April 13 2019
EXTINCTION
I worry. Fortunately it doesn’t affect my sleep. My three times per week of one solid hour of running 5 kilometer, of biking 5 kilometer and doing 50 pushups, outdoors when weather permits or on my three exercise machines, plus the extra hours of doing housework, preparing meals, and helping my spouse, ensures that when 10 p.m. comes along, I am tired and sleep quickly and deep. Oh, yes, I sometimes do have a 20 minute afternoon nap.
I worry. It’s not about me, my wife or our extended family. We have been blessed as no other family I know, in having healthy, intelligent kids, all well married, smart grandchildren, who are well educated and have good jobs, so my worry is not about them. And yet it is about them.
I worry about their future.
I’ve had my life. I have enjoyed the most extravagant era of all times, even though I now realize that it was at the expense of creation. When I pray the Lord’s Prayer, and come to the line, “Forgive us our sins,” then my trespasses on creation come to mind.
In my line of work I travelled tens of thousands of kilometers to do appraisals as far away as Bancroft – 90km -, Haliburton – 130 km -, Minden – even further -, the Algonquin Park, Barry’s Bay, to the North, Peterborough to the West, Picton to the South, and Smith’s Falls to the East, and places in between. Appraising commercial properties so far away was my profession: I was the only qualified person in my area.
And now I worry because my considerable contribution of Green House Gases has added to the Environmental Crisis we are facing, and the consequences my children and grand – and great grandchildren will face.
I have long maintained that we live in End Times.
Last week I reread THE SIXTH EXTINCTION. Elizabeth Kolbert relates how a mysterious fungus totally wiped out the Panamanian Golden Frog. The fungus spread rapidly from country to country, from continent to continent, and caused the sudden demise of most amphibians, world-wide, including those in my large beaver pond.
Last week I read, in the New York Times, where its lead article also was about a fungus, named Candida auris. It is spreading like wildfire through the world’s hospitals. Its fatality rate is 43 percent, and there is no cure. The fungus is airborne, water-born, clings to every surface, and is extremely difficult to eradicate. The New York Times reports that in a hospital room, ”Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump, the mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive -”.
I suspect that hospitals and medical authorities are suppressing the knowledge of its existence. Since there is no antidote, the people in authority don’t want to alarm the public, and so it has been given the silent treatment, so to say.
There are different theories how Candida auris came about. Dr. Jacques Meis, a Dutch researcher, attached to the Nijmegen University, believes that drug-resistant fungi developed thanks to heavy use of fungicides on crops. These poisonous commercial pesticides suppress the immunity of the soil and free substances such as these fungi.
We really have no clue what we are doing to The Earth.
We are indeed speeding up the disintegration of the planet’s defensive system by introducing foreign substances to supposedly aid the growth of crops.
It reminds me of a wise First Nation elder, Marie Gladue, a Navajo elder,
Natural Law was here before and will be here after we’re gone.
Western law was not here then and will not last.
.Western Law is what we live by today. It only has one aim: exploit the earth for all it worth. That goal is failure-bound, a fact that is becoming more evident by the day. That’s why it is the appropriate time to echo the message John the Baptizer brought, “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.”
For me this character, John the Baptizer, is my prototype, my model. He was called to pave the way for the Messiah. I believe that this is the task of all Christians, and especially the Church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw the task of the church in completely eschatological terms, always pointing to the Eschaton, so he wrote,
“The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”
The trouble is that the church sees heaven as the end. Every Sunday in church we read a portion of THE LIVING FAITH, the statement of Christian Belief of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. This past Sunday, we read,
Love is the greatest gift in the world
because it will last beyond this world
and is supremely pleasing to our Lord.
Love foreshadows life in heaven.
That’s a bunch of baloney. If that is the official point of view of a denomination, proclaiming that the end of it all is heaven, then God help us, because the church, the official mouthpiece of God in the world, has it all wrong. Bonhoeffer sees it differently. Here’s what he wrote:
“Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world
to
other worlds beyond: rather he gives us back to the earth as its
loyal children.”
My other favorite theologian, J. H. Bavinck, wrote essentially the same,
“Personal salvation and the salvation of the planet go hand in
hand”.
Both Bavinck and Bonhoeffer see the Kingdom in eschatological terms: The New Creation to come!
“Personal salvation and planetary redemption go together!” That is revolutionary: it turns the message of the church upside down!
THE BELGIC CONFESSION confirms this. Here’s what this all- important statement of faith says about us knowing God:
“We know God FIRST by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book…. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: “(the creation of) all these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”
If we know God first through his creation, then there’s something drastically wrong with the Gospel business.
Let me give a closer look at Romans 8. It connects human suffering with the pains the earth endures.
Here’s the exact wording, verses 17 – 21,
And if we are children, then we are heirs: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him. I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the revelation of the sons of God. ……. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now.
The HERITAGE awaiting us is THE NEW CREATION, if we share in the suffering.
Let me take a concrete example. Picture Johann Sebastian Bach, who composed an immense amount of music. Suppose that just like Christ, Bach had a mortal enemy, who got ahold of all his music before it was widely published, and before JSB’s very eyes, burn it, slowly destroying his entire portfolio. You can imagine that it would pain him no end, seeing his life’s work destroyed.
But that’s what we are doing to Creation, God’s glorious work of art. That’s what EXTINCTION really means: we are extinguishing species after species; we are fouling everything else, turning it into poison; we are creating bizarre conditions, everywhere, turning benevolent entities, such as air, soil, water, into dangerous substances.
“And if we are children, then we are heirs: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him”.
We call ourselves God’s children. As children we are slated to become heirs, which indicate that we will inherit what now belongs to God. But it comes with a caveat: today we all are continuously complicit in destroying God’s very good creation: we are sacrificing our inheritance just like the Prodigal Son! Read Luke 15.
We have become so immune to creation’s suffering, so enthralled with the tricks we can play on our machines, praising our accomplishments to heaven, we have become so addicted to everything technical, that all cries of creation are drowned out by the clamor we generate in our cities, where the towers scale ever greater heights, where the traffic congestion clams up all degrees of common sense, where the rich get richer and the poor poorer.
And Christ? And his suffering? We sing, “what a friend we have in Jesus.” But what is a friend for, if not to share in his suffering?
We no longer have a notion of the earth’s pains. Christ, seeing his creation going to hell, aided and abetted and encouraged by his supposedly very body, the church, is still suffering stupendously.
Judas was the lonely betrayer among the twelve disciples. Now, it seems, the entire official church, is betraying the Gospel, the Good News, and entirely misses Jesus’s proclamation: LOVE FOR CREATION. John 3: 16 proclaims this unambiguously: GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD!!
And We?
We have paved the earth, mined the seas, flattened the mountains, and with our high-up condos and cars, we have eliminated the in-built, original knowledge received directly from the Earth. And because we are being bombarded by information, toxins, and electronic signals coming at us faster than our bodies can process, our brains assemble fragments of information into a distorted composite from which we react rather than respond.
The fatal illness of our times is that we have lost touch with the earth, and have left God stranded in the process. Roman 1: 20 directly points to creation as the source of divine knowledge. We have forgotten that the physical landscape is an encyclopedia of wisdom, where everything serves everything else. We have forgotten that we ought to be Servants in Chief.
What to do.
Today there is no more important Bible passage than John 3: 16. 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.
The Greek word for ‘world’ is ‘cosmos’. Cosmos includes all created matter, from a blade of grass, to the stars and planets. Just as Bach loves his repertoire of created notes and tunes which he formed into harmonious melodies so God loves his creation, the immense, eternal, infinite, never fully grasped assembly of atoms and mountains, seas and prairies. God, in a fit of generosity – see Psalm 115: 16 – gave it all to us humans, hoping that we would take care of it, explore it, and further develop it to God’s glory.
Instead we became greedy to the point where we now face world-wide extinction, the death of everything and everybody.
Really, there’s no stopping the process. So Jesus – God’s Son – perfect God and perfect Human – descended to earth to wrest God’s creation from the hands of THE ENEMY whose sole aim is to destroy God’s work of art.
The Price? The Ransom? The death of God, seemingly a victory for Satan, but really it restored Creation.
That is what the Church has to proclaim. In these last, these very last days, Satan will redoubled his efforts, will create unimaginable harm and chaos, and WE will suffer more than any earlier generation because we have failed to serve creation.
“And if we are children, then we are heirs: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him”.
Our suffering is different: our suffering is not for ourselves. Our suffering concerns creation. It is not about us, in the first place, but it is about the animals whose lives are eradicated, is about the plants that no longer see life.
I am not worried about myself. I worry about all those who shut their eyes to what is plainly visible, ignore the signs, and disregard the ever growing list of extinct animals and plants, which sooner than later will include us as well.
But those who consciously suffer with Christ, and mourn EXTINCTION, await a total rebirth, the true renaissance.