EVERYTHING IN OUR WORLD IS FAKE.

Everything in our Western world is fake. Nothing is real. It’s different elsewhere. My wife and I spent some time in Malawi, one of the poorest countries in the world. Some 30 years ago, our youngest son worked there for 2 years as a lawyer, representing the Canadian Presbyterian Church, helping its transition to democracy. 

There I met genuine people sharing the little they had with others, nothing fake about it. They reminded me of my grandparents, born in 1870, some 155 years ago, when they lived simple lives, fulfilling lives, pleasing to God and his creation.

Now everything in our world is fake: nothing is real. Take my car. When I bought it new – a 2002 Jetta diesel – it was advertised by the Volkswagen designers as the most climate friendly automobile: least polluting, highest mileage. Since then, this claim has proved to be false. 

Actually, what is true for my car is true for all cars, even the total electric ones: all the world’s billion plus ‘auto’ = self – ‘mobiles’ = moving, vehicles, harm God’s creation, to the point where ‘global heating’ increases unabated. Yes, even the word automobile = ‘Self-moving’, is fake:  There is nothing ‘self-moving’ about them: trillions of tiny explosions propel them, causing global poisoning and drought, affecting especially poor nations like Malawi.

Today all machine-operated apparatuses, without any exceptions, in the final analysis are harmful and destroy, and thus – yes – are sinful. SINFUL!. 

That really means that things in this world are really not what they are in the final analysis. Everything in our world is fake, carries a mask, is disguised; everything is different than it is advertised. All the political pledges to reduce climate change, are bogus, false, lies, fraud. Why? Once again, we find ourselves enacting a tragedy of the commons: short-term economic self-interest encourages using ‘free’ air, until it heats up beyond human endurance. We experience it daily. Everywhere. Just as the air, even the immense oceans covering most of our globe, have become liabilities, impure, toxic, a source of evil.

The same applies to A.I. content where we maximize clicks and views, which in turn pollutes our culture and even weakens our grasp on reality. Yes, yes, yes.

Revelation.

We find all this in that mysterious Bible Book, Revelation. Revelation means Revealing. Revelation means ripping off all veneer! Revelation means going naked, shedding all pretensions. 

In the book of Revelation, that very Last Bible Book, the name so familiar, the message so obscure, John paints the progress of the grand happenings of OUR time, today, 2024. 

There he starts with the premise that, at last, matters will become what they are, that masks will be torn off. In its very last chapter of Revelation, he sounds the alarm bell: “Let those who do wrong can only keep on doing wrong, and those who do right must continue to do so, and let those who are holy continue to be holy”. That means that the time for going back to simpler times, is over, that it’s too late to make amends. Still, I persist in trying: My holy duty! 

Why try? 

Because, out of all the chaos and collapse at long last the truth emerges, when all camouflage vanishes and everything, at last, shows its true character. That is the melody that vibrates through the entire book of Revelation and makes it so engaging and vibrating.

The Good News!

Yes, there is good news: “Our good deeds”, says Revelation 14: 13, “will follow us”. What we do today in preserving God’s creation, in providing meals for the destitute, in loving others as ourselves, in doing everything in our power to live God-honoring, creation-enhancing, neighbor loving, acts: all these will follow us into the new world to come.

Still evil expands: everywhere.

Now the universal use of social media products – every kid now has a mobile phone – designed for compulsive use, are rewiring the way children think, behave, and learn, harming the wellbeing of students, and leaving educators and schools to manage the fallout. Here again: under the cloak of education, the minds of young people are enslaved to social media.

The Western World, in its entirety is again engaged in a Civic war conflict: our Industrialized World versus Creation, or more correctly: The West against God, in spite of some pious postulations. COP 1 through 28, 28 years in succession, have only seen climatic conditions worsen: all our pledges and promises are false and lies. 

On this EASTER weekend, we celebrate Christ conquering death forever, bringing the TRUTH and making everything NEW.

ANOTHER SIGN: THE FINAL REFORMATION.

Years, no, decades ago, in the late fifties and early sixties of the previous century, when our family lived in St. Catharines, Ontario, there was an air of spiritual renewal hanging under the skies in what was called, The Garden City. People there, a good core, adhered to the slogan, then well understood, Ecclesia Reformata, Semper Reformanda, now needing translation: The Reformed Church, Always Reforming. There were these ICS conferences, attended by enthusiastic crowds of young people. ICS standing for Institute for Christian Studies. 

In 1965 I was the chairman of a 5 days Youth Conference there, where 3,000 Christian Reformed Young People from all over North America met – centering on Niagara Falls – filling a large arena there repeatedly. Their gathering slogan was Alive for Christ in ’65.

I was then 60 years younger. These participants too are now gray and dying off. Their children and grandchildren? Where are they? Not in the church, not at young people societies!

I now believe that the church has failed them. Instead of ‘Semper Reformanda’ it remained ‘Nunquam Reformanda’, never reforming.

How have times changed! Churches are graying.

But now there is a glimmering of HOPE!

Peace – Shalom – On Earth.

Remember that Christmas song, the song the angels choir introduced to us when Christ was born? Luke 2: 14, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people on whom his favor rests.

Well, there is a new book published, in the Netherlands, with this title: Peace On Earth. This book, some 400 pages, was written by Stefan Paas, a professor of Missions, occupying the J. H. Bavinck chair of Mission at the Free University in Amsterdam. 

This timely and ground-breaking book has sent a shockwave through the Protestant Churches in the Netherlands, as it questions the entire approach of the church there, still based on ‘soul salvation’ at the expense of the earth. Since its publication in September 2023, it has gone through 3 more printings, suggesting the impact the book is having in the post-Christian world of my birth, by questioning the dominating pietistic approach to Christianity centering on religious soul experiences, with the emphasis on heaven as the goal. 

As a professor of religion, teaching students how to be ‘missionaries’, Dr. Paas writes that “the traditional ‘redemption dogma’, the teaching of salvation, now plays a ‘damaging’ role, because it quite easily leads to the subjecting and dominating of nature.” 

He also writes, and I translate again “That sort of teaching of salvation places itself constantly over against or above creation instead of uniting itself with the earth”. 

Somewhat later he continues, “Nevertheless, it is for many modern people who no longer have the same ties to the earth as their ancestors had, difficult to develop an approach to salvation, that enables them to feel at home in creation and establish connections with their fellow-creatures (pointing to the non-human entities)”. 

Dr. Paas continues: “I want to show that the way to experience God, is through meeting with other living beings and through a close unity with the earth. That concretely means that we must go out into nature with binoculars and illustrated books to identify trees and plants, and so develop an awareness where our foodstuff originates, and how we can prayerfully engage with the soil, enlarge our knowledge concerning creation, stop to admire a flower, even the so common dandelion. We also should more often view nature films, and read more about ecology. We must learn to value the slow pace of nature, and exercise patience by observing and listening to God’s handiwork. We must learn to mourn when gigantic trees are felled and when birds and insects and fish experience mass die-offs.”

All of us are now part of this new mortality mode. 

I conclude from this book that: The increasing threat to all living creation today dramatically indicates that all creatures, including us, are imperiled, no exception, as the cancers in the British Royalty indicate.

“Everything becomes what it is!”

This book by Stefan Paas, so well-written and persuasive, shows that ‘peace’ or ‘shalom’ can be realized. We must thank the author to expose the errancy of our ways. His loving and timely critique regarding the church and our Western ways of death and Christian practises, emphasizes God’s ultimate care for his creation and thus fills us with hope and greater understanding of the prospect what awaits us in the renewed creation to come.

ANOTHER SIGN: THE FINAL REFORMATION?

Is this the long-awaited church reformation? Yes. The basic message of the last Bible Book, Revelation, is that, in the end, everything becomes what it is. Dr. Paas has shown in his book, “SHALOM ON EARTH, that salvation is totally comprehensive, involving ALL created matter.

Thank you Stefan Paas.

A NATION DIVIDED: A WORLD IN PERIL

 

Concordia parvae res crescent, Discordia maximae dilabuntur.

A Latin phrase, meaning: “As concord makes small things grow, discord brings the greatest to ruin”.

Jesus twice echoed this very truth: “Any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and a house divided against itself will fall”. (Luke 11: 17). And again: “If a house is divided against itself, that house cannot stand”. (Mark 3: 25).

The above quotes perfectly apply to the USA, to the nation as a whole. The division in that great country, just south of where I live, resembles the years 1861-65, that war about slaverythat came at the cost of 625,000 lives – the bloodiest war the US waged, ever.

A lack of soul-searching

The USA has never had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission that in Canada brought the conflict between the aboriginal people and the new immigrants into the open and opted for solutions. The same procedure was followed between Canada’s French and English population, so that today Canada is at peace and united.  The painful task of such soul-searching in the US, probing into the root cause of the war between the North and the South – between the country and the city – has never been attempted and so the old wound became a Cancer that has become metastatic, spreading from where it originated as a one-issue conflict, to all parts of the National Body. It has become like a soured marriage, exactly as Euripides coined it 2,500 years ago: “stronger than lovers love is lovers hate incurable in each the wounds they make”. Yes, incurable!

From a beacon of light to unquenchable hatred.

Ronald Reagan called the USA a country on the hill, a beacon of light, an example for other nations to follow. That was perhaps true at the time: No longer!

Here I rely on my intuition, a matter of projecting the past into the future combining history, trends and human nature, basing my thoughts on my gut feelings. I strongly sense how the economic, environmental and spiritual decline, world-wide, is gathering speed, and plays an important role in the unreasonable attraction America’s ‘Christian’ segment has for a devilish man with definite dictatorial designs. 

Let’s call a spade a spade: we have to face reality: the planetary crisis is deepening; the situation is dire and will only get worse. Only a universal ‘metanoia’, that beautiful Greek word that designates a radical shift in attitude, can avert total annihilation. The traditional model of unlimited economic growth, driven by avarice, jealousy, and domination, leads to doom, because as 1 John 5: 19 tells us: “the whole world is under the control of the evil one”. Just look how Donald Trump and his loyal legionnaires speak and act.

2024: a crucial year.

The next 30 plus weeks are among the most consequential in the life of the USA, if not the world. Mr. Trump was a clear danger in 2016; he’s a mortal threat now. The former president is more vengeful, more bitter and more unstable than he was, which is saying something. There would be fewer guardrails and more true believers in a second Trump term. He’s already shown he’ll overturn an election, support a violent insurrection and even allow his vice president to be hanged. There’s nothing he won’t do. It’s up to the rest of the US to keep him from doing it.

American leadership is failing: That is the argument of an eccentric new book that since January has stood near the top of France’s best-seller lists. It is called “La Défaite de l’Occident”: “The Defeat of the West”. Its author, Emmanuel Todd, is a celebrated historian and anthropologist.

Mr. Todd calculates that the United States produces fewer engineers than Russia does, not just per capita but in absolute numbers. It is experiencing an “internal brain-drain,” as its young people drift from demanding, high-skill, high-value-added occupations to law, finance and various occupations that merely transfer value around the economy and in some cases may even destroy it, witness the opioid crisis, mainly affecting the young.

America has always been a world-leader. Twice it rescued Europe from its foolish wars, 1914-18, 1939-45. Then, through its generous Marshall Plan, it helped devastated Europe to recover. Now the opposite is true: its divided status imperils the entire Western world: no longer are there national principles, only partisan ones, with each side convinced that the other is trying not just to run the government but also to capture the state.

Look at religion.

According to one study, three-fourths of American Christians agree that “God wants us to prosper financially.” At the expense of creation, I should add. This false religion, this individualism, is at the root of its crisis. “A nation divided, and a world in peril”. The USA is a (false) religion-soaked nation, suffering from a severe spiritual crisis. It’s in deep trouble, everywhere, a situation that will adversely affect the entire world.

Pray for Christ’s Return.

DEATH: THE LAST ENEMY.

There is a new book out: The survival of the Riches. I read a review of it in Civis Mundi, a highbrow Dutch monthly magazine, a free electronic periodical of Social Philosophy and Culture, which my brother Drewes in the Hague faithfully sends me.

Before the author, Dr. Douglas Rushkoff, a professor in New York City, dealt with “The Rich”, he, 10 years ago, wrote the Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, a non-fiction work. 

That book caught the attention of a certain segment of society, and earned him an invitation to speak at a conference, which came with special privileges: first-class airfare, a chauffeured limousine, a remuneration that equaled one-third of his professorial pay, staying in a super deluxe resort somewhere in the desert. 

In Present Shock, Rushkoff describes our Western predicament, a state of anxiety in which we try to keep up with the ever-increasing speed and immediacy of time, because our temporal pressures are so great and our confidence in our own ability to solve the world’s problems so weak that apocalyptic finality has an unshakable appeal. 

This ‘end-time’ state of mind, makes Rushkoff write that, rather than focusing on building a better future, society is primarily concerned with building a worthwhile present, and failing on that score. 

Actually, he says that there no longer is a future: the future is here!

An unusual request.

Rushkoff’s extravagant trip, accommodation and renumeration were not the only surprises: when he was ushered in to the auditorium there was not the customary overflowing audience but only five (5) persons, all super rich, none of them interested in his prepared speech.

They had invited him because they feared for their future: their wealth had given them everything they could wish for, yachts, private planes, trophy wives, except life without death.So, these 5 multi-billionaires had a few questions:  how to escape the consequences of what they themselves had caused to happen: the coming collapse of society. These unnamed men also wanted to discuss such pressing questions as how to maintain authority over their private security, after that dreaded “event”. 

By the way: Don’t ever think that the ultra-rich are a balanced lot. The richer people are, the more insecure they feel: Can they really depend on their ‘hired men’? Maybe the guards could wear some sort of disciplinary collars? Better yet, what about using robots as guards? Are friends, real friends? Do their wives really love them? 

But especially they wonder about their own mortality. They all knew about Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft, also a billionaire, who died at the age of 65. He also had all the toys, including a luxury yacht, but he died anyway. Is death really inevitable?

These were the questions Dr. Rushkoff faced. Would there be a cure for death? They saw ‘death’ as the greatest evil, the scourge of humanity, a moral scandal. These superrich were outraged over their own mortality, regarded it as a personal affront. Yes, they saw DEATH as the ultimate enemy, now that death lurks everywhere.

Take the Arctic. 

The danger there will sooner than later affects us all. Arctic News reports that the ICE is disappearing! Without the buffer constituted by thicker sea ice, an influx of ocean heat threatens to destabilize hydrates contained in sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean, resulting in eruptions of huge amounts of methane, a gas 100 times more deadly than our very own tail-pipe variety. 

Then, too, there is the growing nuclear threat. There too we are beset with universal elimination. Is there a cure? Can we escape death? Can we bypass both global and personal death?

The rich are different.

More terrifying than a Hollywood-derived nightmare is their naive and profoundly antisocial response: They’d rather build their bunkers than work to avert the apocalypse. Rushkoff describes their attitude as a “faith-based Silicon Valley certainty that they can develop a technology that will somehow break the laws of physics, economics, and morality to offer them something even better than a way of saving the world: a means of escape from the apocalypse of their own making.”

No wonder: Many people now seem fixated on stockpiling enough resources to protect themselves from the rest of the world.

Conclusion.

The world is scared. It sees dangers everywhere. GOLD is soaring, as if possession of it will assure survival. I remember from the war 1940-45 golden wedding rings were offered in payment for a loaf of bread, and refused. Only Christ can offer eternal life: as Paul writes in 1Corinthians 15: 26, The last enemy to be destroyed is death. Christ came to bring us LIFE, and that to the full, (John 10:10), life without super-yachts and private aircrafts and trophy wives, but having all of God’s Holy Creation as our inheritance, the Tree of Life, bearing twelve crops of fruit every month! 

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE?

“How Should We Then Live” is the title of a book written by theologian Francis A. Schaeffer, published in 1976. At that time, I found the book’s title attractive. Then as now for me ‘how to live’  was a daily struggle, quite convinced that, because of ‘habituation’, we had grown accustomed to a thoroughly unchristian lifestyle, for the simple reason that our cosmos-destroying existence was killing the very world which God loves so much. 

So, yes, ‘how should we then live?’ was always uppermost in my thoughts, so much that, in 1975 I built an energy-efficient home, passive solar, 2 storey and large windows on the south, one storey and a small window on the north, mostly heated by wood, super insulated, of course. And a large vegetable garden.

So, what did Francis Schaeffer recommend?

Francis Schaeffer and his wife opened in Switzerland a retreat called l’Abri. There, devotion to Christ and the reality of prayer formed the nucleus of daily life. In essence life was seen as a spiritual journey with heaven as its goal. In 1975, when the book appeared, I was in full accord with these goals, until……..

Until I no longer was. In 1991 I bought a thin book – only 150 pages – with the intriguing title TENDING THE GARDEN, essays on the Gospel and the Earth. In it I found an essay by Paulos Mar Gregorios, head of the Indian Orthodox Church, in which he outlined the three principles that ruled his life. For the first time in my life my pious existence got a jolt. His first principle shook me, serious believer, to the core: Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. 

Yes, read that statement again. Human redemption can be understood only as an integral part of the redemption of the whole creation. 

I greatly admire Bonhoeffer. To me he was, what today Aleksei Navalny is: a martyr for Freedom. Just as Bonhoeffer returned to Germany in 1939, abandoning a promising position at Union Theologian Seminary, to a certain death by Hitler – he was hanged a few weeks before War’s end – so too Navalny went back to Russia, knowing full well his predicament. Bonhoeffer, in his book, A Testament to Freedom, writes – and his words, written in 1932 (90 years ago!) were truly are prophetic – “We have fallen into secularism, and by secularism, I mean pious, Christian secularism. Not the godliness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth…This pious secularism also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things…(However) The function of the church is to witness to the power of God in the new creation”. When did you hear that message?

How do non-Christians see Christianity?

Carl Safina is one of them, a non-Christian who has closely studied Christianity.

In his fascinating book, Alfie & Me, this author/ecologist, convincingly demonstrates that the outcome of Christianity is actually based on Greek philosophy more than on the Bible, which, in John 3: 16 expressly states God’s ultimate love for creation, yet almost unanimously Christians believe that eternal life will take place in heaven, while the earth is disposable. He clearly demonstrates that Plato, this revered Greek philosopher, moved the sacred away from the body, from Earth, from LIFE! And, tragically, the church did the same!

What is ‘Christian’? You decide. Is Safina Christian? His book is all about caring for an injured owl, Alfie.

In his epilogue, Safina writes, “What will we do with our one wild and precious life? Perhaps the answer can be easy: to care fiercely without apology (for the earth). If there is a final exam at the end of life, and its sole question is “Did you care”, I hope I might at least pass the course.” Yes, Dr. Safina, yes there is a final exam. Yes, the question is: “Have you cared for creation and her creatures?”

When Dr. Safina asks that question in his epilogue, we know that he ardently cares for planet and people, for birds and biosphere. He does not like the Christian Religion, of which he has a good grasp. On various occasions he quotes the Older Testament, which does have an anti-creation bias, emphasizing exploitation and dominion. On page 198 he writes, “The man who has been called the most influential evangelical, anti-environmentalist in the United States, Calvin Beisner, told an interviewer in 2016, that people should be concerned of the state of their eternal souls – not about the state of the merely temporary planet.”

This is exactly what Francis Schaeffer saw as being ‘Christian’. That’s what Plato recommends, “we must get rid of the body’. The majority of church people still echo this sentiment, under the enduring influence of  the Late Great Planet Earth, written by Hal Lindsey.

Barry Commoner, another non-Christian, has formulated the laws of Ecology. In my opinion, they reflect pure Christian theology, as important as the 10 commandments. They should be read in church every Sunday! Why? Because they tell us how to live the Christian life.

These simple rules are:

1.   Everything is connected to everything else.

2.   Nature – creation- knows best.

3.   There is no free lunch

4.   Nothing ever disappears. (including our good and bad deeds)

 

Reflect on these rules and fill in the details when deciding “How to live Christianly.”

ENVISIONING THE END.

I know: Doomsday Tidings are unpopular. But then… Let’s face it: The news nowadays is relentless and has a new element: it focuses on finality, whether it is through AI – Artificial Intelligence-, or through the increased Nuclear Threats, whether it is through the alarming development on the climate scene, or through the rapid decline of the ecclesiastical enterprise: (“Will I find faith when I return?”, Jesus lamented). No doubt: Finality has found a fertile focus.

Bad as it is, I worry most about the sorry state of the human psyche, reflected in the loyalty to certain psychopaths, such as Donald Trump, whose utterances are becoming increasingly unhinged and irrational. But then: he and others merely mirror the idiocy that our technological society has unleashed on us through our unquenchable thirst for carbon fuels.

Where there is no vision…..

All this, to me, points to a humanity that has lost her bearings: confused, irritable, vulnerable, unsure, lacking vision. “Where there is no vision, the people perish”, says Proverb 29:18. We are at that stage!

Warnings galore.

Katharine Hayhoe, chief scientist for The Nature Conservancy, said the uncertainty about the interaction of the different factors was a reminder that we do not fully understand every aspect of how the complex Earth system is responding to unprecedented radiative forcing. “This is happening at a much faster rate than ever documented in the past,” she said. “If anything, we are much more likely to underestimate the impact of those changes on human society than to overestimate them.”

Here’s how ARCTIC NEWS views the world:
“Global empires east and west have become increasingly brutal. Fascism ? the ideology of death ? and its neo-conservative (so-called) followers are not concerned with global warming and its consequences, except where it hurts the profit motive. References to “climate change” by politicians constitute hollow words they hardly mean.”  

Yes, I admit it: I am an alarmist.

Blame me for seeing “Darkness at noon”, the title of a book written when Communist rule in Eastern Europe was frighteningly real, now this darkness is universal. 

Blame me when today, Spring 2024, events remind me of the very last Bible book, Revelation, its name a translation of the Greek Apocalypse. The word ‘Revelation’ points to the disclosure of secrets by uncovering what hereinto has been obscured and hidden. The real point of the last Bible book is that “In the end of time, all that is secret will be unveiled, and everything becomes what it is”. That opening up, that ripping away of any obscuring elements, is now revealing the naked reality of human nature, a state that even the saintly apostle Paul admits to: Romans 7: 19: For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do–this I keep on doing. That sounds over the top for a man who brought the Good News to the world. But is applies to me and to us all today.

We are helpless.

It has come to a stage where we all, I too, have been forced to conform to a mode of living that destroys God’s Holy Creation. We cannot possibly live without harming the earth. Take me as an example: I eat mostly food grown in my garden, but still the plastic I generate in food wrappings and packaging is sickening, and, while living 5 km from store and church, I need a car. And heating? I used to heat almost completely with recycled wood, but the wood particles play havoc with my lungs, and my 95 years play havoc with my endurance, so I too, and we all, have painted ourselves in a corner, have burned our bridges: there is no escape anymore. 

Onto Dr. J. H. Bavinck, who foresaw this all 60 years ago.

Here are some excerpts of his book on Revelation, and my translation: The catastrophes mentioned extend to the entire cosmos. They affect people everywhere. Earlier we have seen how in the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate from above, that find their source in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Here only the first type is mentioned. It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as her own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become recalcitrant, and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity. And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, and her entertainment establishment, all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now in a total humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless. 

We now daily experience The REVENGE OF CREATION. This is the beginning: The worst is yet to come. 

Yes, we now can envision the end.