Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

March 9 2022

TIME TO PRAY.

What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches? (Isaiah 10:3).

I have been re-reading a book by a Harvard Professor, Herbert Benson, MD with the telling title, TIMELESS HEALING, The power and biology of belief.

He, himself a Jew, sees merit in all faiths, as long as there is a degree of commitment. Clinically, he discovered that faith in a higher body, helps recovery from illness, and, in dying, gives grace and comfort. Not surprisingly, church attendance, meeting people, makes them live longer and better. Dr. Benson recommends a simple prayer, repeatedly spoken, such as “The Lord is my shepherd”. I prefer ‘Maranatha, Lord Jesus, Come!” I use it when walking or running.

Prayer is timely.

If there ever is a time for prayer and meditation, for inner emotions to be recognized and ascertained, and for probing the purpose of life, it is now when we are beset with more perils than ever world-wide: Climate Change is accelerating, and military conflict only exacerbates the situation, with world hunger a distinct possibility, as Ukraine and Russia grow much of the world’s wheat.

Me, I can’t stand watching TV anymore. Tears well up when I see the tragedy in Ukraine unfolding. War is terrible, and our war against creation is having identical consequences, increasingly unpredictable weather. There is no doubt in my mind that we effectively live in the last days, beset, as we are, with insoluble problems of our own making. 

Look at the boycott of Russian products: ingredients such as oil, natural gas and wheat, are items we ourselves badly need. Mr. Putin is no fool: our banning of all things Russian has a strict time limit: the West needs a quick solution to the Ukrainian crisis, or we ourselves will be the losers. 

Prayer is our only help.

If there ever is need for prayer and peace, it is now, at the very time when ‘faith’ is at an all-time low, faith defined as belief in ‘divine’ law, the law summarized by Jesus in Mark 12: 30: 

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.

Dr. Benson, founder of Mind/Body Medical Institute, says that too long have we divided the mind/body spheres, sending faith and reason to opposite corners: Faith a private matter, reason dominating the public domain. We now experience the results of this fateful development, particularly evident in our ecclesiastical enterprise, where ‘religion’ is delegated to the soul, while creation, society, science, business, government, medicine, education, has been completely severed from the divine. That’s why Jesus, in his all-comprehensive ‘love’ commandment, includes all our facilities, the total person: heart, soul, mind and strength.

Time for prayer. 

Prayer will not cure the world situation. Prayer will not reverse the Global Heating disaster. Prayer will not restore our aging bodies and give us physical renewal. However, prayer will help us cope with the anxieties attacking us. Prayer can set our minds at peace and, since we are a unity, prayer will also affect our physical wellbeing, still our worries, and prepare us for eternity, and even make us love the perpetrators of evil, many of them are victims of circumstances beyond their control. Prayer will force us to face the reality of the moment, and will grant us true compassion.

Sin and death.

Romans 6: 23 unambiguously states that, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. 

“Sin” nowadays is not a popular word, perhaps because we, Century 21 people, are totally drenched in sin. When I appear before God’s throne to give account of my life, I don’t stand there as a woman or a man, as a Presbyterian or an Anglican, or as Christian Reformed, Roman Catholic Italian, a Jew or a Muslim, or as a citizen of Canada or Russia or Ukraine: I stand there as a ‘sinner’, deserving death, and having caused ‘the death of creation’ for whose re-birth Christ died: there is no such thing as individual redemption: personal redemption and the redemption of Creation go hand in hand: every Christian must be a sincere creation lover.

Spring is hope.

Yet, it’s spring. The sap in my sugar maples is flowing. The birds are returning. The snow is disappearing, and creation is reviving. The promise of renewal is reverberating throughout the universe, in spite of Ukrainians crying out in agony: Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy, Lord have mercy.

What will you do on the day of reckoning, when disaster comes from afar? To whom will you run for help? Where will you leave your riches? (Isaiah 10:3).

March 2 2022.

PUTIN’S MARCH OF FOLLY. 

We live in interesting times, which, by the way, is a Chinese curse. That matters are not normal, is beyond question. Normality presupposes life ruled by ‘norms’, a concept that implies ‘ethics’, a set of acceptable standards that underly LIFE. 

Bonhoeffer in his book ETHICS sees life ruled by LOVE which becomes creative in FREEDOM. He writes, “One must subordinate oneself in ethical decisions to the will of God; must see one’s own actions sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of eternity, and then no matter what course is taken it will be the right one.”

I love that phrase: “In the light of eternity”. It means that, instead of looking back, to history, we look forward to our ultimate destination: The New Earth under a New Heaven. 

A long time ago we took the wrong turn, of which we now see its terrible consequence: resembling a suicide scenario. Wherever we look, we see the results of our initial error, which basically stems from failing to see God as the creator, and consequently, seeing Creation as holy. 

Here we are: 8 billion of us on this planet, and every single one of us a child of crude oil. Without crude oil and other fossil fuels, most of us simply wouldn’t exist. And without crude oil, we cannot continue to exist: we are on the road to suicide. 

You may see that as tragic, because tragedy always connotes being overtaken by some sort of fate, something we cannot fight. No, it’s the result of sin, of pride that comes before the fall, our fall.

Putin exposed.

In the Russia-Ukraine situation, Putin’s Pride is the prevalent factor. He sees history in terms of his own place there, certainly not ‘in the light of eternity’. Putin lives in the past; he imagines himself as the Czar, and his billionaire buddies as the former nobility, while the common people are the serfs, either to conform or to be sent to prison. He wants to go back in time, a road that has led to tragedy and folly.

Christians are totally different: they look forward, expect to have eternal life, and see today as the preparation for tomorrow, living in the New Creation: they see life in the light of eternity.

So, what is world history? 

World history, as we experience it today, is terribly sad: one damn thing after another, as somebody put it. It is even more so because we know that it, inescapably, leads to a disastrous finale. 

We saw this ever more clearly in the events of the last week, when Putin pursued his greater Russia goal, his very own March of Folly, which will precipitate what the Bible calls, “The fall of Babylon”.

That fall is now in full swing. It has to come because it constitutes part of God’s holy justice. Revelation 18: 11 – 19 provides us with a clear clue: “The merchants of the earth will mourn”, and so will the politicians and the bankers and the money manipulators, for they are on the losing end: “in one hour the economy has been brought to ruin.”

This passage tells me two things: (1), The collapse of our world comes at a time of material prosperity, witness today, and, (2), comes totally unexpected.

The movers and shakers of today’s world are still convinced that, somehow, they can preserve our awesome civilization. They don’t believe that it is coming to an ignominious end. They think that it is just another economic downturn. 

A very pessimistic view.

Here is what I see coming. Putin in his March of Folly, has not factored in a peasant revolt: the Russian people turning against him. Times have changed: Internet and Facebook and Twitter have brought everything home.

Putin, drunk on his own delusion and perverted by his own position of grandeur, is unable to face the raw reality of a popular revolt against his rule. In his manic state of self-deceit, his insane mindset refuses to face defeat. When confronted with internal revolt and growing resistance in Ukraine, rather than face failure, he orders the world’s total destruction: Putin bombs the world into oblivion: That is his ultimate March of Folly. 

World history is, indeed, suicide; world history is, indeed, a leap into the abyss. That is what humanity does without prompting: God does not have a hand in all this.

Back to Bonhoeffer.

Bonhoeffer in his book ETHICS sees life ruled by LOVE which becomes creative in FREEDOM. He writes, “One must subordinate oneself in ethical decisions to the will of God; must see one’s own actions sub specie aeternitatis, in the light of eternity, and then no matter what course is taken it will be the right one.”

February 23 2022

IS GOD GONE?

There’s a curious text in Deuteronomy 32: 20:

 I will hide my face from them,” he said, “and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful.

That’s us. There is good side to that: God has granted us independence: we resemble young people, leaving the parental home and striking out on our own. Yes, God is the ultimate pedagogue, full well knowing that the best way to learn is to try. The Bible tells us so: in 1 Thessalonians 5: 21 he urges us: “to test everything; hold on to what is good.” That’s what we did up to a point.

Looking back 2,000 years, and knowing a bit of history, we have come a long way, especially in the last 50 years. After a quiet 19^th Century, the next 100 years became the bloodiest ever, with 10% of all those alive in 1900, dying prematurely in the following 50 years, due to 2 World Wars, the Spanish Flu and Stalin-induced famine in Ukraine.

Then from 1950 on, the world saw tremendous economic growth and an astounding increase in Carbon-inspired technology, feeding a population explosion, quadrupling in my life-time from 2 billion to almost 8 billion. 

However, in our supposed self-sufficiency we eliminated God from our world. Without God history is reverting toward barbarism. We have an authoritarian strongman in Russia, invading his neighbor, a rapidly expanding dictatorial China, waging genocide on its people and threatening Taiwan, cyberattacks playing havoc with the world order, democracy in retreat everywhere, thuggish populists across the West undermining democracy, from Turkey to Hungary to, yes, the USA as well. Even the weather is in tune with the global barbaric behavior, boding ill for the coming summer, with the CO2 count galloping and the far more lethal methane in the Arctic bubbling up out of control. 

APPROACHING THE END.

More than 30 years ago I bought THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD by Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, a professor of Hebrew: an outstanding book, displaying tremendous insight into both the Hebrew and the Christian Bible. 

Friedman deals extensively with both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky, two troubled authors of tremendous talent; two brilliant men brought up in strict religious families, struggling with the concept of the death of God, both proclaiming that “Without God, all is permitted”: today’s headline.

Friedman points out that when God is close-by, a daily or semi-permanent presence, people often rebel. He points to the Israel tribe, wandering in the desert for 40 years, daily provided with ‘angel’ food, with wonder water, with a cloud by day, sheltering them from the hot sun, yet always yelling against Yahweh. He concludes that people cannot stand God’s proximity. 

I see some similarity there in our church practises by hiding behind rites and confessions, shielding us also from God’s immediate presence through the intermediary of priest or minister, because we are afraid to deal directly with God and Jesus. 

God is gone into hiding.

God is gone for those who, in the name of God, rebel against the legally elected government. God is gone for those who, in the name of God, destroy his creation. God is gone for those who, in the name of God, condemn colored, homosexual, transgender, Islam people. God is gone for those who, in the name of God, wage war. God is gone for those who, after destroying the earth, expect to go to heaven.

When Jesus was tempted by the Devil, (see Matthew 4: 8) the Satan offered him the entire world. Just before He was crucified, Jesus prayed to protect you and me in a world dominated by the Evil One, a world to which we don’t belong (John 17). We belong to the world to come, because in today’s world we have eliminated God, who has hidden his face to see how we manage without Him. 

Now, through his wounded world, God is unleashing his righteous anger, through which, combined with human evil, God is showing his irresistible powers to punish us for mortally molesting his holy work of art, as infinite as God is infinite. 

Yes, on the public scene, God has gone, Today, in our arrogance and ultimate stupidity, we were convinced that we could shape the cosmos in our own image, with satellites and space journeys, with clever machines and instant communication: a world without God.

God is gone, but not in the lives of his people. I feel his presence continually. But from the public scene he has been barred, because we, by destroying his creation, have killed him also. 

After the Flood, God promised not to repeat that process, fully well knowing that this time around, by hiding his face, we ourselves would accomplish the world’s destruction. 

Now, with The End in sight, the world is ready for renewal, already.  accomplished by Jesus Christ. Maranatha.

A SONG AND A PRAYER.

February 16, 2022

Something completely different! New times: new songs, songs reflecting our earth, the place God gave us to inhabit for eternity, and new prayers as we await his coming.

THE LORD’S PRAYER in verse and song. 

Melody of “All people that on earth do dwell”.

Our father far beyond our reach

Yet still so close that you can teach

Us how to live in your great earth

Where we forever have our berth.

You made this world for us to dwell

Made it both yours and ours as well

Made it so holy, all for us

To treat with care without a fuzz.

Our father in eternal light

So great and ever, ever bright                  

Your kingdom you to us did give

To treasure, so that we may live.

Your kingdom is the holy earth

You made it: it reflects your worth

Your precious, dear beloved globe

Our last and very real hope.

A song celebrating the laws of Ecology.

(Everything is connected)
All people that on earth do dwell,
sing to the Lord, his ways foretell.
Remember earth, air, sea and tree
Are all a part of you and me.

(Creation knows best)

Creation knows the ways to go
God bred it in its natural know,

We therefore must inquire of her
To see where we go right or err.

(Nothing disappears)
Nothing will ever disappear
It lingers on, it is now clear
The oil we burn creates much ill
And causes universal kill.       

(No free lunch)

There is no free lunch to be had
The bills are due: they will be bad
Our children must pay this great debt
We robbed them of their safety net.

We robbed them, left them in the lurch

No wonder they have left the church
We wasted, stole, their future need
Please Lord, forgive us our great greed.

A translation of the Dutch Easter Song: Daar juigt een toon.

A voice rings out a glorious hymn

Resounding through Jerusalem

A bright new morning lies ahead

The Son of God rose from the dead

Now death has lost its very sting

We now need ne’er fear anything

For Christ has conquered everything

He truly is creation’s king.

Now that the Lord rose from the dead

We look for brand-new life ahead

New life prepared by his demise

New life in earthly paradise.

A Lament for creation. An adaptation. With refrain.

Where are the birds that sang in tall tree towers,

Why are the woodlands now full-soaked in ash,

Where are the eyes to see the fire showers,

Where are the tears when birds no longer dash?

How clean the water, how tall the grain?

How green the forest, can the earth renew again?

 When will the deserts stop their massive spreading?

 Where will we plant so food can freely grow?

 When will we hear no more of species dying?

 When will we care enough to cherish all?

How clean the water, how tall the grain?

How green the forest, can the earth renew again?

When will the sea be free from human binging?

Safe for the whales that frolic in the deep

Who will arise and send alarm bells ringing?

Now is the time and for our voice to weep.

How clean the water, how tall the grain?

How green the forest, can the earth renew again?

Music: 11.10.11.10 with refrain, based on TIDINGS: James Walch, 1875. P.D. 

The entire world is struggling with extinction. Despair is mounting.

When anxiety for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and pray, Maranatha, Lord Come, 
and visualize the new creation,
where all is at rest, where the wolf and the lamb feed 
together, and swords have become instruments of peace.

I then see shalom emerge, everywhere
in earth and sky and seas.

In my dreams I see Jesus, walking hand in hand
with his woman friend, amidst a throng of children
Happily dancing around that pair.
I see flowers in manifold colors and shapes,
And I see above me the balmy sun,
with healing in its wings, 
friendly, soothing, refreshing, blessing
those who have waited for the Lord.                 

O Holy Earth.

O holy earth receive our tears

O brother Jesus, still our fears.

We live as exiles in our land,

Oh, where, oh where your healing hand?

The people all are drunk with wine

In blinded daze see no decline

The nations’ rulers spread the lie

With death for many, life for some.

What evil thought gave life to birth

That made us kill God’s Holy earth?

(Tune: The Old Hundredth: O people that on earth do dwell)  

February 9 2022

EVERYTHING BECOMES WHAT IT IS.

That’s what Revelation, the last Bible book is all about. It exposes the LIE of our economic and ecclesiastical situation, and thereby indicate that the END is here.

Here are some of these signs.

David Brooks, long-time columnist for the New York Times, and, together with Jonathan Capehart, a Friday night feature on the PBS News Hour, had a long essay last Friday in his regular spot in America’s leading Newspaper, The New York Times, expounding at length about the catastrophic chaos in the Christian Religion that splits churches continent-wide. Actually, an age-old problem, dating back to pre-exile Israel more than 2500 years ago. There’s a curious passage in Isaiah 6, where in verse 3, the ‘holiness of the earth’ is affirmed, (also proclaimed in Psalm 24) and then a few verses later: “Be ever hearing (the Gospel), but never understanding”.

That’s what I concluded from David’s Brooks’ essay, in which he cites Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Seminary: “Many of the seminarians at Fuller are moving away from church as we normally conceive it. They want to build communities that are smaller, intimate, authentic, which can often fit in a living room. They see faith as inseparably linked to community service with the poor and marginalized. There’s a general interest in getting away from all the bitterness that has devoured the elders and just diving back into the Bible.”

Neither Brooks nor Labberton mention Creation as God’s Primary Word, basically endorsing Gnosticism. Harold Bloom, in his THE AMERICAN RELIGION, in 1993, wrote, and I paraphrase, “The American Religion has ceased to be Christian, consumed as it is by GNOSTICISM, that pagan belief that nature and grace are separate entities, that God in Heaven has nothing to do with the earth below, calling ‘Spirit’ divine, and ‘Nature’ evil.” 

Why is it so difficult to connect the Christian Religion to Creation? Today the most applicable text in the Bible is John 3: 16, expounding God’s ultimate love affair with Creation, sacrificing the life of his beloved Son to buy the cosmos back from the Satan, the “Prince of this World”, as Jesus, correctly, called him. 

Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer, J. H. Bavinck, are steeped in Biblical knowledge. Here’s a quote from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, “I entreat you remain true to the earth (his emphasis),and do not believe those who speak to you of superterrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.”

 Bonhoeffer sees God and the world (cosmos) as one. Bavinck states that ‘personal redemption and the redemption of the earth go hand in hand.’

The church has never given heed to these warnings. Now that the earth is in extreme peril, the church goes its wayward way, without any consideration for God’s wonderful word in creation: it, with some exceptions has become a clear example of EVERYTHING BECOMES WHAT IT IS: a fraud.

Last week’s New York Times, openly admitted “The End of the World.”

“I can’t say precisely when the end began, just that in the past several years, “the end of the world” stopped referring to a future cataclysmic event and started to describe our present situation.” 

So writes Amanda Hess on February 3 2022 on Times’ front page. She continued: 

“Across the ironized hellscape of the internet, we began “tweeting through the apocalypse” and blogging the Golden Globes ceremony “during the end times” and streaming “Emily in Paris” “at the end of the world.” Often the features of our dystopia are itemized, as if we are briskly touring the concentric circles of hell — rising inequality, declining democracy, unending pandemic, the financial system optimistically described as “late” capitalism — until we have reached the inferno’s toasty center, which is the destruction of the Earth through man-made global warming.”

The END is caused by the fraudulent thesis that “Infinite Growth is possible in a Finite World.”

Should I mention the economy? Or the rebellion against vaccination, abetted by “The Christians”.

ARCTIC NEWS – worth a look – in its February 5 and 7 issues, believes that, yes, The End is Near. Typical of The End is that human true nature is exposed. 

Everything becomes what it is. 

Fortunately, there also is Revelation 14: 13, where it says, “Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on…they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them”. Fortunately, there also is Romans 5: 21: “Just as SIN reigned in death, so also grace might reign through righteousness to bring eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

This world is rushing to the End. We all know that. “Even though the LIE is fast, in race with truth, the LIE comes last”. 

 February 2 2022.

It’s a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrew 10:31)

A TERRIBLE TEXT: WHY?

Animal carcasses litter the land in areas where the rains have failed, as millions go without enough food and water in a country already grappling with civil war.

That’s Ethiopia today. Not enough rain, also the case in South America, a region China depends on for its soybean supply to feed the millions of hogs, whose porkchops are the staple for its people. 

The first month of the year 2022 has come and gone, and everywhere weather records have been broken. What will the other 11 months bring? If January is any indication, we are in for more of the same: more rain where it is not needed, more heat where it is already hot, more drought where the soil is already sheer powder and the forests not timber but tinder.

Where is the church?

Where is the church in all this? Does the church have any business in global affairs? What is the church for anyway today? Does it still have a purpose in the world? Remember: Jesus did not start the church: we did. He simply taught us how to live in and with creation in a loving relationship, a perfect symbiosis. John 3: 16 plainly tells us that Jesus died to restore the cosmos, including us. Have you ever heard that in church?

But how about those synagogues? Weren’t they churches? No, the Old Testament synagogues were religious schools. In Yiddish they are still called ‘Schule’. And the temple? That’s so Old Testament. The temple then is creation now. Even that temple had numerous depictions of trees and flowers and animals. Just as salvation then was for God’s Chosen People, the offspring of Israel, and the temple its exclusive place of worship, now the Cosmos is our object of love, as John 3: 16 unambiguously proclaims.

The ECONOMIST, that prestigious weekly, in its January 9^th issue, has a two-page article, featuring a picture of an old – fashioned church sporting a FOR SALE sign with as subscript, “Follow us online!” Its heading: God, Mammon and real estate.

The ECONOMIST, being the economist, writes from a dollar-and-cents point of view, not questioning the church’s purpose in society. It does mention that there are 1200 denominations in the US, most of them struggling. 

I am a member of such a struggling church. Last year we amalgamated with a nearby Presbyterian Church counting on its existing members to increase attendance and revenue. Before the uniting it contributed 35% of the budget. After the unification it dropped to a fraction of that. People are more attached to ‘home turf’ than confessions. Apparently, they care little about the ‘communion of saints’ with strangers. 

During the last five weeks of the pandemic, our church, now without a minister, and with a person in charge adverse to technology, online became offline. An attempt to start an online Bible Study attracted only 20 percent of the listed members, a meagre 7-8 persons.

All this makes me question the entire ecclesiastical ‘enterprise’. 

I have long opposed the church’s monologue approach to explaining the gospel. I have pleaded for person-to-person interchange of faith experiences, made impossible by the ‘sermon’ delivery, a custom dating back to the Middle Ages when people could not read: sermons breed ignorance and complacency. Also, by exclusively dealing with the written, indirect, secondary, WORD, and by preaching ‘a heaven-oriented’ Gospel, the church has become alienated from God’s direct, primary, Created Word. 

There are advantages to online meetings, imperfect as they are: they save driving long distances, save heating a building used for one hour out of 168 weekly hours. Online people, in the comfort of their homes, may feel freer to open up to other ideas and opinions. Also, we do well to take to heart Augustine, one of the earlier Christian leaders: “Many whom God has, the church does not have; and many whom the church has, God does not have.

It’s a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

I agree: That is a terrible text.

How do I explain it? In my opinion a sin against creation is a sin against God, is taking God’s name in vain. We, the so favored West, do this 24/7. We all know the first line in the Lord’s Prayer is, “Hallowed be Thy Name”. It tells us that God’s signature on Creation makes the world we live in ‘holy’.

Our persistence in shying away from God’s Holy Created Word, and taking the road traveled by the majority, has caused the travail we are in, increasingly earning us God’s wrath. We should read that text differently: 

“It is dreadful to fall into the hands of the living Creation!”

That’s what we are experiencing.