Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

December 22 2021

THE FALL OF BABYLON

Babylon. What in the world has this ancient city to do with today? You might know that 2500 years ago there was a Babylonian Empire, to which the Jewish elite was banned, giving us the ‘Daniel in the lion’s den’ stories, and Psalm 137: “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion”. 

Actually, much of what is in the Hebrew Bible, was composed during Israel’s 70-year exile there.

Babylon. According to Revelation, the current world, anno 2021-2, is called Babylon. In that last Bible book, Babylon is called “the great mother of prostitutes and of the abominations of the earth.” (Revelation 17:5). Not a very flattering description. Today Babylon stands for all that is poisonous: pollution, pandemics, perverted plutocrats, population explosion, persecution, pornography, prostitution, all incurable societal ills.

An interesting text is in Jeremiah 51: 17, “We would have healed Babylon, but she cannot be healed; leave her and each go to his/her own land, for her judgement reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the clouds.”

The reference to ‘judgement reaching to the clouds’ reminds me of tornadoes and high winds, of Climate Change and all the perils associated with it, the very present dangers we face, especially from the rapidly warming Arctic and Antarctic regions, the weathermakers of our present world.

Babylon: She cannot be healed!

That to me is a very telling statement: She cannot be healed. Our society, our ‘energy-dependent-economy’ cannot be healed. Our “CONSUMER” society is beyond repair. We struggle on, we do what we can. I try to do my bit by living in an energy-efficient house, with large – 2 storey – windows facing south and only a small window on the one-storey north, and mostly heating with wood recycled from the local pallet factory, and driving as little as possible, while also having solar panels to defray the use of electricity, but yet my carbon footprint is far larger than my grandparents. Should I mention that I also have a good-size vegetable garden?

Our society cannot be healed, just as it cannot eradicate the current pandemic or prevent a next one from erupting.

The written word.

In my writing I sometime create the impression that I don’t value the Scriptures. For me they are ‘a lamp for my feet and a light to my path’ as Psalm 119: 105 attests. Each morning, right after breakfast, I consult the Lectionary for the day, read the applicable passages, highlight a text that speaks to me and write a 500 words commentary, which often takes me one hour. I never edit it, never re-read it, just type in as my thoughts lead me. Yesterday it was Romans 8, how a living CREATION is longing for redemption, and we too! 

We are Babylon.

We are Babylon, the present world. Today in our world we find increasing anguish, unspeakable pain, terrible loneliness, bitterness, hate, doubt, passionate longing, burning ambition, despicable degeneration, and an indomitable deathly desire that craves for the ultimate depravity. That is the Babylon we have created, wonderfully beautiful, engaging, romantic, full of breathtaking entertainment, but also utterly miserable and disoriented.

Today we are experiencing the ultimate message of that last Bible book: “Everything is becoming what it is: the overriding theme of Revelation”. 

We see our economic enterprises exposed, based as it is on finite natural resources. We see the pitfalls of our political system, especially in the USA. We now fully experience the consequences of our environmental exploitation, increasingly suffering from the onset of planetary pain. 

“The Fall of Babylon”, is at hand, fully outlined in chapter 18: “For all nations have drunk the maddening wine of her adulteries. (We all are ‘carboholics’). The merchants of the earth will weep as no one buys their merchandize anymore.” That predicts both deflation and depression, now being fully implemented.

Babylon. 

In that terrible Matthew 24 chapter, Jesus looks ahead to our days when the culmination of our sins against God’s created Word is happening. It says that the Day and the Hour of Jesus’ return is not known. Creation, God’s Word in living and dying color, has its peculiar tipping point that we can approximate but not pinpoint. Signs galore. Warnings aplenty. Each day we face new revelations and each day shows our sheer inability to defuse the accelerating deterioration, while our leaders offer optimistic opinions, but the trends are undeniable: Babylon is falling in our lifetime. 

Peter, the impetuous Peter, turned prophet, writes, “The Day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.” (2 Peter 3: 10).

Babylon. Our world, on the verge of dissolution.

DECEMBER 15 2021

ALL ABOUT GOD.

Dr. Paul Tournier, medical doctor/ psychologist /Christian, in his The Meaning of Persons (bought in 1974) urged me that “the supreme and universal need for us humans is to find God.”

Finding God is all the more pressing today, as the environmental news becomes ever more alarming. In the December 12 ARCTIC NEWS the heading was: Terrifying Arctic methane levels. Methane is 80 times more potent than CO2, suggesting that our demise is accelerating.

So, where do we find God?

Not in heaven. Paul told us that, “God lives in inapproachable light: Nobody has seen God and nobody can see God”, (1 Timothy 6: 16). Jesus said to the Samaritan woman he met at the well there, that God is a spirit. He should know. Jesus also mentioned to Nicodemus, as recorded in John 3: 13, that nobody ever had gone to heaven, So, if we won’t go to heaven where God dwells in whatever form, where on earth is he?

For me, the matter of finding God took a different turn when I finished reading Dr. Sabine Dramm’s, “Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an introduction to his thought.” 

On page 230 of her 232 pages book, she writes, “What Bonhoeffer presents as specific to the Christian faith is the perception of God and the world as one, and the perception of life that has its wellspring in this world in God, and proceeds from this world back again to God.”

As I see it, God can best be understood – and found – when we equate God with his creation, giving us the holy duty to live in symbiosis with creation. 

Thus, our life truly has meaning only, when we recognize creation as God-given and see it as totally divinely originated, as God is basically revealed to all of us only in his creation. 

J. H. Bavinck, professor of missions, wrote that Paul, the great missionary, always started his message to the pagan world with, “The God who made the world and everything in it, is the Lord of heaven and earth.” (Acts 17:24). We know and find God when we believe him to be the Creator.

Perhaps a theologian should also be a geologist, an ‘earth-knower’, which Teilhard de Chardin was, a priest turned paleontologist. However, the church condemned his findings.

Another source. 

The Belgic Confession expresses the God concept, beautifully. It poses the question, “How do we know God?”, and the answer – sadly often neglected by the church – is:

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.

So, what does Paul write in Romans 1: 20?

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities – his eternal power and divine nature – have been clearly seen, being understood from was has been made, so that men and women are without excuse.

A similar thought I found in a book Wisdom of Elders, by Peter Knudson and David Suzuki. 

It starts with a quote from Roger Sperry, Nobel Prize winner neurobiologist, echoing Bonhoeffer, “The Creator and Creation cannot be separated. The two of necessity become intimately interfused and evolve together in a relation of mutual interdependence. Thus, what destroys, degrades or enhances one does the same to the other.”

Does that mean that, rather than finding God, we have destroyed him?

Yes, I sincerely believe that our God-consciousness has been destroyed and degraded because we have done the same to creation. We have to return to see creation as divine, and thus holy.

Lately, I have been reading two books by the indigenous author Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss, Natural and Cultural History of Mosses. 

For far too long we have seen the culture of the First People as inferior. When Columbus arrived on America’s shores in 1492, he found a native population, now estimated at between 50-70 million, living sustainably in symbiosis with the land. In God’s name we destroyed them, just as we now are busy destroying creation.

Lament is in order:

O, Holy Earth, receive our tears
Console us, still our deepest fears
We now are aliens in our land
Oh where, Oh where your healing hand?

I deeply believe that very soon Jesus, the Christ, will return. He will fulfill the promise that “The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the nations, of the entire cosmos.” (Revelation 22: 1-2). There is where we will find God.

DECEMBER 8 2021

PREPARE YE…

The church needs new songs, songs preparing its members for the new creation, the future of God’s people. That singing is crucial is plain from 2 Chronicles 20, where Israel was threatened by a powerful hostile army and the then king, Jehoshaphat, consulted with the people how to handle this grave situation. The outcome was truly amazing: this courageous and democratic king appointed a large choir to sing and while singing with their hearts in their throats, they advanced upon the enemy and with the help of the Lord, the enemy fled. 

The words of that song were simple: “Give thanks to the Lord for his love endures forever.” Then, and only then in the history of God’s people, the song, “Like a mighty army moves the church of God,” was authentic: a singing army!

Twice in Isaiah, Chapter 35: 10 and 51: 11, identical words prophesy that “The Redeemed of the Lord shall return and come with ‘singing’, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.” 

However, singing is not a spontaneous action: it takes rehearsing and learning, a procedure that must start now, because the ‘world-ending’ situation is approaching with a speed seldom experienced in the history of the world. 

 

Here is a headline of ARCTIC NEWS

MONDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2021

Planetary Extinction due to Arctic Atmospheric Methane Veil

 by Malcolm Light

Dr. Light, an Arctic specialist, calculates that, based on the unprecedented heating of the Arctic, untold gigatons of methane will be released within a few years, heating the earth beyond human capacity to endure.

Last week, I was walking on the Canada trail, as I do most days of the week, and a woman, on a pedal two-wheeler, stopped. She works in the Tweed Food Bank and I told her that I had just brought a donation there, and her response was, “You might as well: money won’t do any good when the Lord comes back.” Was she right? I think so.

But first we must prepare ourselves for being able to enter the New Creation knowing how to live NOW. That too needs preparation, because I believe that only those who today struggle trying to fit in the coming new world, will be granted entry. The book of Revelation calls these people, “those whose robes are clean” (Revelation 22: 14). Clothes in the Bible are a symbol of one’s personality.

Barry Commoner, a modern-day prophet, coined the laws of ecology. I made these laws into song so that we can more easily memorize them by singing them daily? These laws are:

(1) Everything is connected to everything else; 

(2) Creation knows best; 

(3) Nothing ever disappears; 

(4) There is no free lunch. 

Here’s my feeble efforts, based on the familiar Melody of, “All people that on earth do dwell”.

(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.

That is more a song for today, reminding us how to live now. The song to sing when we enter eternity might well be, 

“Praise God from whom all blessing flow”, or a version thereof.

That we are entering the last phase of mortal humanity, is becoming clearer every day. The eternal question uttered by Pilate at Jesus’ trial, “What is Truth?” can no longer be answered. Both the world and the church have lost direction, and both ramble aimlessly in an ever more confused society. Amos 8: 11 comes to mind, ”Not a famine of food, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord”.

That also means that we are deaf to the cries of creation.

New songs, new everything.

New songs are needed and new mindsets. Fortunately, Jesus promised that he will make everything new, but we must make a start, must be open-minded, must look everywhere for worn-out habits, customs, ingrained patterns, that need re-new-al. That takes courage.

DECEMBER 8 2021

PREPARE YE…

The church needs new songs, songs preparing its members for the new creation, the future of God’s people. That singing is crucial is plain from 2 Chronicles 20, where Israel was threatened by a powerful hostile army and the then king, Jehoshaphat, consulted with the people how to handle this grave situation. The outcome was truly amazing: this courageous and democratic king appointed a large choir to sing and while singing with their hearts in their throats, they advanced upon the enemy and with the help of the Lord, the enemy fled. 

The words of that song were simple: “Give thanks to the Lord for his love endures forever.” Then, and only then in the history of God’s people, the song, “Like a mighty army moves the church of God,” was authentic: a singing army!

Twice in Isaiah, Chapter 35: 10 and 51: 11, identical words prophesy that “The Redeemed of the Lord shall return and come with ‘singing’, and everlasting joy shall be upon their heads.” 

However, singing is not a spontaneous action: it takes rehearsing and learning, a procedure that must start now, because the ‘world-ending’ situation is approaching with a speed seldom experienced in the history of the world. 

 

Here is a headline of ARCTIC NEWS

MONDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2021

Planetary Extinction due to Arctic Atmospheric Methane Veil

 by Malcolm Light

Dr. Light, an Arctic specialist, calculates that, based on the unprecedented heating of the Arctic, untold gigatons of methane will be released within a few years, heating the earth beyond human capacity to endure.

Last week, I was walking on the Canada trail, as I do most days of the week, and a woman, on a pedal two-wheeler, stopped. She works in the Tweed Food Bank and I told her that I had just brought a donation there, and her response was, “You might as well: money won’t do any good when the Lord comes back.” Was she right? I think so.

But first we must prepare ourselves for being able to enter the New Creation knowing how to live NOW. That too needs preparation, because I believe that only those who today struggle trying to fit in the coming new world, will be granted entry. The book of Revelation calls these people, “those whose robes are clean” (Revelation 22: 14). Clothes in the Bible are a symbol of one’s personality.

Barry Commoner, a modern-day prophet, coined the laws of ecology. I made these laws into song so that we can more easily memorize them by singing them daily? These laws are:

(1) Everything is connected to everything else; 

(2) Creation knows best; 

(3) Nothing ever disappears; 

(4) There is no free lunch. 

Here’s my feeble efforts, based on the familiar Melody of, “All people that on earth do dwell”.

(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.

That is more a song for today, reminding us how to live now. The song to sing when we enter eternity might well be, 

“Praise God from whom all blessing flow”, or a version thereof.

That we are entering the last phase of mortal humanity, is becoming clearer every day. The eternal question uttered by Pilate at Jesus’ trial, “What is Truth?” can no longer be answered. Both the world and the church have lost direction, and both ramble aimlessly in an ever more confused society. Amos 8: 11 comes to mind, ”Not a famine of food, but a famine of hearing the words of the Lord”.

That also means that we are deaf to the cries of creation.

New songs, new everything.

New songs are needed and new mindsets. Fortunately, Jesus promised that he will make everything new, but we must make a start, must be open-minded, must look everywhere for worn-out habits, customs, ingrained patterns, that need re-new-al. That takes courage.

December 1 2021

I AM AN “EARTHER”.

In my church, St. Andrew’s Tweed, hangs a large Celtic Cross, crafted by one of our parishioners. A Cross is Celtic when it has an orb, a circle at its center, symbolizing that the revelation of God in creation and the revelation of God in the Scriptures belong together, telling me each Sunday that I must listen to the living Word in nature as well as abide by the dictates of the Bible.

Here’s where the church erred.

Nature is God’s primary, direct, created Word and the Bible is God’s secondary, indirect, written Word. Under the fatal influence of Gnosticism, the church has not only reversed that order, but has, by absentia, allowed a curse to be placed on the work of God’s own hand.  

In 1565, the Belgic Confession was composed; it singled out creation as the primary source of getting to know God. Psalm 24 states this plainly: “The earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.”  

Yes, the Bible is a necessary tool for a Christian: it is a light that guides us in navigating Creation. In essence the Bible tells us that God created, we uncreated, Jesus recreated. 

The first step in understanding Christianity is to acknowledge that, since God created it, the entire world is holy. When we abuse creation, we take God’s name in vain, and curse God’s majesty, which never goes unpunished, witness Climate Change and the Covid condition, worsening world-wide.

I call myself an EARTHER because Genesis 3: 19 plainly states: “Earth we are and to the earth we shall return”. Yes, the earth’s DNA and the human’s DNA resemble each other closely. 

Back to Celtic Christianity.

That God is present in all creation was certainly the conviction of the ninth-century philosopher, John Scotus Eriugena, perhaps the greatest teacher of the Celtic branch, the church ever produced. His name simply means John, the Scotsman from Ireland. He taught that Christ moves among us in two shoes, as it were, one shoe being that of creation, the other that of the Scriptures, and stressed the need to be as alert and attentive to Christ moving among us in creation as we are to the voice of Christ in the Scriptures. One of his prayers was, “Show yourself to us in everything we touch; show your presence in every one we meet.”

Like the Celtic Christian teachers before him, the thoughts of John the Irishman, were particularly shaped by the mysticism of the Apostle John, who tells us that “God is Love.” The realization that God is also a love affair is summed up in the doctrine of the Trinity. 

Celtic Christians, a 1000 years ago, expressed this in this poem:
The Three who are over my head.
The Three who are under my tread.
The Three who are over me here
The Three who are over me there.
The Three who are in the earth near.
The Three who are up in the air.
The Three who in heaven do dwell.
The Three in the great ocean swell,
Pervading Three, O be with me!

When God created, he called it good after each phase, and very good when it was all completed. This basic goodness in creation is a special feature of Celtic Christianity. Says the Irish John: “God’s divine goodness is the essence of the whole universe and its substance. Evil is opposed to the existence of creation and where goodness is creative, evil is destructive.”

All this was written long before we experienced the evil of pollution, of global warming, of the current pandemic, which, we can now clearly see, is the devil at work. 1 John 5: 19 unambiguously states that today the Devil calls the shots in this world. Jesus in John 17 openly admits that Satan is “the prince of this world.”

As so often happens in the church, true reformers and true radicals are not tolerated by the ecclesiastical authorities. In 1225 the main writings of John the Irishman, were condemned by the Pope and in 1685 they were placed on the Index, the papal list of forbidden writings. 

But the Celtic influence persisted. 

Jesu who ought to be praised.
There is no life in the sea,
there is no creature in the river,
there is naught in the firmament,
but proclaims his goodness.
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu!
Jesu who ought to be praised.
There is no bird on the wing,
there is no star in the sky
there is nothing beneath he sun,
but proclaims his goodness.
Jesu, Jesu, Jesu!
Jesu who ought to be praised.

We must begin to see the earth as Holy, and identify creation with its maker, just as we recognize and revere Bach in his St. Matthew Passion.

That’s why I call myself an EARTHER.

November 24 2021

WHAT IS “CHRISTIAN?”

A few weeks ago, I received a mailing from the Christian School Foundation, a Canadian body with the aim to help Canada’s Christian School movement. To me it generated a somewhat adverse effect, a feeling of negativity, a strange reluctance to even read the booklet. I know it was the wrong emotion, Why? Today the word “Christian” is now often associated with ‘anti-vaccine’, ‘anti-homosexual’, ‘anti-science’, even ‘anti-creation!’

It was not always so.

In 1955 my wife and I and one little son, moved from Hamilton, Ontario to St. Catharines, where in 1957, with a daughter added, I became quite involved in establishing a Christian School there, convinced that public education would lead my children astray from the true faith.

I myself am a multi-generational product of Christian education in the Netherlands. My parents had gone to their village Christian school, while the parents of my grandparents paid for their Christian schooling, just as we now had to do.

I must admit, my Christian elementary education has had a lasting influence on me because of my weekly memorizing the rhymed Psalms: my wife and I sang them together when she suffered from dementia: the songs learned in our youth remained with her and me till the very end. 

I was for years the secretary of the local Christian School board, and a member of the Education Committee. Being self-employed, I spent at least one day a week working for this cause. From 1959-1965, as recording and corresponding secretary of the board of the Ontario Alliance of Christian Schools, a province-wide organization I traveled one day each month to Toronto, for an all-day meeting there. That often entailed another day of work, writing the minutes and doing the extensive correspondence.

Then a change.

When my term was up more conservative men took over and I lost touch with the Christian School movement. But not quite.

In 1972 I gave a chapel talk at the Beacon Christian Highschool in St.Catharines. That year had been a turning point in my life: two books changed my entire outlook: Donella Meadows: “The Limits to Growth”, and Telder’s (Dutch) “After Death, what…?” The first book awoke what must have been lingering in my mind concerning the future of our profligate lifestyle, predicting a sure end. The second confirmed my suspicion about going to heaven, and suggesting eternal life on earth. 

In that chapel talk, with my minister present, I expounded on my doubts about what I now call “The Heaven Heresy”, prompting the minister to send a letter to the school parents, contradicting my views. That, combined with my disenchantment with the growing inflexibility of the church I attended, coupled with the 1973 Oil Crisis and the outlook predicted by “The Limits to Growth”, my wife and I decided to make a radical move: sell business and house and move to Tweed where friends had come to the same conclusion. That happened in 1975. 

From City to Country.

We moved. I built an energy efficient house on 50 acres, two storey with large windows facing south, a central masonry chimney, all set to heat the dwelling with wood and a back-up system. We became part of a house church, the type of worship when Christianity began. I took extra university courses – economics, urban studies – wrote three master-appraisals, to qualify for commercial real estate appraiser, which I did in 1978.

Always a ferocious reader, I fell in love with Bonhoeffer. Translated three books by an enlightened Dutch theologian, J.H. Bavinck. Both men convinced me that personal redemption and redemption of creation go hand in hand: a radical new insight for me.

Years ago, I wrote a book, DAY WITHOUT END, in which I imagined myself living in the New Creation. That prospect still governs my life. I see everything from the perspective of eternity, and am also governed by Revelation 22 where is says, “And there is no altar there”: no church, no Bible in the New Age to come! The real “Christian” Life is totally centered on and in ‘creation’. 

That made me see how ‘original sin’ is the result of picking fruit from the Paradise tree without asking the tree for permission.

The ‘heaven heresy’ has distorted the “Message”: my growing trouble with church and Christian Education finds its source there, I believe.  

A new perspective needed.

Christian churches and schools, need a new perspective, one that focuses on the End, so that we can prepare ourselves for living in the New Creation: A total Way of Life, listening to Creation, and effectively loving it: That is the NEW Way. It seems to me that the written Word, God’s indirect revelation, has become a talisman, because our way of life constitutes a curse on God’s direct, created word, to our mortal peril. 

I pray and hope that these institutions follow that path. My reluctance to embrace the word “Christian” stems from my emphasis on God’s Created Word. 

What is “Christian”? We have to find another word.