OCTOBER 19 2019
RELIGION-LESS CHRISTIANITY.
There’s a very telling text in the Bible, a wise reminder from the apostle Paul written to the sophisticated believers in the then world’s capital city, ROME, today still the headquarters of the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity. Here it is:
“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.”
When in our church the Bible is read, the reader often adds, “This is the word of God”. This is true, but the text quoted above points to another word of God: Creation. Never reading the Bible is not seen as a sin, but looking at creation and not attributing it to God: That is seen as inexcusable.
INEXCUSABLE!
Looking at creation and ignoring the creator, is like listening to THE ST.MATTHEW PASSION and refusing to attribute it to J. S. Bach, or admiring Rembrandt’s NIGHTWATCH, stubbornly maintaining that he did not paint it, instead suggesting that these master pieces evolved by themselves.
I realize these examples pale in comparison to the unfathomable intricacy of creation, where everything is connected to everything else.
There is one issue of overriding importance today, and it is: “If God created the cosmos, does that mean that creation is Holy? If that is the case, then mistreating it, is sin.”
I believe that the Belgic Confession is correct: “We know God by two means:
First, by the creation, preservation, and government
of the universe,
since that universe is before our eyes
like a beautiful book
in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God:
God’s eternal power and divinity,
as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20.
All these things are enough to convict humans
and to leave them without excuse.
Leave them without excuse!
The “THEM” are us. Yet, our entire society floats, moves, flies, focuses on abusing creation.
What can be concluded here is that creation exists to affirm the reality of the Scriptures and that the Scriptures exist to affirm the reality of Creation.
All signs signify that we are in the END TIMES. The differences between denominations are disappearing, as the matters that once divided these various churches are fading into irrelevance. Bonhoeffer predicted this when he coined the phrase,
“Religion-less Christianity”.
We all stand in history. The animal does not know history: it is aware, shows love and compassion and has many admirable attributes, but it stands outside what’s happening in its surroundings. Only we –men and women – have a place in history, and that place determines our life.
That place is now exclusively determined by the way in which we treat God’s creation, and how we care for it, especially now when the End is approaching.
Let’s face it: of course we have to enact our love for our neighbor, but if, in the process we poison the air, what good does our love do when we bring disease and death?
Just as the Bible, in a few sober words, depicts the beginning of it all, so it outlines for us the end-times as well, the confluence of everything, where cosmos turns to chaos.
We are getting a taste of this nowadays: wherever we look, wherever our eye turns, whether to China and Hong Kong, whether to the Arctic and ever higher temperatures there, whether to Indonesia and its fires, whether to the Middle East and its explosive situation, whether to Europe and Brexit, whether to the USA and a simmering civil war, it becomes increasingly clear that the history of the world ends in God’s judgment, a judgment that originates with humanity.
It is also becoming clearer by the day that not God, but The Evil One, is in charge of this world, and now that the coming of the Lord is fast approaching, the Devil and his legion of angels are redoubling their destructive efforts, using us as the executors.
Just as our life-story starts with TREES, so today, in the end-times, all things turn to the beginning. Just as the book of Genesis paints paradise for us, the place where human life started, so the Revelation of John brings us back to the same place.
To be human means to have a place between the beginning and the end, between the two trees in the beginning, the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and the Evil, and the END, with self-imposed, self-inflicted punishment and Judgment.
That’s in short how the Bible depicts, in living color, the life of us men and women, each with their own life to live, each directly related to eternity, and each simultaneously caught up in history.
And at the center of it all is CHRIST, who did not bring religion, but who taught us how to LIVE! CHRISTIANITY means LIFE and that to the fullest!
Crunch time.
Everything becomes what it is. It’s becoming increasingly clear that by treating creation as disposable we are cutting our own throat. By denying Creation as holy, we deny God. But when we love creation, then we do God’s will, then no other doctrine, no other religious rule is required: then we practice Religion-less Christianity, then, as Bonhoeffer has stated, we can live Etsi Deus Non Daretur, live “As if God does not exist.”
Looking back
For centuries now we have treated God’s Creation, God’s Primary Word, God’s Direct Revelation, as an item to be abused. We have scratched out God’s signature on every created entity, and written in our own name, even though the Ten Commandments explicitly state that “You shall not misuse the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”
That’s why Romans 1:20 bears repeating:
“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.”
But we must treat creation as God’s precious GIFT to us, remembering Psalm 115: 16 “The highest Heavens belong to God, but the Earth he has given to us:” all our actions must be geared to better the earth, because it’s our eternal HOME: Christ gave his life for it. We now can throw out all church teachings. We now have only ONE goal to live for: loving creation.
Confessions are useless when we deny them in reality, which we do constantly in our daily life: it’s easy to say “God is Love”, when we our actions scream that this does not apply to his creation, which we can and do abuse without ceasing. We are asked “to pray without ceasing” and that is true. My constant prayer is “Maranatha, Lord come quickly”, because my life, everybody’s life has become denial of God’s majesty in creation, God’s Primary and Direct Word, as Romans 1: 20 asserts.
It’s easy to intellectually love God. But he demands more than tokenism. Both in the Hebrew Bible and in the New Testament, the basic commandment is: Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ (Mark 12: 30).
The Hebrew Bible says exactly the same in Deuteronomy 6: 4, 5. Jesus calls that the greatest of all laws.
In other words we have to love the Lord with all our facilities, just as the Lord loves us with his totality, including Creation. There is no more beautiful Psalm than Psalm 19: “The heaven proclaim the glory of the Lord…… The Law of the Lord is perfect, it revives the soul. The fear of the Lord is pure…. In keeping them is great reward”.
Those lines refer to CREATION.
Dr. Barry Commoner, a man who taught biology for decades, by studying creation coined the LAWS OF ECOLOGY.
- Nature – Creation – knows best;
- Everything is connected to everything else;
- There is no free lunch;
- Nothing disappears.
At our own peril we are disregarding these rules for life. While there is great reward in keeping them, there is immense danger in ignoring them, and that’s what we have been doing: hence Climate Change; hence Global Heating.
With that in mind we must read – with new eyes – John 3: 16. It too 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”, which embraces everything that exists: you, me, the earth out of which we were formed, the trees, the air and oceans, the elephants and whales: nothing excluded.
That’s why “Our own deliverance and the deliverance of creation go hand in hand.”
James 2: 14 points to this: “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save them?”
Today the overriding issue involves the disintegrating of creation. Since everything is connected to everything else, we, the citizens of the earth too are affected, bringing protests, dissatisfaction, chaotic minds, confusion.
Organized religion has lost its relevance: only creation matters.
I know: I have mentioned this before, but I am fighting the generally accepted belief that Jesus died ONLY for our sins. He Did Not. Yet almost every hymn sung in church mentions that line. Also every other hymn wants to make us believe that we go to heaven. We Can’t Go to Heaven because Earth we are and to Earth we shall return: there’s where our destiny and future lies. I am fighting givens that the church has adopted for centuries, if not millennia, and they are LIES. Jesus – as John 3: 16 unambiguously states – died because he loved the earth, because He made it. He cringes in agony every time we abuse it.
That’s why the only way to ensure our future is to treasure the earth, to love it as Jesus loved it and gave his life for it.
Sorry to rehash this but new ideas have to be repeated to us constantly…What we read at nine in the morning will be forgotten by lunchtime and will need to be reread by dusk”.
John Calvin was wrong when he wrote that, “For anyone to arrive at God, the Creator, he needs only Scripture as his Guide and Teacher”. That may have been true 500 years ago when the earth was still pure. Protestants then agitated against Roman Catholicism, where all churches were replete with the replicas of saints and depictions of heaven.
Now often the Roman Catholic Church members are keener in their treatment of the earth than Protestant Christianity.
What counts today is Revelation 21: 22. There John was allowed to have a peak into the future and discovers that on the re-created earth he sees no temple there: “I did not see a temple in the city, because the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.”
No temple means the absence of church denominations. No temple means the disappearance of the Bible. No temple means the disappearance of all doctrines and church teachings that has caused so much confusion on earth. No temple means that God – his creation – is all and in all. God’s law will be in our hearts. No temple in the new creation means Religion-less Christianity.
That’s why we now, in these last days, seconds before Christ returns, must give priority to the welfare of creation, show our love, our utmost devotion, to the Created Word, which before our eyes is
like a beautiful book
in which all creatures,
great and small,
are as letters
to make us ponder
the invisible things of God.
Any other way is a denial of God. That’s why today John 3: 16 must dominate our life: since God so loved the cosmos, we too, to ensure eternal life, must follow Christ’s example by loving creation as the primary goal in life.
Here’s an exercice:
Repeat every day four times, before breakfast, before lunch, before dinner, before bed time:
“Christ did not die for our sins, he died to restore Creation.”
Repeat every day four times:
“We don’t go to heaven: we will inherit God’s Earth.”