Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

December 6 2015

ARE WE READY FOR A PANDEMIC?

A super El Niño is on the way. El Niño is Spanish for the child. It is the name climate scientists have given the occasional periods of Pacific Ocean warming that play havoc with global weather patterns. There was also one in 1918, the year of the Spanish Flu, which killed anywhere from 40-100 million people when the entire world population was less than 2 billion. A new study shows that the 1918/1919 El Niño was one of the strongest of the 20th century. The study also noted that the 1918/1919 El Niños central Pacific location linked it more closely to drought in India. The drought coincided with a flu pandemic that was sweeping the globe at that time – with tragic results. The influenza pandemic killed an estimated 18 million people in India. There was famine and a lack of potable water, thus a compromised population. It is clear that climate played a role in the mortality of people in India.
Were the two connected? Yes. People now think that the 1918 El Niño contributed to the onset of that pandemic as an El Niño affects weather patterns throughout the entire world, causing extreme droughts in some places and severe floods in others, and severely undermining public health. An El Niño occurs when warm water that has piled up around Australia and Indonesia spills out east across the Pacific Ocean towards the Americas, taking the rain with it.
Today we have a situation similar to 1918, except that we now have 7 billion plus people in the world. A pandemic today could well kill hundreds of millions.

What can we expect?

We already experience a very mild December and the long-range forecasts call for a very mild winter. Be assured that the coming of a very strong El Niño will disrupt global weather patterns and have broad consequences for agriculture, energy consumption, and public safety. It is also very likely that this El Niño and its consequences will be more intensive due to global warming.
So why do I offer the possibility that a Pandemic is on the way?
One reason is that, according to the influential medical magazine The Lancet, 90 percent of the world population already suffers from some sort of disease. Thus the general overall health is poor. Also there is not a person in the world free of chemical contaminants, due to the universal presence of airborne particles originating from automobile exhausts, electricity generating stations, pesticides and fertilizers. Yes, the tens of thousands of compounds originating mostly from our oil-based industrialization have invaded the very essence of humanity. Obesity too has become a world-wide curse, another symptom of poor health and the wrong food sources. Yet the main culprit to aggravate the situation, and make it ripe for a Pandemic, is the El Niño now gaining formidable strength. It will even further weaken human health and make it more susceptible for a contagious condition.

Is there a historic precedence?

I see a similarity with global conditions some 1500 years ago, when Roman domination came to an end, a time of great upheaval, not unlike we are witnessing today when the entire world is on the verge of tremendous change, and that not for the better.

I have a book with the telling title: Rats, Lice and History by Hans Zinsser. That book leaves no doubt that pandemics are part of the human make-up. About the Sixth Century- coinciding with the Fall of Rome – Zinsser writes: “The sixth century was a period of calamity rarely equaled in history…..A succession of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions – Vesuvius in 513 was one – and famines preceded and accompanied the series of pestilences which wrought terror and destruction throughout all of Europe, the Near East, and Asia for over sixty years. Of the natural convulsions, the most destructive was an earthquake, followed by conflagration, which destroyed Antioch in 526, killed between 200,000 and 300,000 inhabitants, and frightened away most of the remainder…… A succession of floods and famines added to the general misery. ….All this was accompanied by the great plague of Justinian. After the plague had ceased, there was so much depravity and general licentiousness that it seemed as though the disease had left only the most wicked.”

In The End of the World, Otto Friedrich devotes a long chapter to The Black Death 1347-50, some 700 years later. In a population of less than 100 million, 30 million, at least 1 in 3, died. They too were confusing times, both religiously and nature-wise. Again there were droughts, famines, swarms of locusts, deluges of frogs, lizards and scorpions, forcing rats and other rodents in search of food. Heavy rains in 1314 severely limited the grain harvests, so that the general physical well-being was greatly impaired, not unlike today. The rain persisted into the next year as well, causing the price of food to skyrocket.
Laurie Garrett in her book The Coming Plague gives an exhaustive overview of the viruses that are out there today and the conditions now that have come into being due to the improper use of antibiotics. Combine that with the tens of millions of refugees often living in deplorable conditions and today too the stage is set for newly emerging diseases in a world out of balance.

Our faith in physical security is misplaced.

We now are also some 700 years after The Black Death. The life of Riley we live, totally dependent on fossil fuels, has done more harm than simply filling the air with CO2 and threatening our very physical existence. It also has given us a false sense of spiritual security, as if we no longer need God. It reminds me of Psalm 2, depicting the very situation we have today:
Why this tumult among nations,
Among peoples this useless murmurings?
They arise, the kings of the earth (Come to Paris!)
Princes plot against the Lord and his anointed.
He who sits in the heavens laughs;
The Lord is laughing them to scorn.
Then he will speak in his anger,
His rage will strike them with terror.
Don’t for a minute believe that the Bible only applies to historical situations, relates what happened to the people of Israel and the early Christians. When we read Revelation, then we know what is in store for us, and it is not pretty.

Next year a new book by J.H. Bavinck will be published dealing with the near future as depicted in the last Bible Book, the Revelation of John the Apostle. Here is a lengthy quote from this book:

“The Great Catastrophe
“Something is going to happen. We sensed right from the start that somehow the portrayal John offered could not last for long. Everything is simply too artificial, too downright crazy, too terrifying for it to endure. Something is bound to happen, something that will cause this so elaborately structured set-up to collapse. The description of that regime makes that quite clear. The main plank of this governing body is its hate against God. Its confession of faith is based on unlimited trust in human power. Its only hope in life on earth is to fully immerge oneself in the pursuit of pleasure. The basis of its morality is that nobody can be a somebody, that nobody can believe in their own responsibility, and is ultimately answerable to God. The regime of the beast has as sole purpose the extinguishing of even the tiniest part of personal life, personal joy, and a personal connection to God. It all is built on one colossal lie, on the total denial of the most fundamental and decisive reality. The culture of the new regime constitutes a tremendous push to suppress, to close off peoples’ minds so that it deprives humanity of the very essence to be human. It is a culture that promotes escaping what is truly human. Its most primary goal is to live totally without God.
“And this can simply not continue. Eventually the powerful presence of God will penetrate all pores. It is simply impossible to suppress it forever. All this nonsense will have to be exposed someday when, finally, that what was so perseveringly is suppressed will break through after all. On every page of the book of Revelation of John it is clearly shown that someday this house of cards will collapse. The only question remains how and when this will happen.
“But, exactly at what point this will take place, John’s book is not quite clear. When we observe how that kingdom is experiencing its highest expression then a new series of visions appear, visions all directly related to the last things, but which also leave us with a barrage of other questions.
“It starts with a vision of the infinite majesty of the Lamb. After all these deplorable depictions of the kingdom of man we urgently need some more information of the world behind the world. “And I looked, and there before me was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion.” Just a short snapshot of indescribable grandeur: the Lamb amidst the thousands who belong to him. That short vision for a brief moment interrupts that insanely dark and somber picture of that human busyness.
“And right after this we see the first signs of the coming deterioration. The walls start to crumble, and the initial symptoms of decay and fall are visible. But it now looks as if John starts to hesitate. He already hears the rumbling of the approaching storm but it looks as if he isn’t yet ready for it. It all is so terribly unsettling, so intensely horrible that he can hardly absorb it. Here, finally, the age-long suppressed truth knocks at the portals of the human heart with loud and ineradicable force. Here, finally, the forever scorned, the nailed to the cross Christ, stands, in his full majesty, before the door of the kingdom of man. This time he cannot be refused entrance, he cannot again be dragged outside Jerusalem’s city limits, he cannot again be pushed away as an unwelcome stranger. His knocking at the door becomes louder and more insistent. And that human structure that was built with so much artifice and cunning, that entire building starts to shake.”

So far J. H. Bavinck.

Yes, the times they are a’changin. And not for the better.
All conditions are in place for all this to happen and a pandemic is part of that scene for which there is no hiding place: it will affect poor and rich, white and black, male and female, old and young. What form will it take? Probably some new form for which there is no antidote, and with the over-use of penicillin having deprived us of our best defense, the stage is set for a calamity of historic proportions.
No, the Bible is not a book that predicts that on such and such a date this or that will happen. What it does tell us is that before the return of the Lord, some disastrous events will take place.

Matthew 24 gives such an indication. Jesus tells us that there will be great distress, unequaled. Had these days not been shortened, no one would survive.
Therefore keep watch: when you see all these signs you know that The Time is near.
Are we ready for a Pandemic? No, because it will come suddenly and will bring on a lot of other disasters in its wake. Revelation speaks about an earthquake that will be the very beginning of all the havoc. That earthquake could also be in the form of financial collapse. So there is a warning, but, as we all well know, earthquakes come unannounced, come “like a thief in the night”. Even the best scientists have no clue when and where the Next Big One will hit.

No, I am not predicting that 2016 will see a world-wide devastating unstoppable disease affecting all. I think that it will come after the financial collapse when the entire world is already in disarray. Then the odds for some immense health disaster are extremely present.

Are we ready for such an event?
Hope in the Lord and pray for the coming of his Kingdom, the New Earth where ‘righteousness will dwell’.

November 29 2015

COP 21: A COP-OUT?

Tomorrow the much anticipated conference – COP 21- on Climate Change starts in Paris, the scene of these brutal attacks on innocent people a few weeks ago.
Of course the word ‘innocent’ is a relative term. I believe we all are somehow implicated in causing terrorism, which has its root today in oil extraction and consumption, the atrocious act of forcing crude oil out of the earth where it has been buried for millions of years and squandering the product in a time span of seconds on a geological scale. Violence to creation always bounces back on all of God’s creatures, especially on its highest form, us, God’s images. As the torture of nature accelerates, expect much more violence, augmented by the increasing scarcity of water, fertile land and forests. If all else fails, the ultimate outcome is a global war.

For 10 days we will be inundated with detailed information on the dangers we face from our overuse of carbon products. If the previous 20 conferences – called COP, which stands for Conference of the Parties- are any indication nothing much will be accomplished: in other words another COP-OUT.
In the year 2000 I had the opportunity to attend COP 11 in The Hague, lodging with my brother who lives there. I went as an accredited member of the press, representing the regional daily newspaper for which I wrote a weekly column for 10 years. Then Canada had a real image problem, while the USA went BUSH in a presidential election that was decided by four of the seven judges of the highest court.
We know that in the USA the Republican Party, which has a majority in Congress, denies the occurrence of Climate Change, so the nation which is the largest polluter in the world – 17 tons of Green House Gases per person, versus a global average of less than 5 – will not come on board with any resolution. China, as a nation, is the next highest polluter, and together with India comprise between 35 to 40 percent of the world’s people. Both nations want to see their people achieve higher living standards, so, instead of them cutting back on carbon products, they will accelerate their use. Both India and China argue they have the right to modernize like anybody else. That inevitably means large increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has expressed “uncompromising commitment on climate change,” providing it doesn’t affect India’s ability to raise hundreds of millions of people up from poverty. One analysis found that if India sticks to its growth plans, its carbon dioxide – CO2 – emissions will increase three-fold over the next 15 years. China’s emissions will keep soaring, too. The world’s biggest emitter has promised only that emissions will peak by 2030. In the next 15 years, its greenhouse gas emissions are expected to rise by one-third.

In other words if you live long enough you will experience hell on earth.

The question is whether the USA is even able to reduce its carbon foot print. Where the architectural make-up of Europe was determined prior to the Carbon revolution, with densely packed populations in small areas, and thus a natural for mass transportation, the USA was developed on the basis of unlimited use of carbon fuel, with suburban and exurban housing development, geared to individual automotive transportation, making the use of subways and trains almost impossible.
Already voices are emerging that the conference should forego a top-down approach that has guided the effort since 1992 to be replaced by a bottom-up model, relying on voluntary commitments by individual countries (and people?) to rein in their contributions to climate change.
True, the UN has no power to enforce restrictions on fossil fuels. Individual jurisdictions have more power, but can they enforce it? The only way is by upping the cost, which will hurt the poor. A bottom-up approach in the fight against climate change could be an important step forward, but politicians everywhere have a short vision: they want to be reelected. With economic activity – and thus tax income- already weak, a further charge on consumers will be far from popular. So brace yourself for higher temperatures and the resulting disasters.

In my opinion the entire Paris enterprise, where some 50,000 delegates and press people will gather, is an exercise in futility, because well in advance of the Paris talks, the UN announced that the amount of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere has locked in 2.7 degrees Celsius warming at a minimum, even if countries move forward with the pledges they make to cut emissions. Hence, even the 2 degree Celsius goal is already unattainable, which, by the way, has already been reached in Canada. In effect, the countries are vowing to make changes that collectively still fall far short of the necessary goal. We, the world at large, are much like a patient who, upon hearing from our doctor that we must lose 50 pounds to avoid life-threatening health risks, take pride in cutting out fries but not cake and ice cream.

I live in Canada so I am keen to find out what Canada will promise, which is not the same as what they will do. At least there is a lot of willingness there, initiated by the newly elected Liberal Party. So far it looks like they will pledge to reduce the 2005 level by 30 percent, the same the previous government had I mind, but the bad news is that the pledges will still be short of what is needed, guaranteeing at least a 3 degree warmer world. That would mean higher temperatures than at any time in the last three million years, with potentially dramatic effects of intense heatwaves, flooding and climate refugees across the world.

All the big shots of the world will be in Paris, provided they can guarantee safety. Barack Obama will be there. Justin Trudeau will be there. Everyone who’s anyone will be descending on Paris in the coming week to strike a global deal to fight climate change. The rhetoric is remarkable: “We are at a turning point now,” declared UN climate chief Christiana Figueres. We are at “a moment of remarkable transformation.”

Recollect Copenhagen six years ago? That too was labeled as crucial, and it was a conspicuous fiasco. Nobody in the world can bind nations to cut down on energy use: they all want to provide more for their citizens, who are growing older and sicker, and they all need economic growth. But we can’t have growth and use less energy: we simply can’t have one without the other: the two are intrinsically related.
And then there are the poorer nations. They think their rich uncles in the West should pay for them to confront climate change because, let’s face the truth: We, the rich, created the problem in the first place. They’ve threatened to walk out if the developed world doesn’t fork over at least $100-billion (U.S.) a year. “Whether Paris succeeds or not will be dependent on what we have as part of the core agreement on finance,” declared South Africa’s delegate, who speaks for more than 130 nations.

The trouble is that the rich nations are already overbooked: they all run deficits, they all have awesome obligations. Look at Europe today: Totally divided about the refugee problem, with the ultra-right –almost fascist- parties gaining ground.
So what we will see in Paris is a lot of politics, a lot of positioning, and a lot of empty promises.

Here’s what I gleaned from a Margaret Wente column in the Globe and Mail:
“Even if all these problems were overcome and every nation lived up to its commitments, the effect on the planet would be negligible. Bjorn Lomborg, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, did the math in a new study published in the journal Global Policy. “If all nations keep all their promises, temperatures will be cut by just 0.05°C (0.09°F),” he stated in the news release. “Even if every government on the planet not only keeps every Paris promise, reduces all emissions by 2030, and shifts no emissions to other countries, but also keeps these emission reductions throughout the rest of the century, temperatures will be reduced by just 0.17°C (0.3°F) by the year 2100.”

The hard truth about global warming is that there is no public policy solution. The only solution is to quit using carbon based products. No technological breakthroughs on a massive scale are possible, nothing that we do will make much of any difference, not even if we figure out substitutes for fossil fuels, converting our entire global infrastructure to other power sources. That is the brutal truth.
About 80 per cent of the world’s energy comes from fossil fuels. The International Energy Agency estimates that global energy demand is set to grow another 37 per cent by the year 2040. As greenhouse gas emissions level off in the developed world, almost all of that increase will come from poorer countries such as China and India. By 2040, the IEA estimates, 75 per cent of all our energy will still come from oil, gas and coal – the major sources of greenhouse gasses.

The other hard truth is a simple human one. No one is going to give up the material comforts of life today for the avoidance of an uncertain disaster many years in the future. Any politician who fails to reckon with that will soon be turfed from office.
That’s the sad situation we find ourselves in.

Some, such as Margaret Wente, believe that sooner or later, human ingenuity will bail us out. Fat chance. How can technology that brought us this condition, will then cure us from it? The Pharisees once accused Jesus by saying that “It is only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this fellow –Jesus- drives out demons. (Matt. 12: 24). Jesus commented: “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined……… If Satan drives out Satan he is divided against himself. How then can his kingdom stand?”
The same applies to technology which is purely driven by carbon power. Human technology lies at the base of this curse which purely is driven by Beelzebub, the prince of demons.

Meanwhile, the planet burns.

Japan’s meteorological office announced that this past September was, by far, the warmest September on record, and records now show that October has also become the hottest recorded October. As a whole, 2015 remains easily on course to become the hottest year ever recorded.
The COP 21 bulletins will truthfully convey that we indeed are at a critical junction of history. It could quite well be that this coming Paris meeting, is the last of its kind. Why meet when no significant reduction in Carbon emissions is possible?
The trouble is that nations cannot solve this problem on their own. This is a world-wide problem that can only be solved when every nation on the earth participates in reducing GHG – Green House Gases. And that will not happen. The problem is too big, so big that it can no longer be solved, so, as an increasing number of people conclude: we have to adapt.

Adapting means that we write off Africa and the Middle East, the most affected regions of the world. In due course, perhaps in the next two decades they will become inhabitable. Already it is from there where the majority of the refugees originate. What are millions now will be scores of millions in the near future.
We now have many good-willing citizens who welcome these poor people, and that is to be lauded. But when the trickle becomes a deluge, what will happen then? Then the law of the jungle will take over: the way in which only the strongest and cleverest people in a society stay alive or succeed.

Jesus has something to say about that as well.

In Matthew 25, when Jesus was approaching the end of his ministry, he also saw how the end of the world as we know was shaping up. What does Jesus want us to do? “For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat. I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink. I was a stranger and you did not invite me in……I tell you the truth whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do to me.”

Our task is clear. No COP-OUT for his followers. We have to share our blessings with the poor – the refugees of all colors and faiths – of the world.

NOVEMBER 22 2015

PRAY FOR PARIS? PRIEZ POUR PARIS?

There is a certain saying in Latin which today could refer to prayer: Deus ex Machina. It literally means “God out of the machine”. It comes from ancient drama where sometimes a god was needed, so the actors had a god figure suspended above their heads and some stage hand would lower it whenever a god was called for. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian, put to death by Hitler weeks before World War II ended, used Deus ex Machina as an example of the sort of god that is needed only when special circumstances require his presence, which actually is the way Christians in general uses God as well. When all goes perfectly, we can do without God but when sickness strikes or death or unemployment or the Paris attacks, we want God there to heal our cancers or avoid death or get us a job or wage war on ISIS. For the rest, we don’t need him.
And then there is the Paris Climate Change Conference starting next week, on November 30, when 50,000 people from all over the globe will converge on Paris to decide on the fate of the planet. All churches in Canada –urged on by CPJ, an organization I have supported since it was founded in 1960 and on whose board I served for a while -are supposed to pray that the world will still has a lease on life. Has it? Should it?
In America people, by and large, couldn’t care less about Climate Change, so in that huge country no or infrequent prayers are offered to prevent us from killing off the planet. Too bad: the USA is supposed to be the most Christian country in the world, with the highest percentage of prayers, supposedly, and also the highest per capita polluters. So….
So are you going to pray for Paris? Of course we should pray for it, pray especially for these Muslim attackers, because in Matthew 5: 44 Jesus urges us to, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”
Last week my brother Drewes, living in The Hague, sent me an article he found in the Dutch daily TROUW. I translated it because it gives insights into ISIS that are deeply disturbing. It was written by a Robin de Wever.
Here’s what he wrote:

ISIS desires the end of the age, but its own demise may be the result.

It’s only a matter of time, according to the theologians of ISIS, before the true believers in Allah and the infidels from the West will face each other on the battlefield. That conflict will be the final battle, spelling the end of history. If we want to understand the Paris attack on Friday November 13 2015 we cannot discard the apocalyptic rhetoric of ISIS.
It’s on the fields around Dabiq where the last battle will take place according to a saying attributed to the Prophet Mohammed. ‘After a rather long interval,’ according to the Great Prophet, ‘the armies of Medina and the forces of Rome will meet there.’
Once the fighting starts a third of the Muslims will flee and a third will be killed. The remaining third ‘will be the conquerors of Constantinople.’

The ISIS theologians are fascinated by this prophecy. The Muslim faithful are ‘the armies of Medina,’ while the forces of Rome (read, The West) are the enemies of Islam. This prophecy has convinced them that the ISIS fighters are the bloodthirsty and self-appointed ‘army of Medina’ which in the end will be emerge as the triumphant warriors.

The quotation is found in a ‘hadith’, one of the many saying attributed to the prophet Mohammed. Most Muslims know and acknowledge the hadith of Dabiq, but the majority fails to implement it. That is not unusual because there are so many of these hadiths. ISIS, on the other hand, has made the prophecy of the battle on Dabiq the cornerstone of its theology. This simply means that ISIS wants to bring on the End Time.

This really implies that the Paris attacks on November 13 are connected to this apocalyptic belief. Yes, just as some Christian movements believe that the End Times, as proclaimed by John in Revelation, are near so the ISIS also is convinced that the Dabiq prophecy is about to happen, and, in contrast what the Christians believe, the ISIS militants are sure that they must cause the Apocalypse to come.

They have made a beginning with this in Iraq and Syria by creating what they think is a perfect rule where slavery is part of the package. All this indicates, according to the ISIS’ hadith interpretation, that the End of history is approaching.

‘The more the West reacts, the more people perish, the more convincing is the tale that the end is near,’ according to the terror expert Matthew Henman of the London-based HIS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center.
But creating the ‘Caliphate’ – the perfect religious state- is not enough and that too is clearly indicated by the Dabiq’ prophecy, according to these ISIS theologians. The End Time will come only when the Muslims (read ISIS fighters, as the others are not really true Muslims), engage the armies of Rome, that is to say, the West.

ISIS constantly speaks of this ultimate encounter. In the last few months there was a lull in the fight against ISIS because the West did not want to get mixed up too much into this conflict in Iraq and Syria, but the Paris event has changed all that. These attacks have resulted in the US and Russia and France uniting to engage these elements. (“We are at war” said President Hollande).

An apocalyptic struggle.

‘We must not underestimate the apocalyptic element in ISIS’, according to Matthew Henman of the London-based HIS Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center. In an article in the Washington Post he points out that those who sympathize with ISIS interpret the bombing (by Russia, France, the USA and others) as indications of an apocalyptic struggle.

The spiritual leaders of ISIS are no doubt anxiously looking forward to this confrontation as the start of the great struggle between ISIS and the Satanic super powers. Even though the Western powers see this as a war against terror and a threat to national security, ISIS sees it is a holy war, a struggle with a possible apocalyptic outcome.

“The more the West bombs,” says Henman, “the more people perish, the more credible is the prophecy that the end is near.”
ISIS itself contains a queer mixture of different goals. Whether the average ISIS fighter is motivated by the end-struggle is very much in question. ISIS is a complex mixture of apocalyptic expectations, both trying to attain a pure Islam doctrine, but also one political opportunism, as well as simply blind hate toward neighbor enemies such as the Shiites and Yezidis and the far-away Western enemies. Last year it became plain from leaked ISIS documents that a segment of the ISIS founders had very religious motives, but that another section was composed of warlords whose aim was simply to overthrow the established power centers. Already for years they are assisted by fighters from elsewhere who have their own motivations. “The more enemies they create the more enemies are fighting them”, says terror expert Daniel Byman.

And yet, the Apocalypse, the aim of striving for the End of Time, is a recurring theme in ISIS propaganda. The glossy ISIS periodical called DABIQ is full with this stuff.

Escalation, yes or no.

It is quite possible that ISIS is going international to take revenge for all these bombing attacks by Western nations, so say people in the know: thus a simple message of retribution. That’s why they engaged the French on their own backyard, simply to scare the wits out of them, in the hope that this will teach them a lesson not to intervene. But it is far more likely that all this actually will make matters worse, will accelerate the conflict. The ISIS actually envisions both scenarios.

“ISIS has pictured the attacks in Paris as an attempt to discourage the West”, commented ISIS expert William McCants last weekend, “in order to stop further escalation in Syria and Iraq, but this does not make sense if its real aim is a cease-fire agreement. After all, they constantly have made statements such as: let them come on because we are at war with the entire world.”

Can ISIS really wage war with the entire world?
Well, they are doing it now, whether this is the proper thing to do for them or not. They are fighting in Syria and Iraq; they downed a Russian plane in Egypt; their attacks in the French capital are further proof. If ISIS is directly or indirectly responsible for all this, then it is, indeed, busy on multiple fronts.

“The more enemies you tackle, the more enemies will fight against you”, is the obvious conclusion of terror-expert and former advisor of the US government, Daniel Byman, writing in Foreign Policy. If the USA and France are really serious in tackling ISIS then ISIS better watch out. It may not end up as an Apocalyptic Ending for them and an eternal victory for the true Muslims, but simply a military defeat, not the End of Times, but a humbling military debacle. So far the TROUW article.

So what is my reaction?
If recent history is any indication then the US powerful military machine will crush the enemy and – see Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan- will bungle the peace. On the other hand, if the ISIS movement is really set to unleash the End of Times, then the Middle East is the right place for it.
There some 1.5 billion people make their home. There also Climate Change will have its most calamitous impact, as millions of small-time farmers, perhaps the bulk of the population, have been forced off the land due to desertification, soil erosion and persistent drought. Desperate people do desperate things. They already experience End-Times. How would you feel if the land which has given a living to an untold number of generations, no longer is fertile and the buildings which were inherited from your ancestors all are destroyed? Multiply that by a few millions and the collective consciousness turns toward apocalyptic thinking.
I see as the prime danger there the presence of nuclear bombs: Pakistan is the real wild card. Its population is largely Islam and its rulers are principally the military, and we all know that the military mind is one-dimensional: for them the only solution lies in the use of weapons, and when the situation seems beyond remedy – and in religious conflicts there really is no solution – then the ultimate weapon may be called for, even when it means collective suicide.
How about the West?
Things at home are not too rosy either. As a matter of fact the West too is in the clutches of a suicide mania. Thus not all that different from the Middle East, which, a hundred years ago, was one of the world’s most peaceful regions; today it is the most violent, witness the millions of refugees, now striking at the heart of Europe.
The current disorder started in 1918 when the World War II winning parties, France and Great Britain, divided the region into several incoherent blocks, by creating artificial states screaming for dissolution. Ever since 1918 there never have been stable successors to the defunct Ottoman Empire, which, through its benevolent rule, used to keep the peace in the Islamic world.
Priez Pour Paris? Pray for Paris?
The Middle East mess has been typical of what politicians do. They look for short-term solutions and never extend their vision to the ultimate consequences. The same is true with the Climate Challenge. Do we really grasp what we have to pray for?
When we pray for a solution to Climate Change, then the Lord right away bounces it back to us: “what are YOU going to do about it? Are you going to throw your car keys away? Are you becoming a vegetarian, as beef cattle are the second highest emitters of methane? Are you willing to share your 2500 square feet house with 2 other families? If not: The West is as much on a suicide trip as is the dreaded ISIS.
Pray? Yes. Pray for forgiveness.

NOVEMBER 15 2015

THE FUTURE OF WORK

The late Sheikh Rashid Bin Saed Al Maktoum, longtime Emir of Dubai and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates, once said:
“My grandfather rode a camel, my father rode a camel, I drive a Mercedes, my son drives a Land Rover, his son will drive a Land Rover, but his son will ride a camel.”

When I apply that to my own situation, then I can truthfully say that both my grandfathers rode bikes, my father drove a Ford, I drive a Jetta, my sons (and daughters) all have fancy cars, so do their children, but in the end they all will go back to a bike.
When I look at the farming situation, I see a similarity there as well: my grandfathers worked with horses, my father moved to the city and, while living there still kept a country connection. His children, my generation, all acquired a city-bred mentality, but some of my grandchildren will (be forced to?) move back to the country where they will adopt the life similar to my grandparents, in some ways the same, but also totally different. Yes, much the same but also totally different, because Climate Change will change everything, including the future and nature of work, and especially it will change us.
Famous psychiatrist, Carl Gustav Jung – 1875 to 1961 – said somewhere that there is a basic difference between a city person and a country personality. That was true in his lifetime, but is no longer the case now: we all are urbanized, all have become technophiles, all depend on nuclear and lots of carbon energy to exist. Sad to say, everything and everybody will have to change.

The coming conference in Paris, starting November 30, will bring a new message to the world: the age of carbon fuels is coming to an end. The immense trouble is that our energy slaves have made it possible – for a few decades – to live far beyond our natural means, far beyond what is possible on a sustainable basis. That has to change. Is that still possible?

Last week I read a quote by famous French novelist Anatole France, so famous that when I studied French he was required reading. He wrote, “All changes, even the most longed for, are melancholy. For what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another.” We must die to our ‘un-creating’ life before we can enter into the ‘creation-friendly’ life. Actually that is a complete religious statement.

When I was born in 1928, I lived in two worlds: part urban, part rural. My grandparents were truly rural: no or little electricity, horse and buggy for commerce, bikes and walking for mobility. As a privileged kid we always had an automobile, but we were the exception. Our children and grandchildren have never experienced anything else: we all must die to one life before we can enter another. That will prove the greatest challenge ever faced humanity, much greater than fighting terrorism. And creation-loving Christians have to be the example!!

This year officially, the world temperature will have increased by 1 (one) degree Celsius. Not a big deal, some will say, and that is true if that would be the last of it, but that is only the beginning. Today we are guaranteed to experience at least 2 degrees and most likely more. And that spells disaster on a grand scale.
One obvious fact is that the world-wide use of carbon products in the form of natural gas, which made fertilizer and plastic possible, and liquid fuels, such as gasoline and diesel, has changed the face of farming and has, in my life time more than a tripled the world population. In the year 1900, when there were 1.5 billion people to feed in the world, close to 40 percent of the working population were engaged in agriculture. Thanks to huge machines, lots of carbon expenditure, and megatons of fertilizer, today less than 1 percent of the working population is engaged in farming and successfully feeding 7.3 billion people.

I have a book by Juliet B. Schor, a professor of sociology at Boston College. She is known worldwide for her research on the interrelated issues of work, leisure, and consumption. Her books on these themes include The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting, and the New Consumer, and Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth (retitled True Wealth for its paperback edition).
She writes that, “during the last year or two I’ve noticed that conversations about the future of work are now mostly about machines—how smart ones will do fantastic things to make our lives better, or how they’ll make human labor redundant and create a jobless dystopia.”

True, ever since the Industrial Revolution extraordinary labor-saving technological change had both good (cheaper products) and bad (pollution) effects. We no longer work to eat, we now work to consume. That will change: all our work habits will change in the future!

She continues, “Today, that context must include consideration of climate change, which has been almost totally missing from discussions about the future of work. The most obvious reason Climate Change matters is that it promises to be extremely disruptive. Even if the global community can pull off the equivalent of a Hail Mary pass and limit warming to two degrees Celsius, plenty of climate chaos is still in store. At this point, a future of four degrees of warming is more likely, given current national pledges for emissions reductions and considerable uncertainty about them.”
How true. Today all signs point to catastrophic sea level rise, drought, plummeting agricultural yields, frequent extreme weather, and human migrations on a large scale. The current march of the millions to Western Europe and Canada is only a small beginning. It has an immediate effect on the employment picture. Already a totally new kind of work is popping up: helping refugees, re-educating them, requiring greater need for first responders, health professionals, and aid workers, among other occupations. Climate chaos will also have large macroeconomic effects, reducing investment, consumption, and, yes, employment. It might well cost you your job.

In Canada we just elected a new government, its platform based on continued economic growth. It is true that the faces of a new generation of politicians are refreshing, and there is again hope in the air. But the raw reality is that in Canada the carbon bubble has popped. The Oil Sand oil extraction enterprise – Tar Sand in the USA – cannot be continued: it simply is too polluting. That means an entire arm of the economy is dying. And that is only the beginning. The terrible truth is that our entire existence built on fossil fuels – as today all of our enterprises are – belongs to a former age, the 20th Century, because Climate mayhem leads to economic mayhem which will force a new mindset whether we like it or not. We have to start thinking differently, and must die to carbon rich life before we can enter another based on renewables. The stark choice is: change or die.

Will that happen?

The USA is the world’s largest economy. There the mindset is closed to change if the Republican Presidential debates are any indication. With such an anti-intellectual attitude no turnaround is possible, assuring that catastrophe is guaranteed.
The needed turnaround is immense. Look at transportation. The faster one wants to travel, the more energy one must use. The further we live from where we work, the more energy we use. No longer are suburbs the only problem: it’s the exurbs that necessitate the longest commutes. True, telecommuting is an option for some, but, judging by the crowded highways, that does not seem to make any difference. Granted, cities in Canada, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa, all have elaborate plans for mass transit, but, as the economy declines, the billions needed to build these systems, will not be available. What if all these rapid rail systems are ready and the jobs have gone? That is a terrible possibility.

Today there are two opposing trends at work: a slowing economy means less tax revenue. To combat Climate Change, more tax dollars are needed. To look after the old-age segment for pensions and medical care, more tax dollars are needed, while disappearing jobs also cry for more unemployment assistance.
There also is another adjustment needed, perhaps the major one. In the last century machines have replaced muscle power but they are severely polluting, which means that a totally new approach to life must be learned or re-learned, replacing mechanical power with muscle power. My grandparents had multiple skills. We only know how to push buttons: we lack real life-skills. Climate Change will force us, by the grace of God, to re-learn creation-loving abilities, such as growing food, living more simply, do more walking and biking, greater appreciation for real leisure, not just TV watching or computer games, but reading, conversation, and communal games.

Be assured that Climate Change will play havoc with employment: oil extraction will diminish or disappear; trucking will suffer; flying will be curtailed with ‘going south’ becoming a thing of the past. With jobs disappearing, the government will probably establish a minimum income for all people, and with tax receipts decreasing, this will lead to governments creating money out of nothing, the way they did to rescue the banks by giving them trillions of dollars.
That is a recipe for hyperinflation, driving up the cost of living, and, while making cash savings disappear, will make it easier to pay off debts on all levels. I remember from the war years 1940-45 how our church quickly paid off its huge mortgage when money lost much of its value.

All this indicates that we are speeding towards the end of human life as we know it, because the end of oil will mean the end of billions of carbon-dependent lives. The bad thing is that many will not be able to adapt. The good thing is that it will prepare people for the Kingdom to come.

Today very few people have a clear understanding what “The Kingdom of Heaven” really entails. By and large the churches have not been a leader here, even though Jesus often told us to “First seek the Kingdom”. It bears repeating that the Kingdom of Heaven – as described by J. H. Bavinck in his Between the Beginning and the End: A radical Kingdom Vision – page 32- is: made up of all plants, all animals, all people, all angels —-all things. The kingdom includes the sea and the land, the mountains and the valleys, all that was and is and is to come— all of it incorporated into a grand and mighty whole. The kingdom is the place where all things are in the right place and where everything can fulfill its function and work toward its potential in complete harmony with all that surrounds it. The kingdom is synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God – all in harmonious veneration.

I need not emphasize that we have done the opposite. A bit earlier on that same page Bavinck describes our situation: “It is impossible to visualize the immense difference between the majestic, harmonious unity of creation as it emerged from God’s hand and the frantic, demon-dominated planet in which we, cursed humanity dwell after the fall into sin…..God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse and destroy it.”
Oil, all carbon-based fuels, has speeded up this process, and it is our, almost impossible task, to go back to a life that is dominated by the Divine Kingdom concept.
The future of work lies in that direction.

Anatole France – 1844 to 1924- may not have had a clear idea what it really meant when he wrote, “All changes, even the most longed for, are melancholy. For what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves. We must die to one life before we can enter another,” but then poets and writers often are prophetic. For us to gain entry to the Kingdom to come we must die to our present life before we can enter the Life to come, “while forgiving those who trespass against us.” There’s only room for humility here.

There’s where the Future of work is headed: we must live the Kingdom life.

November 8 2015

FIRES, FIRES, EVERYWHERE.

2 Peter 3: 10 comes to mind. It says that: “…the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”

Just this past week I read a warning by Greenpeace that “fires raging across the forests and peatlands of Indonesia are on track to pump out more carbon emissions than the UK’s entire annual output.” The thick smoke choking cities in the region is likely to cause the premature deaths of more than 100,000 people in the region and is also destroying vital habitats for endangered orangutans and clouded leopards.
In Indonesia alone there were 10,000 fires on two of its largest islands alone: Sumatra and Borneo, now known as Kalimantan. Actually it is raging across the entire 5000-kilometre length of Indonesia. One of the burning islands is West Papua. It’s not just the trees that are burning. It is the land itself. Much of the forest sits on great domes of peat. When the fires penetrate the earth, they smolder for weeks, sometimes months, releasing clouds of methane, carbon monoxide, ozone and exotic gases like

Why is this happening? Indonesia’s forests have been fragmented for decades by timber and farming companies. Canals have been cut through the peat to drain and dry it. Plantation companies move in to destroy what remains of the forest to plant monocultures of pulpwood, timber and palm oil. The easiest way to clear the land is to torch it. Every year, this causes disasters. But in an extreme El Niño year like this one, we have a perfect formula for environmental catastrophe.
It is hard to convey the scale of this inferno, but here’s a comparison that might help: the fires in Indonesia alone are producing more carbon dioxide than the entire US economy. In three weeks the fires have released more CO2 than the annual emissions of Germany. And Indonesia is just one area: South America is just as bad and so is Siberia.

What we are now doing to the planet and to human society is exactly that – burning down the house while we are still living in it. Everyone needs fuel, especially during a bitter winter, but only a mad man starts deconstructing the house in order to burn bits of it in the stove or fireplace.
Almost as mad as that is stealing bits of other people’s houses to burn, but that at least is not soiling your own doorstep – well not at first. In a world of limited resources and limited space we’ve now reached the point where raiding our neighbours’ houses is the same thing as raiding our own house, because the net effect is the same – disaster on an unprecedented level.

Of course it’s easier to live in denial and keep on cannibalising the world’s vital resources at an ever-increasing rate and pretend that it’s business as usual, but in reality it is anything but that. The alarm bells from commentators from all sectors: science, economics, religion etc. are getting louder and more frequent, better argued and with the raw data to back it up, but we are still not listening.
So this month the Paris deliberations start, lasting until December 11. Whatever will be decided there will have little impact on the ultimate outcome of Climate Change because curtailing GHG – Green House Gases- will cost money and jobs.
More than fifty years ago I, as a member of a book club, received Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring. I never read it and gave it away. Then nobody really listened that well back then, although governments paid lip-service to these troublesome do-gooders. Now we know that what they said was entirely true, that we are headed for disaster.

Just a simple statistic.

According to scenarios used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global annual per capita emissions would need to fall from today’s average five metric tons per person to less than one ton by 2075, a level well below what any major country emits today and comparable to the emissions from such countries as Haiti, Yemen and Malawi. Just imagine: current annual per capita emissions from the United States is 17 tons, while Europe and China are 7 and 6 tons. Get used to it: we will never reach that goal. I have never been in Haiti or Yemen, but spent some time in Malawi, where the average fuel use is what we all should aim for and will never reach: 1 ton per person. I fell in love with Malawi, where the people always were cheerful, the kids sang and danced, everybody walked and lived simply, and everybody wanted to be like the white people.

Yes, we, North Americans, Canucks and Yankees alike, use 17 tons of carbon emission per person. We have to bring this down to 1 (one) ton. Last week in the New York Times a lead article talked common sense: no matter what happens in Paris, even the most drastic reduction will not be enough, so the only thing we can do is adapt. Move to the Arctic as James Lovelock recommends in his book The Revenge of Gaia because the rest of the world will become inhabitable.

Fires will aggravate the water problem and soil erosion. Couple this with increased damming of rivers, pollutant run-off into rivers, fracking and mining and you’ve a recipe for a water crisis, which will, in turn, lead to a food crisis.
Without fresh water we cannot participate in agriculture – this is the basic fundamental industry that keeps most people on this planet alive. Of course, a few people subsistence farm or hunt and gather still, but this is a tiny, tiny fraction of the human population. The rest of the world relies on increasingly intensive agriculture to provide vegetables, grains, fruit and also meat for the several billion people that are busy doing something else with their time.
Take China. It now has come to light – yes, everything will come out as the Bible tells us – that coal use in China has been much higher than previously reported. Coal is the greatest climate enemy. What will bring China to its knees will be the collapse of the environment. Bad air, bad water, bad land and total reliance on imported food will inevitably take its toll.

Of course these problems are not restricted to China, a country simply the canary in the coalmine. Across the Middle-East, Asia, Africa, southern Europe, USA and central and southern America there are increasing difficulties relating to the basics of food, water and the condition of the land.
One of the facts I learned from translating the Bavinck book on Revelation is that the world will soon start to suffer from Hyper Inflation. Bill Bonner and Associates predict that as a result of government flooding the market with phantom money, the current deflation will suddenly jumped over into hyperinflation. Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan says the same. No wonder. With everything under threat, air, water, soil, food will become hard to come by: back to the very basics of life, just as in Malawi.

But back to the fires that are everywhere.

The global fires do more damage than burning trees: they are destroying treasures as precious and irreplaceable as the archaeological remains being levelled by Isis. Orangutans, clouded leopards, sun bears, gibbons, the Sumatran rhinoceros and Sumatran tiger, these are among the threatened species being driven from much of their range by the flames.
South America is also severely affected. According to Greenpeace, a fire in the indigenous Territory of Arariboia has already consumed 45% of the 413,000-hectare. Worst affected are the 12,000 people from the Guajajara ethnic group, whose communities have been surrounded by flames. There are also fears for the approximately 80 members of the Awá-Guajá, an uncontacted tribe. “This is certainly the biggest fire we have seen in recent years,” said Gabriel Zacharias, the fire combat coordinator of Ibama (Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources). Almost all of Maranhão’s forests have been cleared. Those that remain are on indigenous lands or in nature reserves. Loggers enter these areas illegally, cut down trees and then launder the timber for sale to the UK and other foreign markets.

Such degradation of the forest increases the vulnerability to fire. Efforts to prevent illegal logging have also raised tensions. Last week an Ibama ranger was shot in a confrontation with loggers during a fire combat operation. Indigenous forest guardians have also been involved in several confrontations.

Fires, fires, everywhere.

“The elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”

What is also being revealed- laid bare – is human stupidity. Trees are a significant source of our oxygen supply. When we burn them we not only create more greenhouse gases, we also deprive future generations of absorbing the CO2 we generate, and cut back the supply of the very air our lives depend on. The seas supply the most oxygen, but there too, due to warming of the waters and its acidification the plankton- which generate the oxygen – is also under threat.

In the meantime the world population is increasing and human wants and needs are also growing while the supply of air, the supply of water and the quality of the soil is rapidly deteriorating. It seems to me that our sense of values, our capacity of understanding the basic facts of life, is rapidly diminishing. These basics are that we need three things in life: food, shelter, clothing. Make it four: an understanding of the human mystery, the sense of the supernatural. To me Romans 1: 20 tells volumes. It says that “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 men are without excuse.”

We simply cannot plead ignorance. Creation all around us testifies to God’s greatness. The now global fires reveal our basic unbelief. The fear of the Lord is missing, which means that we no longer possess wisdom. Also, by deliberately destroying God’s creation for the sake of very short term gain, we are openly aligning ourselves with the Evil One whose sole aim is to destroy God’s most precious creation he so much loved (John 3: 16).

There is no greater sin than purposely destroying God’s work of art.

The basic question facing us all on this earth – especially us North Americans who create 17 tons of Greenhouse Gases (GHG) per person each year – is “how then shall we live?”
That is a question no individual alone can solve. J. H. Bavinck in his book Between the beginning and the end: a radical Kingdom vision writes (pages 34-35) “There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal………The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all-wise will of him who lives and rules forever.” That really means that personal salvation and the efforts to restore creation go hand in hand,

This is radical language, so totally different from that useless and meaningless “Brother, are you born again”, that a completely revamped church is needed to even start this process. It means becoming fully aware of the destructive lifestyle that we Westerners, especially we North Americans are engaged in.
Job, the man who was fabulously wealthy, can teach us something. He lost everything thanks to the Satan. Now this same Satan has done the opposite to us: thanks to Satan-inspired polluting oil we too have everything, large houses, luxurious mobility, heat and cool at our fingertips, food from everywhere, all obtained at the expense of creation. The catch is that, just like Job, we too have to lose all that and have to get rid of our ill-gotten gains, because they clash with the values of God’s kingdom to come. “There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal………The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all-wise will of him who lives and rules forever.”

Preparing for the Kingdom to come implies to “reduce, reuse, refuse, repair, recycle”, and constantly pray: “Maranatha, Lord come quickly.”

November 1 2015

That dreaded number: 666.

My NIV study Bible tells me that the most acceptable explanation for this number is that, as the number 7 signifies perfection the triple 6 indicates a valiant attempt to reach that perfect stage but in the end, fails.
I mostly agree with that rationale, but I think there’s also more to this.
In the past 3 months I have translated a Dutch book dealing with Revelation and the author, the late Johan Herman Bavinck, a theologian and professor of Mission at the Free University in Amsterdam, refrains from giving any explanation to the many numbers bantered about there. This caused Walter Brueggemann, offering a short review on the book, to write:
“J. H. Bavinck has written a commentary on the Book of Revelation. It would, however, be wrong to call this a commentary, because he honors none of the turgid protocols of commentary. He sweeps away the calendar-counting of hysterical fundamentalism; he has no patience with the book-keeping mentality of historical criticism. Rather he plunges us into the great cosmic drama of conflict that defines the earth as it yearns for the perfections of heaven. The writer of Revelation knows that “everything on earth is tiring” as the church lives in conformity and contamination. But the lamb/lion is relentless even while remaining hidden and delayed. Bavinck says of the book of Revelation that it swells “to a mighty choral, the jubilation song of the victory.” And he offers us, on that great choral, a vast fugue that calls us to great imagination through which we as church will be drawn and empowered to live differently in the world. We have no commentary like this that is itself emancipatory and of transformative, well beyond our usual arithmetic of piety and morality.”
Brueggemann lauds the absence of the guessing game that has made Revelation the source of the most outlandish speculation about the end of the world and what is in store for us in the final days. Perhaps foolishly, I will venture into a field where these two learned men, Bavinck and Brueggemann, don’t want to go.
Why do I do that?

I am not a theologian, just an informed layman whose opinion really does not matter. Bavinck is quite cautious in the Revelation’s number game. The number 666 he does not mention at all and he only devotes a few words to the Thousand Years of binding Satan (Revelation 20), saying only that it probably occurred in the past.
When I look back many centuries it dawned on me that the period from about 600 A.D. to 1600 A.D. could be seen as the most fitting time frame. St. Boniface, a Celtic missionary, born in England in 672, ventured into the Netherlands to preach the gospel there which cost him his life: he was murdered in Dokkum, the top of Friesland, in Netherlands in 754. The blood of martyrs always has been the seed of the church. No exception there. That God is present in all creation was certainly the conviction of the ninth-century philosopher, John Scotus Eriugena, perhaps the greatest teacher of the Celtic branch of the church ever produced. (He was excommunicated). Throughout the Middle Ages Christianity flourished as never before. All the great cathedrals were built during that period. Also the St. James Bible, the Westminster and the Belgic Confessions and the Heidelberg Catechism date from that time. All these documents are still in use. So that period could well have been the era Revelation pointed to. That period ended with the 30 year religious war (1618-48) which was the most devastating conflict Europe ever experienced. Since then wars have dominated the world scene, culminating in the war on Creation, now raging in full force.

Back to 666.

Bavinck wrote En Voortwentelen de Eeuwen in the mid 1950’s thus more than 60 years ago. I translated the title as And On and On the Ages Roll. When Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, Michigan, publishes it next year it may emerge as At the Threshold of Eternity, a commentary on Revelation. In that sixty years interval we have experienced the advance of technology with the Internet, instant photography, but also the onset of all the catastrophic symptoms so well outlined in the book of Revelation.
Bavinck sees the main aspect of the last bible book in Revelation 22: 11. There it says: “Let those who do wrong, continue to do wrong….Let those who do right continue to do right“. He writes: “Now we can approach what can be seen as the heart of this book, its dominating theme. This can be captured in one phrase: everything becomes what it is. That’s what the book is all about, that is the meaning of all happenings and in particular of this final phase.”
He continues: “That simply means that we now live in a masked world, a world in disguise. Matters are not what they are, are different from what they are in fact. That is the secret that this world so carefully wants to conceal. The Satan, that immense moving power behind the world’s happenings holds humanity in the clutches of the fateful illusion that God is dead matter, something stale situated in the past, a self-satisfied sugar uncle, far beyond from being relevant. He has sold humanity on the notion that men and women everywhere are now fully in charge.”

About the final phase we now live in, Bavinck writes: “Nature will fall upon the human race as a provoked lion: nature will breach all the constrains humanity has laid upon it, and will explode into extraordinary catastrophes, earthquakes, floods, failed harvests, pandemics. All these will be more severe than ever. And as part of all this comes the dissolution of human society. Wars will come of an intensity and severity never before experienced, causing incalculable confusion. And all this will result in the coming of the kingdom of the one world-tyrant, the beast with his abhorrent body, arising out of the ocean of the community of nations. Again for a short spell the human throne will be established. Humanity has not turned to God, has only become more outspoken in his resistance, more spiteful in its hatred, more determined in its powerless hate, more relentless in its rage against God’s children. Indeed, who is unjust, more injustice will ensue, who is vile, more vileness will follow. The mask falls off.”

The stage is set for that final phase. Each week now we experience another 1000 year event: floods, droughts, storms, you name it. That the masks are falling off we see in the Volkswagen cover up of the true emissions. We also see this in the Roman Catholic Church where its sexual abuse scandals are coming out in the open. We see this in Capitalism, causing the destruction of the entire world for the sake of money. We see this in the Snowden revelation, outlining the extent of government penetration into the internet and other digital data. We see this in the millions of refugees now escaping the wars everywhere. We see this in the impossibility to cut down on energy use.

This month the world meets in Paris and people there will call for a ban on all carbon products, which is easier said than done. All plastic is derived from oil sources, all vehicles move on gasoline. There are today more than 6000 items that depend on carbon-based material to exist: car bumpers, airplanes: there is no end to its uses. There simply is no substitute. Or take air conditioning: The USA, a nation with 318 million people accounting for just 4.5% of world population consumes more energy for air conditioning than the rest of the world combined. It uses more electricity for cooling than Africa, population 1.1 billion, uses for everything. Or take its NSA the USA National Security Agency, once so secret that NSA was said to mean No Such Agency. It warns that no internet address is completely safe. The only way to stay undetected in this world is to join an as yet unknown tribe in Brazil or somewhere in Papua New Guinea. As soon as a person is connected, is wired, has an e-mail address, the cover is blown.

And here is where the number 666 makes its debut.

Governments now argue that to guarantee our security we have to sacrifice some rights. This is an invalid argument. By shifting from targeted to mass surveillance, governments risk undermining democracy while pretending to protect it.
Already we live in an age when your supermarket’s software knows who you are from your buying choices; where your email provider can send you advertisements matched to key words in your supposedly private messages. Fact is that we slowly lose our rights to privacy and our commitment to democracy. Canada’s former Prime Minister was well on the way to become a dictator. Will Justin Trudeau be different? Economic necessities and environmental constraints will be stronger than any good intention.
Already individual supervision is in place. More than 2.5 billion people, mostly urban dwellers, voluntarily wear a tracking device – their smartphone. It can tell you the nearest coffee shop, order you a taxi and even find you a nearby potential sex partner because it knows where you are. Hire a bike and the city transport system knows where you start and finish. The privacy issues here are dealt with by limiting the flow of data between public and private sectors, and by making the individual the centre of the information flow.
But in a smart city, you need data to flow freely across sectors that, in the commercial world, would normally be separate. The energy system needs to know what the transport system is doing. And the whole thing needs to be run like a “God game”: the government, not the individual, must exercise control.
For this reason, early on, the technology companies realized smart could only be built with a new kind of government. You would have to run the entire state as an integrated system, where every recorded change reconfigures activity elsewhere – so, a traffic incident at point A can temporarily reroute buses, redraw cycle lanes and send additional public transport to affected suburbs. Right now, at every conference and jamboree, mayors and council leaders are being bombarded with marketing pitches for smart-city technologies.

I recommend you read Chapter 13 of Revelation the last few verses. There it says that the mark of the beast- the Anti-Christ – is either on the forehead or on the hand. Only when this is visible can people buy or sell.

Today there are two technological ways to identify people: fingerprints and an eye scan, now widely used in airports before you board. With the power of computers doubling every year, the entire world population can be registered at a central point. Only the poorest of the poor in Africa and Asia escape detection: commercially they don’t count anyway.

Revelation, chapter 13, ends with a call for wisdom. That means that this passage can only be understood when it actually takes place, when reading the signs of the times. When Bavinck wrote his commentary some 60 years ago, computer power was negligible. The most powerful machines, made by IBM, occupied an entire room. Today a laptop has more capacity. “If anyone has insight, let him calculate the number of the beast, for it is man’s number. His number is 666.” So ends this chapter.

We are approaching the end of this world. Already everything is under threat: all of nature, the food supplies, whatever moves and lives and has a being. Still humanity will not turn to God, with churches closing everywhere and people abandoning ‘religion’ in droves. Has the church become a failure?
The Evil One, having the world solidly in its power, will persist till the bitter end and use all tricks of the trade to subject humanity to his evil intentions. The Evil One will use the powers of technology to make sure that everybody will comply with his wishes. For that end our SIN- Social Insurance Number – or our Social Security Number will be used, a number symbolized by 666.

Yes, that number 666 means more than a valiant attempt to reach that perfect stage.

P.S. “Hiel” is a Hebrew word meaning: god lives. The ending –ema, indicates ‘son of’. The name “Hielema” could mean: “son of the living God”( See Psalm 82: 6).

Next week: Fires, fires everywhere.