Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

THE ANTICHRIST

September 13 2015

The Republican Party in the USA, or perhaps more correctly, its mostly Christian component, believes that President Obama is the forerunner of the Antichrist, just as John the Baptizer was the forerunner of Jesus Christ.
Why do I so suddenly choose to write about this mysterious figure?

Two reasons.

(1). I just finished translating a book dealing with the last book of the Bible, the Revelation of John. In the last chapters the matter of the Antichrist is mentioned, an unavoidable subject because the Bible is quite clear on that score. He is portrayed there as the beast, an apt description. Bavinck writes that the end of the world- and we are fast approaching this point – will culminate in the appearing of the Antichrist who will rule the entire world. He sees this is the last frantic effort of the Satan to assert his power over the earth. John, on several occasions, both in the Gospel with his name and in his first letter calls the Satan “The Ruler of this world” (See John 12: 31; 14: 30; 16: 11) and in his letter in 1John 5: 19 John unambiguously states that “the whole world is under the control of the evil one.” So forget that Christ is in control at this point. The Satan offers Jesus the entire world if he would only worship him. Jesus does not dispute that claim, but also refuses to bow before the Evil one. We usually in the church sing and preach that Christ is the King of this world, and that is ultimately true, but in the meantime not he but the Satan calls the shots here in our world.
That we now live in a world dominated by the evil one is becoming more and more evident by the day, certainly quite visible in the march of the millions, escaping from chaotic countries to more orderly ones. Part of this global confusion is due to climate change – itself a sign of the last days. Both Daniel and Jesus in Matthew 24 mention that the last days bring the “great desolation” of which Climate Change is a sure sign. Another part of the new condition in which we live is the post-imperial, post-colonial and, soon, I believe, post-authoritarian world, in which no one will be able to control the disorderly regions. The Middle East regions with their arbitrary boundaries – all relics of World War I- used to be ruled with an iron fist by characters such as Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein, but the USA thought it best to intervene, confirming again that “the law of unintended consequences” is still in effect. That is one reason for the emerging of the Antichrist: utter chaos that needs a harsh tyrant.

(2) The second is the rise of the Anti-Party symptom. For this I have to thank David Brooks of the New York Times.
He calls the rise of the Anti-Party men, such as Trump, Carson and Sanders in the USA and Corbyn in the UK signs of disorientation.
Here’s what David Brooks wrote in the New York Times:
“Political parties are civic institutions. They are broad coalitions built for the purpose of creating a governing majority that can be used to win elections and pass agendas. This summer three American politicians have risen to the fore, and they all sit outside or at the margin of the party they are trying to lead.

Donald Trump didn’t even swear allegiance to his party’s eventual nominee until last week. He is a lone individual whose main cause and argument is Himself.

Ben Carson has no history in politics and a short history in the Republican Party. He is a politically unattached figure whose primary lifetime loyalty has been to the field of medicine.

Bernie Sanders is a socialist independent, who in the Senate caucuses with the Democrats.
And yet, these anti-party figures are surging in the party races for the presidential nominations.

This phenomenon is even more extreme in Britain. The British Labour Party suffered a crushing election defeat in May because people did not think its leader was strong enough, and because they thought its policy agenda was too far left.
And yet at the moment the next leader of the British Labour Party is Jeremy Corbyn. Mr. Corbyn has existed for decades on the leftward fringe of the Labour Party, tolerated as sort of a nice but dotty uncle.

He spent much of his career at the edge of the parliamentary party, writing columns for The Morning Star, a communist-founded newspaper. He’s a pacifist who called for British withdrawal from NATO. He’s spent his career consorting with the usual litany of anti-Western figures, including his friends in Hamas and Hezbollah. Until about three months ago he was considered the most outside of the outsiders — until a cult of personality developed around him, rocketing him to the top of the polls.

These four anti-party men have little experience in the profession of governing. They have no plausible path toward winning 50.1 percent of the vote in any national election. They have no prospect of forming a majority coalition that can enact their policies.
These sudden stars are not really about governing. They are tools for their supporters’ self-expression. They allow supporters to make a statement, demand respect or express anger or resentment. Sarah Palin was a pioneer in seeing politics not as a path to governance but as an expression of her followers’ id.

Why has this type risen so suddenly?

First, political parties, like institutions across society, are accorded less respect than in decades past. But we’re also seeing the political effects of a broader culture shift, the rise of what sociologists call expressive individualism.”
So far David Brooks

I connect these Anti-Party men to the Anti-Christ. If these people appeal to the masses, can an Antichrist not do the same? Let’s face it: the church is rapidly disappearing. There is little respect for the church even though a man such as Pope Francis is generally admired, basically because he challenges the capitalistic system, and in that “the God of this Age.” America is supposedly a Christian nature but its religion has ceased to be Christian. Christians there, by and large, are gun-toting, bent on revenge, climate change denying people, having no notion that Jesus once proclaimed that those he use the sword will die by the sword.

Let me point out one thing that struck me while translating this book on Revelation. In Revelation, that last Bible book, nature is given priority over the church. Here’s a quote: “The four living creatures, as we have seen, represent nature in its fullest sense of the word. Nature itself is the background against which history is depicted, the history of all her high and low points, her bloody wars and glorious discoveries. In the song John hears, it is the existence of the four living creatures, the beings of nature that glorify God as the God who was, who is and who is to come.”

Later on Bavinck points to the silence in heaven that lasted for half an hour. He explains that this is due to the church neglecting its duty to tell the world about the coming of the New Creation, and the Eternal Future that awaits those who “first seek the Kingdom”.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer talks that same language. In his introduction to his book on “Creation and Fall”, he writes words that should be engraved above every church door: “The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”

By failing to do so the church has become by and large irrelevant because it has paid at most only lip service to the importance of this message. No wonder in the book of Revelation nature is seen as more important than the church. Think about that.

The rise of the anti-party men is to me a sign that all institutions are in danger and that a fast-talking fellow – an Antichrist figure – who appeals to the basic instinct of the people, pursuing greed, easy living, something for nothing, all which can easily seduce the masses.
Increasingly the world becomes ungovernable. Increasingly institutions are failing us. Hillary Clinton, however much I admire her, is essentially a status-quo woman, who will follow the will of the money men. If fellows like Donald Trump can generate such a following, then it seems to me that the days of the Antichrist are not far off.

Already the scene is set for global disorder. What we see today in Europe with millions on the march to a better life, is only the beginning. The world is radically splitting in two camps, the haves and the have nots.

The bible is quite explicit that we are in for disastrous times. There is that number 666. Bavinck does not mention it, because when he wrote the book – he died in 1965 – there was no logical explanation possible for this. If today you follow the financial news then you will have noticed that many important people connected to both big government and big banks are calling for the abolishing of cash. In Greece there is a lower VAT – Value Added Tax equivalent to the HST in Canada- for using a credit card to pay items, for the simple reason that they leave a record, so there is no cheating on tax there. In the next few years when governments everywhere will need the maximum tax revenue, the call for abolishing cash will become more pronounced. It will leave each citizen who buys or sells at the mercy of the big machines, which all operate via numbers. Then nobody will be able to buy or sell unless they use the government or bank sanctioned card. It will use either the hand, via finger prints, or the head, an eye scan, exactly as Revelation portrays it. With security measures increasing all the time whether there is reason for it or not, we will quickly lose all freedom. I am not paranoid, but I see that what the Bible now already mentions may soon become reality.

Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw the coming of the Antichrist. He wrote a book by that name. He foresaw the coming madness, now evident in Climate Change. He wrote that the loss of God entails madness, which has implications for a society which has lost God. A society that prefers a Trump and a Corbyn in the UK has become mad. Once they prefer to be led by such figures, the matter of choosing for the Antichrist is the next step.

The entire world has already become godless. When in the next few years the world economy falls apart due to excess of monetary and environmental debt, and severe hardship will be the result, the disasters so plainly stated in the book of Revelation of John, will not be far away.

Basically we are blind to all this. We prefer a willful blindness, generated by false optimism and a wishy-washy religion that fails to consider the implications of what it means to be a Christian. I repeat, it is the failure of the church to “seek first the Kingdom’, to strive first and foremost for the welfare of creation, and so be prepared for the New Creation to come that is at the heart of the problem. That’s why Christ died on Calvary. John 3: 16, says it all. This text is almost always abused be the church to read that “God so loved humanity etc.” No, it says “God so loved the cosmos” for which he gave his life. The cosmos includes all that lives and moves and has a being. In other words: “The Four Living Creatures” that feature so prominently in the book of the Revelation of John have to become central in our lives, because without them “The Kingdom” is not possible.

Be aware: the Antichrist in whatever form, as a person or as a spirit, will come. Soon.

SEPTEMBER 6 2015
THOUGHTLESSNESS

In one of her book Hannah Arendt describes the concept of thoughtlessness, the failure to gauge the consequences of one’s actions. She wonders whether this is the root of all evil.

Perhaps she is right. It reminds me of the Garden of Eden which the Bible sees as the beginning of history and the origin of sin with Adam and Eve eating that fateful
piece of fruit. Had this human pair really gauged its disastrous consequences, now imperiling our entire earthly existence through Climate Change, perhaps they would have acted different.

I was thinking about that this week because I had a rather unique experience these last few days. For this I have to go back 40 years.
In 1975 our family, upon my insistence, moved from urban St.Catharines, Ont., to rural Tweed, midway between Ontario’s two principal cities, Toronto and Ottawa, each approximately 200 km away. Actually my story goes back even further, also connected to my topic of “Thoughtlessness”. That year was 1944 and as a 16 year old I still can picture myself in front of a corner store – a tobacconist- shuttered, of course, because there were no tobacco products for sale anymore. During the war in occupied the Netherlands cigarettes, if you had them, were worth their weight in gold. Nevertheless there I learned how to smoke. My friend, the eldest son of our family doctor, only a week younger than I, was puffing a cigarette, stolen from his father. He was smoking rings, which intrigued me and I wanted to try it as well. I did and that launched my smoking addiction, except that in those days smoking was seen as a manly thing. My father was a confirmed smoker and because he had lots of stuff to barter, was never short of cigarettes and cigars ever during the war. It was not hard for me to filch more than the odd one.

Fast forward to 1959, 15 years later and now well settled in Canada. One of my clients was dying – I then operated an insurance agency- and when I saw how he no longer ate or drank, but till his last breath smoked, I decided to quit my a pack-a-day-addiction. It was thoughtlessness that got me into the smoking habit – my father died of lung cancer – while my friend who was my accomplice in acquiring the habit, is also long gone. I see it as providence that made me quit. Instead I took up running, a so-called positive addiction, which I still do until this day.

I was reminded of all that this week when a pole that carries the wires that bring electricity to our house, snapped right at the point where it enters the earth. At a 70 degree angle it was leaning against a tree and the heat of the transformer caused the beginning of a fire there. I saw it happen at 2.30 p.m. Tuesday afternoon. I called 911 and the Tweed voluntary fire force came out with three trucks and they called Hydro One, just 2 km down the road. The hydro people too appeared with 2 trucks and quickly disconnected me from the grid by removing the transformer. Since the pole was on my property it became my responsibility to call a contractor to remove the broken pole and insert a new one. Both my phone and my internet were affected, so I had to go to a neighbor for this. The Ontario Hydro crew gave me a number to call, which turned out to be a wrong one. So it wasn’t until the next day that I located a firm able to so this.
That all happened on Tuesday September 1. On Friday morning a crew came to replace the pole, but another complication arose. Forty years ago, in 1975, I planted some 4000 trees in that same area where the wire connection is between our house and the highway. These trees were tiny when I planted them, but I never looked up, taking that overhead wire into consideration. Basically this was a matter of Thoughtlessness. So I had to engage a firm to cut a corridor through that pine forest because no power would be provided until that was done.

So how did we manage having no electricity for four days? Actually very well. Thanks to some foresight, the opposite of Thoughtlessness, I had, years ago, installed a winterized water pump over my wellhead. Winterized means that there is some four feet of air before the water is reached, something necessary in our neck of the woods where the frost at times goes as deep as 4 feet. So we had water, an important ingredient of human life.
Another, equally important feature was that we had solar panels and fairly new batteries so we had lighting, TV and enough power to boil water, make coffee in our house, and have the slow cooker prepare our oats. That was another good thing. A few years ago I had converted my office – a separate building- into a guest house, so, when our children come – they all live far away – they have separate lodging. There we have a propane-fired stove where we could cook our own meals, which we did in great comfort.

Years ago I bought a small freezer to accommodate the extra food we needed to overwinter. That one is connected to the solar panels. There was enough space there to store all our frozen items. Thank God.

Thoughtlessness is the key to our demise as the human race, something that started in the Garden of Eden. Take the Greenhouse effect, as it was called in the initial stages. A Swedish chemist by the name of Arrhenius wrote in 1906, thus 109 years ago, that if the concentration of Greenhouse Gases would double, the average temperature of planet Earth would rise by 5-6 degrees Celsius. Then it was less than 280ppm of CO2. Now it exceeds 400, not quite double but well on the way. We were certainly forewarned, but we did not listen. When coming November the world meets in Paris to discuss Climate Change we will hear all sorts of dire predictions and governments will make solemn promises, and, if history is any guide, all these promises will be broken because immediate needs, such as the pursuit of economic growth, and the pledge to provide employment, will have priority.

A dry run

To me the episode this past week is a dry run for the time when some powerful natural event will inconvenience us in North America so much that we will be forced to
live off the grid for an extended time. Our total way of life is one borrowed from the future and there will come a time, perhaps soon, where there is nothing more to borrow. To me it is an omen, and reminds me of what Joseph Conrad wrote in his Typhoon. There it says: Omens were as nothing to him, and he was unable to discover the message of prophecy till the fulfillment had brought it home to his very door.

To me there is a lesson here. Thanks to some foresight – the opposite of thoughtlessness – we weathered this small crisis well, and it made me realize the preciousness of water. For four days I went back to the old-fashioned way where every drop of water had to be carried into the house, to flush the toilets, to make tea and coffee and prepare meals.

Also for four days we had no access to telephone and Internet. We did have TV and radio, so we were not completely cut off from the world. The absence of Internet and the news sources there – I usually spent an hour each day to read various papers and blogs – gave me more time to finish the book I am translating which deals with Revelation, the last Bible book. That has been an intense job: 70 days of 5-6 hours of thinking, writing, erasing, re-arranging, while also receiving a thorough education in what Johan Herman Bavinck, a celebrated Professor of Mission Studies at the Free University of Amsterdam, once wrote.

Transposing his words from Dutch into contemporary English gave me good insight into the matters that deal with the Last Days. The more I re-interpret his words into the language of the world, the more I am convinced that we live in the Last Days. These last days – I think today – will be preceded by some terrible happenings, and when we watch TV and see what happens in the Middle East, the cradle of civilization, then for a large part of the world these terrible happenings are already taking place. Many parts of Africa are now inhabitable, due to drought, overgrazing and overpopulation. The deserts there are expanding rapidly and so is the population. Soon there will be some 200 million excess people in Africa alone, converging into cities where there is no work and no housing. What we have seen so far at the edges of Europe is only the very beginning.

Turmoil is also happening in the USA. A few days ago the New York Times reported that the murder rates in US cities are skyrocketing for the same reason: no work, no opportunities, no decent housing and too many guns.
Let me end with a quote from the last chapter of the Revelation book that I finished translating this past week.

But what is sure beyond doubt is that humanity will be hit exactly there where it imagines itself to be the strongest: in its technical knowhow and in its mastery over nature. Nature will fall upon the human race as a provoked lion: nature will breach all constrains humanity has enforced upon it, as it will explode into extraordinary catastrophes, such as earthquakes, floods, failed harvests, and pandemics, more severe than ever.
An integral part of this will be the dissolution of human society. Wars will come of an intensity and brutality never before experienced, causing incalculable confusion. And all this will result in the kingdom of the world-tyrant, the Rule of the Antichrist, the beast with his abhorrent body, arising from within the community of nations.

Again for a short spell the human throne will be established. Humanity will not turn to God, will only become more outspoken in its resistance to the Christian religion, more spiteful in its condemnation, more determined in its powerless hate, more relentless in its rage against God’s children. Indeed, the unjust will become more so; the vile will simply pursue more vileness: the masks will fall off, and the true nature of everything will be revealed.
Yes, what will become quite clear in the last days is that the real object for this new situation is to lay bare the true nature of everything and everybody. In this very last human empire that is coming into being, all hidden forces that have dominated the world’s history from times immemorial will be there for all openly to see in its minutest detail. In other words: sin will be revealed in its full sense of the word, in its breathtaking hubris, in its self-elevation to God’s throne, in its all-out discarding of everything that stands in the way of exercising power. All our vilest intentions will rise to the surface; all veneer will vanish, and melt away in the heat of evil evident in the last days. Humanity, not as single persons but as the human race in its totality, as a collective species, will unite in its secular dream to form a totalitarian world empire, lauding its greatness and power. This state will only have one idol….the Antichrist, the culmination of the world’s history.

All the signs are there already. Our artificial world, now tottering under the mountain of monetary and environmental debt, will soon collapse through a series of disasters, all man-made.

Once this evil empire has run its course, Christ’s Kingdom will come where everything will be as it is.
That is the ultimate consequence of the ‘thoughtlessness’ that started in the Garden of Eden. Indeed it looks like the original sin.

AUGUST 30 2015

HOW ACCURATE IS REVELATION, THE LAST BIBLE BOOK?

For the last 2 months I have been translating a Dutch book on Revelation. The book’s original title is: En Voort Wentelen de Eeuwen , which I have translated as And On and On the Ages Roll. The publisher will be Eerdmans Grand Rapids, and the publication date probably Fall 2016. This is the third book I have translated from the same author: Johan Herman Bavinck, a professor of mission at the Free University of Amsterdam.

I have almost finished the English version. I have given it my utmost, doing 4 pages each day, seven days per week. With 232 pages, densely printed at 360 words per page, I have so far done more than 75,000 words out of a total of some 83,000, so I have a pretty good idea what the book is all about.
I was really struck by the accuracy of the predictions because the book itself is a vision, a view 2000 years ahead, of what basically is the situation today.
Basically the book depicts the struggle between the forces of heaven and the forces of God’s opponent who was thrown out of heaven and landed right here on earth. That scene is described in Revelation 12, and the book starts with that chapter. Read it: it’s an interesting piece, and sets the tone for the entire book. Because Satan rules the earth now, Jesus calls him “The Prince of the World.” John too in one of his letters readily says (1 John 5: 19) that Satan controls the earth. That is all too evident today.

In my blog this week I will quote a few excerpts which I found striking. Here is one paragraph that accurately describes today’s world:

“As yet the industrial complex keeps on functioning. As yet the flowers bloom, the harvests ripen, and the heavens above the earth seem peaceful, revealing nothing of the bitter battles fought there between the powers of heaven and the powers of hell. But all this is soon to end. There is a spirit of despair in the air; there is something of skittishness affecting all of nature. All human certainties seem under threat, and all facts we always have regarded as true, now are being exposed as fiction. That’s what John observes with growing amazement.”

Isn’t that striking! It accurately describes the world today, where nothing really is what it seems. I have for a long time been writing that we live in the last of days. This seems to confirm it.

Here is another quote from the book:

“In the next scenario (Rev. 15: 5 till 16: 21) the last things are set into motion. The picture John provides us with is again a succession of sad disasters. In several aspects they remind us of those that happened in Egypt during the ancient Pharaoh regime, but here they are considerably more intense and dangerous. They are of cosmic proportions and even the sun and the earth are part of all this. Pandemics produce panic in the planet’s population, deadly droughts, hellish heat devastate the crops. The culmination of the natural disasters and the pinnacle of pain are caused by an earthquake (16: 18) “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.” The seismographs in the capitals shake wildly and record numbers beyond any ever registered. And the houses tumble, the palaces are ruined. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events rolls over the world.”

Another picture of today. So far we have seen drought and floods. As yet no earthquake but all the signs of the BIG ONE are out there. It will come, and so will a pandemic. Lancet magazine reports that some 90 percent of the world’s population suffers from one or two maladies. Indeed the stage is set for this as well.
Here is something very evident today:

“The catastrophes mentioned here all are of a cosmic nature. They affect people everywhere. Earlier we have seen how in the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate from above, that find their source in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Here is only the first type mentioned. It is as if the earth, given by God as a present to humanity to be her own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature which for so long, for many centuries, has faithfully served humanity and provided it with all its needs, now has become recalcitrant, and full of revenge has thrown herself upon humanity. And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her atomic energy, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now confronted, in a total humiliating fashion, with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.”
Once nature turns against us, we are helpless. That is the situation today.”

This passage reminds me of James Lovelock’s book THE REVENGE OF GAIA. That book too says that Climate Change is a ‘man-made’ curse. Revelation is totally accurate here. We are the cause of all this trouble. Creation is taking revenge for all the pain we are afflicting on her.

Gail Tverberg in her latest blog – August 26 2015- predicts that “The big thing that is happening is that the world financial system is likely to collapse. Back in 2008, the world financial system almost collapsed. This time, our chances of avoiding collapse are very slim. Without the financial system, pretty much nothing else works: the oil extraction system, the electricity delivery system, the pension system, the ability of the stock market to hold its value. The change we are encountering is similar to losing the operating system on a computer, or unplugging a refrigerator from the wall. We don’t know how fast things will unravel, but things are likely to be quite different in as short a time as a year. World financial leaders are likely to “pull out the stops,” trying to keep things together. A big part of our problem is too much debt. This is hard to fix, because reducing debt reduces demand and makes commodity prices fall further. With low prices, production of commodities is likely to fall. For example, food production using fossil fuel inputs is likely to greatly decline over time, as is oil, gas, and coal production.”

Her conclusion is that:

“We can’t say that no one warned us about the predicament we are facing. Instead, we chose not to listen. Public officials gave a further push in this direction, by channeling research funds toward distant theoretically solvable problems, instead of understanding the true nature of what we are up against. “
A few words about Gail Tverberg. She is an actuary interested in finite world issues – oil depletion, natural gas depletion, water shortages, and climate change. Her blog is called The Finite Earth.

The book I am translating continues in the exact way Gail Tverberg predicts. The human race, you and me, and basically all others, are not ready when the disaster strikes that Gail thinks will happen very soon.

Here is another excerpt of the book on Revelation. Will the human race turn to God? Will these coming disasters cause them to convert?

“There’s not a trace of confusion to be noticed. Of course people are unsure. Of course there also is a good amount of despair. But conversion? No, they cursed God, the God of the heavens! Strange, those modern men and women, who had become convinced that the concept ‘god’ did not exist anymore, all these people started to curse. They always had told themselves that they no longer believed in God, that it was a fairytale, something they had ridiculed all their lives. They had left the church in droves already long ago and had assured their neighbors that God was dead and that they, in line with the spirit of the age, had nothing to do with him anymore. On the census they had written “no church affiliation”, so how come that it was now possible that God suddenly was back, risen from the dead? How come that these educated people, so up-to-date with everything, with the latest gadgets, who never did need God, now suddenly seem to remember that he exists after all? Was there in the deepest crevices of their mind a secret notion that the meaning of life is that we always are in a conversation with him who made and even guides us? Have they understood this more profoundly than they would admit to themselves and to others? In any case, at this so critical juncture, now that the flames of defeat leap up high and start to scorch their fragile body frame, now irrepressibly the certainty arises that God is there after all. No wonder these nervous, these now so unbalanced persons, clench their tiny fists and threaten the Lord of the heavens. They wished they could aim a guided missile at him and so shoot God from his throne. They would crucify him again if they could, would cast him into the deepest black hole, dead, forever defeated. But all they can do is shout out their powerless rage against him who now so powerfully intervenes in the human endeavor of creation and construction.”

Revelation is quite clear here: no mass conversion.

Revelation also says something that concerns the Middle East, Iraq and Syria. It is there where the biblical world began, and civilization started. Is it also there
where it all will end? The Middle and Far East has four countries that possess nuclear capacity. It is a ‘powder keg’ and much more dangerous with these dangerous bombs, and even more dangerous with so many people who have nothing to lose. This next excerpt reminds me of the Middle East problems. John touches here on some problems that happened there in his time. For Scythes and Parthians read ISIS or Sunnis and Shiites.

“In the meantime the world of humanity is in motion. It is getting ready for battle. John relates it in a few small flashes. The river Euphrates dries up, opening the way for the kings of the east. The Euphrates is the borderline that separates the culture of Asia Minor from the barbarians in the East, the Scythes and the Parthians, whose masses have overrun the old (Western) world. The Euphrates is the last frontier, the last protection against chaos. Now that same Euphrates River has dried up. I imagine that this indicates that the kingdom suddenly has become vulnerable. Apparently there still are nations who have refused to submit to the authority of the tyrant. They never bothered this strongman before because then they were powerless. But now that the capital (Babylon) has been reduced to rubble, now that universal lawlessness is threatening to overwhelm the realm, now there is a real danger that they will invade the kingdom and destroy it. Again there is a real threat of war and the nations prepare for the worst.”

We really have no idea how volatile the entire world situation is. The newspapers are incapable of reporting the truth because their management is dominated by big capital and it is exactly big capital that is the anti-Christian force in this world. Its motto is ‘creative destruction’ which is better labeled as ‘creation-destruction’ because that is exactly what its main aim is, believing with the power of religion that the earth in infinite.
Jesus once wondered whether he, upon his return, would find ‘faith’ on earth. Of course there is ‘faith’ and ‘faith’. What he is referring to is ’faith in the coming of his kingdom”, the new earth that he is preparing. The book of the Revelation of John concludes with that, calling it “The New Jerusalem” which is adorned like a bride. The groom is the New Humanity, including Jesus Christ, “The Son of Man”, Humanity personified. The bride is the New Earth, and the we dding is the perfect union between the New Humanity, the Redeemed of the Lord, and the New Earth.

It is for that union we now must prepare ourselves. With the situation as it is today, where our economic situation is so fragile, there is no time to lose.

AUGUST 23 2015

WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE WE GOING?

I am somewhat of a news freak. Each day I read the New York Times, the Guardian, the Globe and Mail (Toronto) and several other news sources. All on line, of course. I also closely follow the financial news, partly because until my retirement, I had been in business for some 40 years. There I made three successive moves: in 1952 I started out in life insurance, then, in 1957, I added general insurance, mainly fire and auto, while in 1963 I branched out in real estate. In 1975 I sold out, moved from the city to the country, where I built an energy efficient house.
In 1979 I qualified as a professional (real estate) appraiser, after a few years of full-time study, living on the interest of some capital, in a day when money still earned 8-12 percent per year, and the cost of living was a lot lower. I remember that in 1975 I paid less than $5 per month for telephone service.
For the world the last 40 years have been an era of transition. Oil spiked, China awoke and moved from a medieval existence to the 21th century, jumping the world’s all important Primary Productivity from less than 40 percent to now dangerously approaching 50 percent.

Primary Productivity

Primary Productivity was 100 percent 10,000 years ago when there were only hunter-gathering people, eating from the earth what was readily available, killing the odd animal, eating the apples and fruits and tubers that would grow back the next year. Agriculture changed all that. Rather than eat the buffalo that roamed the prairies by the millions, we plowed over that fertile soil, grew corn and fed it to millions of beef cattle at great expense to the soil and weather. We call that progress.
Now we have paved the planet, syphoned off the sea-fish, mined the mountains, ruined the rivers, asphyxiated the air, all for the sake of money. And, thanks to oil, thanks to fertilizer-oil derived, thanks to tractors – running on oil – thanks to an elaborate trucking and distribution system – all run on oil – we sired a few extra billions of people, and now we have reached the top, going downhill from here. We now use so much of the earth – almost 50% – that almost nothing is left for wild animals, birds and bees. So they die. We are a race of murderers.

In the process we have abandoned religion, except the capitalist religion of infinite growth, but now that religion is proving false, but, since the church has gone in bed with the spirit of this age, not in name, but in practice, the entire world is groping in the dark, having lost all security. It struck me, while translating a book on Revelation, that in the book the “four living creatures” representing creation, are named before the 24 elders, symbolizing the 2 x 12 elders of the Old and New Testament church. In John’s vision as recorded in Revelation, creation has priority over the human race. I should repeat that: in the last bible book, Revelation, the book that lays everything bare, creation is seen as more important than the church. Wake up Church, and reset your priorities if you want to be relevant in a world where the church has almost completely lost its membership. We are speeding to the End.

The world going up in smoke.

Years ago Bill McKibbon wrote a book “The End of Nature”, referring to Climate Change. Today we see that end in living color when we watch the trees everywhere go up in smoke, not only depriving nature of its natural CO2 absorber, but sending out millions of tons of extra soot into the air. The temperature in California has increased by close to 2 degrees Fahrenheit in a few decades while the Arctic, where most of the methane is buried, has seen even greater increases, setting the stage for a Climate Change explosion as the 20 times more powerful methane starts escaping.

Oil is THE cause of Climate Change. Here is what Thomas L. Friedman wrote in the New York Times last week.
”
Here’s my bet about the future of Sunni, Shiite, Arab, Turkish, Kurdish and Israeli relations: If they don’t end their long-running conflicts, Mother Nature is going to destroy them all long before they destroy one another. Let me point out a few news items you may have missed while debating the Iran nuclear deal.
On July 31, USA Today reported that in Bandar Mahshahr, Iran, a city adjacent to the Persian Gulf, the heat index soared to 163 degrees “as a heat wave continued to bake the Middle East, already one of the hottest places on earth. ‘That was one of the most incredible temperature observations I have ever seen, and it is one of the most extreme readings ever in the world,’ AccuWeather meteorologist Anthony Sagliani said in a statement.”

If you are not familiar with the Fahrenheit gauge of temperature, 163 degrees Fahrenheit is “163 minus 32= 131 divided by 9=14.5 x 5 =72 degrees Celsius.” That is hellish hot.

Another quote from this column:

“Indeed, see Syria: Its revolution was preceded by the worst four-year drought in the country’s modern history, driving nearly a million farmers and herders off the land, into the cities where the government of Bashar al-Assad completely failed to help them, fueling the revolution.
All the people in this region are playing with fire. While they’re fighting over who is caliph, who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad from the seventh century — Sunnis or Shiites — and to whom God really gave the holy land, Mother Nature is not sitting idle. She doesn’t do politics — only physics, biology and chemistry. And if they add up the wrong way, she will take them all down.
The only “ism” that will save them is not Shiism or Islamism but “environmentalism” — understanding that there is no Shiite air or Sunni water, there is just “the commons,” their shared ecosystems, and unless they cooperate to manage and preserve them (and we all address climate change), vast eco-devastation awaits them all.”

Please note that Climate Change is behind much of the turmoil in the Middle East. No wonder millions of young people flock to Europe where a more moderate climate and accumulated riches keep society functioning to some extent. That too is going to change. Under the surface the foundation there too is crumbling. In the Middle East it is lack of water, and excessive heat. In Europe debt will do them in, as will be the case in China and Japan as well. Nothing is certain anymore.
Nihilism rules

The Latin word for ‘nothing’ is ‘nihil’. We have entered the age of ‘nihilism’. It also means that nothing works anymore. Oh yes, we have an election coming up in Canada on October 19. The present government has done Canada a lot of harm, both in the environment and in its reputation as an enlightened country. I am all for a change in government, but, given the financial and environmental situation, basically nothing will change, for the simple reason that the momentum both in finances and the atmosphere will stifle any good movements. Also the mind of the people will make it impossible to alter the course we are on. No wonder the people have become believers in Nihilism, because we are drifting in a fixed direction to destruction, and this will not change.
Look again at the article Friedman wrote, the columnist of the New York Times. The people in the Middle East have nothing to lose, because they have lost everything. At least they have some sort of religion they say they believe in (they probably cannot define it) and Climate Change is far from their minds, so they will continue to kill each other and wreck whatever is still working.

We have now entered the age of ‘nihilism’, which also applies to money as money earns ‘nihil’, nothing, in interest. Next month, September, Janet Yellen is supposed to increase the rate of money from next to nihil, next to nothing, by perhaps 0.25 percent, an increase the world deeply fears because even such a tiny raise may throw off the books of most nations.

The whole world is nervous.

Nobody knows what’s happening anymore. The only certain thing is uncertainty. Everything is worsening. Greece is fueling this uncertainty again. The weather is doing the same, with the past month, July, the hottest ever recorded. A ray of hope was given by a 90 year old man, President Carter, a sincere Christian who now fights brain cancer and speaks about it so smilingly that it reminded me of Paul saying (Philippians 1: 21) “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain.”
Meanwhile, as far as I can see, the climate change movement is effectively dead in its tracks, and we no longer have time to make something happen before the rising spiral of climate catastrophe begins—as my readers may have noticed, that’s already well under way. From here on in, it’s probably a safe bet that anthropogenic – which means “generated by us humans -climate change will accelerate until it fulfills the prophecy of The Limits to Growth and forces the global industrial economy to its knees.

A terrible future await us

The coming crisis will be horrendous. As corrections to crises are wont to do is: they overshoot. The force of the collapse that is certainly to come will be so devastating that much of what we hold dear will be wiped out, including, of course, that monthly addition to your bank account that the Federal government is so kind to credit you each month. It won’t happen tomorrow or next week, or perhaps not even next year, but 2017 could well be the catastrophic year, right after the American Election.

A new book coming on Revelation

That will be a year after a book that I am translating on the last bible book, Revelation, dealing with “The Last of Things”, the final days of our sinful life on earth.
I chose to translate the book because I agree with its main premise, which is that, in order to reach the glorious end that the Bible teaches, the coming of the New Earth, we will have to go through what the Roman Catholics used to call ‘purgatory’.
We are heading for a profoundly humbling experience, to put it mildly. We, technological wizards, are not the demigods we supposed ourselves to be. The Lord, in order to speed up history, made us the recipients of an energy bonanza which temporarily allowed us to turn the wildest dreams into reality: in the last 100 years we fought two world wars to secure access to these energy sources, killing some 100 million people in the process. Thanks to having some 200 energy slaves at our disposal 24/7, we, for a short time, lived the life of kings.

Now this dream is ending, and the end will mean that many multiples of the 100 million killed in wars, and another 100 million killed in car and other energy related accidents, will bite the dust, by which I mean that not millions but billions will experience a cruel death in the next decades. After all how many can the world support on a sustaining basis?
The warnings are out there loud and clear, especially this past week when markets tumbled, gold soared, and the money people became very nervous.

What is the message of this week? We do well to heed the warnings that our way of life can no longer continue. We must look ahead and prepare for a much simpler life, convert to the ways of our ancestors who lived close to God and close to nature, God’s holy direct Word.
I’d wish that church communities would be open to this as they are supposed to know ‘the way of the Lord.”
Where are we going? There is not a grain of doubt in my mind that we are speeding, galloping, racing, to the end of the world as we know it. That’s why I am rushing to finalize that book. Eerdmans in Grand Rapids, MI will publish it. My work will be done in mid September. Pray that I do a worthwhile job.

AUGUST 16 2015

THE EARTH IS ANGRY

Almost every night, for a few minutes, I watch an American channel because it reports the ongoing weather disasters in the USA. And there are plenty of them this year. Last week I saw a dust storm in Arizona, floods in Colorado and New England, fires everywhere. All these happenings are now a daily occurrence.
True these unusual weather events happen in Canada too, but not to that extent. I think it has to do with Climate Change. James Lovelock in his book The Revenge of Gaia which has an equally telling subtitle: Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, has in its Preface this sentence: “We have driven the Earth to a crisis state from which it may never, on a human scale, return to the lush and comfortable world we love and in which we grew up”.

Fond memories

I am old enough to remember those days when there were a mere 2 billion people in the world – compared to 7 billion plus – and the atmosphere was relatively at ease. Not so now. Worse, much worse is yet to come, but, strangely enough, we will not pay attention. Why Not?
Here is what Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard, says: “Our brain is essentially a get-out-of-the-way machine. That’s why we can duck a baseball in milliseconds, but threats that unfold over generations fail to trigger our reactionary instincts…… Many environmentalists say climate change is happening too fast,” Gilbert says. “No, it’s happening too slowly. It’s not happening nearly quickly enough to get our attention.”
So don’t expect the world to change when all the governments on the earth will send delegates to Paris in November to discuss “The State of the Climate”. We will read frightening press releases, hear nations make great promises, and the war against the earth will continue, and the earth will become more angry than ever.
Last week Friday in the New York Times I saw an editorial “How California is winning the drought”. Pure hogwash. The earth is especially angry in California, a state built on sand. The Bible warns us not to build on a shifty foundation because when the storms come or drought or too many people clamoring for gold in the so-called “Golden State” then something has to give.

Here is what’s really happening: “California’s rivers and lakes are running dry, but its deep aquifers are also rapidly disappearing. The majority of the 40 million Californians are already drawing on this last reserve of water, and they are doing so with such intensity and without restriction that sometimes the ground sinks beneath their feet. The underground reservoir collapses. This in turn destabilizes bridges and damages irrigation canals and roads.
This groundwater is thousands of years old, and it is not replenishing itself. Those who hope to win the race for the last water reserves are forced to drill deeper and deeper into the ground.”

And not only California. I have a well, and fortunately it contains enough water to provide a life-long water supply for more than 10 families. But it is on an electric pump, so, in case electricity fails- and today anything is possible because the earth everywhere is angry – I have a hand pump, a frost free one, because in the winter with an ice storm, who what happens.

Consider this: “The Earth may be a blue planet when seen from space, but only 2.5% of its water is fresh. That water is wasted, polluted and poisoned and its distribution is appallingly unfair. The world’s population has almost tripled since 1950, but water consumption has increased six-fold. To make matters worse, mankind is changing the Earth’s climate with greenhouse gas emissions, which only exacerbates the injustices. When we talk about water becoming scarce, we are first and foremost referring to people who are suffering from thirst. Close to a billion people are forced to drink contaminated water, while another 2.3 billion suffer from a shortage of water. How will we manage to feed more and more people with less and less water? But people in developing countries are no longer the only ones affected by the problem. Droughts facilitate the massive wildfires in California, and they adversely affect farms in Spain.”
We can go without food for a few weeks: we need water every day, that’s why I have a hand pump, just in case.

Yes, the earth is angry. It reminds me of Isaiah 24. It says it better than I can put it:
The earth is defiled by its people
The have disobeyed the laws
Violated the statutes and
Broken the everlasting covenant.
Therefore a curse consumes the earth;
Its people must bear their guilt.
Therefore earth’s inhabitants are burned up,
And very few people are left.

No wonder that the New Testament repeats it in Romans 8: 22, where it says that: “We know that whole creation has been groaning as in pain of childbirth right up to the present time.”

These words were written thousands of years ago, confirming that soil degradation and the onset of deserts, due to overgrazing and deforestation has been going on for many, many centuries.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, in his The Upside of Down. Catastrophe, creativity and the renewal of civilization, writes that the Fall of Rome now some 1550 years ago was due to “greater complexity, the empire needed more and more energy, and eventually it couldn’t find enough.”
History is repeating itself. The earth is angry, because its very essence is being consumed.

A friend sent me an article by Andre Nikiforuk, which appeared in The Tyee. The article’s title is The Earth’s Battery is running Low. The subtitle is “We’ve drained our planet’s stored energy, scientists say, with no rechargeable plug in sight.”

The article starts with the following words:
“In the quiet of summer, a couple of U.S. scientists argued in the pages of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that modern civilization has drained the Earth — an ancient battery of stored chemical energy — to a dangerous low.
“Although the battery metaphor made headlines in leading newspapers in China, India and Russia, the paper didn’t garner “much immediate attention in North America,” admits lead author John Schramski, a mechanical engineer and an ecologist.
“In the paper, Schramski and his colleagues at the University of Georgia and the University of New Mexico compared the energy state of the Earth to “the energy state of a house powered by a once-charged battery supplying all energy for lights, heating, cooling, cooking, power appliances and electronic communication.
“It took hundreds of millions of years for photosynthetic plants to trickle charge that battery. Those plants converted low quality sunlight into high-quality chemical energy stored either in living biomass (forests and plankton) or more lastingly in the dead plants and animals that became oil, gas and coal. But in just a few centuries humans and “the modern industrial-technological informational society” have spent that stored chemical energy and depleted the Earth-space battery.
“Society partly drains the battery by converting forests and grasslands into agricultural fields. It diminishes the battery further by burning fossil fuels to plow fields and build cities. Human engineering of one kind or another has left a mark on 83 per cent of the planet. In essence, humans depleted the battery to grow exponentially and spend more energy.
“As the battery discharges,” the scientists write, the cooling, heating and electronic services provided to the house “become unavailable and the house soon becomes uninhabitable.”
“The Earth is like a dying cell phone at an airport, says Schramski, but with no rechargeable plug in sight. As we burn organic chemical energy, we generate work to grow our population and economy. In the process the high-quality chemical energy is transformed into heat and lost from the planet by radiation into outer space,” explains Schramski and his colleagues.
“Oil companies, dams and solar networks can’t create energy: they can only tap in to the flow and transform it into a useful form. And in the process of transforming the fossil fuels, heat is lost into the atmosphere and eventually space. All of this energy consumption from stored biomass has left an ugly trail of carbon dioxide and methane emissions that are now creating climate chaos and acidifying oceans. According to Schramski, the stored living biomass portion of the battery represents the basis for sustaining all life on Earth and is what distinguishes us from the other planets in our solar system.

“At the time of the Roman Empire, the Earth held 1,000 billion tonnes of carbon in living biomass, which equaled about 35 zettajoules of chemical energy. Meanwhile chain welding, soil eroding and bulldozing humans have whittled the Earth’s net primary production down to 550 billion tonnes of carbon in biomass and thereby depleted the battery to 19.2 zettajoules. That’s a significant drop.
“I’m not an ardent environmentalist; my training and my scientific work are rooted in thermodynamics,” Schramski says. “These laws are absolute and incontrovertible; we have a limited amount of biomass energy available on the planet, and once it’s exhausted, there is absolutely nothing to replace it. The paper goes on: “The Earth is in serious energetic imbalance due to human energy use. This imbalance defines our most dominant conflict with nature. It really is a conflict in the sense that the current energy imbalance, a crisis unprecedented in Earth history, is a direct consequence of technological innovation.”

So far my quote from this magazine.

In other words: we humans have monopolized the earth at the expense of animals: almost all big animals are gone. Almost all fish has disappeared. Almost all water is wasted. How long can we still last?

If these calculations of the earth’s total stored energy of 1000 billion tons of stored energy, of which we have used up 450 billion tons, that means that there are only 550 billion left. We are almost half-way, almost to the tipping point. Having arrived there, red warning lights will show up, and even more disasters will further drain the earth’s battery. As more forests burn, diminishing the capacity to absorb Green House Gases, and the burning itself adding more and more, and as methane escapes from the ever warming tundra, the pace speeds up, exponentially.

Jesus once accosted the Pharisees, in Matthew 23: 24, saying, none too politely: “You blind guides, you strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.” These words were spoken just before Matthew 24, which has as its heading: Signs of the End of the Age. In that chapter Jesus says that “The Angry Earth” will be totally destroyed by you, stupid people, who strain out the smallest of the smallest animal, a gnat, or do a bit of recycling, but fly everywhere in the world for a vacation, creating tons of Green House Gases, swallowing a camel.”

We have painted ourselves in an impossible situation. We are so addicted to fossil fuel that it will kill us if we continue and also kill us when we stop using it.
Well, whatever I say or write will hardly make a difference. Prof. Gilbert discovered that our brains simply cannot fathom the fact that we are on a suicidal path. For centuries, from as far as we can remember, the human race has thrived, has grown in expertise, has become more clever than ever, so we simply look to the past and extrapolate it to the days to come. Never before have we experienced a total global collapse. Yet the Bible tells us so in unambiguous terms. Matthew 24, Jesus’ very own words, spells it out, drumbeat after drumbeat. He hammers it out again in Revelation. Actually the entire Bible confirms it. 2 Peter 3: 10 reaffirms Jesus’ words:

“But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. The heavens will disappear with a roar and the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare”.

That’s what will happen to the angry earth: it will be totally purified and from there on it will be at peace forever.

SUNDAY AUGUST 9 2015

THE TALE OF TWO CITIES

On Thursday August 6 2015, two political debates were held in North America, one in Toronto, Ontario, the other in Cleveland, Ohio. The first one featured 3 men and a woman, with a male moderator who was quite passive and befitting being Canadian, quite polite. And so were the four people. They were, of course, politicians. Nobody else does such crazy things as debating the economy, the environment and national security. I believe those were three topics.
The one woman was Elisabeth May, the leader of the Canadian Green Party a party of two members in Parliament in Ottawa. The other three were men, all professional politicians, paid by the public purse. If Ms. May is Green, Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, also there, is the opposite. He has the worst environmental record of any major country. That’s why he should be booted out.
Of course, there are lots of Green People in Canada, I am among them, but that does not mean that I vote green. It’ll be a lost vote in my rural – green by color but not by conviction – riding. My riding goes Conservative.

Harper has been the ruler of Canada for a decade and most people are sick of him, fed up is the better world. He has the following of the Christian segment of the population but he is an enemy of the environment. I am not sure how that is possible, because, according to the church This is Our Father World. But OK that is a small matter and somewhat of an inconsistency among church people who often take their cue from their American brothers and sisters, adherents to the American Religion which, says Professor Dr. Harold Bloom, goes under the label of Protestant Christianity but has ceased to be Christian.
Perhaps, no, not perhaps but most assuredly, Christianity must be redefined in terms of 21st Century standards. Common Christianity, the Pentecostal – Southern Baptist kind tends to be Gnostic, a heresy the Apostle John condemns in no uncertain terms, but being a gnostic is much easier. It preaches heaven as our destination. P. M. (stands for Prime Minister) Harper is one of those gnostic guys, and so the earth can suffer. The more it suffers, the sooner comes the RAPTURE, the pagan belief that the true believers will be fetched up – raptured – to heaven while folks like me will stay on the evil earth. Yes, Gnostics think that the earth is evil, actually is created by an evil spirit.

There also were 10 men in Cleveland, also all rapture adherents. That Trump man was among them, who only believes in himself: he is the greatest, the best and the cleverest and all the others are dim wits. It says something about the American psyche that he leads in the polls. Americans…. No I will not condemn them. There are a few good ones, but especially the Republican majority are dumb, dumb, dumb, and so these 10 professional politicians, believe it or not, in other to get their vote, they are forced to act dumb. That is what politics does to a person.
Thank goodness: Canada is different. Just imagine: in Canada a confessed Socialist leads in the polls, while that young man Trudeau– 43 years old – is the son of a famous Socialist and probably also is one. So where in the USA the word SOCIALIST is a curse word, almost as bad as being a Commie or a follower of the Taliban or the ISIS, that terrible outfit in the Middle East, in Canada we even have states – we call them provinces – with a Socialist government. Just a few months ago ALBERTA, the most Harper-ite area, went red, not red for Republican but Socialistic Red. So Harper is scared. I really pray that he will not make it.
Oh yes, that debate in Canada. Quite polite. Nobody was shot, nobody was cursed, all very Canadian. I read in the New York Times that these 10 debaters in Cleveland got quite the grilling from the three moderators, especially from the woman on the panel. Of course these questioners were not the run of the mill Republicans.

Back to Toronto.

I am at heart a Green guy, but my riding is a Harper stronghold. The sitting member is a nice fellow: promoted from the backwoods to the back benches. The MPs as we call them – meaning Member of Parliament and not Military Police – are seated in the House in order of importance. The PM and his ministers sit in the front row and so on.
Oh yes, that debate in Canada. Nothing spectacular. I will vote strategically, which means that whoever of the three Harper opposition leaders has the best chance to unseat a Harper-trained-seal gets my vote.
So do I have political convictions? Not of the secular kind. I do vote. As a Canadian by choice I have never failed to vote. In a sense I vote in protest because it has become my sincere opinion that just as the church, political parties too have become meaningless. Perhaps these words create the wrong impression. I am not an anarchist and I am not anti-Christian. I strongly believe in good government and a viable church. But it is becoming my ever firmer opinion that the problems we face as a nation and as a church can no longer be solved.
Let me start with the church, which plays an important part in my life. Bonhoeffer’s advice to the Church of Christ, in his introduction to Creation and Fall, is: “To witness to the end of all things, to live from the end, to think from the end, to act from the end, to proclaim its message for the end.” I believe that Bonhoeffer is right.

I better elaborate here because you may not go to church: not too many people do nowadays. I can only do this by quoting another of my favorite people, J. H. Bavinck. He says that there are two kingdoms. Politicians paint a utopia in their quest for votes. The kingdom they promise when elected is one of full employment, low or no inflation, never deflation, a great environment, and low taxes. All are mostly lies, because we now know that all this has become impossible due to our raping God’s creation.

Bonhoeffer and Bavinck point to the Utopia that is coming: God’s Kingdom. You see God created this world, and it was perfect. Somehow we listened to God’s enemy, the Evil one, who whispered in our ears that we too could be god, be like Don Trump and have it all. So we sinned against creation. Jesus, in principle, restored that creation, and, when he returns he will bring the New Kingdom. That’s ‘the end’ Bonhoeffer is talking about. That is the message for the church, to look forward to the coming of the Kingdom, the restored earth and work for that goal.
I’d wish that the church would follow Bonhoeffer’s recommendation. Then the church would suddenly become a hot item, because, finally, it would have become relevant.
And here the church – and its irrelevance – intersects with politics. Politics would suddenly gain prominence if it too would deal with reality and not simply talk about growth, job creation, and slaying deficits, none of which will happen, but sincerely work to restore creation.
Well, let me tell you: all is not well. We are entering the final phase of Western civilization, and it ain’t going to be pretty. Bonhoeffer’s advice to the Church of Christ, in his introduction to Creation and Fall is, and I repeat: “To witness to the end of all things, to live from the end, to think from the end, to act from the end, to proclaim its message for the end.”

In this the church fails miserably. What must be done today is to prepare for the time – and it can come soon – when Climate Change will either fry us out, because of lack of water and dangers of fires, or drown us out. The hundreds of thousands of refugees from Africa and Asia, seeking some sort of livable life in Europe are proof that large sections of the earth – which God called good after each phase, and did so seven times when it was completed – are now so bad that dust storm take people’s breath away, literally. We better get used to extremes, also in politics, also in crime, also in all fields, because degradation of the environment and of people’s psyche goes hand in hand.

But in these debates, neither in Canada nor in the USA, anybody even hinted at them. All I heard were platitudes, downright lies, such as boasting that jobs can be created. How? By going into more debt? By spending more on infrastructure? Ah, Japan did that, paving roads to nowhere. China did that, building millions of apartments, complete cities with shopping centers, where nobody lives, six lane highways with not one vehicle on them. Lots of jobs were created, and now, now what? Debts, Debts, Debts, were the result. The only trouble with debt is that it has to be repaid. Either by the lender, who goes broke if it is not paid, or by the borrower, who might declare bankruptcy. So in the end everybody suffers and is worse off.

You want an answer to the malaise everywhere? So is my other favorite theologian, J. H. Bavinck.
Here is a direct quote of his book Between the Beginning and the End: a Radical Kingdom Vision. In his conclusion of the chapter on The Kingdom, he writes: The human kingdom is a utopia, an idealistic impossibility, something that is and is not, something that arises but cannot last. Building the Tower of Babel fails every time it is attempted. Over against all these kingdoms God makes his own kingdom come. These human kingdoms resist God’s plan with every fiber of their being; they act like demons in their fuming rage against God’s intention.

So what is God’s Kingdom?

God’s kingdom includes the sea and the plants, the mountains and the valleys, all that that was and is and is to come – all of it, all of creation, incorporated in a great and mighty whole. God’s Kingdom is the place where all things are in their rightful position 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.
That is what Bonhoeffer refers to when he writes that the church must witness to that end. Here the church fails miserably. Yet all signs are there that we are running to the end, hell over heels, is the expression I believe. Do we hear that when we listen to the tales these politicians spin in the two cities? Have we heard them say that this world now is full of our junk and empty of what was there originally, when God created it and all was good?
We are blind and our politicians and our church leaders fail to show us the way. Of the ten in Cleveland nothing even remotely related to this was heard. Of the four in Toronto, a few words of caution were uttered, but also hardly anything relevant.

Believe me soon we will be in for a rough ride. Deflation is the worst of all economic perils. It is on the way, with miraculous China heading the pack. We live in a finite world, where the doctrine of Infinite Growth is the Devil’s Holy Grail. He knows he is defeated, and like a true fanatic, he is redoubling his efforts, and our politicians in all cities are his eager executives.

The tale of two cities is not really about Cleveland and Toronto, about Republicans and Democrats, about Harper and his opposition. They all are on the one side, are all in the same camp, in the camp of Babylon.
The real tale of two cities involves the two cities named in the Bible: Babylon, the bastion of the Evil one, where Cleveland and Toronto find their home and The New Jerusalem, representing God’s Kingdom to come.
Make your choice.