JANUARY 26 2019
THOSE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE……………
Jeremiah 51: 9 tells me that there comes a time when further efforts are useless. I believe that this is the case today. Here’s what this great prophet said,
“‘We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed; let us leave her and each go to our own land, for her judgment reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the heavens.”
In the Bible Babylon always represents the world ruled by Satan.
THOSE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE……… is part of the translation of the Latin phrase, “Morituri Te Salutant: “those who are about to die, salute you” shouted by the gladiators who fought to death in the Coliseum in Rome in front of the Emperor.
These sword fighters knew what to expect, and accepted their fate. I believe we are in a similar position. Those who are about to go extinct include us, as well as animals, trees, and flowers. I wonder whether the very last animal or flower to disappear also exclaims, “I who am about to die, salute my maker”.
The only possible remedy is found in the Bible, in 1 Corinthians 13, that famous LOVE chapter. It ends with these words, “Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face….Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love”.
Yes, our only hope is to bank on God’s love and our love for God and his words.
I believe that, in some ways today we have a better picture of what goes on than in Paul’s days. Then mirrors, some 2000 years ago, gave a rather distorted reflection of the actual image. So, perhaps today, thanks to world-wide-communications, we have greater insight in what’s transpiring everywhere in the world, and can explore where all this leads.
Yes, I deeply believe that “all we have left is LOVE”.
Some 35 years ago my brother Drewes, en route to the Netherlands, after having completed a project in Australia, stopped in to visit us, and gave me a book by C. S. Lewis, THE FOUR LOVES. It remained unread until this week when I finally absorbed to some extent what the great C. S. Lewis wrote about AFFECTION, FRIENDSHIP, EROS, and CHARITY. My overriding impression of the book was my own inadequacy of living up to the love God extended to us, and my feeble response to his reaching out to me.
I love my wife, I love life, I love the earth and love God. It is not that I always am ‘in love’, but in a dream last week my love for my wife became evident again. Even after more than 65 years of marriage and another 5 years of courtship and being formally engaged to be married, I still have troubling dreams from the time she broke off the relationship. Praise God for dreams.
C. S. Lewis is very much sold on heaven. There’s where I part ways with him, because it is much easier, or better, less difficult, to love God through his creation and the Scriptures than to love God in the abstract. I take my cue from Paul who wrote to his adopted son Timothy, “God lives in inapproachable light, nobody can see him, and nobody has seen him”. (1 Tim. 6:18).
I find it difficult to love something or somebody unseen. I love J. H. Bavinck and Dietrich Bonhoeffer for the books they wrote which have given me clearer insights in matters eternal, such as The Kingdom of God. I also love God for the books he left with us, including the book of creation.
When I read in Bavinck that “A human being, adam, belongs to adamah, the life-bearing earth, with every sinew of his existence he is tied to the earth, which bears him and feeds him,” then this resounds in me as the true gospel. No heaven talk there!
When I read in Bonhoeffer’s CREATION AND FALL, written in 1932-33 when he was only 27 years old, that “Technology is the power with which the earth seized hold of humankind and masters it. And because we no longer rule, we lose the ground so that the earth no longer remains our earth, and we become estranged from the earth”, then too I thoroughly agree.
Bonhoeffer also years before Bavinck wrote, “God, the brother and sister, and the earth belong together. Once we lose the earth, we lose God as well”.
That tells me that treating the earth as something disposable, willfully polluting it, implies kicking God out of our lives: we simply cannot love God if we don’t love the earth.
My own inadequacy.
I have a friend, a true friend, who knows infinitely more about birds and plants than I do, and shows his affection for injured animals by lovingly caring for them and going out of his way to save them. We are true friends because we both deeply grieve for the way we are speeding to the end. In that way he is to me a shining example of John 3: 16, “God so loved the cosmos… “. We grieve because we love.
That’s what I especially love in our own church, because we have an environmental team that tries to make God’s love for creation evident in a way visible to the municipality, especially since our church building is smack on the main street, on the most direct route between Toronto and Ottawa.
In the yard around the church we have planted bee-and butterfly-friendly plants, have installed a small-take-away-library stand, and this spring intend to construct 6-8 large planters – wheelchair accessible – filled with vegetables for the taking and with tomato plants clinging against the south wall of the church.
As a church we have visited the Amish communities in our area, trying to learn from their creation-friendly way of life. Next week, for the third time, our church people will visit the immense beaver dam and pond on our property, where a good friend has fashioned enough seats fashioned from a dead pine tree to accommodate the people who can manage the 20 minute trek of ‘forest bathing’ on the way to this natural phenomenon. There’s no better scenario for worship than in God’s natural setting.
Why do we do this?
In these last days, these days of EXTINCTION, these days of THINGS DYING, we must prepare ourselves for living and working in the New Creation.
Everything points to an early demise of the earth. Because the ice in the Arctic that acted as an atmospheric stabilizing factor is largely gone and with it the global atmospheric balance, we will experience extreme weather volatility. It is expected that this summer all Arctic ice will disappear, exposing the METHANE, many times more lethal than the CO2 we generate in ever greater quantities.
So, yes, it is high time that we prepare ourselves for a totally new approach to life and to worship.
Everything has to change.
Take the church again as example: basically we haven’t changed its make-up since the year 400. Yet, in Revelation 22, the very last Bible book, referring to THE NEW CREATION, it explicitly states that “And there was no altar there”, indicating to me that formal worship there has disappeared altogether.
Now that we are at the end of the secular timetable, one of the indications is the disappearance of the church, oh, not in buildings, not in formal religion, but in lacking to grasp the true message, all too evident in the total confusion what the Gospel really means for today.
For instance: ask the average churchgoer where the real aim is of God’s love, and the answer, for the orthodox Christian, will be for the sinner. But the Bible clearly states that his most direct love is for THE COSMOS.
That’s why I see John 3: 16 is the most important text for today: meditate on that passage, display it on the fridge door, repeat it aloud to your family members, mention it to you friends that Jesus came to earth for the LOVE of the cosmos, his love for humanity, fauna and flora, all things visible and invisible.
All this brings me back to Jeremiah 51: 9 who really foresaw the present conditions.
“‘We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed; let us leave her and each go to our own land, for her judgment reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the heavens.”
That text is now being fulfilled. Remedying Climate Change has become impossible. Changing the way we live, totally depending on fossil fuels, has become impossible. Bringing the GOOD NEWS to the world has become impossible because we don’t know any more what the GOOD NEWS is. Reforming the church has become impossible because it is too entrenched in its own structure. Altering the way we govern ourselves has become impossible as is all too evident today.
It seems to me that in all things we have gone full circle: from CHAOS before the Garden of Eden, to COSMOS with Paradise, to now, thanks to our constant environmental abuse, a return to CHAOS until the Lord returns and the final COSMOS appears, ready and waiting for its full deployment.
I believe that the church has gone through a similar cycle: from simple gatherings and communion with the Lord at people’s homes, to meeting in public places, then assembling in specially built edifices, expanding to elaborate cathedrals, resembling heaven, with painted ceilings depicting angels, and other celestial beings, and now falling apart, as the faithful have become unfaithful, as sermons, in times of vastly superior methods of communications, have become outmoded and stale, and people attain a level of maturity, perhaps not theologically, but in their own minds.
So, in order to make faith proclamation more direct, a new approach is needed. There too, the death of formality may bring new life: back to the former, simple structure.
Rather than being addressed from the pulpit, informality is needed, perhaps in a church setting, perhaps in small gatherings at home where neighbors are invited, with the hosts in charge. Gatherings (ecclesia means ‘gathering’) confined to Bible readings, prayers, some cautious songs, intermingled with relating personal experiences of the week, having a ‘communal’ meal together, remembering the death of Christ.
It will need practice, of course. Perhaps relating how a certain book or news item or article caught one’s attention. And it may never happen, because we … and you know the reasons.
When Jesus died, the curtain in the Jerusalem Temple that separated the Holy from the Holy of Holies ripped from Top to Bottom, something really radical. This signalled the end of Temple worship, and the beginning of a totally different type of worship, not centered on a building, not centered on formality, not centered on rules and regulations, but totally transformed by LOVE.
And so we know and rely on the love God has for us. God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them (1 John 4: 16), writes John, who often is called the disciple of love.
We live in different times.
Yes Jeremiah 51: 9 speaks to me: We now live in conditions that can no longer be changed: the momentum, the infrastructure, the vested interests are simply too powerful.
We tried our best to heal society, but it is beyond repair. We have the church, but it is stuck in the rut. We have Suzuki, but he now has gone mainstream. We have Greenpeace, the Green Party, recycling, but the plastic keeps on multiplying. We have carbon taxes, and Climate Pacts, but the CO2 increases just the same.
Yes, we would have healed Babylon, but she can no longer be healed.
So we simply resign to let the world go to pot?
Revelation 22: 11 comes again to mind: let those who do the right thing, persist; let those who don’t give a hoot, let them do so, for her judgment reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the heavens.”
“Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. Now these three remain: faith, hope, and love; but the greatest of these is love”.