so he could be – and was – much more radical. He said: “we have fallen into secularism, and by secularism I mean pious, Christian secularism. Not the godlessness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth…. This pious secularism also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things…..The function of the church is to witness to the power of God in the new creation. …. Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from the world to other worlds beyond; rather he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children”. That is truly revolutionary.

When Bonhoeffer wrote this he was in his twenties. By that time he had a double doctorate. When World War II broke out – in 1939 – he was 33, was in the USA and was offered a position of professor there, but he decided to return to Germany, fully well knowing that, because he was fiercely against Hitler, he probably would not survive.
J.H. Bavinck was a churchman, an ordained minister, a professor specializing in missions. As such he worked in Indonesia, then a Dutch colony, known as the Dutch East Indies and later taught at the Amsterdam Free University.

Bavinck is more explicit when he describes how the KINGDOM will be when it comes. He writes: “In the first place we must realize that God’s Kingdom has a cosmic character, which means that it comprises the entire world as we have come to know it. Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the worlds of animals and plants. Yes, even the angels are part of this wider context: they too have a place in the harmonious totality of God’s Kingdom.
“This implies that all parts of the world are attuned to each other. Nowhere is there a false note, a dis¬so¬nant that disturbs the unity, as everything fits harmoniously into the greater scheme of the totality. This applies both to each individual specimen but equally to the various circles or spheres found in creation. The celestial bodies follow their orderly tra¬jectories and do so according to God’s royal will, obeying his voice. And so the stars in their courses sound a melodious note in the great concert in which all creatures participate. The mountains rise up high above the water-saturated earth, their proud summits piercing the clouds; yet even these mountains are nothing but servants of Him who has planted and secured them by his power. On every page the Bible makes plain that the meaning of creation resides only in the one overarching motif: the motif of God’s Kingdom. That is why Scripture and Creation are never at odds: they always form a unity where the one reinforces the other.”
Yes, that resounds with me. Perfection in a perfect world is what awaits us in eternity. It seems to me that in the short spell we live under the regime of evil (1 John 5: 19 is unambiguous there: “the whole world is under the control of the evil one”) maybe 90 years if we live carefully, makes our sinful life now the proving ground for the New Creation.
Both these men have identical views on the Kingdom which is to come, simply following Jesus’ command “Seek first the Kingdom”, so prominent in Jesus’ teaching and so missing in the church.
What other similarities are there? They both have identical views on the earth.

Bonhoeffer first.

The direct quote I found in his essay DEIN REICH KOMME, Your Kingdom Come. There he writes: “Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world to other world beyond (no heaven destination for him, I might add); rather he gives us back to the earth as his loyal children.”

The first book published by Bonhoeffer was a commentary on Genesis 1-3, not surprisingly called CREATION AND FALL. The book actually was a series of lectures at the university where he taught at the tender age of 25. There he elaborates on the matter of THE EARTH. Here are some quotes.
“Technology is the power with which the earth grips people and subdues them. The earth is, therefore, no longer OUR earth (The automobile is a good example), and thus we become strangers to the earth………Without God, without our brother and sister, we lose the earth….. God, brother and sister and the earth belong together”

This leads me to conclude that
BLESSED ARE THEY WHO HAVE LIVED THAT WAY BEFORE THEY DIE: THEIRS IS THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN.

Why? Says Bonhoeffer: “I completely belong to this world. It bears me, it nurtures me, it holds me. The soil and the animals are the world in which I live, without which I cease to be.”
Bavinck uses almost the exact words in his book BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END, a Radical Kingdom Vision. Noting that ‘hanging’, as on the cross, is such a cursed matter as it separates us from the earth, he writes: “Contact with the earth is an essential element of life. We are taken from the earth, we belong to the earth, and we live through the earth. Our bond with the earth is so strong that we cannot for a moment imagine existing apart from the earth, and hanging (as Jesus did) breaks the contact with the earth.”

Further elaborating on the significance of the EARTH he writes: “The word ADAM reminded the Israelite immediately of the first Adam who was taken from the dust of the earth. That made the word eminently suitable to typify the human race in its unbreakable unity. The Israelite here sensed some-thing of the fact that humans are earth-bound. A human being, ADAM, belongs to ADAMAH, the life bearing earth. With every sinew of his exis-tence he is tied to the earth, which bears him and feeds him.”

Bavinck further explains what the KINGDOM means when he writes:
“The nature of the Kingdom of God was not intended to be static but dynamic. It was not destined to continue for ever and ever in the same shape and form. On the contrary, from its very inception the Kingdom contained an incentive to develop, perfect and unfold all its potentials and powers contained in it. This means that from its very beginning the concept of history was entailed in the idea of the Kingdom. When we say Kingdom we say history. The total reality of the Kingdom could only become manifest in history. From the very first day of creation the Kingdom had the full range of powerful options. It contained possibilities that would require a slow process to come to full fruition. The entire process, however, was subject to God’s will.”

So what does the NORTH AMERICAN CHURCH teach about these two essential elements, KINGDOM and EARTH?

For this I rely on another “B”, the Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Dr. Harold Bloom, who calls himself an agnostic Jew.
He writes that in North American churches Gnosticism rules. The word comes from the Greek word ‘gnosis’ which means “knowledge”. Harold Bloom, America’s foremost literary critic in his book THE AMERICAN RELIGION claims “The United States of America is a religion-mad and religion-soaked country. We think we are Christian. But we are not. The American Religion is post-Christian, despite its protestations, and even in that it has begun to abandon Protestant modes of thought and feeling.”

Bloom argues in his book that the American Religion masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian.

Dr. Bloom laments: “we are, alas, the most religious of countries, and finally only varieties of the American Religion will flourish among us, whether its devotees call it Mormonism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, or what-ever-you-will. And the American Religion, for its two centuries of existence, seems to me irretrievably Gnostic. It is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge (gnosis) leads to freedom, a dangerous and doom-eager freedom, from nature, time, history, and community.”

Dr. Bloom coined a new word. Where the word EVANGELICAL has its root in the Greek word EU-ANGELOS, the Good Message, he calls THE AMERICAN RELIGION “KAK-ANGELOS, THE BAD NEWS”.
That BAD NEWS has spawned The Late, Great Planet Earth.

THE LATE, GREAT PLANET EARTH is another good example of American religious thinking. The book outsold the Bible there. Dualistic America sees the earth, God’s pride and joy, as evil. No wonder Republican politicians, the Christian people’s representatives, have no regard for the environment and pursue warlike policies, anything that will destroy the earth and bring on Armageddon. The churches there are consumed by a premillennial eschatology. They read in the Bible that the Rapture will take place when all believers will be taken up into heaven before the great tribulation and Christ Second Coming, to establish a Thousand Year Kingdom on Earth.

The word “RAPTURE” comes from the Latin verb ‘RAPIO’ which means ‘to seize in order to keep’. (Rapio, rapere, rapui= I have seized, raptum= I have been seized). Our word ‘RAPE’ has the same root. How peculiarly appropriate that RAPE and RAPTURE has a common root. Supposedly ‘rapture’ means that God will seize people in order to keep them in his kingdom.” Nothing is further from the TRUTH.

Because we have failed to see the EARTH as God’s earth, our eternal dwelling place, now and in eternity, we are on the brink of extinction. It is generally acknowledged that humanity is entering a new, dangerous and ultimately fatal condition. It is no longer a matter of one civilization falling, to be replaced by another, such as happened when Europe arose after the collapse of the Roman Empire. Now all civilizations are endangered and none can survive as autonomous, independent entities as in the past. It is in this sense that we are now moving to a historical stage that is beyond civilization.

The sad thing for many and at the same time the exhilarating TRUTH for others is that THE KINGDOM IS AT HAND. Both Bonhoeffer and Bavinck have prepared us for this situation.

“IN THESE LAST FATEFUL YEARS – IN HIS ULTIMIS ANNIS FATALIBUS”

July 24 2016

We – my wife and I – live in the country on 50 acres – 20 hectares – of mostly wetlands and trees. On the only open land I planted trees, some 4,000, except for the site where we have our buildings: our 2 storey house, with attached sunroom – shaded by two soft maples – where we spend most of our waking time (not in the winter, of course), a 2 storey guest house and a detached workshop-toolshed. And, naturally, our vegetable garden and the yard with 3 apple trees, one early – I already made applesauce from the grounded apples last week – another early fall and one late fall – a Northern Spy. Oh yes, I also have half an acre of grass to mow.
Just as our home is surrounded by trees, I am always surrounded by books: this week I re-read parts of Schumacher’s SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL, written more than 40 years ago, but still very current. He ends the book with pointing to THE KINGDOM. Here’s what he writes: “unless you seek first the Kingdom of God, (the welfare of creation, I might add) the other things which you also need, will cease to be available to you.”
We are now approaching that point in history.

There’s something scary in the air. Trump had that right, but he did not mention the Biggest Scare: Climate Change. His ‘Christian’ vice-president choice does not believe in Climate Change and also, not surprisingly, is a great advocate of unlimited gun access.

It seems that there is a universal eye-opening going on, as if we are awakening from a horrible hangover. It is not evident in our immediate surroundings. There it is quite peaceful. A few weeks ago a black bear came banging at our sun room-door, bouncing away into the bush as soon as it saw us. A pair of deer is regularly grazing in the field in front of our house. Squirrels are back after an absence of a few years, forcing me to squirrel-proof the bird feeders. I notice a greater variety of birds, although one humming bird is missing, but there is a mother turkey, surrounded by 7 little chicks parading in the yard. This morning I saw a fisher on our walkway.
Daily we thank the Lord for the beauty of the countryside where we live. The pallet factory in our village sells its leftovers, mostly good-size square blocks of clean hard wood, so we bought there enough fuel to last us 2-3 years. There’s a long waiting list for that stuff. The maple syrup harvest was good, and, thanks to a wonderful growing season and timely rains – and extra watering – the garden has never looked better, giving us this coming week the first green beans, the first new potatoes, with just one meal of last year’s crop left. Also my new hearing aids make it possible to hear the birds sing or screech – the blue jays and the woodpeckers.

I almost daily bike to the village store- 5.6 km away – on a new bike, as the old one needed new tires, extensive repair, costing more than it was worth. I love bikes and biking. Living on a busy highway, I always wear an orange shirt and peddle on the edge of the road with a mirror attached to my helmet, enabling me to spot what’s coming up behind me. Still it’s always prayer time when I am in the saddle.

Even though around our place it is a peaceable kingdom, the world at large is not at ease. More and more books and articles deal with the planet’s disintegration. Daily I study the global heat map where I often notice that the Far North in Canada and Siberia is one of the warmest places in the world, the area were the METHANE is buried in the permafrost, 20 times more dangerous for Climate Change, and ready to explode. The sins of our generation are visiting us with increasing ferocity.

Then there is the political scene. Turkey is clamping down on dissent, the USA is becoming a police state, Trump is as crazy as ever, France is frantic, Germany in jitters, Great Britain has its Brexit problems, Italy – and actually the entire world – has a serious debt problem, and in Africa famine approaches, and with it massive population movements, all trekking north toward Europe. In the USA the heat and the lack of moisture will cause food inflation, while the deluge of moneys released by central banks in the West has depressed interest rates below the zero mark. All this means that those who live from investments must pay ever more for daily food, while getting nothing back from their hard-earned money: the worst of all possible worlds.

Another personal note.

While I read non-fiction during the day (this week centering on the possible apocalypse) I read fiction in the evening. Having just finished one novel I just grabbed another book and discovered on the first few pages that THE CLOWNS OF GOD by Morris West is about a Pope who is forced to resign because he had a vision of the PAROUSIA, the return of the Lord. The Holy Father had just finished a draft of an encyclical written in the customary Latin with as title: IN HIS ULTIMIS ANNIS FATALIBUS – IN THESE LAST FATEFUL YEARS – trying to prepare the Roman Catholic Church for the return of the Lord, when his writing was leaked to the Curia, the Vatican cabinet, which wanted no part of it, and forced the Pope to resign.

I greatly believe in Providence, and picking that particular book at random signals to me that, yes, I should pursue this topic.
So what are the HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE?

Looking back, there have been total collapses before. The fall of Rome in the fifth Century is a good case, heralding the Dark Ages. Jared Diamond in his COLLAPSE has related several instances, of which the Easter Island is just one example. The peoples settling the isolated Easter Island around 900 AD engineered their own collapse after several hundred years of expanding their population and quarrying gigantic stone statues (weighing up to 270 tons) which they then moved to the perimeter of the island. They deforested the island and the surrounding waters filled with silt, while at the same time vast energies were expended on rivalries over which clan could build the biggest stone head. The first-recorded European contact with the island was on 5 April (Easter Sunday), 1722, when Dutch navigator Jacob Roggeveen visited it for a week and estimated a population of 2,000 to 3,000 inhabitants.
When Captain Cook arrived at the island in 1774, he found a tiny population (down perhaps from a peak of 20,000) that he described as “small, lean, timid, and miserable.” The civilization had collapsed in a cannibalistic endgame.

Collapse there was caused by population growth beyond the capacity of the land to support it, by destruction of good farmland, and the use of resources in tribal conflict and monument building. Leadership in both societies failed to respond to the handwriting on the wall. This sounds all too familiar.
As we fail to adequately address climate change and its root cause, will our society face a similar collapse? All signs point to this.

STRATFOR

Here’s what I found in STRATFOR. The name is an abbreviation of Strategic Information, one of the best- and also most expensive – news sources. When an outfit such as STRATFOR considers COLLAPSE we better take it seriously. Here’s part of it:

‘The obvious way to answer this question (of COLLAPSE) is by looking at how the various Dark Ages began and asking whether similar conditions apply today. Strikingly, in every case where we have enough evidence, we see the same five causal factors, which I like to call the Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

The first, which is always prominent, is mass migration, on a scale that the societies of the time cannot control. Just how many immigrants it took to destabilize borderlands and spread violence across entire empires must have varied, although DNA seems to suggest that in the wrong circumstances even a group less than one-tenth the size of the host population could bring the roof crashing in.

The second factor, often coming on the back of the first, is disease. Long-distance mass movements sometimes merged what had previously been separate disease pools, producing new infections to which hardly anyone was immune. Steppe nomads migrating across thousands of kilometers were probably the main vector for the Black Death, which killed perhaps a quarter of the world’s population between 1350 and 1400.

The third force, regularly linked to the first two, is state failure. Collapsing borders and shrinking populations often bring down governments too, and as chaos spreads, even states that have not been directly hit by invasion and plague can be sucked into the whirlpool.

Fourth, and strongly linked to the first three forces, is the collapse of trade. When failing states can no longer protect merchants, long-distance exchange networks break down, bringing starvation and yet more rounds of migration, disease and violence. Many historians think that the tipping point in the fall of the Roman Empire came when the Vandals invaded North Africa and cut off grain shipments to Italy from what is now Tunisia in 439. The city of Rome lost three-quarters of its population across the next two decades, and in 476 the Western Empire was officially declared defunct.

The fifth factor, always present but never in a straightforward way, is climate change. Some great collapses, such as that in the Eastern Mediterranean after 1200 B.C., coincide with rising temperatures; others, such as the Roman and Han Chinese breakdowns in the early first millennium, coincide with global cooling. The direction of climate change seems to matter less than the fact that any big change puts stress on farming, which — when everything else is already going wrong — might be enough to push people over the edge.”

So far STRATFOR.

When an important body, such as STRATFOR starts analyzing COLLAPSE then it is time to take it seriously. Take Trump. If he wins, collapse is certain. If he loses, collapse is also certain. That’s how tippy matters are.

So, are we in the last days?

IN HIS ULTIMIS ANNIS FATALIBUS – in these last fateful years- is that really true? Are we there now?

When the FLOOD came, the people then did have extensive warnings. After all, it took Noah and his clan – and they probably engaged outside help as well – many decades to gather the wood, to cut the planks to size, all with rather primitive tools, and so construct this monstrous ARK. Then the animals came, the same animals that now are disappearing at an alarming rate. Ample warning!

Jesus also gave pointers. He said, of course pointing to nature, when the trees are budding, we know that spring is near. In other words: Keep an eye on what’s going on.
When many millions are on the move, when the weather becomes weirder by the day, when the money-market goes haywire, when the TRUMP tragedy emerges out of nowhere, watch out: the last days are at hand.

Of course we will not heed the warnings. People in Noah’s days did not, and human nature is still the same.
No, we don’t know when The New Beginning is at hand. The church does not want to touch this subject, even though it is its very mission to prepare the people for The New Creation.
Does Acts 2 give us a model? Then, right after Pentecost when, in Jerusalem, thousands for the first time heard about Jesus and the Holy Spirit descended upon them, they expected Jesus to come back within their lifetime. So they pooled their resources and founded a tight community where they had everything is common.
Of course Jesus did not return then, and now, 2000 years later, he still has not come back. Yet, all the signs that our ‘civilization’ has run its course are everywhere.

Oh, yes, THE GREAT TRIBULATION!

According to Matthew 24: 21-22:”there will be great distress, unequaled, had those days not been cut short, no one would survive”.
Of course. We have built a society totally dependent on finite fossil fuel. Once it runs out, and it will, that’s the end. Electricity is fabulous; it makes this blog possible. Once is stops, so does everything: planes, trains, cars, trucks, computers. Within 2 weeks most people on the grid will be dead.

We live in the most vulnerable era in history. We have bet society on the most fragile of systems. Nobody knows when our infrastructure will collapse, but when it does….
Read the entire chapter 24 of the gospel of Matthew. It makes for the most interesting reading.

Fortunately: THE VEIL THAT HIDES THE FACE OF THE FUTURE WAS WOVEN BY THE HAND OF MERCY.

WHY 30 MINUTES OF SILENCE IN HEAVEN? (Revelation 8: 1)

But first a Rapture wrap up.

More than 50 years ago, for 6 years, from 1959-65, I served on an Ontario-wide Christian School Board with a man who became a good friend: he was the chairman and I the secretary. Fifty years is a long time and a lot can happen, and a lot did happen.
When I talked to him a few months ago he told me that he believed in Rapture and would be taken up to heaven just before the Great Tribulation would take place.
Well, the Great Tribulation is about to happen: Trump? Famine? Extreme Weather? Pandemic? Financial Collapse? All of them? Take your pick.
So will Rapture appear? Rapture is based on a single text in the New Testament book of 1 Thessalonians 4: 17, where it says that the believers still alive when the Lord returns “will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air.” That’s all. That the Lord has booked a one-way ticket back to earth is conveniently forgotten.
Nowhere else in the Bible is there any other reference to this event, and only the Pentecostals and the Southern Baptists in the USA take this as the gospel truth, as they fanatically believe in HEAVEN, a doctrine that, actually, all mainline churches, including the Roman Catholic Church, have adopted as God-given on even more flimsy evidence, but that is mostly due to Greek philosophical brainwashing (more about that later), ignorance and lack of pastoral guidance.

The sad truth is that what I call the HEAVEN HERESY is deeply ingrained in all churches. Even many hymns in the two song books I have, Presbyterian and Christian Reformed, two staunch Calvinistic churches, contain the heaven line, as in the well-known FOR THE BEAUTY OF THE EARTH, a song which praises the glory of the earth and sky, but still sees heaven as better, as is evident from the lines below.
For the joy of human love,
Brother, sister, parent, child,
FRIENDS ON EARTH AND FRIENDS ABOVE!

All oh so pious, but it is, as Bonhoeffer coins it: plain pious secularism. According to this hymn and scores of others, the earth is beautiful, but heaven beats the earth hands down. What kind of proof is there? Nobody has ever been there or has come back to boast, but still the hymns and the prayers and the cemetery sermons keep on repeating the lie.
The church is completely sold on the ’heaven’ deception, with immense consequences not only for the fate of the earth but especially for the entire gospel message. Jesus’ explicit message is to ‘first seek the kingdom’ which comprises all of creation, and once that is attempted, Christ promises that our entire life will fall into place.” (Matthew 6: 33). “Seeking the kingdom” means pursuing the welfare of God’s creation, living a life that benefits the trees, seeking the best for all waterbodies, has at its aim promoting clean air and improving the status of animal life, and I could go on. That’s far too God-honoring, so we take the easy way out, have heaven as destination, then we can pollute to our heart’s content.

That the church has robbed itself of the opportunity to preach hope to a world desperate for answers is totally forgotten, because proclaiming as our ultimate destination a renewed earth is vastly more appealing to the unconverted than going to some undefined pie in the sky heaven, wearing white robes, endlessly singing songs: totally boring!
Fact is that today the church proclaims the LIE. There is no other word for it. The TRUTH with capital letters is that “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof”, now and always, into eternity. So how about the LEFT BEHIND movement? It too is pure bogus. Why is it false?
It is right there in Matthew 24: 36-39. There it relates how the people in the days of Noah had no clue what was going to happen – even though the ARK, under their very noses, was under construction for years on end. However the ruling opinion then was that Noah was a complete neurotic and was made the butt of many a joke, “until the flood came and took them all away.”
Who were taken away and who were left behind? The sinners all drowned and the righteous were LEFT BEHIND! The Rapture enthusiasts made a number of films and wrote books, called the LEFT BEHIND series. These Rapture prophets claim that the good people will be fetched into heaven, while the sinners, people like me who deny and even ridicule this entire concept, are left behind. Now, look again at Noah: Who were taken away? Who were raptured right into eternal death and drowned a miserable death? The mass of unbelievers who had made Noah and his family the center of their derision.

THE HEAVEN HERESY CONTINUED.

Rapture and going to heaven upon death are two sides of the same coin. Nowhere in the Bible is there one line that tells us that when we die we join God and his angels. Actually it is the other way around: God and his angels will join us on earth!
There still is a hymn out there with the horrible line: “Prostrate before Thy throne to lie and gaze and gaze on Thee.” I call this horrible because it totally contradicts the Bible, but, nevertheless the Billy Graham crowd swallows this as if it were a piece of cake. I remember Billy Graham, the Presidents’ pastor, being interviewed by Larry King on CNN. Skeptical Larry asked Bible Billy what would happen when he died. The ‘great’ evangelist responded: “Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God”, forgetting, or more likely not knowing that “God lives in inapproachable light, that nobody can see or ever has seen God” (1 Tim. 6: 16).

The heaven-destination, just like RAPTURE is of pure pagan origin, an inheritance from Greek philosophy of which Plato and Socrates were the chief proponents. When Socrates died, he welcomed death. In The Trials of Socrates, Plato depicts Socrates’ last moments before his death. Plato quotes Socrates: “I’ll no longer stay put, but will take my leave of you and depart for certain happy conditions of the blessed”.
Socrates is certain that he’s on the way to heaven, and even says a prayer to the gods after drinking the poison: “One is, I suppose, permitted to utter a prayer to the gods – and one should do so – that one’s journey from this world to the next will prove fortunate”. Socrates died to celebrate death.
Socrates gladly drank the chalice filled with deadly poison, seeing death as better than life.
Since Christianity became a global phenomenon, who has been more influential: Jesus or Socrates?
Sad to say: The Greek ‘heaven’ philosophy has blindly been assumed by Christians thanks to Socrates. That’s the reason why most of Christianity – almost every expression whether that is Roman Catholic, Pentecostal, left wing or conservative – has suffered from a form of dualism, splitting body from soul, sacred from secular. Socrates, as recorded by Plato, is the author of many ideas which are still regarded and accepted as the pure unadulterated essence of Christianity, such as the doctrine of an immortal soul, a self-denying attitude towards matters involving our body, and the view of sexuality as in itself ‘the sinful lust of the flesh’.

The Bible again.

Just as Donald Trump calls the Bible his favorite book, so do millions of Americans, who proudly carry it to church or prominently display its presence on the coffee table in the dining room, but they have no clue what’s in that book. For one thing, it never states that people go to heaven. What it does say is that death is like sleep.
Numerous Psalms simply say that death means going to the grave. Period. Jesus himself always sees death as ‘being asleep’. The last words in the Book of Daniel leave not a grain of doubt about our final destination: “As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.” Daniel, David, Isaiah, Paul, Peter, their remains are still out there, waiting for the Lord’s return.
Still unsure about heaven? Jesus direct words in that famous Chapter 3 of the Gospel of John, verse 13: “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven, the Son of Man.” Need I say more?

That same Paul, to whom the Pentecostals attribute RAPTURE, extensively writes about DEATH in 1 Corinthians 15 where he first talks about ‘those who have fallen asleep’ meaning, of course, those who have died. Their dead bodies are like seeds buried, to be resurrected when Jesus returns to judge the living and the dead. Just as a seed dies in the earth, to later appear as a tree or whatever, so the bodies of the Lord’s elect will rise in a glorified state.
The church has erred.

I am not exaggerating when I write that the FATE OF THE CHURCH hangs in balance here because escaping to Heaven either at death or in the so-called RAPTURE event really means that we have no basic commitment to the earth. The heaven heresy distorts the entire message for which Jesus came to earth and for which he died on the cross.
So what is so particular about the earth? Both J. H. Bavinck and Dietrich Bonhoeffer repeatedly say that God formed us from the earth and even named the first human in the Bible ADAM, which signifies Adamah, the earth out of which God fashioned us. Our bodies are earth, which feeds us, which provides all ingredients of life and is the place where we will sleep until the Lord wakes us. Both these theologians say that God- humanity- and the earth form an unbreakable unity.

SILENCE IN HEAVEN. WHY?

There’s something seriously wrong with the church. It is not the people. They are like those about whom Jesus, at Calvary says that “Lord, forgive them: they do not know what they are doing (Luke 23: 34).
It is the leadership that stands condemned. No surprise that James singles out the preachers: “they will be judged more strictly.” (James 3: 1).
If only the preachers had listened to Bonhoeffer, who wrote in CREATION AND FALL: “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”

The church of all ages has been far too preoccupied with worldly affairs, far too much involved with what ferments and foments here in the goings on in the world. The church of all ages has been too tied in with her present plight and not sufficiently geared to the final ending, not enough yearned for the completion. Heaven is waiting in vain for the church to do her thing: is waiting in vain for it to preach the coming of the Kingdom, is waiting in vain for the church to realize that it does not belong to a world ruled by the evil one, but belongs to the new earth to come.

That’s why we read in Revelation 8: “there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.” Why? I believe that Heaven is mourning the death of the church for failing to preach the Kingdom. Heaven mourns for half an hour. When we remember the millions died in the wars, we take two minutes. The angels needed 30 minutes to recall the “many billions who were called but the few who were chosen” (Matthew 20:16). During that 30 minute period of recollection also Jesus’ prophecy came to mind: “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18: 8).

Yes, the world is ready for judgement, but the church has failed to bring the message of judgment and the Good News of the Kingdom. If it only had confessed more ardently, if it only had prayed more fervently, if it only had looked forward to the coming of the King more eagerly, then it all would have fallen into place because God is capable to make all other matters come to pass. But the church has not done that, has been too preoccupied with going to heaven and has not been concerned enough for the earth. Now the SILENCE in HEAVEN signifies the death of the church.

And yet, there is the great paradox: extra ecclesiam nulla salus: outside the church there is no salvation.

HOW AND WHY GOD HAS DISAPPEARED.

“I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be, for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful” Deuteronomy 32: 20.

Trump and religion.

Of course, God is always there, somewhere, everywhere, if we believe what the Bible says. Because He has been barred from playing a role in business, politics , in society in general, and, yes, even in religion, prayer is needed more than ever.
Jesus alludes to God’s absence when, as recorded in John 17, just before going to his Father, he asks, “My prayer is that you protect them (us) from the evil one (verse 15) now that I am leaving,” indicating that the great enemy, the evil one, is in charge in the world. 1 John 5: 19 unambiguously confirms this when it says that ‘the evil one rules our world.’ If you don’t believe it, look it up if you have a Bible.

Over time the influence of the ‘evil one’ has gradually increased and now has become all pervasive.
No doubt some sort of god plays a large role in America, where he is a front-seat actor, especially in the Republican Party, which, by and large, has endorsed Donald Trump, who, in my opinion, embodies evil. He blatantly lied when he stated that the Bible is his favorite book.
What especially galls me is that when Trump met with hundreds of evangelical Christians, Dr. James Dobson, perhaps the most influential leader in the evangelical world, said that “Trump appears to be tender to things of the Spirit.”

I happen to know my Bible, and in Colossians 3: 12 “the things of the Spirit” are listed as ‘compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience”. Anyone who is following USA politics knows that not one of these attributes applies to this presidential contender: his taunts, his boastings, his uncharitable remarks on opponents, minorities, veterans, disabled, are well-known.
And then there is Jerry Falwell Jr., president of that ultra right-wing “Christian” Liberty University who expresses as his belief that “Donald Trump is God’s man to lead the nation.”
These are just two examples of “Christian” leaders endorsing a man who is the opposite of all that stands for Jesus and his teaching. Just one more quote from another influential church man, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Robert Jeffries who told his large flock that “any Christian who would sit at home and not vote for Donald Trump is motivated by pride rather than principle.”

These “men of God” as they call themselves, have totally lost touch with the God who has revealed himself in Jesus. Just imagine: these people want to do away with all environmental protection, scrap laws that protect the poor and introduce measures to make the rich richer.

It reminds me of an episode that ties in with this. I noticed it in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, Dostoevsky’s last book. It’s called “The Grand Inquisitor”. It’s a story that Ivan, the atheist Karamazov brother, has composed and recounts to his younger brother Alyosha, the aspiring priest. In it Jesus returns to the earth during the Spanish Inquisition. Ivan says: “It is fifteen centuries since signs from heaven were seen. And now the deity appears once more among the people.” Everyone recognizes him, because a blind man sees and a dead child rises. But the old cardinal, in charge of the Inquisition, takes Jesus to prison and tells him that: “You have no right to add anything to what you have said…. Why have you come to hinder us?” Ivan explains that this is a fundamental feature of the Church that God cannot ‘meddle’ now because “all has been given by you to the Pope. The Church is the authority now.”
The Grand Inquisitor then tells Jesus that he erred when he resisted the devil’s three temptations in the wilderness, where the devil offered him miracle, mystery and might, which the Church has accepted. Jesus, however, wanted them to have freedom of choice. But, says the clergyman, freedom is too difficult and frightful for the masses and so the Church has taken the three awesome gifts for them. The Inquisitor concludes: “We are not working with you, but with the devil– that is our mystery.” Jesus, still not speaking, kisses him on the lips. “That was all his answer.” The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door and says, “Go, and come no more, never, never.” And the divine visitor leaves.
“Freedom is too difficult for the masses” says the cardinal, but that is an important part of Jesus’ teaching: “The Truth shall set you free”. The church of his day and of today rather not gives the people a free hand.

Is the result of this the following?
“Whenever God erects a house of prayer
The Devil builds a chapel there;
And ‘twill be found upon examination,
The latter has the largest congregation.”
Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman

By and large (of course there are exceptions that confirm the rule) the devil has taken over much of the instituted church. I greatly admire Pope Francis, but he is stuck in a system that is beyond reforming.

In many ways the Christian religion, as practiCed in North America, differs very little from Islam where the existence of the one and only god forms the cornerstone of this entire belief system. There Allah alone is the all-powerful authority. “We are not working with you, but with the devil– that is our mystery” is true of Islam and equally true of the American evangelical movement, which is owned by the Republican Party, abhors any environmental regulation, wants food stamps abolished and fully endorses the Rapture heresy.
No wonder these two “religions” hate each other: they are two sides of the same coin.

Jesus gave us two important rules for life.

Jesus gave a few directives in his brief sojourn on earth. One of them was “Love God above anything else”. Tell me: how possibly can say that we love great artists if we despise their works of art? When we say we love God and treat creation as totally expendable, then our attachment to God is completely phony.
The other direct rule Jesus gave us is in the Sermon on the Mount: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and its righteousness”. The Kingdom of God is his creation, this simply means that we always and everywhere must strive to improve creation and obey the laws that govern it. Show me a church where this is the case. Show me a person who does that. Our collective failure to pursue the aims of the Kingdom indicates our total lack to implement God’s intentions, which shows up in our willful neglect to preach and practise love for creation (John 3: 16), and is proof that we has not grasped the essence of the gospel.
This essentially means that we have eliminated God from society. God’s disappearance is our doing.

It all started long ago.

Of course Christianity has immensely influenced the Western world, witness the Roman Catholic Church and its long history. There the first Pope emerged 1700 years ago in the year 312 when the Emperor Constantin exchanged the Roman Eagle for the Christian cross. Ever since then the Roman Catholic Church has been fashioned along Roman Imperial lines, with the Pope resembling the Emperor, the Cardinals acting as consuls, while all the way down the line the priests have taken the place of the centurions.
All this has been a far cry from the simple instructions of Jesus when he wandered the earth, teaching his small group of followers of the kingdom to come.

Jacques Ellul. Ever heard of him?

Jacques Ellul is another of my favorite authors. He was a professor of law at the University of Bordeaux, France, and a member of the Resistance during the war. In his book – one of many I have – HOPE IN TIME OF ABANDONMENT, in its preface, he writes “The decisive importance of the promise, the approach of the Second Coming, the Eschaton, which is at our doorsteps, is the only hope we have. It is the only hope now that God has abandoned us.”
Why was Ellul so convinced that God has abandoned us?
Here are a few quotes from his book: “The glory of God cannot be made present by means of words (preaching alone, I might add, is totally inadequate)…..Paul tells us that the whole creation witnesses to his glory (Rom. 11: 38).. It is of the utmost importance to maintain this creation to the glory of God…..It is not only we humans who must live to God’s glory: it is the whole of creation! That’s why God has disappeared: it is no longer his creation.
“We no longer live in a natural universe. The things surrounding us are no longer the things of creation…..Where the things of creation are destined to manifest the glory of God, technological products express the glory of the human race…..
“When the light of the world becomes a darkened light, when the rainbow is reduced to the physical phenomenon, when the Ark of the Covenant is eaten by termites, the empty tomb is filled with our hermeneutics, when the kingdom of God is a political product, when the life in Christ is a mere symbol, when the dethroned King takes refuge in speeches, then the dead of night has won the heart and darkened the eyes. The dead of night is now”.
Enough of Ellul.

So what really set off God’s disappearance today?

God’s disappearance vastly accelerated with the universal use of fossil fuels, with the mass production of goods, setting the stage for the consumer society. Geert Mak, a Dutch writer, depicted this quite accurately in his HOW GOD DISAPPEARED FROM JORWERD.
In that book he described how a small town in the Frisian province of the Netherlands changed from a tightknit community to a bedroom town for city dwellers. He traced how the impact of the automobile and the rise of supermarkets in the larger cities killed off the small-town merchants, and emptied the churches, while cheap fuel and large farm machinery eliminated the need for farm laborers.

That phenomenon happened everywhere in the Western world. My own father, catering to small bakeshops in the North of Holland, became a victim of this development. It also fueled the Dutch large-scale emigration to Canada, where I was among those seeking new opportunities.
We now experience the great falling apart, of which Brexit is just a beginning.
All this reminds me of that children’s nursery rhyme: Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.

A Brutal choice.

Now the fuel revolution which started some 70 years ago has run its course. We are faced with the brutal choice: either quit fossil fuels or perish, an impossible dilemma because we have built our entire existence on cheap fuels. If we quit the carbon addiction, society must go back to the era before 1830, before the Industrial Revolution, when the world had some 1.5 billion people, when present day Germany consisted of 372 different regions, ruled by kings and dukes and princes, when Small was Beautiful. If we don’t quit, and that will happen, given the vested interests, everything will fall apart.

I started out with a Bible text.
“I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be, for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful” Deuteronomy 32: 20.
That is God speaking, giving us power to rule his world, perfectly well knowing what the result will be.

It reminds me of Psalm 14 which has as its heading: THE FOOLS.

Here it is:
The fools have said in their hearts: There is no God above.
Their deeds are corrupt, depraved; not a good one is left.

From heaven the Lord looks down on the children of men
To see if any are wise, if any seek God.

All have left the right path, depraved every one;
There is not a good one left, no not even one.

See how they tremble with fear without cause for fear.
For God is with the just, whose refuge is in the Lord.

The fools in this Psalm are not stupid: they are agnostics who have their values all wrong.
So, why has God disappeared?
With 200 energy slaves at our disposal 24/7, with heat/cool at our fingertips, with 200 horsepower to transport us everywhere in total comfort, we have become little gods, no longer
needing the God Creator.

Of course this will not end well. The first stages of un-creation are becoming visible: signalling sickness, death, destruction: hell on earth.

P.S.
Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, has published three books I have translated from the Dutch: THE ECONOMICS OF HONOR, by Dr. Roelf Haan, BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END, A RADICAL KINGDOM VISION, by Dr. J. H. Bavinck, and just of the press THE RIDDLE OF LIFE, also by Bavinck.
A fourth book on REVELATION, again by Bavinck, will be published next year.

The RIDDLE OF LIFE is highly recommended by John Bolt of Calvin Seminary, calling it “A perfect gift for college-age students or others wrestling with the deepest questions of life.”
Order them at your bookstore or buy them online.

JULY 3 2016.

AN APPROACH MORE DIFFERENT.

On July 4 1951 my younger brother and I entered Canada in Fort Erie, Ontario, on the train from New York City where we had landed early that day having sailed on the luxury liner Veendam from Rotterdam, a 10 day journey.
Today, exactly 65 years later, we both have been success stories, both looking back upon decades of service to the communities we found ourselves in and both humbly seeing our children and grandchildren all doing extremely well. Amazing, simply astounding.

Yes, my blog is back on a new computer. The breakdown of my old one gave me an excuse to stop writing for a while. During these four weeks I used my fingers, not to type but to pull weeds, and used my knees not to hold my laptop but to crawl in the dirt and used my hands to push my electric – sun-powered – lawnmower and rototiller. Ah, my garden this year: practically no mosquitoes, few potato bugs, lots of heat and regular rain! Can’t wait to eat my beets and cabbages and potatoes and beans. Nothing better than home-grown stuff!

So why do I pick up this blog-business again?

Well, as a kid I always wanted to become a missionary in what was then the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. That sort of desire is still in me, and since the only world-wide medium is the Internet, that’s where I see my calling. This may sound, and perhaps is presumptuous, but I feel that I have a perspective on matters religious that is different, different from what the churches teach and different from the generally accepted wisdom of the world, but that’s how I feel.
Here’s what I did in my 4 weeks of computer drought. Besides weeding I did a lot of reading. I reread Paul Kennedy’s PREPARING FOR THE 21ST CENTURY. I also went back to my Bonhoeffer’s books and more carefully studied the writings of J.H. Bavinck.

Paul Kennedy – a Yale history professor – wrote that book in 1989. He was correct on Climate Change but entirely missed Japan’s stagnation and the rise of China. Generally his pessimistic view has been born out.
Bavinck taught me a new word: Entgötterung. It contains the word “Gott” which is German for God. The “Ent” there means ‘deprived of’, so the German expression –and the Germans have created a lot of words that are untranslatable – means ‘living as if God does not exist”. In that connection T. S. Eliot got it right when he said that, “Men have left God not for other gods but for no God, and this has never happened before.”

I rediscovered that Bavinck wrote that the created Word is as important as the written Word, the Scriptures. That was more than 50 years ago, as he died in 1965. Now the cries of creation have become louder and louder, clamoring for greater emphasis on the created Word. Can the church, that old wineskin, absorb and preach this new wine, this new message of the growing importance and suffering of creation? Can the church shift from the three S’s: singing, sermons, and supplication, its business model for 2000 years, and give a more than prominent place to creation loving, God’s primary Word?

Let’s face it: God is gone.
God is barred from public intercourse. Religious consciousness has practically disappeared. For almost everybody God is dead. He has become the great irrelevant. The only mention of God is in the now so popular OMG – Oh My God. Whenever I hear that now so current expression I am inclined to ask: “Who and where is that God of yours?”, but I am afraid that I won’t get a reply.

Look at today.

There is no doubt that a world without God is a frightening world. The political system is not working: whoever you vote for, the same people win, the ones who control the money. Political funding ensures that parties have to listen to the rustle of notes before the bustle of votes, a line George Monbiot gave me. These problems are compounded by electoral systems that ensure most votes don’t count. This is why a referendum – as in Britain – is almost the only means by which people can be heard. Welcome to BREXIT and as in all revolutions – including the TRUMP mania – more confusion is guaranteed.

Our culture is no longer working. Look what’s happening everywhere: all that is left is a globalized shopping culture. Now that the SHOP TILL YOU DROP attitude has ceased to dominate it is torpedoing an economy that depends on it. We are sunk.
So what must we do? What must CHRISTIANS do?

I mentioned that both my brother and I look back upon decades of service to the communities we found ourselves in. As Dutch immigrants from a strict Reformed background we both were soon involved in what we then called KINGDOM BUILDING. My brother became a minister in the Christian Reformed Church, the favorite destination of Dutch immigrants, and I within a year was self-employed, giving me the freedom to sit on boards of various organizations, including church councils, helping to build schools, colleges, universities. We were instrumental in the building of a full range of Christian educational institutions, also branching out in such fields such as publications, mental health, labor, you name it.

What I suspect now is that we – the Dutch immigrants – have identified ourselves too much with these institutions: Look Lord what we have done! We have arrived!
But we never arrive, not until the Lord returns.

I also read a long article in a Christian College periodical by a man whose opinion I value, also because we have a first name in common “Egbert” and are both from the North of the Netherlands.
I am referring to Egbert Schuurman, P. Eng, Ph.D., a professor emeritus of Reformational Philosophy at several state universities in the Netherlands. His presentation had as aim to help Christians in politics to acquire a better vision in a rapidly changing culture. The speech was given in 2011, thus 5 years ago, and, I believe, it already is out-of-date in that short time.
Let me mention the positives. Schuurman is a great proponent of the Kingdom idea, something I also have stressed repeatedly. He categorically states that “The Kingdom of Christ is not of this world. But even as creation sighs and groans, Christ’s Kingdom will triumph!” In tune with both J. H. Bavinck and Bonhoeffer he states the “Christ is the meaning of history……Christ Kingdom will only come in its fullness beyond the horizon of earthly time.” I fully agree.

Yes, we have not, we can never build, THE KINGDOM. That is Christ’s doing.

However, in these five short years since he wrote this article, history has accelerated beyond anything previously. In my long life I have seen culture go from the horse and buggy stage to supersonic flight, from small organic farming to large destructive agricultural practices, totally ignoring the holiness of creation.

I agree with the other Egbert that: “The Reformation- in 1517 – did so to the glory of God, the Renaissance for the glory of man. In the eighteenth century the movement of the Enlightenment linked up with the latter, radicalizing and popularizing it.” ….”With the further radicalization of the Enlightenment in our own day, however, we seem to have gotten stuck.”

We are stuck.

There’s where we are now: we are stuck, witness Brexit, witness the rise of Trump. When people feel their world is vanishing, they are an easy prey for magical thinking and demagogues who blame immigrants. Fact is that people are feeling deeply anxious. It’s the story of our time: the pace of change in technology, globalization and climate have started to outrun the ability of our political systems to build the social, educational, community, workplace and political innovations needed for many citizens to keep up. We have globalized trade and manufacturing, and we have introduced robots and artificial intelligence systems. It’s left a lot of people dizzy and dislocated.
Especially in Climate Change the heat is on, setting the stage for massive world-wide food shortages. Already in China pollution from factory farms has wrought havoc in the air and water, so China has begun a push away from a meat-centered diet to a return to small-scale, organic farming and a switch to vegetarian diets, but the trouble is that a seven billion plus world population can only survive on an oil-based, factory-farmed meal ticket, insuring the death of creation.
Schuurman is also right when he writes that “The scientific-technical domination of the entire world, reinforced by one-sided economic development not only restricts humans in their freedom but threatens to deplete natural resources, pollute the environment, and destroys nature.”

So what does he see as the solution?
Schuurman consistently points to the Kingdom and its coming, which should be the aim of all Christians, especially for politicians of which he was one, having been a senator in the Dutch
parliament for 28 years.

However……………….

I disagree when he writes that ”God does not allow humans in their conceitedness to disrupt everything to the bitter end….Sometimes disasters can put humans back on track.”
That’s not how I read Revelation when the rule of the Antichrist will encompass the entire world. Climate Change, a direct result of technology, affects everybody and everything. It is simply too late to mend the current situation.

HERE’S WHERE I AM DIFFERENT.

For one thing I live in the country, where I use some mechanical tools – all solar powered – to aid in my growing a substantial portion of what we eat. People in the city cannot function without technology, yet, in the final analysis all technology depends on highly polluting fossil fuels, even the manufacture of solar panels and windmills totally relies on these sinful substances.
I also missed in Schuurman’s essay the mention of the HOLINESS OF CREATION, which I call God’s primary word.
Jesus, in his prayer, as recorded in John 17, especially asks his father to empower his followers who, with him gone to heaven, are on their own in an evil world, because, as 1 John 5: 19 indicates “We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” That evil is now universal.
Since Schuurman’s presentation in 2011 a lot has changed. In my opinion, in view of that “Entgötterung” symptom, people no longer are able to grasp what Christianity is all about, having acquired a completely different mindset. Also, by and large, the churches no longer preach or understand the Kingdom Message, basically making them obsolete. No wonder people are voting with their feet.

So what do I suggest?

Just as the Old Testament writings were basically organized during the Great Exile in the 6th Century before Christ when some 12,000 of the Israel elite were transported to Babylon, and there in isolation were able to organize what we now know as the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament, so now too we must go into some sort of exile from the world to prepare for the New Creation. A couple of Scripture passages point to that: Jeremiah 51: 45 and especially Revelation 18: 4. Both texts urge us to abandon our sinful, godforsaken society “so that we will not share in her sins.”

Ouch. That hurts. Fact is that we all, Christian and non-Christian, in these last days, depend for our comfort in life and death on the energy derived from fossil-fuels. We now see this result in the global cancer that affects the climate everywhere, where even the most pessimistic predictions prove far too optimistic.
Perhaps my wife and I, living amidst an abundance of trees, always aware how pests and weeds daily remind us of the curse the occupants of the Garden of Eden brought on us, has given us a taste for a different eternity, more in line with the Paradise expectations.

Does that make me DIFFERENT? Is my notion that we go into some voluntary exile really something that needs to be explored? Or is it an escape from a collapsing economy?
My suggestion does mean a drastic departure from a society that is rapidly becoming impossible to maintain and has largely abandoned any notion about God and the Coming of the Kingdom, the promised New Creation.