GET OUT: but how?

September 30 2017.

GET OUT: but how?

In our church we are part of a Bible study group which for the past 18 weeks has studied the Book of REVELATION, using N. T. Wright as a guide.
Last Thursday, September 28, we dealt with Revelation 18 which is headed by THE FALL OF BABYLON, and says
“?‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!’
She has become a dwelling for demons
and a haunt for every impure spirit,
a haunt for every unclean bird,
a haunt for every unclean and detestable animal.
For all the nations have drunk
the maddening wine of her adulteries.
The kings of the earth committed adultery with her,
and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.”
Then I heard another voice from heaven say:
“?‘Come out of her, my people,’b
so that you will not share in her sins,
so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
for her sins are piled up to heaven,
and God has remembered her crimes.

The GET OUT passage has long fascinated me, so I decided to write about it, remembering a line I once read, “I don’t know what I am thinking until I have read what I have written.”
While I wrote I remembered that Jeremiah also mentioned the same warning (Jeremiah 51:45): “Come out of her, my people! Run for your lives!”

Then I wondered how often the GET OUT theme occurred in the Bible, and was amazed how frequently this has been the case.

Right from the very beginning, in Paradise, Adam and Eve were forced to get out of paradise. Noah too was asked to leave the world in which he had grown up; it had become too sinful, so he was chosen to make a new beginning. Then it became Abram’s turn to depart from his patrimonial place to go on an as yet unknown destination.
Lot, his nephew was guided out by God’s angels, urging his family on with the curious words, “hurry because I can’t act until you are safe.” That made me wonder. My guess is that Lot’s name was written in the Book of Life, so it would be impossible for him to die with the sinners, because a name in that book cannot be removed, ever.

It seems to me that the place, Sodom and Gomorra the Lot family had to quit, very much resembles the situation today: a haunt for every impure spirit, a haunt for every demon, a haunt for every unclean bird, and every unclean animal.

The entire book of EXODUS deals with the fledging Israel tribe getting out – exodus – to go to the Promised Land. Later that same nation was banned to Babylon, and then returned: another phase in the long series of relocations.

Don’t forget that the first Christians had to make a very difficult choice: by getting out of paganism and converting to Christianity they had to abandon their immediate family, their friends, business associates, and be shunned by them, disinherited, not unlike today when Muslims become Christian.

The same was true with the Reformation, creating intense friction among families and communities, wars even.

A more recent event occurred in my own family, when Abraham Kuyper was the driving force seceding from the Dutch National Church to form a new denomination, the Reformed Church, of which my grandparents became members.
That brings me to today and that recurring theme:
“?‘Come out of her, my people,’
so that you will not share in her sins,
so that you will not receive any of her plagues;
for her sins are piled up to heaven,
and God has remembered her crimes.

Sins piled up to heaven have a double meaning, I believe. It’s both the CO2 filled atmosphere, causing floods and hurricanes that are becoming common place, as well as our actions causing great grief in HEAVEN.

Does “come out of her, my people” apply to us today?

It is plain to me that through the way we live we are killing creation. All of us, without exception, partake in this murderous process. We are guilty like hell, to say it crudely. The problem is that we have painted ourselves in a corner: there’s no way we can go back in time to the year 1800 before the Carbon Age.

I do believe, however, that even though we cannot avoid being partakers in these global sins, God will forgive us when we are aware of what we do. It means that we must constantly pray for forgiveness and do everything in our power to minimize the damage we do. We can’t get out anymore. We are stuck.

And global sins they are: the entire world is guilty. “For all the nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries. The kings of the earth committed adultery with her, and the merchants of the earth grew rich from her excessive luxuries.”

What strikes me in this text is that again the earth is seen as a living body, and ravaging her is pure adultery, a direct sin against God. The reference to wine shows that the act is one of addiction, truly making us CARBOHOLICS.

Addiction is terribly hard to cure. It robs us of common sense, deprives us of sound reason intoxicated as we are with a substance that makes it almost impossible to see what’s really going on in the world around us. Just as an addict is oblivious to the effects of the vice, so we too ignore what our life style does to us and to the world we live in.

Of course we know. The signs are all around us. The ruling powers, especially those in charge of the mightiest nation in the world, openly encourage the use of substances that further poison the atmosphere, and all rulers, without exception openly state that their aim is ECONOMIC GROWTH which always, always, means more pollution, more harm. Television is kept in power because the merchants of the earth grow rich and richer: the heirs of WALMART are among the 0.01 percent, in Canada the Westons and Jim Patterson.

More and more regions of the world resemble utter desperation. Not only Puerto Rico where it will take months to restore electricity, not only parts of Texas or Florida or Mexico, where natural disasters, brought on by us poisoning the atmosphere are the direct cause of anger: the entire world is under threat, such as North Korea, Iran, the entire Middle East and now Asia as well.
In recent weeks, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Rohingya have been forced to flee from Myanmar, in the midst of a brutal army offensive that has been described by the UN’s human-rights chief as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing.”

That is just one example of religious intolerance, instigated by Buddhists, supposedly peace-loving. Religious intolerance is on the increase. We see it in the Western world against Muslims, encouraged in the USA by the top ruler there.
There are increasing signs that the USA is on the brink of another Civil War, which most certainly will erupt if or when Trump is forced to resign or be impeached. Far-right elements are on the march – promoting nihilism, of which the US president is an obvious example.
There is more to society than a deteriorating environment. We also have created a global money system which is based on debt, – created by a mere touch on a computer screen. Once it is in existence, however, it must be repaid, because a debt is an obligation to repay.
Indeed the problems we face are multi-dimensional: they are not only environmental: they also are monetary, religious, political and ethnical. Since life encompasses all these facets, COMING OUT OF HER entails quitting all these different strata as well.

Yes, the problems we face are complicated: they together keep us chained to the system. Oh, Satan is so clever: we really don’t grasp the intricate way in which we are bound to Capitalism, that very web that keeps us glued to what Revelation 18 calls our sins and crimes.
I admit, instead of giving an answer to our plight, I have done the opposite: I have immensely complicated the situation.

So let me try to untangle this. I read three books on Revelation: REVERSED THUNDER by Eugene H. Peterson, N. T. Wright’s Bible Study Guide on REVELATION, and J. H. Bavinck’s Dutch EN VOORT WENTELEN DE EEUWEN, loosely translated as ON AND ON THE AGES ROLL. None of the three give me a concrete answer to my question: “How do we disengage ourselves from our current way of life” which we are discovering is highly destructive.

Lot and his family were guided out by the Angel of God. We, supposedly having come of age and are on our own. That is very frightening.

So, after all this loose talk, what do I do about it?

My life’s motto is Ora et Labora, Pray and Work. I run 2-3 times each week and often bike to Tweed – 11 km round trip. I ran the Terry Fox 10 km in good time. My mantra when I run is “Maranatha, Lord come quickly, Maranatha, Lord come quickly”. When I put my head on my pillow at 10 p.m. my lullaby is “Maranatha, Lord come quickly”.

Remember the ICE STORM now more than 10 years ago, when electricity was out for weeks not too far from where we live. Since then I have installed a frost-free hand pump on our well. My freezer is on solar panels, recently renewed, and so are our lights, CD player and TV.
I am very conscious of our carbon footprint, use our car sparingly. We have not renewed our passports, foregoing a recent wedding of a grandson in Minnesota. I mow our lawn using solar power, have a large veggie garden. For many decades we have been vegetarian.

Even though I increasingly regard church denominations as irrelevant – John 3: 16 is what counts today – I support the Presbyterian World Service and the CRC World Renew. My wife and I are active in our local church where we attend a weekly Thursday morning prayer meeting, choir and Bible studies. I am a member of the church’s environmental committee.

My theology has been shaped by Bonhoeffer and Bavinck, but goes beyond that. My botanist-animal-specialist friend tells me that homosexuality is found among animals, so why would it not be seen among humans? It also points to evolution. God gave us eyes to see and brains to arrive at conclusions to detect what goes on in God’s created Word, the COSMOS which he loved as his ultimate work of art, which we sold to the Satan, and which Christ bought back on Calvary.

We now wait for Christ’ return with bated breath, because the birth pains are becoming more frequent and severe, fully aware that Romans 3: 24 tells us that we are “justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus”.

In these last days we consciously must treat creation as HOLY, as God’s DIRECT word. Deuteronomy 6: 4 says
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.

We cannot split God from his creation, just as we cannot split the St Matthew Passion from Bach, or the Messiah from Handel. That is the Cardinal Truth the church seems unable to grasp.

The church must reshape worship to include Creation as God’s Primary Word, and so prepare the believers for the New Creation to come where the Bible will disappear as we will able to directly communicate with the authors, with Moses and Isaiah, with Amos and Jonah, with Job – if he were an actual figure – and whoever wrote the Song of Solomon and, of course talk to the apostles and Jesus himself. That’ll be lots of fun and provide for some rich reasons for merriment.
In the New Creation in the company of the true saints, of totally like-minded people, we can look back to our former times, and laugh.
It reminds me of Isaiah 51: 11, “Those the LORD has rescued will return. They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.”

So ‘get out’ and look forward to everlasting JOY.

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