Come out of her, my people.
Where to go?
“Come out of her”, says Revelation 18:4. Come out of what? Come out of a system that destroys the world. There comes a Day of Reckoning because there is no free lunch. For years we have been playing the game of easy money, supposedly harmless energy but it is becoming more and more evident that it has come at a huge cost to the citizens of all countries, and their children while the wealthy have profited. We, the poor taxpayers of the world, have bailed out the fraudulent banks and insurance companies, with their big bosses taking home billions in bonuses.
We live in an insane world. “Come out of her, my people” urges the Bible on several occasions. In Isaiah 52: 11 the prophet pleads with people to get out the trap of idol worship. In Jeremiah 51:45 the text reads ”Come out of her, my people, run for your lives!”, referring to the same situation as in Revelation: the greed factor. That same Jeremiah chapter – verse 9 – has an interesting note: “We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed.” That somber phrase also applies to the situation today: the world suffers from so many different diseases: monetary deterioration, environmental degradation, unstable weather, psychological malaise, water shortages and droughts – the list goes on – that she cannot be healed. There is no shame in abandoning her.
In Jeremiah’s time leaving godless Babylon was still possible: the old country, the sacred soil of Israel was still there, in ruins, but possible to restore.
Now Revelation 18 also urges people to get out: “Come out of her, my people, so that you will not share in her sins, so that you will not receive any of her plagues; for her sins are piled up to heaven and God has remembered her crimes.” Is there still a place of refuge? We are told to leave Babylon, now synonymous with the world we live in. Where do we go? There is not one place on earth that is spotless; there is not one speck of soil that is safe; there is not one molecule of air that is not soiled; there not one drop of water that is not unsanitary. There is nowhere to go. When Jerusalem was besieged in 70 AD people still could escape to the hills. Today there is no escape from the disasters that are in store.
No place left? Where do I go?
When Jesus was relaxing with the Mary-Martha-Lazarus family, Mary sat with Jesus, while Martha was busy serving them and was getting more and more steamed up because she thought her sister too should be in the kitchen getting the meal ready. No quick frozen meals in a micro wave then: everything from scratch, the way all meals should be. Martha was not a woman to hide her feelings, she bluntly told her sister to get cracking. Jesus looked at her and said: “Martha you worry head, Mary gets the priorities right.”
Luke 10:38 relates that the house was owned by Martha, and that her perhaps younger sister and brother lived with her. I picture Martha as a business woman who through her dealings become quite successful and was a bit of a bossy type, not untypical for leading church women. In that sense Mary was probably a dependent while Lazarus perhaps suffered from same sort of ailment: his death might not have been entirely unexpected.
On any other occasions when there had been visitors, Mary always knew her place and helped out. Not in this case when Jesus was the guest. She saw Jesus as special, while I think Martha saw him as a celebrity. Mary had the keener insight and Jesus confirmed this. Other women, quite high class ones, helped Jesus financially, says Luke 8. Did Martha want to impress Jesus with her cooking skills and show off her business acumen?
Matthew 24 is also part of the bible. Jesus tells us there – verse 32 for instance- that we must look around us, including observing nature, trees in particular, to detect what’s going on in our world. Later in that so contemporary chapter he again urges us to keep watch.
Can we still do anything?
I don’t want to rehash all the signs of the tiredness of the planet. That same lethargy also has affected our physical and mental state. Most of us just drift along. I know that there are people who are trying to outlive the End of the world but we know that this is impossible. What is there for us left to do? We have painted ourselves in a corner. We are caught in an impossible situation. We have created a society that is completely dependent on carbon fuel which comes with a totally annihilating guarantee. What can we do?
What we have is a crisis of imagination. Albert Einstein said that you cannot solve a problem with the same mind-set that created it. We don’t need more people like Martha. We need people like Mary of Bethany. The time for action is over. There is no escape from the onslaught awaiting us and which will affect us all.
The bible does not say what Jesus and Mary discussed, but I can guess. They were not talking about run-of-the-mill-matters. Mary had questions about life and death, about here and eternity. Jesus had answers. We are in the same predicament: we have questions about the life and death of the planet and Jesus has answers. That is not a cheap shot of ‘Jesus saves’, of ‘Jesus has all the answers’. Fact is that he throws the questions right back to us, because we know what to do. In these last days we are faced with the same questions how to live and what happens after death, after the death of our planet, the time when we meet Jesus. We need to reassert our humanity. When we meet Jesus in person we want to be in the best physical shape possible for our age and circumstances. When we meet the Lord he must find us doing the right thing. Our bodies are the temple of the spirit. Colossians 1:15 tells us that Jesus is the first-born of all creation. I interpret that to mean that in the beginning Jesus’ very first act was to turn himself into a human being. When creation was ready to receive the human race, you and I were fashioned using Jesus – the first-born of creation – as a template: that’s why we are created in the image of God. We should not underestimate ourselves. We – all of us without exception – are God’s children and, with Jesus being the Son of God, we too are daughters and sons of God. We meet Jesus as our brother and sister.
We need to regain our potential. Here is what one non-Christian fellow writes: “To survive the implosion / collapse, you are going to need outstanding nutrition. This means that right now is a good time to focus on dropping all the junk from your diet and eating lots of fresh fruits and vegetables, super-foods and high-grade nutritional supplements. I especially want to encourage you to boost your intake of medicinal herbs with special properties that help protect you from stress. Herbs like ginseng and turmeric are amazing natural medicines. In terms of more mundane nutrition, I urge you to boost your intake of natural vitamin C, B vitamins, zinc, magnesium and potassium.”
There is a lot of truth in this. We should always keep in mind our primal origin and our ultimate destination, reason why we must, as closely as possible, follow the health guidelines that ensure our best body conditioning. Remember we are meeting our Maker.
Here is another line from that same report: “Now is also a good time to start juicing if you don’t already practice it. Juicing is one of the best ways to bring high-density nutrition into your body. As you do this, I strongly recommend you add one quarter of a beet root to every batch of juice you make. Beetroot boosts athletic endurance while also lowering blood pressure. It helps you chill out, in other words, while also giving you more stamina when you really need it.”
This same fellow writes: “If you hope to survive the collapse of society, you will need to go to great lengths to protect your own sanity so that your own brain functions at a high level, even when under stress.”
The above comes from secular sources, but it applies to us just the same.
My take on ‘how to opt out’.
My personal advice: One good step is to get rid of television. It serves no good purpose because TV basically is a tool of the system that is destroying the earth. Watching TV is a zombie experience, involves a process of deactivating the brain. In these last days mental activity, brain alertness, sharping one’s wits are more necessary than ever. Our entire system is geared to make us dumber. On the way to meet the Lord we must be totally with it, both mentally and physically. We are about to meet the Lord, the creator, our creator. Not something to treat carelessly.
So get yourself in shape both mentally and physically: mens sana in corpore sano, which means ‘a sound mind in a sound body’. We have to meet Jesus as equals. No, that is not a typo. We are God’s children and that means that Jesus – God’s son – is our older and wiser brother but still a sibling, whether male of female. Yes, we can also see him as a wiser sister. Jesus had 12 male disciples but it was the women who looked after him and had a much greater belief in him than the men. The women stayed with him all the way on the road to Golgotha while the men abandoned and betrayed him. Peter in his three-fold betrayal interpreted the feelings and opinions of all his buddies. The women came to the grave first; the women – see Luke 8 – supported him financially, some occupied very important functions. Jesus was way ahead of his time in giving women a role in his mission.
I have said it before and will say it again: we don’t know when the Lord will come back. Of all the people in Jerusalem only old Anna and old Simeon had that mysterious feeling that they would witness the most important event in the entire world: the arrival of the long expected Jesus. These two seniors, a man and a woman, were the only representatives of the entire human race.
Where are the Simeons and the Annas today? We have to find them and join with them, perhaps in the church, the equivalent of the contemporary temple, perhaps at a small house gathering planning the parousia, the re-appearance of the Messiah.
Let’s hope that there are thousands of such little clusters everywhere going about their daily routine but somehow in touch and preparing for His coming. Is there that longing? Is there that fervor for his coming? Is there what J. B. Phillips once wrote in his translation of Romans 8: standing “on tiptoe” to await his reappearance? The Dutch have an expressing: “reikhalzend”. My dictionary translates the word as ‘eagerly awaiting’. It has the same feeling as ‘on tiptoe’, meaning that a person stretches his or her neck to see better and at the same time stand on his or her toes to get a better view. That is the sort of mentality we should have in our expectation of his coming.
Why are the people of the church so reluctant to even entertain the End of the world as we know it? This past week I read that forest fires are raging in the subarctic, the most unlikely place to have it. The boreal forests there are the last major vastness of trees to absorb the oceans of carbon we pump into the atmosphere every day. Once the permafrost melts and releases the methane there I expect a sudden surge in temperature sufficient to engulf the entire earth in one overwhelming conflagration, exactly as the bible tells us. All signs point to a unique event. The apostle Peter mentions it. We better take his word for it: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief….the elements will be destroyed by fire and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.”
The Lord is looking forward to this: that’s why it is called “the Day of the Lord.” Are we?