Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

August 2014

HEADING FOR DISASTER?

The simple answer to this question is: Yes, we are on the path of unparalleled, unprecedented perils, worse than anything ever experienced, even in the entire second millennium, the previous 1,000 year period, which saw such enormous events as the Black Death, when as much as a third of the European population died, and world-wide wars that killed as many as 100 million people in the last century alone.

Two hundred years ago – 1815 – the Napoleonic Age ending with the battle of Waterloo, signaled the conclusion of the first European World War. This was followed by a century of peace briefly broken by skirmishes such as the Crimean War and some colonial conflicts – the Boer War comes to mind around 1900.

This all changed in 1914 when, for reasons still debated, Europe erupted not unlike a volatile volcano dispatching sudden death and destruction. Perhaps, who knows, the economy played a role, because just prior to the onset of the first cataclysmic event of the 20^th Century, the so-called World War I, financial turmoil was just as bad as it is now. This war was welcomed because, in 1914, with high unemployment and no government aid, the unemployed flocked to the recruiting centres to enlist, as joining the armies meant payment of a dollar a day – when one single dollar still had substantial buying power – three square meals a day and free clothing. Historians do agree that commercial competition between England and Germany played a role, while France still smarted from Germany decisively defeating La Belle France in 1871. Whatever the reason, fact is that this war was the most tragic conflict in modern history, that it was totally unnecessary madness, and that its unintended consequences wrecked Europe’s illustrious and indeed idyllic civilization, spawned a Stalin, a Hitler and its continuation in 1939. The victorious politicians, after Germany’s defeat in 1918, cut up the Middle East without regard to tribal and religious factions, creating numerous problems which only now, 100 years later, are screaming for solution.

The Final Reckoning: the Four Horsemen

The entire world is preparing for a final reckoning as all simmering strives and unsolved issues are coming out in the open. Apocalypse the Greek name of the Bible Book Revelation, its last chapter, means ‘coming out in the open.’ The bad decisions and political resolutions of this long 41 year War, from 1914 till 1945, are being exposed and are screaming for rectification, including long suppressed colonial injustices. To aggravate matters even more, cosmic conditions are being bared, of which Climate Change, energy shortages, clean water availability, soil erosion, and overpopulation are the most prominent, all affecting the entire human race. Fighting in the Middle East, Israel, Iraq, Yemen, Eastern Europe, and an Ebola pestilence in Africa, are eerie examples of the four horsemen of pestilence, famine, war, and death, now evident everywhere. We are caught in an impossible bind. On the one hand energy availability is waning and the global economic system is beginning to turn down, on the other hand our political structure and Capitalism can only function with expanding growth.

This all looks like the Beginning of the End.

Our slaves have enslaved us

Am I unduly pessimistic? No. For me, an older man, it pays to have such a frame of mind. A study published last year in the journal Psychology and Aging found that older people with pessimistic views of the future were more likely to live longer and healthier lives than those with a rosier outlook. The researchers used data from a nationally representative survey in Germany of about 11,000 people. When looking at respondents older than 65, a total of about 1,300 people, the researchers found that the likelihood of surviving or remaining healthy increased by about 10% for those who were more pessimistic. Pessimists prepare themselves for the worst and so are better equipped to face the future.

And there is a lot to be pessimistic about. Everywhere we look pressures of all sorts are pushing against us, threatening our well-being. The main reason is our comfortable condition, with each of us in the West, having 200+ energy slaves at our disposal night and day, provided by coal, oil and gas. That very situation is now under attack, because, in human history, this is an enormous anomaly. It has caused the earth itself to become our enemy, the very source on which our life depends: the hand that was created to feed us has become the fist that fights us. The struggle for the remaining energy slaves has placed the planet in mortal peril, thanks to oil, which is a finite product, and also highly polluting.

The Arctic Region and Shale are about the only ‘new’ sources of oil and gas we have, but Shale is a rapidly depleting source and the Arctic is too expensive to exploit, reason why immensely powerful and rich oil companies, such as Shell and Exxon, have sold their shale holdings and abandoned their leases in the forbidden Beaufort Sea. But don’t the Saudis have lots of oil? No. They won’t be able to make up for the difference. Not even close. The only possible way to go from here is to lower our energy demand, and our reliance on the energy demand of our society, by as much as 90 percent. If we don’t – and we won’t, for the simple reason that we no longer can’t – the West will face a sudden and merciless demise, probably preceded by the collapse of the financial system. The single reason why world population has tripled in my life time is the use of carbon fuels. Once this supply stream slows, so will life expectancy. A sudden stop will cause the death of billions within a very short time.

Wars and rumors of War.

I am writing this in August 2014, the exact month when 100 years ago the 20^th Century First World War started, the very reason why this war is so much in the news now. Historians have been busy trying to trace who were primarily responsible for starting this conflict. On one side of the debate is historian Margaret MacMillan, whose new book “The War That Ended Peace,” lays primary blame on Germany’s military and commercial ambitions. On the other is “The Sleepwalkers – How Europe Went to War in 1914” by Cambridge professor Christopher Clark who disagrees with MacMillan and shows that Germany’s role in the conflict was no greater than the other belligerents, and perhaps less than commonly believed.  He writes that starved into submission by Britain’s naval blockade, Germany was unfairly and foolishly saddled with total war guilt, and saw 10% of its territory and 7 million of its people torn away at Versailles by the victors, primarily France and England.

Both authors agree that the cruel conditions imposed on Germany led to Adolf Hitler’s rise to power on his vow to return Germany’s lost lands and peoples who had been given to Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. Most of today’s Mideast’s problems flowed directly from the diplomatic lynching of Germany at Versailles led by France and Britain.

In one report I read Prof. Clark shows that both of these imperial powers feared Germany’s growing commercial and military power (just as the US today fears China’s rise). Germany’s vibrant social democracy with its worker’s rights and concern for the poor posed a threat to the capitalists of Britain and France.  Britain’s imperialists were deeply worried by the creation of a feeble little German Empire based in Africa.   At the time they controlled a quarter of the globe and all of its oceans.

Whoever is correct, we now know only too well that almost 40 years of petty European rivalries, intrigues and power games finally ran disastrously together in 1914.

We see the same dangers today in the growing conflict over Ukraine between the US and its European allies and Russia.  Every week seems to bring the US and Russia closer to a collision as the Washington seeks to dominate Ukraine and use it as a weapon against Russia. At this point no one in the West is ready to die for Luhansk or Donetsk, but then, in 1914, few in Europe were ready to die for Verdun or Ypres – but millions did. Will history repeat itself? Often when politicians are powerless to prevent recessions or depressions, war seems to be the best alternative. History tells us that, if all else fails, making war diverts the attention of the electorate. However, the last thing our fragile environment needs is more destruction and violent deaths.

We are sleep-walking into oblivion

The title of Christopher Clark’s book The Sleepwalkers is eminently fitting for our time as well. Just as Europe, as in a trance, got closer and closer to the fatal step from which there was no retreat – optimistically proclaiming that any conflict would be short-lived – our war against nature is very similar , also a war with no winners.

The average person in the Western World is blind to what’s really happening and consequently our ‘carbon footprint’ is still increasing – and mine as well. In July my share of the world’s pollution was bigger than usual: I flew to Europe to visit a sick sister and brother, and later my wife and I flew, also from Toronto, to Minneapolis for a grandson’s wedding. I observed that both in Europe and in the USA there is little or no awareness that Time with a capital T is running out. It reminds me of Revelation 22:11, the last chapter in the Bible. There is says that “Let they who do wrong keep on doing so… let they who do right continue to act that way.” In other words, the time for conversion is past. People are too set in their ways to change direction. We no longer can change our life style, and so the dome of bubbles just keeps blowing bigger and bigger into an unstable explosive critical mass. Limited resources are rapidly vanishing under our global canopy; extreme drought in China, in West USA, in South America means that food scarcity is increasing worldwide; political, religious, business leaders all are silent about the taboo topic of controlling the world’s out-of-control population growth and unable to stop Climate Change, and so the real clock keeps ticking.

Yes, silence on long-term big-bubble issues is deafening, stifled by our relentless quest for more, by the endless drive for earnings by big banks, big oil, big lobbying, big government and blinded, crowd-pleasing, small-minded politicians who tried to be re-elected by promising a better future, with nothing to back up their empty slogans.

The military men, the real power in Washington, are planning for more wars, austerity, massive population losses, as pandemics lurk in the shadows, emerging without warning.

What’s ahead? What is the West’s future? What sort of world is emerging where a hundred billionaires own more than half of the world’s resources and want more? Where are we headed when billions go to bed hungry every night? Can we really say that matters will improve when soil erosion, Global Warming, polluted waters, a looming pandemic, increasing unemployment and a still rapidly expanding world population are the only growth industries?

So what’s ahead? Wars, wars and more wars fought by desperate people for vanishing resources, because failure to deal with the big issues will fulfill the Pentagon’s 2020 prediction: “As the planet’s carrying capacity shrinks, an ancient pattern of desperate, all-out wars over food, water, and energy supplies would emerge … warfare is defining human life.”

That’s also the clear message of Michael Klare’s “The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources,” preceded by Klare’s earlier book, “Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict.”

Klare’s prophecy is unambiguous: “No matter how much corporate or government officials wish to deny it, there are not nearly enough nonrenewable resources on this planet to perpetually satisfy the growing needs of a ballooning world population.”

In today’s world run by Big Oil and climate-denying billionaires like the Koch Bros, Klare warns “existing modes of production are causing unacceptable damage to the global environment……continuing with current industrial practices will simply prove impossible.”

The truth is our planet is at a historic turning point. A critical mass is near its flash point, bringing with it a perfect storm of regional wars, mass starvation, pandemics and global-warming catastrophes, the perfect Apocalypse situation. And yet most conservative politicians, Wall Street CEOs and billionaires minimize the warnings of men like environmentalist Bill McKibben, money manager Jeremy Grantham, anthropologist Jared Diamond, and global security expert Michael Klare, all warning us to wake-up before it’s too late to save our planet.

The Four Horses of the Apocalypse are out in the open. The world is facing an unprecedented crisis of resource depletion, a crisis that goes beyond ‘peak oil’ to encompass shortages of coal and uranium, copper and lithium, water and arable land. With all of the planet’s easily assessable resource deposits rapidly approaching exhaustion, the desperate hunt for supplies has become a frenzy of extreme exploration, as governments and corporations rush to stake their claims in areas previously considered too dangerous or remote, such as the melting polar regions, where now exploding methane gases – 23 times more deadly than our exhaust-spewing Green-House-Gases – cause mysterious craters in the Arctic ice, accelerating Climate Change beyond the most pessimistic projections.

All this will “Prepare the Way of the Lord,” when he returns to ‘judge the living and the dead.’

In September I will start a weekly series on

PREPARING   FOR COLLAPSE

July 2014.

GENESIS 1: 26-27: “Let us make the human race in our image, according to our likeness.

Isaiah 61: 1 “Proclaim freedom for the captives.”

God created; we uncreated.

God created everything we observe around us, all in different stages. It seems to me that, when creation was fully operational, when the butterflies where fluttering by, when the birds flew their erratic courses, when insects were strictly there for pollination, when everything was in full bloom, God took a break. He paused for a while, surveyed the scene, surmising that something was lacking.

Where until now everything else had sort of evolved, perhaps from seed, perhaps from different life-forms over the millennia taking on the shapes and sizes and figures we now know as created matter, when it came to calling the human race into being, God used a different method.

We were not created ex nihilo, out of nothing, as all other matter. They took their shapes and essence from the way God had visualized them. No, unlike everything before, God created us, women and men, using already existing stuff, the soil with its trillions of microbes and other substances. From the very earth he fashioned a human figure, a mirror image to his own appearance: perfection in other words.

I know this is a deep mystery. What does it mean to be created in God’s image? Jesus said of his father that “God is a Spirit,” Paul writes that God lives in inapproachable light: “Nobody has seen him and nobody can see him.” (1 Tim. 6:16). Paul also tells us that “Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation by whom all things were created.” (Col. 1: 15- 16).

What could I conclude from this? If Jesus was the first-born of all creation, was he the first human who, as a human being created everything, including the human race made in his image? Psalm 82: 6 says that “We are gods, all sons of the Most High.” When Jesus was accused by the Pharisees of calling himself “the Son of God” he pointed out to these bible experts that this is exactly what this Psalm tells us.

Bonhoeffer, in his Creation and Fall, referring to Genesis 1: 26-27 which deals with The Image of God on Earth, writes that “being created in God’s own image on earth means that humankind is like the Creator in that it is free.”

So, based on this I could say that being made in God’s image means two things: (1)  we look like God- or Jesus, the image of the Father – and (2) we were created not as captives, but mentally, physically and spiritually free.

We are no longer free.

It is exactly this freedom that is now imperiled. We have become captives. The Bible speaks of this captivity both in Psalm 68: 18 and Isaiah 61: 1. Jesus quotes Isaiah 61: 1, when he speaks in his home town. There he says that Jesus has come to proclaim liberty to the captives, implying that his former playmates  – and by implication we too – are prisoners of systems that enslave. These words so infuriate his former neighbours that they want to kill him.

Why were these small town people so upset, ready to do away with Jesus? Let me take a stab at this. Here was this bachelor Jesus, 30 years old, who had never once joined in to condemn the Roman occupiers, who, when others went out to chase girls, left to meditate in the countryside, who, where others participated in the parental business, had long discussions with the regional rabbis and sought out the shamans and the naturalists, those who like himself found solace in nature. He just was not a joiner. He was a maverick, traveling to pagan strongholds, doing all sorts of things a respectable Israelite would never do.

So this oddball was going to tell them what to do and what to believe? No way. When they heard Jesus say that they were captives of a civic spirit that was contrary to the freedom Jesus proclaimed, it was precisely this that so infuriated them: they were convinced that he was wrong, so wrong that they were certain that he was a traitor, a public disgrace.

Is the same true today? Do we too get upset when the true implications of these words become clear to us?

Let me explore how situations we take for granted and even love, have, in reality, become prisons for us. The people in Nazareth, in Jesus’ days, were totally sold on ‘them versus us’, the Roman occupiers and the Jewish traitors against those who refused to recognize that the Roman occupation had a shred of legality. This prevented them to see beyond the narrow confines of Jewishness and kept them from embracing a larger global perspective, something Jesus often emphasized. The Jews thought themselves better that all other people: they were the real seed of Abraham, the chosen people, while all others were inferior, lost forever. His fellow citizens hated Jesus’ tolerance.

I believe that what applied then to the Jews, also applies to the church of today. We too are prisoners. Before we can come to Jesus, we must be aware of our status as captives just as the pious Jews in Jesus’ home town. We too have to free ourselves from what enslaves us. We, more than any other generation, have become blind followers of sinful systems.

What am I really talking about? 

We must look into the mirror and confess that we are prisoners of conditions that constantly debase God’s creation. We must recognize that we are subject to situations that undermine our health, enrich the rich and penalize the poor. We must confront ourselves with the truth that the way we live is deeply flawed, is not the Way of Life, but the Way of Death. We must confess with Milton in Paradise Lost that we rather “reign in hell than serve in heaven.”

We must acknowledge that we have become addicted to creation-debasing habits. We have become carboholics, slaves, captives, not free anymore to live and do what we like, or better what Christ demands of us. We still confess that Christ has set us free, that Christ is all and in all, according to Colossians 1: 15-20. We still maintain that we are free to use everything created, while respecting the holiness of each created entity. But these words belie our actions because we fail to see our true state of dependence on life-altering fossil fuels. The fact that everything created by God is holy means that we sin when we harm any facet of creation. I believe that it was exactly that to which Jesus referred to in the Lord’s Prayer. There he asked us to “Hallow his name,” regard everything created in his name as holy. We so flippantly recite these lines Sunday after Sunday without really fathoming what they mean. The grammatical construction of the phrases “Hallowed be thy name” and the next line “Thy Kingdom come”, suggest that we must constantly work to accomplish that. Both imply that we must keep on trying all our lives to realize that. Actually the line in the Lord’s Prayer asking us to “give us this day our daily bread” is wrongly translated. The word ‘epiousios’ translated as ‘daily’ really means something like ‘tomorrow’ referring to a later time. A better translation is “give us the wherewithal to always be focused on the kingdom that comes tomorrow”. “Forgive us our trespasses” is included in that same prayer because we cannot live without sin.  We may live perfectly moral lives, but in regards to creation we constantly sin. I sincerely believe that when we appear before God’s throne of judgement, one of Jesus’ questions will centre on our ‘carbon foot print,’ asking us what we have done to reduce the harm caused by us to our own bodies, our fellow citizens and creation in general.

That’s why forgiveness is needed all the time.

Because we are addicted to a carboholic life-style, we need forgiveness every minute of the day. It is my contention that our entire society, the whole-wide-world in which we live, is conspiring to rob us off the freedom that Christ has given us and forcing us to live not according to the laws of creation but according to the laws of Capitalism, which thrives on Creational Destruction. The very first commandment Jesus gives us is to love God above anything else. This simply means that our priority in life is to love everything God has made. We don’t love Bach as a person. We don’t love Rembrandt for his charm: we love these men for their masterpieces. The same is true for God, who can only be known for his unequalled creation: the world we inhabit.

Rather than honoring his marvelous piece of art, the world and they who dwell therein, we daily molest it. The sort of society we have created leads to universal death, and we are, by and large, eager participants in this destructive act. Christ has promised to set us free from this bondage, but as is the case in all we do: God won’t do anything without us and we can’t do anything without him. Christian living has always been a total affair.

What are some of the other factors that entrap us? 

Let me name a few, not in order of priority. (1) Transportation and Energy; (2) Food; (3) Religion; (4) Money and debt.

(1)        Transportation and Energy.

Fact is that we live in a finite world. Fact is that our financial world looks like a bankrupt remnant of our past. Fact is that our energy resources are dwindling, that we hit peak conventional oil in the last decade. Shale is a pipedream, wind and solar can’t keep the grid running; these things, like the debt situation, look so obviously threatening to our way of life you’d think we’d be looking hard at seriously adapting that way of life. But we don’t, we just want to substitute one energy source with another, even though they’re hugely different and to a large extent incompatible.

We’re so addicted to the comfortable feeling of having all rooms in our homes heated or cooled, and to taking our own little transport units the same half hour drive to work and back every single day that we’d rather not think about why we do it than change our ways, even as it’s glaringly obvious that our ways must and will stop at some point. We’re not going to find some new magical mystery energy source, and besides, both our own legacy of profligate energy use and the 2nd law of thermodynamics tell us it wouldn’t be all that magical anyway.

The consumption of energy is a potentially very destructive force, as physics clearly states, which should really teach us that we need to be very careful about using it, burning it, and building our societies in ways that necessitate for us to use more of it all the time.

We have become captives of a transportation system that is now seen as destroying everything we hold dear. Yes, only prayer for forgiveness is all that we have left. “Forgive us our trespasses.”

(2)Food.

We have bought into a food culture in which eaters — that’s everyone — exploit animals, people and the environment, and which make ourselves sick. To change that, we have to change not only the way we behave as individuals but the way we behave as a society. Food, saturated with sugar, salt and other ingredients that cause cancers, heart attacks, diabetes and obesity, are for most the only available sources of nutrition. It has become impossible for many to free themselves from this trap, as pesticides and contaminated soil and water lead not to life but premature sickness and death. But try we must, even though it has become nearly impossible for those with little income and often no notion of a different approach.

Obesity, diabetes, cancer and other environmental diseases can be traced to the way we eat. Making meals from scratch, especially from home-grown ingredients has become a lost art. Just as General Motors bought up bus companies and then liquidated them to prevent people from using mass transportation and encouraging the use of autos and the building of subdivisions, multinational companies have done the same for food production. For them not nutrition, not basic health, but shelf life and deceptive appearance that promote profits is their goal, at the expense of general well-being. Never trust a product that is produced in a factory.

(3)Religion

Beware of religion that promotes heaven, wealth, nationalism and ignores or even condemns Climate Change. Beware of religions that know exactly what God wants us to do or what God doesn’t want us to do. We see through a glass darkly and today that glass is more obscured than ever. Churches, almost without exception, see the Bible as God’s only Word, while in reality Creation is God’s Primary Revelation. I see the Sin against the Holy Spirit, of which Jesus suggested that it would be the greatest of sins, having a connection to creation through wantonly and purposely harming God’s precious creation. (See John 3:16). We are already being punished by ignoring the impact of methane, CO2 and other substances. The Climate Change principle is dead simple: increase the amount of these substances in the atmosphere – in the soil and in the oceans – and temperatures will rise. It is basic physics. What awaits us is a world of violent storms and heatwaves, of crop losses and flooded nations, a world which at the same time will have far less energy available to deal with these issues, and no money/credit to speak of to buy that energy with. That looks like a pretty accurate picture of the world that we – or is that our children? – will live in.

The bright side is there’ll be far fewer of us, which will reduce per capita energy consumption drastically. The dark side is we will be fully unprepared, because we will have chosen to live in our past until our future caught up with it. Come to think of it: a nation and a world that no longer cares for the future is already dead.

(4) Finances and debt

What is true for transportation and food, also applies to finances. The global financial system owns our societies, banks, politicians, everybody, including you and me.  It can do what it wants and what it pleases with impunity. Today all money matters are controlled to the advantage of the moneyed segment of society and to benefit the financial structure of the ruling class. As long as interest is kept at a very low level, our immense debt will be manageable. Where before savings and decent wages fueled the economy, now debt makes the world function. As soon as interest rates increase, making debt service impossible, our financial world too will collapse.

Is there a solution?

Bonhoeffer in his book The Cost of Discipleship wrote that there is not such a thing as “cheap grace,” something we wealthy Westerners are counting on for eternity.” Replying to the rich young man Jesus said that it is almost impossible for a rich person to enter the kingdom. We are much richer than even the Emperor of Rome in all his glory. No wonder Jesus wondered whether: “He will I find faith on earth when he returns” He also stated “Many are called but few are chosen.”

Fact is that we are saved by grace, because we cannot live perfectly, that’s why we must pray for forgiveness all the time, and, with the words of the church reformer Martin Luther, ‘sin bravely.’

When Christ returns he will not ask us how well we have observed religious customs but how carefully we have lived in God’s Holy Creation, the Kingdom to Come, and how well prepared we are for entering it. Johan Herman Bavinck in his Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision the Kingdom has pointed out that the New Creation is The Kingdom to come. That’s why Jesus has urged us to Seek First the Kingdom of God and the laws that govern it. That simply means that our primary task in life now is to seek the welfare of the creation from which we get our food, in which we live and move and have our being, and which will be perfected when Christ returns.

We now have to prepare ourselves for that situation. We must free ourselves from the slavery which has chained us to the secular forces that have imprisoned us and which threaten to separate us forever from the love of Christ. This love will become evident to every living creature when he returns as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

IS PREACHING THE PROPER APPROACH TO PROCLAIM THE GOSPEL?

June 2014

Earlier Experiences

While biking – which I do a number of times each week, always between where I live in the country and the village where I shop, a distance of 11.2 km back and forth – I calculated that in my life-time I have gone to church and heard a sermon at least 5000 times. I started going there when I was as young as 5 years old.. Then attending worship services on Sundays was the family routine, always twice, followed by Sunday School. That meant sitting still some 90-105 minutes, standing up when ‘the long prayer’ was being held, that one alone often taking 10-15 minutes, about the duration of an average sermon today. And Sunday School yet to come!

Standing up in church?

I now think that that custom of some men- never women – to stand up during prayer was probably to fight any inclination to fall asleep. I remember my paternal grandfather doing the same even during the sermon to fight the urge to take a snooze, accustomed as he was to outdoor life because a stifling hot church produced mind-numbing conditions.

I also remember how, in the absence of a minister, an elder would read a sermon, prepared by a minister of course. That same grandfather refused to use the pulpit for that purpose: to him that was a holy place reserved for the holy man, appointed by God to be the proclaimer of the Good News, and he was not worthy to occupy that elevated position.

It must be me, but of the 5000 plus sermons uttered in my presence during my long life, I can only recall two, both at funeral services, one by Dr. Paul Schrotenboer, who preached on Psalm 116: 15: “The Lord takes pleasure in the death of his saints”, and one not too long ago by my friend Stephen Dunkin, also at a funeral. He, so far, has been the only preacher mentioning the New Creation as the destination of the saints. It could quite well be that I have subconsciously been influenced by pulpit talk. I do remember a few sermon-related incidents, one involving my future father-in-law- who died when both my future wife and I were 8 years old- pounding the pulpit to emphasize a point. The other instance was a merciful short service when our then minister, K. G. van Smeeden, had received some negative feedback from his church council and in retaliation, highly inflamed, quickly read through his prepared text and we were out of the church within an hour to our great delight. Those were the days when the ministers saw themselves a bit better than most, a notion that, I think, is still out there.

New wine: new containers

On that same bike ride one of Jesus’ sayings came to mind: you don’t put new wine in old wine bags, because that only leads to trouble. Any person with a bit of insight into the times we live in, realizes that we face different circumstances, of which the church itself is a shining – or better a terrible – example.

That the church is in trouble is no secret. Our church building was erected in 1891, almost 125 years ago. It seats at least 250 people. Today the audience often is no more than 25, a tenth of the capacity, the average age well in excess of 70 years of age. The people, my wife and I included, go to church faithfully, partly to express our loyalty to the people we love.

In an age where communication is mostly graphic, where the attention span has become shorter and shorter, the traditional church communication, by means of the spoken word, is sorely outdated. Jesus’ reminder that new wine belongs in new containers, is not followed. The church, almost without exception, has stubbornly stuck to the old model of preaching. The retention rate of speeches – and that is what sermons are – is less than 10 percent if it penetrates at all. When our congregation was established there were no other distractions, no radio, no television, let alone the host of mind-numbing electronic devices we have today.

Today our church- and all churches – uses the same format to tell people about the gospel as was done 125 years ago, when the church was full, the wine was new and so were the containers. Now the containers are old and whatever Good News is out there, is leaking away because the method of delivery no longer functions. Everywhere churches are grasping at straws to find new ways.

Are there new ways?

When Jesus spoke, as he did in the Sermon on the Mount, he sat down amidst his eager listeners, all stretched out around him while he spoke. Why did Jesus sit on the ground? It seems to me that he derived strength from the soil, totally aware that, fully human he was and we are, the soil was the material out of which we all are formed, something both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Johan H. Bavinck constantly emphasize. Communication is more than just uttering words. By standing above the crowd, away from the earth, the elevated position suggests that the message has nothing to do with the earth. Heaven comes to mind. Also, after hundreds of years of sermons, it is almost impossible to hear something new. The Bible’s basic message is that God created, we uncreated, and Jesus has made all things new.

There’s also something else. In many denominations a minister is called Father. The head of the R.C. Church is even called Holy Father. When the new pope is elected the Latin words are: Habemus Papam: we have a new daddy, suggesting exactly what it is “paternalism”, which literally means ‘letting father call the tune while the children have no voice and the women are not even allowed to think for themselves.’ That stratagem has led to constant immaturity, and is one of the basic causes of the church’s stagnation. Having a person address the laity without a chance for discourse, without an opportunity for discussion, is entirely out of tune with the spirit of the 21^st Century.

Jesus sat down, fully conscious of the mood of the people, feeling their reaction as shifting body weights or strained attention vibrated through the common ground. By sitting among them he could sense the bated breath, but also the waning of interest. I have a picture book of Dietrich Bonhoeffer where he too is seated on the grass while conversing with others.

There is much more to communication than mere words. Ministers, by and large, are not trained in the full spectrum of conveying meaning: it also involves voice projection, a logical structure of the message, enunciation, the inclusion of emotions in the presentation and an intimate involvement of one’s own feelings.

Most people have become aware that the way we live leads to death. We constantly violate the laws of creation, which means we sin against God in the way we live. We also sin when we violate the laws of communication. Even though a person may have the correct academic qualifications and has been institutionally properly installed, this means little or nothing when he or she is not schooled in the total range of communication. Sermons usually lack creational input: today in whatever we do we have to take God’s cosmos into account because God’s Word is more than the Bible. God’s creation is the Primary Word: the written Word is needed to understand the Primary Word. Failure to integrate the two Words is a form of “the shifting baseline syndrome.” Coined by the biologist Daniel Pauly, it described our relationship to ecosystems, which is utterly relevant to theology as well: we can’t have one Word – creation -without the other Word – the Scriptures. To charge ahead without doing justice to the totality of the Word is the main reason why, by confining preaching to one dimension, we have imperiled the entire ecclesiastical system. That’s why the church is suffering, retaining mostly only those who are loyal to the institution through friend- or family ties or simply through custom and superstition.

Seek First the Kingdom

Another reason why preaching is a passé experience is that it promotes individualism. The church has the wrong approach when the goal of the church is nothing else but personal salvation, with heaven as the eternal destination. It seldom mentions the pursuit of the kingdom, the dominant feature in the Scriptures.  “Seek first the Kingdom,” is Jesus’ most emphatic exhortation.

Both Bavinck and Bonhoeffer emphasize the corporate aspect to salvation. J. H. Bavinck writes:

“The central point of the gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering: its entire focus is aimed at the unique, powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom.

It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one over­arching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All sal­vation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. 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 for ever.”

So far this quote from Between the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision.

A new approach to worship: preparing for the New Creation!

So how then should worship services be fashioned? Yes, there is a place for sermons, but only by those who have mastered the necessary art of combining the both Words and are capable of using the entire range of communication to implement that: speeches are not dead. If a minister lacks these integrated gifts then sermonizing should stop, with the assembly concentrating on singing, prayer, the Lord’s Supper and Bible reading, all done with everybody doing a part, however imperfectly. The audience should then split up into smaller groups where a bible passage is studied, with the aid of some guidelines distributed in advance, always relating them to today’s circumstances: theology has no place in church services.

Some weeks ago I injured a muscle in my shoulder and right away went to see a physiotherapist who gave me instructions and helped me to heal myself. The church plays a similar role: it must help us, as communities, to live in God’s creation in preparation for the Kingdom to come, especially now in an age of universal turmoil.

Numbers are not important. Where there is a pool of knowledgeable people a paid preaching position is probably not necessary. Bonhoeffer recommends that the church leader has a fulltime job in the real world. The money saved from paying a stipend can be better used elsewhere. Also with economic prospects from poor to disastrous, this would be the only way for a church community to survive financially.

Since energy is highly polluting, and church buildings – especially the ancient ones – are notorious for being energy hogs and all require automobiles to reach, gathering in nearby homes must be considered. Also when church people are re-settling, they must contemplate buying or renting in close proximity to like-minded people, keeping in mind that future economic development will require much more sharing in preparation for the End to come.

The ultimate solution is to form convents for families. When we visited our youngest son who served in Africa, we discovered that such communities are standard practise there: people are clustered around the place of work, a hospital for instance, complete with school, church, market and stores. Those churches will survive which are composed of self-sufficient communities, with as principal aim to prepare the people for The Kingdom to Come.

Bavinck has stated: “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 for ever.”

If we want to be part of the kingdom, then we have the glorious task to make that ideal our own and, even though our entire society conspires to prevent that all- inclusive aspiration, we still have to mentally, spiritually, if possible physically, embrace that ideal. The word is E.Q is the opposite of Q.E. which is the current monetary scheme – Quantitative Easing. Q. E. propagates to tell us to enjoy life today and pay tomorrow. EQ, on the other hand, measures a person’s Emotional Intelligence. It sees through the phoniness of today’s economic state and works for a better world. Thanks to Q. E. every child born in America has a $176,833 debt sticker on its head. E.Q. sees beyond today, embraces the hardships facing us now and looks forward to the Kingdom and speeds its coming. That’s what Jesus wants us to do, mindful of his words: “my burden is light and my yoke is easy.”

More on this in a following blog.

WHERE ARE WE?

Conclusion

Are we in the last days?

Of course we are in the last days. The entire New Testament has been written in the expectation of Christ’s return. In Acts 2, when the church had its modern beginning in Jerusalem, we read that people sold all their possessions and shared what they had, in anticipation of Jesus’ Second Coming. Since then there have been a lot of false alarms. Is this one of them? Perhaps.
All informed Bible readers know that the day and the hour of Christ’s coming again is unknown. That restriction means very little. I compare it to the birth of a child. There we know the approximate date, but not the ‘day or the hour.’ We know that after a 9 months period more or less, a new life will emerge but even when labour pains start the actual time of birth cannot be exactly established. That’s why we cannot say that on July 10 2014 at 8.22 p.m. we will see Christ’s glorious re-entry. The Bible is quite emphatic on this point: the Lord repeats it twice in Matthew 24 that not even the angels or the Son of Man himself know the exact date and time. That makes eminent sense to me because nobody can accurately pinpoint the tipping point. Still, the Lord tells us to keep watch, because there will be definite indications. That’s why Jesus used the example of the fig tree and how it, at a certain time, will change in appearance, signaling summer. So too we always have to look around us and see what sort of signs point to the expiry date of the world’s time clock, when the birth of the New Creation comes and eternity enters. Romans 8: 22 explicitly mentions labour pains: “the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of child birth.” These pains, it seems to me, are now in its final phase.

There are definite signs.

There are major indicators.
One is Climate Change, the topic of a study commissioned by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The latest report written by hundreds of reliable scientists concluded that, unless the world acts now, Climate Change is irreversible, making our planet inhabitable. Climate Change also affects everything including the world’s waters. There are now 530 dead zones globally, and another 228 showing signs of stress. Toxic blooms are replacing the fish-depleted areas with disastrous effects on the remaining species. With much of the big fish and marine mammals having vanished, with birds and the mussels and sea cucumbers choking on plastic, the only persistent survivors are the jellyfish. Like rats and cockroaches jellyfish kill all the predators. Even when they die they rot and help create toxic bacteria.

Another sign, published just this past week involves the West Antarctica, where the immense ice sheet is in a permanent melting phase, causing sea-levels to rise so that many of the world’s coastal cities will eventually have to be abandoned.  All this is happening much faster than predicted earlier. So far everything predicted on Climate Change has proceeded at an unprecedented accelerated pace. Welcome to a new worrying water world.

And on land?

Weather change will cause:
1) Food shortages due to decreases in net global agricultural production;
2) Decreased availability and quality of fresh water in key regions due to shifted precipitation patters, causing more frequent floods and droughts
3) Disrupted access to energy supplies due to extensive sea ice and storminess, while the world’s population is still rapidly expanding, all of which is causing considerable stress.

Already there is a lot of stress and unrest everywhere. Where do you think the sudden world-wide turmoil has its roots? Humans fight when they outstrip the carrying capacity of their natural environment. Every time there is a choice between starving and raiding, humans raid. From hunter/gatherers through agricultural tribes, chiefdoms, and early complex societies, 25% of a population’s adult males die when war breaks out….
As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters strike due to the abrupt climate change, many countries’ needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression in order to reclaim balance. Imagine eastern European countries, struggling to feed their populations with a falling supply of food, water, and energy, eyeing Russia, whose population is already in decline, for access to its grain, minerals, and energy supply.

What is really at stake here is what J. H. Bavinck describes in his forthcoming book Between Beginning and End: a radical Kingdom vision. Here is a quote:

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, the cursed human­ity, dwell after the fall into sin. The Kingdom is in shatters. That is the profound tragedy con­fronting the life of the world. This goes far beyond the fact that we have torn up its cohesion: it actually means that God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse it and destroy it. The Kingdom, after all, com­prises all things, all plants, all animals, all people, all angels. The King­dom includes the sea and the land, the moun­tains and the valleys, all that was and is and is to come; and all of it is incorporated in a great and mighty whole.

The dangers Bavinck outlined have been the result of human-induced actions, due to the burning of fossil fuels. The increase of carbon-dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is something new under the sun, by now all too well documented.

According to a Waterloo professor, Thomas Homer-Dixon, the future looks bleak. He writes: “what we have experienced (are) so far only the earliest stages, just the leading edge, of the planet’s environmental crisis. Far, far greater environmental challenges are still to come.”
Here are some statistics.
During the past century, our population has quadrupled, but our energy use has increased 20 times, on an average. In countries like the United States, Germany and the Netherlands, the production of goods and services today requires, for each person, over 80 metric tons of natural resources annually. We consumers don’t notice that producing food causes about 15 metric tons of soil erosion for each North American resident each year. Building roads and other infrastructure need the moving of a further 14 tons of rocks and soil for each person on this continent. If present trends continue, by 2050 the total quantity of energy, resources and waste moving through the world’s economy each year will have nearly tripled, and Planet Earth, the only one we have, will have to withstand nearly three times today’s dangerous annual impact.
Here’s another example of our energy extravagance. Harriet Friedman, a University of Toronto professor specializing in analysis of food systems, writes: “more than half the world’s agricultural land suffers moderate to extreme soil degradation. Climate change will certainly make yields unpredictable in the future, if not already.”
Our efforts to change the make-up of the earth is connected to “Primary Productivity,” a concept indicating the total amount of plant mass created by Earth in a given year, the sum of earth’s plant energy that makes our lives possible. It is in essence “the total budget of life.” All humans and all animals eat either plants or eat animals that eat plants and solar-powered photosynthesis is the only way to make this fuel. It is this very activity that is now in danger. When Adam and Eve lived in the Garden of Eden, Primary Productivity was at its peak: 100 percent.
In our age of rapid population growth this phenomenon has accelerated with earth-breaking speed. Consider the following, quoted from “The Ingenuity Gap” by Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon.
“We are moving so much rock and dirt, blocking and diverting so many rivers, converting so many forests to cropland, releasing such huge quantities of heavy metals and organic chemicals into air and water, and generating so much energy, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen compounds that we are perturbing the deepest dynamics of our global ecosystems. Between one-third and one-half of the planet’s land area has been fundamentally transformed by our actions: row-crop agriculture, cities, and industrial areas occupy 10 to 15 percent of Earth’s land surface; 6 to 8 percent has been converted to pasture; and an area the size of France is now submerged under artificial reservoirs. We have driven to extinction a quarter of all bird species. We have used more than half of all accessible fresh water. In regions of major human activity, large rivers carry three times as much sediment as they did in pre-human times, while small rivers carry as much as eight times the sediment. Along the world’s tropical and subtropical coastlines, our activities – especially the construction of cities, industries and aquaculture pens – have changed or destroyed 50 percent of mangrove ecosystems, which are vital to the health of coastal fisheries. And about two-thirds of the world’s marine fisheries are either overexploited, depleted, or at their limit of exploitation.”

It is now estimated that we use almost 50 percent of the Earth Primary Productivity, almost half of all there is. That percentage may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet: we, the 7 billion plus, have simply stolen the food, the rich, a lot more than others.
It’s the Oil we use that now makes up the difference. Oil is Primary Productivity stored as hydrocarbons, a trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years. However of that trust fund we not only have used the interest but the capital as well, to the point where we now must envision, “The End of Oil,” with drastic consequences for the human race. Fracking will only delay the End of Oil by a few years.
Consider the following. In 1960 expansion of the supply of unfarmed, arable lands came to an end. In spite of that, grain yields tripled. Ever since we ran out of land, food is oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by about ten calories of oil. That figure does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to the store, or the fuel used by us driving to the store. Writes Dr. Harriet Friedman, “One kilogram of asparagus sent from Chile to New York takes 73 kg of fuel energy and contributes 4.7 kg of carbon dioxide to global warming…The food miles average of the supermarket items was more than 5,000 times greater than the same items in the farmer’s market.” Compare this to 1940 when the average farm produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used.
Basically this means that the End of Oil means also The End of Food. Not only poses Climate Change almost insurmountable problems, when combined with “The End of Oil,” potential catastrophes are so big that they remind me of the seven angels in Revelation 8.

Oil is a finite fuel

When wood ran out, some 400 years ago, coal came on line. When coal proved to be too polluting, oil and natural gas were available. Now, what do we do? Rely mainly on Natural gas of which the world still has plenty, but all in very remote locations, such as Siberia or Australia? It will take trillions of dollars to feed the North American market with adequate supply, assuming there is plenty of it left.
Once we pass the oil production peak, a return to a medieval style of existence looks a frightening possibility. It will mean a greatly reduced human population. Thanks to oil, in my lifetime, the world’s population tripled from 2 billion to more than 7 billion. As late as 1945 my maternal grandfather had no electricity on his small farm. He managed with one horse and one help. Then people were mentally and physically equipped in coping with little. These skills we have lost. Also much of the earth has been spoiled, unfit for intensive, organic, agriculture. The End of Oil may mean a reduction in the world’s population to perhaps 1 billion. Imagine the hardship.
Now we have a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure powered almost exclusively by fossil-fuels. Cars, trucks, roads, boats, docks, airplanes, airports, hospitals, schools, farms manufacturing plants, food processing centers, water treatment plants – all run on fossil fuels. All plastics, pesticides, and fertilizers are derived from that source as well.
The End of Oil means the End of growth, on which our economy depends. A world-wide recession may make oil too cheap: OPEC, Russia, the largest suppliers, need $100 plus per barrel. Oil too cheap may also spell the End of Oil.

What we have in abundance is debt: corporate debt, government debt, and consumer debt, all at record levels. In order to finance debt, we need economic growth. Economic growth requires a constantly increasing consumption of consumer goods – most of which are made from plastic, which comes from petroleum (oil) and are delivered by trucks, which consume diesel fuel (oil). Even a truly successful conservation program would require us to drastically cut our consumption of consumer goods, which would also stop economic growth. Conservation would cause indebted corporations, governments, and individuals to slide towards bankruptcy. No wonder the USA and Canada are against the Kyoto Agreement. Banks would call in outstanding debts, businesses would close, government services would cease, and people would lose their jobs. During the Dirty Thirties many people had relatives in the country, where food, at least, was plentiful. That option is gone. Even farmers don’t grow their own food anymore.
You don’t have to be a prophet to conclude that without an abundant supply of cheap energy, transportation systems will break down. Electrical grids will collapse. Unemployment levels will skyrocket. Consumer goods will only be available to the super-rich. Food and water will become desperately sought after commodities. Riots and urban uprisings will become common.
There is no doubt that we have followed the path of least resistance, assuming that current conditions will last forever.

The Tipping Point: a possible scenario

All this points to the last days. What will speed up the pace is the Primary Productivity percentage, with China and India leading the way. Cambodia, Mongolia, Indonesia, all are being stripped of trees to feed the building booms there, including Brazil to supply China with soya beans.
Primary Productivity now stands between 45 and 50, meaning that almost half of the world’s basic energy, vested in plants, trees, animals, has been used for the benefit of the human race, but in such a way that once it is used, it cannot be restored. Depleted oceans, soil degradation, disappeared species, cannot be re-created by human technology.
Revelation 11: 2 says that “they will trample on the holy city for 42 months.” That’s what’s happening right now. Revelation 13: 5 repeats that: “The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise authority for 42 months.”
Satan, God’s great Adversary, is the beast whose aim has been from the beginning – starting in Eden – to destroy God’s beloved cosmos. (John 3: 16)
There is significance in the number of 42 months, which is 3.5 years, exactly half of that perfect number ‘7’. Matthew 24: 21-22 says that “For there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now – and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect, those days will be shortened.”
Allow me a brief detour by means of a riddle, illustrating the nature of exponential growth. A lily pond contains a single leaf. Each day the number of leaves doubles – two leaves the second day, four the third, eight the four, and so on. “If the pond is full on the thirtieth day,” the question goes, “at what point is it half full?” Answer: “On the twenty-ninth day.”
Back to two things: the 3.5 year period and Primary Productivity.
It is my contention that we are quite close to the 3.5 year mark, judging by the number of Primary Productivity, which now stands somewhere between 45 and 50 percent. Due to the scramble for more oil to keep our economic system lubricated, so-called fracking, the Fukushima nuclear fiasco, and also the increasing pace of Global Warming, environmental destruction will greatly speed up, rapidly approaching the 50 percent mark, which is the half- way to total chaos, just as 3.5 years is halfway to 7, the number of fullness.

Where Are We?

I believe that the Lord will not return on Day 30, but Day 29, when, seemingly, the glass is still half full. That can happen anytime: like a thief in the night, as the Bible puts it. The human time clock is about to stop. We only have a few seconds left. Are we ready for time-less eternity, when the trumpet will sound and, all will be changed, in a flash, in the twinkling of the eye.
The words of Peter come to mind: “Since everything here today might well be gone tomorrow, do you see how essential it is to live a holy life? Daily expect the Day of God, eager for its arrival. The galaxies will burn up and the elements melt down that day – but we’ll hardly notice. We’ll be looking the other way, ready for the promised new heavens and the promised new earth, all landscaped with righteousness.” (The Message, 2 Peter 3.)
What constitutes a Holy Life? We all must answer that question. That it has something to do with “LIFE”. our daily doings, our activities in God’s creation, is beyond question. This makes me think of Matthew 5:48: “Be perfect.” The Greek word there is ‘teleios,’ which is best translated as ‘holistic,’ derived from ‘telos’, which suggests that we always have to live keeping the End – telos- in mind, our final destination, the New Earth.

Remember, the signs will be quite subtle, so vague that the Bible repeatedly states that The End will come ‘Like a Thief in the night!’

This is my last blog for some time. I will post new articles on www.hielema.ca/blog from time to time, but will not e-mail them anymore. So occasionally visit hielema.ca.

Watch for August 30, the release day of

Between the Beginning and the End: a radical Kingdom Vision.

Part of the description in the Eerdmans catalogue says: Bavinck challenges believers to live as Kingdom people…his eschatological vision is now more relevant than ever as climate change, resource depletion, financial turmoil, and other issues increasingly threaten our world.

May 11 2014

Where are we in the mad maze of magic money?

 David Attenborough once famously said: “Anyone who believes in infinite economic growth on a finite planet is either a madman, or an economist”.

Perhaps we all are mad. Perhaps we all need to be detoxified. We may deny that infinite growth is possible, but, really, when it comes down to it we love to see expansion in the place we work, because that means security and perhaps promotion. Our entire world, the way we shop, the way we move about, the way we live is premised on the basic fact that economic growth is forever.

It even applies to ecclesial organizations. When a new church is built or when a religious organization makes elaborate plans for the future, of course lots of prayers are offered, but the untold basis of all this is economic growth, the ability to make the supporters believe that the future is rosy and pledges will be the responsible thing to make.

It’s not only that economists say this and base their entire models on this supposition. The entire ‘science’ of economics as taught in the most prestigious universities is based on the irrefutable fact that growth can and will and shall and must continue. And politicians too bank on this.

Never mind that all this is a very asinine assumption. Economists are not only useless but also dangerous because they have titles and receive Nobel prizes, reason why people listen to them and entire government policies are built around what they say.

Politics and Economic Growth

Where I live, in Ontario, Canada, in about 4 weeks – June 12 – we have an election because the budget proposed by the ruling minority party was not accepted by the opposition. That this budget only increased the already large deficit was not the reason for defeat. All parties religiously accept that growth will happen whether they are Liberal, the current rulers, or Conservatives, or the Socialists. In politics, as in economics, growth is regarded as a physical law, similar to gravity. Never mind that in physics, eternal growth is seen as absurd, but if absence of growth takes place in an economic system, it must be because the wrong policies have been applied. Economists will then prescribe the right recipe, after which growth is certain to return. So the politician who comes up with the most plausible promises will take his or her turn, and the same policies, which did not make sense before, are again implemented.

Fact is that we all are meandering in the mad maze of magic money, and totally lost there as well, because the only exit out of this labyrinth is blocked by our complete lack of direction, as we prescribe policies that did not work yesterday are seen to be the cure for tomorrow.

Yes, we are all mad, mad because we live in the age of Mammon. The pursuit of happiness has now become the pursuit of money.  The bible tells a different story: “The lust for money is the root of all evil.” And the money can only come from one ultimate source: further exploitation of a finite earth.

Solomon and Friedman

Just think about that for a minute: our constant desire for greater wealth forms the basis of all the world’s ills. Solomon, who was the Bill Gates of his days, “the richest man on earth,” actually did not like his status all that well if his claim in his Proverbs is correct:  “Give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.” In those days a king’s real place among the nations was determined by the number of wives. Solomon had a 1,000 of them, which, probably, gave him second thoughts about being so well off.

Contentment is our greatest treasure, but, thanks to television – Mammon’s most effective pulpit, preaching the gospel of More 7/24/365 – money is seen as the main source of happiness.

Milton Friedman, who died a few years ago, is still our money prophet. His teachings governs the monetary policies of our reigning economists, including Canada’s very own Stephen Harper and especially the Christian Republican Party in the USA where such matters as minimum wage and old age provisions, are rejected, because they obstruct the free flow of capital. “The best government is no government” is their motto. Tim Hudak, the Conservative man vying to become Ontario’s Premier, wants to fire 100,000 civil servants, his first step to create 1 million jobs, which makes perfect sense in his mind. I wonder whether he has ever heard of the domino effect: eliminate one well-paying job and another position disappears as well. Never mind: outsourcing is all the rage, even in war. The market is God and price is the only criterion for value. In Friedman’s words: ”Everything that makes human life livable in this world must be enclosed by the high fence of price, a cage with a lock that can only be opened after dropping a coin.” According to this man, enjoying sunshine, admiring scenery, visiting a park must always come at a monetary price. Watch fees rise.

This capitalistic notion is evident everywhere: in Indonesia, in South America where rain forests are clear-cut; in the oceans, sucked dry of fish,  in the mountains, leveled for gold, in Alberta’s rivers, emptied to give the oil companies free water to boil the oil sands; in the greater Toronto area, with the best farmlands converted to subdivisions. Behind all this cosmos-degrading is the ‘lust for money.’

Money versus Nature

As economies expand, politicians simply promise more. As governments grow bigger, debt grows even faster. Even when times are hard governments cannot cut back: as environmental challenges increase, public reconstitution, in the form of payments for storm, water and other damage, also become bigger. As citizens become older and more frail, and but also live longer, medical and pension obligations mean greater monetary outlay.

All this means that debt always goes up, but we also know – and are now discovering – that our practices go against the natural system we live in. When we look around and observe creation we see that the amount of fresh water stays pretty much the same. In fact, aquifers may deplete if we over-use them, or water becomes polluted, as in China. The amount of topsoil stays pretty much the same, unless we damage it or make it subject to erosion. The amount of wood available stays pretty constant, unless we over-use it.

Nature, instead of having an agenda of growth, operates with an agenda of diminishing returns with respect to many types of resources. When we set out to produce more of a resource, the cost tends to rise: deeper wells, more remote raw material, Arctic drilling and deep sea exploration are just the most obvious.

The result is that our economic system becomes less and less efficient, as it takes more resources and more of people’s time to produce the same end product, measured in terms of barrels of oil or gallons of water. With stagnant wages, with higher fuel costs, with food inflation, due to drought or other weather-related damages, our costs of living increases, even though the Government controlled Cost of Living Index shows little change, all part of the increasing level of fraud perpetuated on all levels.

There comes a time, and I believe it is already here, when, due to shrinking income, higher cost of living, greater unemployment, government intake – based on an ever-expanding-economy – drops, posing a real threat to our medical-pension-social welfare-system and to the entire money system  when extra debt has negative results, and debt cannot be repaid.

What does the Bible say about all this?

We are at the end of the money line because the premise on which we have built our society no longer works. We are there now, because the world-wide creation of magic money in the form of trillions of dollars, Japanese yen, euros, Chinese yuan, no longer produces results.

No, the Bible is not a text book for economics. Yes, there is a Christian answer to this, an answer that will not please a lot of people. Let’s start with Jesus. In Matthew 6: 24 he calls money Mammon, an Aramaic word that usually means “money” but also can mean “wealth”. Here Jesus calls money by its real name, considering it a sort of god. This personification, this affirmation that we are talking about something that claims divinity reveals something exceptional about money. In reality Jesus is saying that money is power, a force capable of moving other things. Jesus also is saying that money is autonomous, a law unto itself. Because of this God as a person in Jesus and Mammon as a competing god find themselves in conflict. Mammon can be a master the same way God is; yes, Mammon can be your or my master. I think we all struggle with this because we claim that we only use money even though often it is money that uses us. By bringing us under its law we become its servants.

Revelation 18: 11-13 describes our situation today where retailers have a difficult time: “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore- cargoes of —and you fill in your favorite products or toys, such as cars, cruises, and beach houses.” Then, at the end this text includes in the items which find no buyers the bodies and souls of men.” The author of Revelation sees people here as objects, not to glorify God- which is our first duty – but people placed under a false authority, one that is not God. Jesus himself was bought with a price, foreshadowed by the story of Joseph who was sold by his brothers.

Jesus is usually portrayed as meek and mild-mannered. He, however, got really worked up by the church authorities of his day, the Pharisees, who failed to proclaim the Coming of the Kingdom. He also agitated violently against the profaners of the temple, those who brought business to the place where God’s grace should shine through in all its manifestations.

The Hebrew law, in its entirety, protects human life from the devastating influence of money. The Year of Jubilee comes to mind, where property is restored to the original owners every 50 years, negating the accumulation of excessive wealth and alleviating poverty. We see today more and more that money is a force of destruction. The curious characteristic of money is that its power originates with the issuers. Money would be nothing, materially speaking, without human consent. The mad maze of magic money is just that: its magic is that we give value to something which by itself has no value of use or of exchange, especially today when most of the money is simply an entry or figure on a computer screen. The mad maze is evident in the universal fraud that entails money today.

The entire concept of money is completely unexplainable and irrational. Nothing, whether in human nature or in the nature of things, whether in technology or in reason, can rationalize the original act of creating and accepting money. Nothing can interpret the blind confidence we maintain in money, in spite of all the monetary crises. The only acceptable explanation for this absurdity can be traced back to the spiritual power of money. Only because money is a spiritual power penetrating our very being, enslaving our hearts and minds, replacing God’s spirit in us, prevents us from detecting this ultimate madness.

Our disregard for his creation, our callous conduct in connection with environmental degradation, all point to our love for money. How can we say that we love God when we destroy his work of art?

Of course money in itself is not evil. It could be argued that debt is evil, because it makes us dependent on money. I see debt also as applying to environmental matters because depleting natural resources entails a debt for future generations. Loving our neighbor also includes those who will come after us: our neighbors in time. Our sins literally cry to heaven, therefor God’s judgment will focus especially on our treatment of the cosmos, because John 3: 16, loving the world and all it contains is so central to salvation.

Grace is what saves us, grace, derived from the Latin word ‘gratia’ of which the plural is ‘gratiis or gratis’ which means ‘for nothing’. We are saved not because we have done something that redeems us, but because Christ has set us free.

Next week the final instalment of Where are we?

It will also be the final blog I will post or send. The garden beckons, weddings coming up, birthdays to celebrate, family to visit.

Occasionally, as the Spirit moves me I will add to my blog ‘www.hielema.ca/blog’.

Look forward to August 30 when Eerdmans will publish

Between Beginning and End: a radical Kingdom Vision.

WHERE ARE WE? (see the special announcement following this blog)

Part 3: We are wandering in a wilderness of our own making.

According to the Bible the people of Israel, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, were stuck in the desert for 40 years, during which the Lord provided them with ‘food from heaven’, manna. During those wandering days the manna was only good for one day, except on the Sabbath when miraculously, it lasted for 48 hours. Those Israelis with an inclination to trade and profit- not an unusual trait among these folk – got a bum deal. If they gathered a bit more than needed for their own family intending to sell it later to the lazy fellows who had not picked up enough for themselves, this effort would misfire as speculation in food proved impossible. The Lord ordained that all manna, being essential food and not a commodity, could not be sold for a profit. Does that mean that holding back food for later gain is a sin? Yes. It is equally true is that robbing food off its nutritional value, for the single motive of profit, is a sin as well.

Today we, like the people of Israel, also dwell in the desert, one of our own making. We have fashioned a world that is increasingly unfit for all living creatures, plants, animals, and us humans as well, God’s Kingdom to come. By growing and distorting the food the way we do, we are becoming self-consumers: cannibals in other words.

That needs an explanation.

Thanks to intensive land use through mining, road building, city construction, vacuuming the oceans, tar-sand extraction, and especially land-clearing, we humans have appropriated major portions of the globe for our exclusive use at the expense of everything else, and have made the earth largely unfit for organic cultivation. By mainly relying on chemicals to grow crops we are destroying the very basis of life, leaving little or no space for the non-human world. Don’t get fooled by the package: by all appearance our planet still looks OK. It’s the invisibles, the air, water and soil that hide the contamination.

Scientists have a name for the total amount of plant mass originally available, our total budget for life. They call it the planet’s “primary productivity,” which was 100 percent ‘in the beginning.’ There have been two efforts to figure out how that productivity is spent, one by a group at Stanford University, the other an independent accounting by the biologist Stuart Pimm. Both concluded about a decade ago, that we humans, a single species among millions, consumed about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity, 40 percent of all there is. Now, thanks to fracking, the Fukushima disaster in Japan, the rise of China as an industrial power, the never-ending global forests clearing and fires, overgrazing, ocean depleting and the ever higher pollution, a rapid increase in Primary Productivity is occurring: it could now easily be more than 45 percent. This simple number may explain why the current extinction rate is 1,000 times that which existed before human domination of the planet. We, the 7 billion plus of us raping plunderers,  have simply stolen the food, the habitat, the soil, air, water from all other creatures, all deserving an equal portion to live, in the process distorting our own habitat.

The Dust Bowl in the Thirties and the sand storms in China and fire storms elsewhere are no accident of nature. Intensive cultivation and replacing the prairies with our own preferred grass, wheat, has vastly reduced the top soil, while Climate Change is doing the rest. The paradox is that now we feed most of this grain to livestock, while that same livestock was perfectly content to eat native prairie grass. Never mind that there likely were more bison produced naturally on the Great Plains before farming than all of beef cattle raised in the same area today. We call that progress.

I have this book: Fast Food Nation. I bought it at the Tweed Thrift shop for $2.00, brand new, never been read. The original price was $38.95 purchased at the Redeemer College Bookstore of all places. In it I read that on these same former prairies where once millions of buffalo roamed, now covered with endless stretches of corn and wheat, ConAgra operates feedlots containing up to 100,000 head of cattle, so closely crowded together that it looks like an ocean of mooing, moving mass of multiple shades of white and brown. These animals eat grain dumped into long concrete troughs, their digestion aided by anabolic steroids implanted in their ear. Just to gain 400 pounds – about 180 kilos – each animal consumes 3000 pounds – 1350 kg – of grain, while each day depositing 50 liters of urine and manure which is dumped in a nearby lagoon, leaving more excrement than a city of Chicago produces.

By plowing up the prairies, by eliminating the buffalo and replacing them with grain-fed cows, we have caused the topsoil to disappear. But no problem: when the most fertile soil in the world vanishes we fill it again with new energy in the form of (finite and polluting) oil-rich fertilizers. Chandran Nair, who runs the Global Institute for Tomorrow, argues that the true economic cost of a US$4 burger is US$100, if the cost of converting grain to meat, water and energy use is factored in. That is just one example of the debt we owe to our children and grandchildren. Indeed we live on Borrowed Time.

God had a purpose when he told Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden to live off the fruits of the land, be vegetarian. Now, in 2014, this truth makes eminent sense again because the mass marketing of meat is leading to the death of the country side, in the process pumping billions of tons of Green House Gases – the most lethal methane – into the air. Thanks to the nitrates in fertilizers sea-beds are deprived of oxygen, creating numerous dead zones in the world’s oceans. Thanks to endless monoculture crops, fields lose their wildlife. Thanks to expanded need for feed, native tribes are forced out of their rainforest habitat, depriving the world of so needed weather stabilizers and precious oxygen. Thanks to America’s cheap meat peasants in India no longer can make a living, committing suicide in droves. Thanks to ‘mega-dairies’ where 10,000 cows are kept fouling the air in California, children suffer from asthma. Thanks to the excess of effluent from nearby farms where as many as a million pigs are produced each year in China entire villages lack clean water.

The Oceans too suffer.

Next time you eat chicken, which, thanks to Tyson Foods, has become the lowest priced meat, you might pray a prayer for the poor people in Peru.

In Farmageddon: The True Cost of Cheap Meat a special chapter is devoted to the fish meal industry. The lunacy of this business is that it takes a valuable protein that very few people eat enough of – oily fish – and turning it into a protein that is less healthy and that we already eat in excess: broiler chicken. Here is a quote from that book:

Fishmeal is one of the filthiest secrets of the factory-farming industry, an environmental catastrophe that involves sucking millions of tons of small fish out of the sea and crushing them into fish oil and dry feed for farmed fish, pigs and chickens. The process deprives millions of larger wild fish, birds and marine mammals of their natural prey, drastically depleting stocks of important species. It also pumps vile fatty waste into the ocean bays, creating dead zones; polluting the atmosphere around the processing plants, causing wide-spread human health problems; and diverts what could be a highly valuable source of nutrition for people to industrially farmed animals.

The result is that in Peru, near these factories, 20-30 percent of the people suffer from malnutrition and children develop lesions on their skin from the fumes the fishmeal factories emit. The book states that 99 percent of the broiler chickens in America are reared in the worst kind of processing plants where many chickens are diseased and in such poor shape that they can barely walk, while the minimum-wage workers suffer swollen hands from being pecked when catching the birds. Due to the crowded conditions food poisoning is rampant. Nearly a third of the planet’s land surface is devoted to rearing farm animals or growing their feed. If these cereals went directly to humans, an extra three billions people could be fed.

Where are we?

We are wandering in a wilderness of our own making and dying in the process thanks to fast – and increasingly foul food. Capitalism is decapitating us. “The lust for money is the root of all evil” writes Paul to his protégé in 1 Tim. 6:10. That is especially true in food production. Food now comes from oil. Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least ten calories of oil. When my grandparents farmed, they produced pure food calories: no electricity but real horse- and human muscle power for input. Now even to obtain the oil takes lots of oil: today there is a lot more oil in our food and there is less oil in our oil. In the 1940s we got about 100 barrels of oil back for every barrel of oil we spent getting it. Today that ratio is as high as 40 barrels equivalent for 100 obtained in the Alberta Tar Sands. Fracking too has an extreme high ratio. The lower the energy return, the higher the pollution, and this danger will only increase as we need the energy to survive. Forget sustainable development. Forget measures to control Climate Change. We are at the point of no return, addicted as we are to oil, to sugar, to processed foods, all conspiring to make us dig our own graves.

About two thirds of U.S. grain corn is labeled “processed,” meaning it is milled and otherwise refined for food or industrial uses. More than 45 percent of that becomes sugar, especially high-fructose corn sweeteners, the keystone ingredient in three quarters of all processed foods, especially soft drinks, the food of America’s poor and working classes. It is not a coincidence that the American pandemic of obesity tracks rather nicely with the fivefold increase in corn-syrup production since Archer Daniels Midland developed a high-fructose version of the stuff in the early seventies. Nor is it a coincidence that the plague selects the poor, who eat the most processed food. Want to abandon our sugar addiction? Simple. Make meals from scratch. Even better: grow it yourself. Liberate yourself from the corporate clutches that cater to our cravings for sweets that slowly kill us.

Get a healthy breakfast. It is so simple to prepare oats in a slow cooker at night to be ready in the morning, rather than eat cereals. The grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. A two-pound bag of breakfast cereal burns the energy of a half-gallon of gasoline in its making. All together the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces. That number does not include the fuel used in transporting the food from the factory to a store near you, or the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap.

Then there is ethanol, another lie. According to one set of calculations, we spend more calories of fossil-fuel energy making ethanol than we gain from it. The (US) Department of Agriculture says the ratio is closer to a gallon and a quart of ethanol for every gallon of fossil fuel we invest. The USDA calls this a bargain, because gasohol is a “clean fuel,” which is just as much baloney as calling Tar Sand Oil ethical. This claim to cleanness is in dispute at the tailpipe level, and it certainly ignores the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, pesticide pollution, and the haze of global gases gathering over every farm field. The grain used to make a gallon of ‘bio’ fuel can feed a family for weeks. Eating a carrot gives the eater all that carrot’s energy, but feeding carrots to a chicken, then eating the chicken, reduces the energy by a factor of ten. The chicken wastes some energy, stores some as feathers, bones, and other in-edibles, and uses most of it just to live long enough to be eaten.

Where are we?

Just as the cows, the pigs, the chickens, all wallowing in their own dirt on the way to a cruel death, pumped full with antibiotics, our bodies too, chockfull with chemical compounds, are on that same road, rapidly losing the ability to resist infections, while wandering aimless from mall to mall.

Psalm 13 comes to mind: “The fool has said in his heart: There is no God above.” We are those fools. My commentary says, “A fool is not an ignoramus, an atheist or an agnostic. A fool is one who has his values all wrong, and is encouraged to live as if God would never take action.” In food production too we have chosen the way of death, death for ourselves and death for the planet.

I’ve been taught that Reformation applies to all of life. Everything needs to be changed drastically. The matter of SEAKING FIRST THE KINGDOM, as Jesus asked us to do, means embracing a Global Perspective, involving also seeking the welfare of all animals and every single aspect of the natural world.

Next week: Where are we in the mad maze of magic money?

The book featured below has influenced my thinking and my life more than any other book I own. Translating it so that a wider audience may also benefit, has, without doubt, been, by the grace of God, my most rewarding accomplishment. The translation has greatly benefitted from the careful editing by Harry van Dyke, professor emeritus in history of Redeemer University College.

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