June 15 2019

THE ULTIMATE TEST

We, you, I, every member of the human race, is on the earth for a purpose. That purpose is to try us out for the new earth to come. That trial involves an exam of sorts, even though the Lord’s Prayer has a line, “Save us from the time of trial”, but this is not going to happen. Sorry to say, but the ultimate test is coming, unique to our generation for a reason. As the last generation we must face the consequences of being the most destructive of all who came before us. That makes following the Lord’s command nearly impossible: “Be perfect, as God is perfect”. That’s what Jesus told us in Matthew 5: 48.

The Greek word for ‘perfect’ is teleios, better translated as ‘holistic’. We must live a holistic life, not only refrain from harming creation but even enhance it.

In “Tending the Garden”, Paulos Mar Gregorios, Metropolitan of Delhi in the Indian Orthodox Church, echoed Bonhoeffer and Bavinck, when he wrote, “Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. Romans 1: 20 confirms this:

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

This text points to God as the Creator. Creation is God’s primary message to the world. 

Why has the entire theological enterprise, from Pope in the Roman Catholic Church to the Archbishop in the Anglican Church, to the Billy Grahams in the Baptist and Pentecostal movement, to the Allah adherents, solely centered on the Bible or Koran as the only source of salvation?

Harold Bloom in THE AMERICAN RELIGION, both translator and interpreter of the Hebrew Bible, writes fundamentalist America  (which Bloom calls the Know-Nothing Believers) uses the Book as a Talisman in the same way a person carries a charm or a magic ring to ward off evil. But ask them to define their beliefs and the stammering begins, probably alluding to ‘Rapture’.

“In the beginning was the Word,” that how Jesus’ disciple, John, begins the Bible book named after him. Psalm 33: 9 tells us that, “God spoke and it came to be.” That “came to be” is not the Bible: that came to be is “creation”. Creation is God’s Primary Word. If we want to LIVE forever, have eternal life in perfection, then we have to understand this, then we have to mentally, spiritually, and physically treat Creation as our most precious possession, for the simple reason that it is a direct product of God’s unfathomable ingenuity. The Bible is there to explain how creation came to be: call it a handbook, a directive, a guide for understanding creation. No wonder there are so many different interpretations because they all use the wrong approach. We have turned the entire God culture on its head by using the directions as the real thing, while demoting the real thing to a matter of abuse and scorn.

How did this come to be?

C. S. Lewis hit the nail on the head when he wrote in the Screwtape Letters, “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts”.

Well, that’s where we have been travelling: the road to hell. Instead to work “by the sweat of your brow”, as God told Adam and Eve, our generation has avoided the sweat by employing energy slaves, lambasting the land, wasting the weeds with cancer-causing chemicals, effortlessly speeding everywhere by plane, by car, by motorboat, until….

That until… is now knocking at the door.

The voices that spell ‘doom’ are getting louder by the day, yet the institution that’s supposed to advance the Coming of the Kingdom, the church, is absent here. History is repeating itself. In Jesus’ time the church brought death to the Redeemer. This time we are killing God. How? Dr. Bloom has shown that the American Religion, basically all religious expression, has become totally gnostic, and sees creation, God’s work of Art, as evil or as irrelevant.

The End is approaching.

It’s hard to believe that our miraculous human enterprise, with its megacities and spectacular technology, with its flying machines and satellites, with its television and smart phones, is ending.

That’s what the scientists – the true scientists, not the lackeys of business and politics – keep telling us. We’ve done ourselves in, are destroying ourselves with our own, fatal success. Oh, yes, more and more people are telling us this, but the question is: will the people with power, the heads of state in, say the USA or Brazil, even listen?

And will the others, the world leaders who understand the situation, do enough? Their mantra too is Economic Growth, while business as usual continues, because profits must keep rolling in.

There’s some good news. The good news is that, for the sake of the believers, the true believers, matters of universal disintegration are speeding up. That’s the good news.

David Wallace-Wells in his recently published The Uninhabitable Earth, writes, “Half of the Great Barrier Reef has already died, methane is leaking from Arctic permafrost and may never freeze again, and the high-end estimates for what warming will mean for cereal crops suggest that just four degrees of warming could reduce yields by fifty percent.”

Permafrost covers 25% of the Northern Hemisphere. It is the world’s largest icebox, and its landmass is 4.5xs larger than Antarctica, 6.5xs larger than the United States. It is stuffed full of carbon locked in frozen ground accumulated over eons, which, by way of contrast, makes coal power plant emissions look bush-league. Global warming has changed the equation. Nowadays, permafrost disintegration is officially hot news.

The melting of the permafrost in a very short time, will quadruple the global temperature. When the Giga-tons of Arctic Methane explode – and it is exactly there where the rate of warming is the highest – then a sudden spike in temperature is the result, which would spell the end of all that lives. That is not science-fiction: that is a distinct possibility. The odds that this is occurring are much higher than our house catching fire, for which we all carry fire insurance.

What sort of insurance is there for Methane mayhem?

The altered climate will cause multiple catastrophes, listed in Wallace-Wells’ table of contents: heat death, hunger, drowning, wildfires, out-of-control weather – typhoons, tornadoes, floods and droughts – a fresh water drain, dying oceans, unbreathable air, the spread of plagues not seen in millennia and of tropical diseases throughout the world, climate wars and more.

Yes, matters are acceleration exponentially! In the last 25 years we have altered “twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass”. Ninety-six percent of the world’s animals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock,” writes Wallace-Wells. He describes “the forces that  unleashed climate change – namely ‘the unchecked wisdom of the market’” to conclude that “neoliberalism is the God that failed on climate change.” Indeed those who hope that salvation from the human-induced climate catastrophe will come from our neoliberal leaders are deluding themselves and wasting time.

“More than half of the carbon exhaled into the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels has been emitted in the past three decades,” Wallace-Wells writes. The climate catastrophe is predominately the creation of the World War II generation, the boomers and their children. And if we don’t wean ourselves quickly from oil and gas, from our meat-intensive diet, and if we don’t stop pouring concrete, large parts of the earth will become uninhabitable.

Wallace-Wells quotes, “a billion or more vulnerable people have little choice but to fight or flee.” You think the Syrian war produced a refugee crisis for Europe (a war, by the way climate-change induced drought)? Or that Central American drought has propelled unsustainable numbers of migrants to the U. S.? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

“Since 1980,” Wallace-Wells writes, “the planet has experienced a fiftyfold increase in the number of dangerous heatwaves…The five warmest summers in Europe since 1500 have all occurred since 2002.” Humanity has been playing with fire. “In 2010, 55,000 died in a Russian heatwave…In 2016…temperatures in Iraq broke…120 in July, with temperatures dipping below 100, most days, only at night.” The Chicago heatwave of 1995 killed 739 people, “of the many thousands more who visited hospitals during the heatwave, almost half died within the year. Others merely suffered permanent brain damage.”

Meanwhile “nearly two thirds of the world’s cities are on the coast – not to mention its power plants, ports, navy bases, farmlands, fisheries, river deltas, marshlands and rice paddies…Already flooding has quadrupled since 1980…and doubled since 2004.” NOAA has predicted a possible eight feet of sea level rise just in this century, Wallace-Wells reports.

A human holocaust looms.

This week I also read a book by a Holocaust survivor, Dr. Viktor Frankl.

Just a word on how I select my topic of the week. Actually, I don’t choose it: it chooses me. Somehow each week my eye is directed toward a certain topic, either a bible passage or a book. This week the book was MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING. Dr. Frankl was professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Vienna. During three years of incredible suffering at Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps, he developed his theory of LOGOTHERAPY, which treats the human being as a whole in the effort of groping for a higher meaning of life. Dr. Frankl, in his book, explains that LOGO means ‘meaning’.

So I started to write about ‘the purpose in life and what is the meaning of it all in the light of religion.

David Brooks, the New York Time columnist, last week wrote, “We’re living in the middle of a religious revival; it’s just that the movements that are rising are not what we normally call “religion.” The first rising movement is astrology. According to a 2018 Pew poll, 29 percent of Americans say they believe in astrology. That’s more than are members of mainline Protestant churches.

“Another surging spiritual movement is witchcraft. In 1990, only 8,000 Americans self-identified as Wiccans. Ten years later there were 134,000, and today, along with other neo-pagans, there are over a million. As Tara Isabella Burton put it in an excellent, deeply researched essay in The American Interest, “Wicca, by that estimation, is technically the fastest-growing religion in America.”

It reminds me of Amos 8: 12, People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it.

People are screaming for “meaning”, and don’t find it because the churches have failed to pursue THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM.

The church has fallen for the Gnostic-Hellenic notion that the body is evil, and that matter is without quality. The Biblical TRUTH, however, is that human redemption and the redemption of the entire creation go hand in hand. Of course: this is God’s earth!!    

Jesus told us in Matthew 5: 33, “Seek first the Kingdom of God”. Once we do that, our entire life will acquire meaning. Seeking “The Kingdom of God”, means promoting, living, minding, focusing on the welfare of creation.

Let me repeat that: Our sole goal in life is to enhance creation, is to beautify it, it is promote its wellbeing, is to rise up in the morning with the sole purpose to pursue the beautification of the natural environment. That gives meaning to life, a meaning that extends into eternity. Christ came to wrest creation from the power of the evil one. That’s why John 3: 16 is so important. There it says not that God so loved the human being that he offered his life to set it straight, but that God so loved THE COSMOS. That word encompasses everything created, including us poor creatures, now devoid of meaning, now embracing all sorts of false religions, now slated to become obliterated by the coming Holocaust.

God so loved the world. The only way to gain meaning at this late hour is the do likewise.

The entire world history can be summed up in these words, “God is trying to determine who are worthy to inhabit the New Earth to come”.

That’s why today our constant prayer should be,

“Forgive us our now inevitable intrusions into your holy creation, and make us worthy to inhabit the New Earth”.