MARCH 6 2016
WE ARE ON OUR OWN: GOD HELP US!
I got an e-mail with the message: A SUPREME LOSS. I expected to read about the death of a dear relative, but, fortunately no, instead it was a memo forwarded from FOCUS ON THE FAMILY, a right wing movement, I believe, lamenting the death of Antonin Scalia, a judge on the US highest court.
Scalia. I don’t like extremes. Scalia did. Scalia was an advocate for women having lots of kids. He and his wife had nine, 5 sons, 4 daughters. He evidently, hated birth control and, of course, abortion. That’s why FOCUS ON THE FAMILY called Scalia death a Supreme loss, a play of words on his being a judge in the US Supreme Court.
Scalia’s death is not a supreme loss in my opinion. True the Roman Catholic Church, at least its conservative wing, lost a fervent promotor of male supremacy (he died far from his family in a hunting camp, a singularly male time-passing), and is, I am pretty sure, not an admirer of the current Pope.
This devout Catholic, so revered by the church, in 2000 cast his ballot for Bush, and his appointees, especially Cheney and Rumsfeld, both supreme war mongers, who have been the primary cause of the chaos we now see in Syria and adjacent states, and co-responsible for millions of deaths and maimed, and also to blame for today’s refugees. Yes, he is the main reason why I, in faraway Tweed, head the finance committee to pay for one single family out of the millions now fleeing that once stable region.
This devout Catholic, an icon of the FOCUS ON THE FAMILY, was also co-responsible for the Supreme Court favoring corporations to funnel millions of dollars to the pockets of the preferred candidates who favored the rich, and so indirectly promoted supreme disparity, which, in turn, created the current revolt of the ignorant masses who, en bloc, have rushed to the fascist Donald Trump, the blustering demagogue on par with Adolf Hitler.
Supreme Loss? I’d say good riddance. It’s exactly men such as Scalia, who know exactly what God wants, who have God in their pockets, so to say, that have brought us where we are today both religiously and economically. Fact is that God cannot be known. To claim such is to be like God, and thus a form of idolatry.
Today, more than ever before, God’s face is hidden. Nothing is really black and white anymore: everything is sort of gray, because basically, God has disappeared from influencing human actions. In other words: we are on our own and God help us!
It was not always so. It seems that every 600 years or so a major religion is born. Moses and the birth of the Israelite religion belong to the Thirteenth or Twelfth Century before Christ. Then God was a visible presence. Zarathustra, also called Zoroaster, founder of the religion by his name, is traditionally located in the sixth century before Christ. Confucius, in China, also dates from that period, and so does Buddha. Six hundred years later, in what we call the first century, God revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ, the start of Christianity. In the seventh century Mohammed appeared (563- 632) who died almost 600 years after Jesus. Perhaps due to the dramatic effect of the Black Plague which killed as much as one-third of the European population, the onset of the Protestant Reformation, a new form of religion inspired by Martin Luther, did not occur until the beginning of the sixteenth century (1517), preceded by much religious ferment.
We now are at the waning of all Christian thinking. We are entering THE AGE WITHOUT GOD. I do not count Pentecostalism as Christian since it is an offshoot of Gnosticism, basically having no regard for Creation, with speaking in tongues, uttering inarticulate sounds being a prerequisite for salvation and regarding Rapture, an escape from the earth, as its crowning achievement. It’s also the fastest growing form of worship. One of my good friends told me on the phone that he now is a pre-tribulation rapture believer, convinced that Jesus will dispatch him to heaven before all the real trouble in the world such as pandemics, wars, earthquakes, whatever, occur. He’s got a surprise coming!
WE ARE ON OUR OWN: GOD HELP US!!
And God will. He will not abandon his own. Jesus in John 17 foresaw this situation. His words: (verse 15) “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” God’s guidance is still there, somehow, but on a personal level.
Let me trace how God dealt with men and men with God from the very beginning.
Adam and Eve. God had to even provide them with clothing as their fig leaves, or whatever they used, weren’t very effective. They were like children. Noah received explicit instructions how to build the Ark which, when finished, was personally closed by God. Next: Abraham. He dared to challenge God. When Noah was told by God that he was bringing the flood, Noah did not argue or question God’s decision. Abraham dared to argue that it would not be right for God to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for the sake of the righteous there. “Let my Lord not be angry…” as he bargained with God. Jacob, Abraham’s grandson, fought with GOD and prevailed.
So there is progress: Adam disobeys God, Abraham argues with God, Jacob fights God. People are confronting their creator. And then there is Moses, who more than once successfully persuaded God to relent and actually change a divine degree. Exodus 33: 11 tells us that Moses spoke with God “the way a man speaks to another man”.
All this leads to our day and age, 2000 years after God came to us in Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer, while in prison, in a letter to a relative, uses the term “mündig gewordende Welt” translated as a ‘world come of age.” In a sense it indicates the situation where we are supposed to be mature enough to meet our Savior as the redeemed of the Lord. For that to happen we have to have the condition as outlined in Deuteronomy 31: “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.” The word ‘end’ indicates ‘their distant future’ on the way to eternity.
Jesus in John 17 alludes to that condition. In the prayer to his father he asks him to protect them from the evil one, with the help of God’s spirit which came on Pentecost. God is like a wise parent who allows children to become independent, to learn from their mistakes and so slowly mature. That stage is necessary in order to be fit for eternity.
Of course this does not mean that you and I are no longer guided by God. On the contrary, as churches fail to educate people for eternity, fail to see the intimate connection between the created Word – the world we live in – and the written Word, life in general becomes more and more an encounter with the divine in any form, miracles, prayer, spiritual revelation, all matters not shared or witnessed by the masses.
Yes, it increasingly looks to me that we are on our own. The day and age for personal conversion is not over – but is becoming more and more unlikely, because the church no longer has a clear-cut message. Rehashing biblical stories does not do the trick anymore. Only a direct translation into concrete action involving the betterment of all of creation, including the human part, must take its place.
The real SUPREME LOSS today is not the death of a conservative Catholic who, in spite of being Pro-Life, was indirectly instrumental in causing millions of death and growing inequality. The SUPREME LOSS is the failure of the church to prepare its people for eternity, for making them ready for the New Creation.
That the USA – the most ‘religious’ Western country – has lost its God is plainly evident in voting for Trump, the perfect symbol of overweening pride. Without God all is permitted, something that clearly applies to today. Revelation, the last Bible Book, tells us that, prior to the Lord’s coming, everything will become more chaotic.
The rise of an anti-establishment mentality reeks of a rudderless revolution and is a sign that all institutions are in danger. All this will generate an Antichrist figure who appeals to humanity’s basic sinful desire for greed, easy living, something for nothing: chaos, as opposed to cosmos.
Admit it: increasingly the world is becoming ungovernable. Increasingly institutions are failing us. 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 few ‘haves’ and the overwhelming ‘have- nots’.
The Bible warns us that The End will be chaotic, symbolized by that number 666, a number understood only when it is about to come. If you follow the current financial news, you will have noticed that many important people connected to both big government and big banks are calling for the abolishing of cash, for the simple reason that credit and debit cards 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. The machines will use either use the hand, via finger prints, or the head, an eye scan, for verification, 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. Better start preparing for a barter economy.
Friedrich Nietzsche foresaw the coming of the Antichrist. He wrote a book by that name. He predicted the coming madness, now evident in Climate Change, money mayhem and the Trump phenomenon. Nietzsche wrote that the loss of God entails madness, which has implications for a society which has lost God. A society that prefers a Trump has become mad.
The entire world is already 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’, and 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 by 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. “The Four Living Creatures” representing all animals, plants, trees, natural beauty, so prominently featured in the book of the Revelation of John must become central to our lives, because without the animals, the trees, the coherence of it all, “The Kingdom” is not possible.
A thought: in the Lord’s Prayer the plea to ‘forgive us our trespasses’, refers to our ‘sins against creation’. Think about that and act accordingly.
Ora et Labora, Pray and work.