EARTH
“In the beginning”.
I am going to examine the very first text in the Bible. I am afraid it will involve some speculation, because only God was there, but his great apostle, Paul, encouraged me in 1 Thessalonians 5: 21, to “Test, investigate everything, and retain what is good”. Paul, after all was the most educated of all God’s immediate followers, and a great scientist in his own right, as well as a literary giant: just read again 1 Corinthians 13.
“In the beginning”.
With these three simple words the Hebrew Bible starts. No speculation about the number of years ago. No indication where and how: just “in the beginning.”
Then the next line:
Now the earth was
formless and void, and darkness was over the
surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the
surface of the waters.…
These past days I have struggled to fill these words with meaning. Try to imagine the scene: total darkness, pitch-black everything. Not a star to illumine, no point of light anywhere.
Yet in that utter nothingness – I believe that I was there! Not as my being as I type these words, yet I was there. I was there, among the thousands of trillions of random substances, in this light-less swirl of untold many objects, bouncing off each other, changing shape in the process, a scene that nobody ever has seen or could see or has seen, a seemingly chaotic cauldron of bits and pieces of floating something.
Here’s what J. H. Bavinck writes about that period:
“We are left with the core idea that the time in which we stand, the time is which history takes place, can never be understood in terms of itself. If we want to understand that—if we want to grasp the sense of history—we must go back to primeval times, to the events that took place before the ordering of this world. It was precisely then that the foundations were laid on which the structure of history rests.
It is truly remarkable that this same primitive thinking that is always engaged with the happenings in the Urzeit is at the same time interested in what will happen in the end?time. The gods and the powers at work in primeval times fashioned our world as we now experience it. However, the existence of this world is no more than a brief flash between two abysses of deep darkness. Soon, at the arrival of the end-time, our world will descend to the state it was before, when everything will revert back to what existed in the Urzeit: just as death is close to birth, so the downturn is not far from the upswing. Just as all that has been neatly ordered stems from chaotic disorder, emanating from the fog of the Urzeit, so the cosmos will disappear again in that same undefined state. The end?time is nothing else but the return to the Urzeit.”
That’s why Ecology and Earth systems, from which all life flows, should be at the heart of learning and preaching.
Bavinck needs requoting, “Just as all that has been neatly ordered stems from chaotic disorder, emanating from the fog of the Urzeit, so the cosmos will disappear again in that same undefined state. The end?time is nothing else but the return to the Urzeit.”
J. H. Bavinck calls that era, the URZEIT. Sorry, there is no English equivalent for that concept. My dictionary defines it as, “An unspecified time period extremely long ago, prehistoric times”. We usually label this time-slot as primeval.
All churches, and all educational systems, have utterly failed to make ‘living’ the center point of all teaching. Especially churches have completely fallen short there, because contact with the earth is the essential element of life. We are taken from the earth, we belong to the earth, and we live through the earth. Our bond with the earth is so strong that we cannot for a moment imagine existing apart from the earth.
Oh, that utterly lamentable heaven hoax: it has been the church’s main doctrine ever since not Christ but Aristotle became the ruling force in all religious expressions: anthropocentric, rather than ‘earth-centered’.
Nietzsche, the great Nietzsche, the much maligned Nietzsche, who pulls no punches, whos father and 2 grandfathers were Lutheran ministers, and who also was slated to follow in their footsteps.
Here’s a quote from Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s famousbook, available on line,
I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of super-earthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not.
Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!
Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dreadfullest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!
Yes, in most evangelical Christianity of all stripes ‘heaven’ has been promoted, misleading the flock. That’s why “non salus extra ecclesiam”, no salvation outside the church, is not true. If this is what the church teaches, then the opposite has more weight: no salvation inside the church.
Today, fortunately, we are discovering that our dependence on the earth is elementary. That’s why John 3: 16 is one of the most significant texts in the Bible, if not the most important one. It bears repeating,
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
Once, in a Bible study session I asked a participant what the word “world” included. The answer was ‘people only.’
That’s indeed the popular explanation. The Greek word for ‘world’ is ‘cosmos’, which any dictionary defines ‘anything that lives or moves or has a being.’ It generally refers to the earth and all it contains, including the stars and planets. That’s the world the Lord loves, as any great artist loves his own creation.
Jesus came to buy it back, buy back the cosmos, THE EARTH, he loved so much.
That’s the message to church still misses and is at the root of our troubles. That’s why we must ‘examine everything, and keep what is good.’ (1 Thessalonians 5: 21).
I also love John 1: 1:
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
There, “In the beginning”, the foundation of all that exist, men, woman, animals, trees, everything, all of us, alive and dead, The Earth, in short, was made.
We, thanks to fraudulent theological views, have hastened EARTH’S demise. Jesus is returning to undo our disastrous deeds when he returns.
Soon I hope.
Postscript.
Last week I was admitted to the regional hospital to discover that I had double pneumonia. After 4 days I was discharged on the promise to take it easy. I now recall that for years a dull pain in my chest was a harbinger. This time it was fits of chills and fever that set off my seeking medical advice.