FEBRUARY 23 2019
THE RIDDLE OF LIFE
He who saves a single life, saves the whole world.
The Talmud
I found that quote in a book I bought in 1998, WRESTLING WITH ANGELS, subtitled, “What Genesis teaches us about our spiritual identity, sexuality and personal relationships,” written by psychotherapist Naomi Rosenblatt, born in Israel now living in Washington, DC..
Jews are a people apart, still the chosen race. Remember: Jesus was a Jew and the entire Bible was written by Jews.
My mission in life is: fighting the HEAVEN HERESY. The renewed earth is our eternal destination. That’s why Jesus came.
I have fought the Heaven Heresy ever since I read Dr. Telder’s Dutch book in 1972, Sterven… en dan? (AFTER DEATH…. WHAT?), questioning the Heaven Destination. Each Sunday I am annoyed how the Presbyterian Hymnal is full of this heaven claptrap. It is high time that songbooks and church hymnals are updated, scrapping all references to this basically pagan concept.
Yes, this is what I see as my mission in life. If I can – with the impetus of the Holy Spirit – convince one person that we have to live NOW so that the cosmos can last forever, then I have gained the whole world and the whole world has been saved for that person. That attitude solves The Riddle of Life.
Here`s a quote I found in Rosenblatt’s book, “Regardless of our spiritual aspirations, we never stop living and navigating in the real world. This emphasis on land – rather than the kingdom of heaven – is a daily reminder to us that our human destiny is to live on earth among people, not as astral beings detached from earthly concerns.”
It appears that the Hebrew Bible believers also question this celestial concept, which tells me that there are many Jews among the elect.
I believe this ties in with what the Talmud states when it says, “He who saves a single life, saves the whole world”. To me that means that we must live in such a way that the earth lasts forever: Love the earth as God loves it. Saving a life includes our own.
I can appreciate the Jews with their long and black clothing. I respect their desire to live by the Mosaic rules and show their FAITH in tangible terms. I really value the outward display of their commitment – as do the Amish – and wish that Christians were visible by their way of life, such as carbon-free living, and openly display their love for God and creation by their lifestyle.
The Bible also talks about that One Person. Look at Luke 15: 7. It says “I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over One Sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.”
I taste the irony there: the churches and synagogues are packed with ‘righteous people’ who don’t need to repent. Yes, the angels are closely watching where we are up to. Of course, Jesus here was referring to the Pharisees who believed that by following their rules people will be saved, such as visiting the temple (and pay the tax, of course), go to church, attend mass, do this and that, and pronto God is on your side.
But today God has a different way: no rules at all: just one
word, LOVE, love for creation, love for neighbor. Love rules over all. John 3:
16: God so loved the cosmos!
Can we go back?
Naomi Rosenblatt relates how there was a hidden social dividend of the Great Depression (1930-39). She writes, “With so much unemployment and so little expendable income, everyone had plenty of time to sit around the table drinking tea and talking. Conversation and storytelling were the poor man’s entertainment”.
I wonder, will these ‘story-telling’ events still be there when the next ‘depression’ comes, and television and texting is no longer possible? Having a smart-phone does not make a person smarter: on the contrary.
I remember my paternal grandfather (1868-1959) who lived in a remote part of the Netherlands, on the border between the Provinces of Groningen and Friesland. He told some gruesome tales involving bad men in his neck of the woods, who celebrated the Satan’s Supper, a parody on the Lord’s Supper, and actively engaged an unseen Devil’s Agent, who carried away empty liquor bottles, and brought back full ones, the bottles traveling mysteriously by themselves through the air.
More than one hundred years ago ‘evil’ was more easily spotted. Today matters are more insidious: Satan has gone main stream. We no longer recognize evil, because it is everywhere: we live it: witness our addiction to fossil fuel. No wonder we live in all-around disintegrating times. Ecologically, economically and politically: Capitalism is failing as catastrophically as communism has failed. It is beset by unacknowledged but fatal contradictions, such as Infinite Growth, inherently corrupt and corrupting. But its inherent power, and the vast infrastructure of thought that seeks to justify it, makes any challenge to the model almost impossible to contemplate. Even to acknowledge the emergencies it causes, let alone to act on them, feels like electoral suicide. In a sense it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.
Naomi Rosenblatt writes that before the FLOOD both animals and people were strictly plant eaters, but after the FLOOD humans and animals stopped being vegetarian.
Last week’s Toronto’s Globe and Mail had long articles about the increasing popularity of vegetarianism: those who avoid meat have half the carbon footprint of those who eat meat, something to consider for us who love Creation, because the diet in the New Creation will also be solely plant-based, just as it was when Adam and Eve dwelled in the Garden of Eden.
Disintegration.
Today the old order has frayed to the point of dissolution. Take truth. It was based on the conviction that words have meaning. For Trump, they do not, as his declaration of a “national emergency” on the southern border with Mexico underscores. Without meaning, no law, no treaty is worth the paper it’s written on. This is the real danger confronting the West.
Still the Trump believers insist that his ascendency is heaven-inspired, and is an unmixed blessing for the church.
Well, strangely, there is some truth is this: it proves that Christianity, USA style, is totally false. It may convince those who recognize Trump’s satanic pedigree –The Lust for Money is the root of all EVIL – to look for alternatives, which may force them to seek the TRUTH. In the same way Trump’s chaotic reign, dispensing with all environmental rules will speed up the Coming of the Kingdom.
The Coming of the Kingdom? What’s that?
The fallacy of word distortion and truth negation is true for the church as well.
What does the word “KINGDOM” mean?
Ask any church member, and most likely a shrug is the answer. Yet it is the central message of the Bible.
Ask any church member why Jesus came, and the answer is to bear our sin, yet the real answer is that he came to restore the KINGDOM, God’s Holy Creation.
Ask any church member where we go when we die, and the answer is Heaven.
Yet John 3: 16 tells us that God so loved the world that he sacrificed his son to regain it. Satan has so brainwashed us all, that this text is interpreted strictly in human terms: only we are saved, and not a word about creation,
THE INTERNET.
A fabulous invention. This blog you are reading goes everywhere in the world: it is read most in the USA (34%), Canada (20%), and CHINA (18%), followed by a host of other countries in Europe and Asia. The statistics also tell me what is read most. Today all intelligent human beings are connected, and it takes mature minds to recognize true from false, because it’s a free-for-all, where everyone shows up armed with his or her personal opinions, convictions, and truth.
Reading WRESTLING WITH ANGELS and the Sodom and Gomorrah episode and the lot of Lot’s wife, made me think of the many Jews in war-time Europe (1939-45) who had ample warning what awaited them but, as Naomi Rosenblatt related, “in many cases people couldn’t bring themselves to abandon their homes, furniture and friends.”
It made me wonder whether we face the same predicament. We today live in Sodom and Gomorrah; we today cherish all the fruits from the crimes we commit daily against God’s Holy creation, but today there are no angels to warn us, no Abraham to plead our case before God.
Has God disappeared?
That’s how Richard Elliot Friedman, Professor of Hebrew, in THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD starts his book, “God disappears in the Bible”. He ends the book with, “There is some likelihood… that we are created more in the divine image than we have suspected. There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.”
He also writes that the way God deals with people has changed over time. Adam was like a child, and God treated him as such. Noah was good at following instructions, but not much else. Abraham successfully argued with God and Jacob had a physical fight with God and prevailed. Adam disobeys God, Abraham questions God, and Jacob fights with God. Human beings are confronting their creator, and they are increasing their participation in the arena of divine prerogatives.”
The most stunning episode is found in Genesis 22: 2. There God tells Abraham: “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, (this marks the first mention of the word “love” in the Bible) and offer to God the son of your old age.”
This made me think about our own situation. We may fault God for asking Abraham to bring this cruel sacrifice (averted at the last minute) but isn’t it true that through our way of life we are sacrificing our children and grandchildren to the idol of convenience?
I started out with the statement: “He who saves a single life, saves the whole world.” Of course, we can’t save lives. Only God through Jesus Christ can do that, but somehow we through the spoken or written word are God’s tool: he uses us to bring the Good News.
When we talk about saving lives, then it refers to eternal life. Our earthly existence is simply a brief proving station for eternity but it determines life forever. God wants us to grow up: be independent, think for ourselves. That’s why God told Moses (Deuteronomy 32: 20), ‘I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be’.
That’s exactly what is happened today: God has hidden his face and we face the END without God.
That’s why Bonhoeffer calls himself an Anthropos Teleios, a person who always keeps the End in mind. The End does not mean our finish, but rather our ultimate future.
In these last days God expects us to be adults. He assumes that we have reached maturity.
However, it seems that the opposite is true. We are running stuck because we are living the LIE, embodied in an extraordinary way in Donald Trump. We are living the LIE because we have assumed the life of Sodom and Gomorrah by building an existence based on the fallacy of perpetual growth in a Finite Earth, fueled by poisonous substances.
But we are ‘coming of age’, approaching old age. Humanity is tired, suffering from affluenza, and living in a poisoned world.
Whether we are ready or not, we are about the see the God who has been hiding his face. God has been hiding his face to let humanity go its own way, apart from God, “to see what they on their own, will make of it”.
Well, the verdict is in: we can’t manage. We let things go to pot: animals eliminated, plants disappeared, water wasted, air desecrated, soil soiled, seas saturated with plastic. Nothing has been left pristine.
Jesus knew all that: that’s why he came. God loves the world and wants it restored and populated with ‘wise’ people, who ‘fear’ the Lord, who ‘respect’ his laws.
He who saves a single life, saves the whole world. The world is contained in each of God’s children. That’s the Riddle of LIFE.