DECEMBER 14 2019
HELL IN HEAVEN; HELL ON EARTH.
The Bible gives a picture of heaven that is totally at odds with the portrayal I received when I was a kid, steeped in all things religious. I went to a Christian Kindergarten and Christian elementary and prep school, attended church youth and young adult clubs, sat faithfully in church twice on a Sunday, services lasting at least 90 minutes, churches always packed to capacity, at least 800 faithful, exposed to sermons where heaven featured prominently, always touted as the most desirable destination.
A word about heaven.
The Bible often speaks about heaven in the plural: heavens. Why? Because it recognizes three of them. Paul in 2 Corinthians 12 writes that he was caught up to the THIRD heaven. It sees the FIRST heaven as our domain: the atmosphere below the Ozone layer, the SECOND heaven as the place where the stars and planets dwell, while the THIRD heaven is for God and the angels.
And God? 1 Timothy 6: 16 tells us that “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody has seen and nobody can see”. It reminds me of Billy Graham, the man who paved the way for Trump. I hardly ever watch TV but when the great evangelist decades ago, January 1988, was interviewed by Larry King on CNN, upon the release of his book, “Facing death and the Life After”, I watched the discussion. Larry, blunt Larry, asked Billy what would happen when he died. Billy, the pastor to presidents replied, “Jesus will take me by the hand, and bring me to God.” The poor man, now in the grave, did not know his Bible: nobody can see God.
Back to my Heaven exploration.
Look at the book of Job. There’s that mysterious Satan figure floating around in heaven, reminding God that this rich guy, with his spoiled kids, his immense fortune, must be a fake. And God agrees, sort of.
And then there is Revelation 12: 7. It depicts WAR in heaven. WAR, bloody war, CIVIC WAR, the most cruel mode of all wars: angels fighting angels, total chaos, making hell out of heaven.
War is not war if there is no blood and wounded and death. For heaven’s sake! What’s going on up there! Satan, who had a free hand in heaven, acted there as an accuser, then wanted to be God himself: a step too far.
Satan created HELL IN HEAVEN. “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in heaven,” was Satan’s motto, according to John Milton in Paradise Lost.
No, heaven was not the peaceful place so celebrated in my old church – today still buoyant, still flourishing, still attended by some of my relatives – where one of the hymns I remembered went like this: “Get in line, get in line, then follow the ‘to heaven’ sign.” Another had this refrain, “In heaven it’s so good, always singing in the best of mood.”
Just imagine the atmosphere in heaven, prior to open warfare: a vicious hostility, open division between the pro-God and pro- Satan adherents. None of that open comradery that was evident in the fields of Bethlehem when Jesus was born. Two parties: no compromise possible, either for or against, until it all came out in the open. Something like that’s going on now in Britain, either pro Brexit or against Britain leaving the European Union, or in the USA: for or against Trump, but worse, far worse.
No, heaven was a terrible place to be in! No wonder John 3: 13 tells us that, “No one has ever gone to heaven, except the one who came from there: the son of Man.” Please note the term “Son of Man”. Jesus did not identify himself as God’s son, but as a member of humanity. That suggests to me that Jesus is eager to come back to earth, where his real KINGDOM will be: “seek first the kingdom, the welfare of creation”, is Christ’s foremost commandment: Service, rather than dominion.
Yes, there was war in heaven, and the Devil and his gang were defeated.
Michael and his angels are named here as their great opponents: Michael, an archangel, one of the generals among the celestial army. His name is actually a question: mi-cha-el?, which means “he who resembles God?”
So what triggered the war in heaven?
It started because the basic situation had changed, because Jesus Christ had ascended to heaven. Jesus had left, and Satan thought that now was his chance to take over the world and they who live there.
This is how the Bible informs us: “The dragon and his angels fought back: fought! With all the devilish devices at their disposal! But the Devil army was not strong enough and they lost their place in heaven”.
The dragon, in spite of all his pretensions and his filthy slander, was kicked out of heaven, shorn of his power and deprived of influence there: house cleaning in heaven. No longer was he able to stand before God’s throne with clenched fists and make accusations against God’s elect as he did with Job. He simply had lost his foothold. Totally powerless he was banned from heaven and thrown out as quickly as lightning. “He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him,” says the Bible.
And here he is, next door to you and me.
Yes, here he is, and his untold number of devotees. Here they are on the earth where you are born and I made a living, the earth where Jesus Christ himself cried as a baby, preached, performed his miracles, suffered and died, the earth that saw his resurrection, the earth from where he ascended to the place from which He came.
On this earth the dragon and his army landed, feet first. Here they are making this cruel, grim earth, this rebellious earth even more difficult to deal with, as we experience this every day, with worse to come. Now Satan has dominion over land and sea: earth’s remotest regions today his empire be.
The Satan and his cohorts know how precious the earth is to its maker, because God made it and loved it as his dearest possession, this very earth has now become a demonic world, because the battle is not over: the hell in heaven has become the hell on earth.
The Bible tells us this in somber notes: “But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! Filled with fury, because he knows that the time is short.” (Revelation 12: 12).
Woe to the earth and the sea! Filled with fury!!
Beware! Hell on earth. As Dr. Andrew Glikson, Earth and Climate Scientist Australian National University wrote in last week’s ARCTIC NEWS,
“Given amplifying feedbacks from land and oceans triggered by rising temperatures, the concept of an upper limit of warming determined by limitation on carbon emissions alone is unlikely, since, under a rising high greenhouse gas concentration, amplifying feedbacks triggered by methane release, bushfires, warming oceans and loss of reflectivity of melting ice, temperatures would keep rising. As an example, findings show that warmer ocean water is melting hydrates and releasing methane into the sediment and waters off the coast of Washington state, at levels that reach the same amount of methane from the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Carana (2019) finds a potential for abrupt warming of 18°C or 32.4°F.”
Yes, you read that right! An abrupt warming of 18°C or
32.4°F !! 2 Peter 3 comes to mind.
That means HELL ON EARTH!
That’s the situation TODAY!!
From now on world events will be grimmer, more frightening, accelerating with breathtaking speed, continuously assuming more ghastly proportions, dragging millions along in a maddening “danse macabre”, undermining all old established morals, speeding relentlessly to chaos and social upheaval. This world, indeed, has become possessed.
All factors that somehow acted as brakes to stall this development are pushed aside; now that this process is in motion it speeds up disastrously, and nothing can stop it.
Just look around you: everywhere in the world trouble reigns: war, discontent, strikes, demonstrations, repression….
Michael won the war in heaven, but Satan rules the world with lie and slander.
The naked reality to come.
It is here where we are confronted with the history of the world. It is this extremely remarkable phenomenon that matters are not yet what they are, that everything still looks different than it is in reality. The haze of untruthfulness hovers like a curse over the world and in that haze of uncertainty history marches on, and so does the TRUTH.
We are blind.
We are in a bind because we are blind: we don’t want to see the real state of the earth. COP25 is still deliberating. The number ’25’ tells volumes: this is the 25th meeting where the fate of the earth is discussed, and each time the atmospheric news is worse.
The Arctic again.
The “entire Arctic” now emits more carbon than it absorbs, a fact that can only be described as worse than bad news. “Given that the Arctic has been taking up carbon for tens of thousands of years, this shift to a carbon source is important because it highlights a new dynamic in the functioning of the Earth System,” says Susan Natali at Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts (Source: Thawing Permafrost Has Turned the Arctic Into a Carbon Emitter).
How did this happen?
Developments were manageable until about the year 1800. In the last 200 years Europeans expanded upon vast and thinly peopled regions of the world, carrying with them their crops, animals, weeds, pests and diseases, devastating native flora, fauna and human populations in large portions of the world, and succeeded in establishing “neo-Europes” in regions of North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, bringing their missionaries, singing “Christ – we – shall have dominion over land and sea”, expressing faith in the illusion of unlimited growth.
The industrial revolution and discovery of fossil energy sources further sustained the belief in infinite growth, still the reigning philosophy.
The Bible pulls no punches. 1 John 5: 19 states that “The Evil One is in control”, and he makes us believe that we are the superior race.
But human domination of nature is an oxymoron, for our “control” of nature can only be achieved by understanding its laws and subordinating ourselves to them.
Sorry to say: many religious leaders, like many politicians, actively resist the insights of ecology, for these ideas entail a fundamental reformulation of both liberal public policy and humanist belief in our contemporary world. Clearly there is much work for theologians to undertake in re-examining the received tradition.
That’s what it is: world-wide war against creation, under the direction of The Evil One, who rules the world with lie and hate.
Actually, God wants to speed matters up, eager to establish the Kingdom, for which the Son already gave his life. The whole world is yearning for deliverance, for being freed from the pains inflicted by the human race. Romans 8: 22 tells us that “all of creation has been groaning, as in child birth”. And that was written 2,000 years ago…..
God wants to accelerate the process. God too is in agony for the suffering, the torture, the debasement of his creation, so, as many places in the Bible indicate, he allows the eclipse of the sun to take place, meteor showers to appear, and destroy those who have destroyed the earth (Revelation 11: 18).
And to show God’s personal involvement, Revelation 16: 18 says: “And there was a great earthquake, such as there had not been since man came to be upon the earth, so great an earthquake was it, and so mighty. The great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell.”
Hell in heaven; hell on earth. Trump may ridicule Greta Thunberg, TIME’s person of the year, for speaking out for creation, but as the Lord has repeatedly stated, “For we know Him who said, “VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY.” And again, “THE LORD WILL JUDGE HIS PEOPLE. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrew 10: 30-31)
“Yes, I am coming soon.” The very last words of the Bible.