Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

THE CHURCH: A HISTORIC ABERRATION?

I am not a theologian, nor a church historian of any sort. I confess to be a Christian, and I believe that Christ is the Son of God, fully human, fully divine, who died on the cross, rose from the grave and, as the Apostle Creed formulated it, will return to judge the living and the dead.
I also believe in the Holy Spirit, a holy catholic church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting, which, I believe will be in the New Creation, because we have screwed up the old one beyond repair.

But I do have my doubts.

Where I have my doubts – which will likely label me a heretic – is with the historic development of the church. I continue to believe in “The Holy Catholic Church”, further explained as, “The communion of saints”, but I no longer believe in the ‘man-made’ church, even though I still attend it.

I am now convinced that this entire ecclesiastical concept is not only based on an incorrect premise, but also that the worship takes place in the wrong premises. Yes, I see the entire instituted church as a historic aberration, of which Climate Change is the direct result. 

Climate Change caused by the church? Yes, the general belief that Creation can be exploited at will, as we go to heaven anyway, has, starting 1700 years ago, led to our current atmospheric agony.

And the church?  

Its root is Greek: KURIAKOS, derived from KURIOS=Lord. That word has also been the base of Kirche in German, Kirk in Scotland, Kerk in Dutch. My Greek dictionary defines KURIAKOS as ‘Belonging to God.’ 

Does the church, visited by fewer and fewer people each Sunday, belong to God? No. Psalm 24 tells me that, “The Earth is the Lord’s and fulness thereof, the world and all that dwells in it”. Church, no matter how you slice it, goes hand in hand with religion, and religion killed Jesus! Jesus did not bring ‘religion’: he taught us how to live in his creation!

Should I mention the sexual crimes of the clerics, the enforced celibacy, and the church’s protective response, or the exclusion of women for the clergy, or its lackluster concern for the young people, who have abandoned the church in droves, or its lack of vision at a time of global climatic changes, and political disarray everywhere?

I am particularly galled by the church’s modus operandi, placing the sermon at the centre of its witness, a means of communication that leaves the pew-sitters with the impression that this constitutes the essence of Christianity. I   see them as a holdover of the pre-television and radio ages, more than 150 years ago when many could not afford books, when instruction was done via biblical lectures, called sermons or homilies. 

My additional doubts increased when I read in the last chapter of the Bible, that in the New Creation ‘there is no altar there!’, telling me that, since the law of the Lord will be written on our hearts, we no longer need either the church or the bible. Based on that revelation, it should be the task of the church to prepare people for that kind of independence. 

Is House churches the answer?

Acts 20:20 tells me that Paul, the apostle, “Taught publicly and from house to house.” That was the original and vibrant church for some 250 years. Will it work today?

We must keep in mind that, when Jesus died, the divider that separated the common area in the Jerusalem Temple from the exclusive domain of the high priest was thrown open, signaling the very end of temple and church-based religion. The early Christians understood that, and, most successfully engaged in neighborhood evangelism, with homes as the focal points. 

However, with official sanction of Emperor Constantin, and public recognition, the church restored that divide, heralding a new era of the sort of religion that today has perpetuated the aberration.

It’s not too late.

It is never too late. Now is the time to change course, and admit that the church is not God’s possession: the earth is. That’s why John 3: 16 is today the most important text in the Bible: “God so loved the ‘cosmos’, the house where he dwells. He gave it to us to improve it, and we did the opposite: That’s why he sacrificed his beloved Son to buy it back.

Unfortunately, we have gone beyond the ‘house church’ stage, but we can adapt this to the current situation through using the pew-filled auditorium for public prayer and singing, including choir, followed by small group discussions, and an orderly free for all, based on a specific biblical or societal topic. In other words, a house-church format, of no more than groups of 10 – 20 people, 

What today is desperately needed is a forum where people can air their doubts, their beliefs, their prayers and hopes and fears, laughs and especially ‘tears’, since all signs today point to a speedy arrival of the Parousia, the Second Coming of the Christ, bringing with him the New Creation. 

Walter Brueggemann, in his The Prophetic Imagination, foresaw this situation. He writes: “I believe that grief and mourning, that crying in pathos, is the ultimate form of criticism, for it announces the sure end of the whole royal – ruling and ecclesiastical – arrangement.”

For us it is fitting to mourn for the church that has misappropriated the term KYRIATOS, which has led to an irrelevant, building centered religion, and many different bible views.

For us it is also fitting to mourn for creation, now threatening our very physical existence, and imperiling God’s beloved cosmos.

Brueggemann quotes Jeremiah who “knew long before the others that the end was coming and that God had enough of indifferent affluence, cynical oppression and presumptuous religion….. that death was at the door and would not pass over”. He quotes Jeremiah,

I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void

And to the heavens, and they had no light.

I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,

And all the hills moved to and fro.

I looked, and lo, there was no man,

And all the birds of the air had fled.

I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert,

And all its cities were laid in ruins,

Before the Lord, before his fierce anger.

                  Jeremiah 4: 23-26

THE CHURCH: A HISTORIC ABERRATION?

 Luther warned that using the blind word ‘church’ in the creed, makes the common man think of the stone house which we call church. He wrote that it would have been easy to avoid the word ‘church’ by using “the holy Christian people”. The dire consequence is that today nobody associates church with God’s Holy Creation, with disastrous environmental consequences

Amos, the prophet who lived in the country, comes to mind: 

“The days are coming”, declares the sovereign Lord, 

“When I will send a famine through the land,

Not a famine of food or thirst for water,

But a famine of hearing the Words 

Of the Lord.

Men will stagger from sea to sea and

Wander from north to east,

Searching for the Word of the Lord,

And they will not find it.”  

Amos 8: 11-12.

That time has come. We worship in the wrong premises and our basic heaven-oriented, earth-exploiting, planet-plundering premise is perverse. Some 1700 years ago, we decided to institutionalize religion. There’s no way back: we have burned all our bridges.

I realize that this topic is quite controversial. Yet, since Revelation 22, the last Bible chapter, specifically mentions the ‘absence of an altar’, of organized religion, today we must visualize this situation and prepare ourselves for it. Prayerfully, I should add. 

That my topic is the instituted church, outlining it possibly being a historic aberration, is all part of the Great Unveiling: everything will become what it is. 

CHAOS OR COSMOS: A CHOICE

The word Chaos is perhaps best described by its opposite: Cosmos. Where Cosmos indicates something wholesome and harmonious, pictures an orderly and logical situation, and illustrates a simple and coherent solution, in my Greek dictionary Chaos is defined as, well the opposite: an unformed and shapeless mass, a useless, unreformable blob. Yet God saw this indefinable entity and, says Psalm 33: 9, “God spoke and chaos came to be cosmos”. It’s as simple as that, so simple that it is beyond our comprehension.

The phrase ‘came to be’ included evolution. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, that famous priest-paleontologist, author of “Le Milieu Divin”, THE HOLY EARTH, saw this gradual development, the innate capacity of the initial creation to blossom into something beautiful, and tried to explain this process to the church, for which he was condemned as a heretic by the ecclesiastical authorities who stuck to the Genesis story addressed to a people with acute agricultural insight but with no scientific knowledge. More often than not, the clergy has been the death of progress and the bane of the church.

Cosmos

Last Monday morning, I sat back and looked around in my living room, where I saw ‘cosmos’. I saw on my windowsill flourishing plants, silhouetted against the sky; I saw beautiful furniture, functional and attractive to the eye, I saw a large decorative bookcase full of colorful books, I saw original paintings, some from local artists: in other words, I am surrounded by cosmic creativity, reflecting my innermost being, fully dependent on the Way, the Truth and the Life, personified in Jesus Christ. 

When I peer outside, I see a large vegetable garden and fruit trees, as well as gigantic maples, providing ample shade to keep my two-storey home cool in the summer, with windows south-facing to warm the dwelling in the cold winter months. All that too is part of cosmos.

Chaos.

However, when I open my computer and look at the three dailies I read every morning, the Toronto Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and the British Guardian, I see chaos everywhere. I also see it as irreversible. Chaos, noticeable in the atmosphere, where excessive heat has created chaotic conditions among the very elements that make life on earth possible. And that most certainly involves trees: No trees, no LIFE.

I noticed a little poem while reading a book on ‘trees’: 

“Poems are made by fools like me. 

But only God can make a tree”.

That’s how God started to make cosmos out of chaos: he made trees to sprout. At one time a person could walk along the North of Africa, from Morocco at the Atlantic Ocean to Oman at the Pacific and always be in the shade: indeed, civilizations, from the early Sumerian era flourished and fell when trees and land fertility disappeared. 

These same trees have been in the news lately, proclaiming their intricate root connections, their utter usefulness for the human existence. I once read that a CIA study had calculated that, in order to sustain the oxygen level for the average North Americans, including the O2 burned in our combustion engines, 4500 trees per person are needed. From a friend, a retired forester, in British Columbia, and affirmed by Peter Wohlleben in his new book, “The Heartbeat of Trees”, I learned that the ‘plantation’ method of replacing old-growth-clear-cut approach to forestry with pine-seedlings, is causing the immense forest fires in the North American Pacific West. 

The Tree of Life, in the Garden of Eden, means to me that the TREE is LIFE. Trees can live without us, but we cannot live without trees. The frenetic forest fires, now wherever trees are found, spells the end of our civilization. Its abusive agricultural practices deprived Rome from its nearby food sources and aided in its fall. History is repeating itself. A lengthy article in the New York Times on August 18, predicts that the anti-weed chemicals produced by Bayer and Monsanto are becoming ineffective, as weeds defeat all efforts to suppress them, with dire consequences for our food supply, spelling Chaos also in the soil. 

Chaos in the church.

Whenever God erects a house of prayer,

The Devil always builds a chapel there;

And ‘twill be found upon examination,

The latter has the largest congregation.            

Daniel Defoe in The True-born Englishman.

The Latin Mass, anyone? Abortion? Same Sex Marriage? Evolution? The Bible’s Letter-for-Letter accuracy? Female Priests? No salvation outside the church?

The church is deeply divided everywhere I look, much more Chaos than Cosmos, much more devilish than divine.

Jesus usually was quite mild-mannered, but when it came to organized religion, and its leaders, he was furious, warning his disciples to be aware of the church officials, and in a direct confrontation with the religious leaders, he called them ‘poisoners’ and ‘hypocrites’. Matthew 23 contains a long list of statements condemning the clergy of his days. They ended up killing Jesus. Jesus hated religion: he wants us to be god-fearing, creation loving  humans, just as he was.

Michael Coren, ordained in the (Canadian) Anglican Church, in a Globe and Mail article, decried the resistance of ‘fundamental Christians’ to Covid vaccination. Cardinal Raymond Burke, a staunch conservative in the US Catholic church who has emerged as a leading critic of Pope Francis and a vaccine skeptic, was placed on a ventilator just days after testing positive for Covid-19. 

Abide with us.

That song plays through my mind: “Abide with me, fast falls the eventide, the darkness deepens, Lord with me abide.”

“We are entering an unprecedented era in human history, two simultaneous and hugely challenging climate changes at once: one in the climate of technology and one in the climate of the climate”, writes Thomas Friedman in the New York Times. 

We are sleepwalking into CHAOS everywhere: politically, religiously, environmentally, agriculturally: everywhere we look, we are at the end of the road, and we have run out of solutions.

“Abide with us”, but God has abandoned us because we, as a society, have abandoned God.

Chaos everywhere: just as God in the beginning, created cosmos out of chaos, with leaving us in charge of creation, he knew what the outcome would be: chaos everywhere, and the resulting immense hardship, now already evident everywhere. Brace yourself. We will see Matthew 24 emerging in all its dramatic disasters. 

Here’s a Jesus’ quote:

“For then there will be great distress, unequaled from the beginning of the world until now—and never to be equaled again. If those days had not been cut short, no one would survive, but for the sake of the elect those days will be shortened.” 

Other Bible passages also refer to this event, emphasizing the prosperous conditions, and the abundance of material production, before Jesus returns, with merchants lamenting the lack of sales of their luxury wares: all utterly normal times! Yet, sudden and unforeseen events do happen, witness Afghanistan today, or the Haiti earthquake or pouring rain in Greenland, another unique event.

The literary world is full with sayings such as “the last straw that broke the camel’s back, or the grain of sand or the snowflake that caused the avalanche.” As Seneca said long ago: “Increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid.”

The Bible tells us to live our lives always with eternity in mind, more relevant today than ever, as the finiteness of the world becomes increasingly evident. The trouble is that we live in a culture capable to accomplish almost everything but unable to imagine anything. That the God Creator has plans for a totally new creation, is something even the church no longer believes, and is unable to imagine. 

So, total CHAOS will come: be assured. And total COSMOS will follow: be assured, because the Lord will never allow his beautiful creation to permanently fall into disuse.

A BIT ABOUT GOD

Let me start on a personal note.

First thing I do after breakfast is scan the lectionary for the day, select a text from either the Old-, a Psalm or the New Testament, and write 500 words on my MacBook as the words tumble from my mind to my fingers and on the screen as the spirit moves me. Done it for more than 27 years. 

I also always have a few books on the go. Lately I have been reading “The Art of Loving”, the title of a book by Erich Fromm. My brother Drewes in The Hague, alerted me to this author, and, through the Tweed Library I obtained it. This Jewish, German born, mostly USA situated author and psychoanalyst impressed me with his insight into the human character but also his acute observations on God and his thoughts about the shallowness of those who call themselves Christians. 

Fromm’s parents and grandparents were devout Jews but soon in life he abandoned the ‘faith of the fathers’, which, nevertheless, had a profound influence on his life.

I was intrigued by his thoughts on God and believers in General. But before I quote Fromm, a citation from Dr. Sabine Dramm’s book on Bonhoeffer: “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 in turn proceeds from this world back again to God.” 

Seeing God and the world as one, was also the tentative conclusion of another Jewish author, professor of Hebrew, Richard Elliott Friedman, who, in The Hidden Face of God, ends his intriguing book with, “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.” (emphasis his). In that conclusion he echoes Bonhoeffer whom he quotes quite often. 

 Bonhoeffer also wrote that, “It is only out of the future that the present can be lived”. 

That has become my rule for life. That’s how I wrote my “Day without End”, a book visualizing my conception of eternal life in the New Creation. However, God, the Father, never entered into my story. Jesus did, quite prominently, but not God. That absence can be explained by seeing all of creation as an expression of God, just as J.S. Bach speaks to us today through his music and all famous artists through their works. 

But, back to Erich Fromm. 

He writes that “God cannot have a name. A name always denotes a thing, or a person, or something finite. How can God have a name if he is not a person, not a thing?” Fromm again, ”When God talked to Moses, he tells him that his name is ‘I am becoming that which I am becoming”. “I-am-becoming is my name”, which means that God is not finite, not a person, not a ‘being’”. For Israel, God’s chosen people, God became tangible in the Ark of the Covenant, a holy symbol, and the temple. When Jesus died, the curtain dividing the Holies from the Holy of Holies, ripped, signifying the end of any formal religion.

So, how do we deal with God now that the temple is gone? 

The New Testament tells us that. When Jesus talked to a woman at the well in Samaria – as recorded in John 4 – he told her that, ^“God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” Paul wrote to Timothy that “God lives in inapproachable light: nobody can see God and nobody has seen God.” (1 Timothy 6: 16).

God-Confusion.

We find ourselves in a situation where confusion about God is rampant, and the church, in general, is at the heart of that mix-up, still sees itself as God’s house. It tries to – at best – to explain something that cannot be explained, and usually muddles the issue, rather than admitting that the mystery of God remains a mystery. 

Fortunately, Paul provided the solution. In Colossians 1: 15-20, he wrote,

Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.  For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him.  He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.  He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.  For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross; through Him, I say, whether things on earth or things in heaven.

That, in my opinion, explains the disappearing God, and gives Jesus the prominent place in life, and especially in the church. A church without Jesus ceases to be a church. A church without living with and in creation and loving it unconditionally also ceases to be a church. God, the invisible God, beyond comprehension, is visible in Jesus Christ, and remains a constant presence in CREATION: Romans 1: 20 clearly indicates that, “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse”.

That explains to me the God mystery: he manifests himself through Jesus Christ, and through creation. This also means that worshiping God without Jesus and apart from creation, smacks of idolatry: he is and remains beyond name and beyond understanding.   

Fromm again.

Erich Fromm wades into this morass when he writes that “instead of a religious renaissance, we witness a regression to an idolatric concept of God”. I believe that, unwittingly, Fromm, as an Old Testament Jew, has made the correct discovery, because the church, in general, has made an idol of God by not recognizing the New Testament ‘creation’ version of the Father, a concept that, now in our very ‘last’ days, is becoming prominent.

Fromm is also correct when he writes that in the Middle Ages the average person looked at God as to a helping father and mother, taking God seriously, making it the paramount goal in life to live according to God’s principles, to make “salvation” the supreme concern to which all other activities were subordinated. “Today, nothing of such effort is present. Daily life is strictly separated from any religious values”. 

Fromm, ever the psychoanalyst, adds, “Man of truly religious culture may be compared with children at the age of eight, who need father as a helper, but who begin to adopt his teachings and principles in their lives. Contemporary man is like a child of three, who cries for father when he needs him, and otherwise is quite self-sufficient when he can play.” Bonhoeffer’s view was identical: Deus Ex Machina, pulling a magical string when we need God.

I should add that Christ did not come to start a religion: he came to abolish it and teach us how to live as a human being in God’s creation, which now is on the edge of total destruction thanks to our “economic growth religion’, a religion not about the disappear, in spite of the Climate Change.

By and large the church sees the earth as evil and preaches escape from the earth. But, says Bonhoeffer, “Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world to other worlds beyond: rather he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children.” 

 “It is only out of the future that the present can be lived”. That future is the new creation.

The alternative is hell on earth, for many already a reality as Climate Change has become unstoppable. 

APOCALYPSE

“The lifestyles of around three average Americans will create enough planet-heating emissions to kill one person, and the emissions from a single coal-fired power plant are likely to result in more than 900 deaths, according to the first analysis to calculate the mortal cost of carbon emissions.”

That was one of last week’s headlines in the Guardian.

I believe there once were some laws given on Mount Sinai, when Moses received the Ten Commandments, among which two in particular: (1) ‘don’t misuse God’s name’, and (2) ‘refrain from killing others.’ 

Misusing God’s name has nothing to do with swearing or saying OMG. God is beyond name. However, we do misuse God’s name when we maim, injure, destroy something that God created and pronounced ‘good’. By our destructive acts we openly spurn God’s love, and become part of the 21^stCentury killing machine: every one of us is guilty of these crimes, nobody excepted. We negate God’s love through committing the ‘abomination that causes desolation”, the terrible act that exploits God’s precious possession, and through our actions we are complicit in killing our neighbor and God’s creation we are supposed to love. 

Our most outrageous and ominous SIN is that our entire lifestyle excludes an alternative. King Lear’s complaint that “he was more sinned against than sinning”, does not hold true for us: our very existence spells ‘sinning’. It’s no surprise that today we experience God’s judgement in the form of forest fires and melting poles, of disappearing insects and glaziers galloping into oblivion.

Here’s an illustration how ‘everything is connected to everything else’, “Three hundred trout are needed to support one person for a year. The trout, in turn, must consume 90,000 frogs, that must consume 27 million grasshoppers that live off of 1,000 tons of grass.” 

When the grass burns, the entire interconnected chain of events, that keeps trout alive, stops. When the trout dies: we too die. That shows us our total dependence on a simple clump of earth: APOCALYPSE lays bare our total reliance on a well-functioning earth. Isaiah 40: 6 confirms that: “All flesh is grass”. Everything depends on healthy soil.

When is Time Up?

 
When does Apocalypse come? When will the final facets of life show themselves? How much time do we have before there is a global revelation, a universal apocalypse, the moment when the chain of events, by missing one link, stops dead in its tracks, and everything will be seen in its true light and the naked nature of humanity will be clear to us all? 

When Jesus was asked that question, as recorded in Matthew 24: 36, he answered, “Not the angels, not me, the Son, only the FATHER has the answer.” And, as Bonhoeffer has stated, God and his creation are synonymous, which indicates that the answer lies in creation. Our world, which is alive, is, and as Roman 8 attests, groaning in pain of childbirth, has an hour of expiry, a tipping point, that only creation knows. At a certain moment, the global system which we have been torturing for many millennia, reaches a breaking point, and a new earth will be born. Jesus came to make that possible. 

Peter says essentially the same. 2 Peter 3: 10: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief. …fire will be universal and the earth and everything in it will be revealed.” The commentary there says, “the earth and all human works will appear before God’s judgement seat:” Apocalypse again!

In other words, ‘brace yourself’. Death is not the end: judgement is.

Jesus also said, “The meek will inherit the earth’. (Matthew 5: 5). J. B. Phillips translates it in more accurate and beautiful language, “Those who claim nothing for themselves will inherit the earth”. 

I like that version: we, the greedy 21^st Century creatures want everything, from cruises to snowmobiles, from second residences to foreign vacations, and now, in a bizarre twist, our luxuries are turning to global liabilities. We now have zero years before the climate and ecological breakdown, because it’s already here. We have zero years left to procrastinate. The longer we wait to act, the worse the floods, fires, droughts, famines and heatwaves will get. 

Glasgow, COP 26.

In just three short months, the UN will gather in Glasgow, Scotland, for the 26^th time to discuss Climate Change. The first such a conference took place in 1995 in Berlin, Germany.  Every year, since then, such a gathering took place, and every year promises were made, and every year promises were broken. 

I attended COP 6 in The Hague, Netherlands, in the year 2,000, where I was struck by the presentations made by the Innuit people of the Canadian Arctic who, already then, 21 years ago, saw the ice melting and their livelihood threatened. An ice-free North Pole brings its own perils, now beginning to appear.

Apocalypse also coincides with complete destruction of the world as described in some detail in the biblical book of Revelation. There, in the very last chapter of the very last Bible book, it says that “Everything will become what it is”. Our masks will be ripped off, and the true state of affairs will show itself, because, in spite of all the hype to the contrary, humanity will persist in its sinful ways. COP 26 will go the way of all previous one: promises made, promises broken, even though we are now on that turning point in history. The signs of universal destruction are all around us, but we will continue to ride our ATVs for ‘pleasure’, and travel by car to work as the sole occupant.

Of course, God knew what was coming when, already in Deuteronomy 32:20 he said, “I will hide my face to see what their end will be.” By relying on the gods of progress, capitalism, self-veneration, rather than on the God Creator, humanity sealed its doom. That is now becoming evident.

Not only the Book of Revelation, but the entire Bible testifies to the event of the apocalypse, when the final reckoning is at hand. Subconsciously apocalypse has always been on people’s minds: just as a smoker or an alcoholic knows that the addiction leads to pain and suffering and shorter life, so our addiction to perpetual growth, to ever more intricate and creative ways to burn carbon fuel, leads to doom.

The Guardian newspaper recently interviewed Diana Six, an entomologist for 30 years who teaches at the University of Montana. She took her students to Glacier National Park on a field trip and reported the following: “Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds, are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked… People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated; they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.” (Source: Top US Scientist on Melting Glaciers: ‘I’ve Gone From Being an Ecologist to a Coroner’, The Guardian, July 21, 2021).

“The lifestyles of around three average Americans will create enough planet-heating emissions to kill one person, and the emissions from a single coal-fired power plant are likely to result in more than 900 deaths, according to the first analysis to calculate the mortal cost of carbon emissions.” 

These deaths do not include the untold number of birds and butterflies and insects and fish and……

The July 24 issue of The Economist exhibited a wild-water cover with a floating fire-filled TV screen, telling the world that there is No Safe Place anymore, portraying a thoroughly biblical scene.    

That truly is the basic message of the last Bible book, REVELATION: ‘everything becomes what it is.’ 

DOES THE BIBLE PREDICT CLIMATE CHANGE?

Can the Bible tell us what will happen in the weather? Yes. I sincerely believe that The Abomination that causes Desolation refers to today’s atmospheric conditions. The phrase appears in Daniel in the Old Testament, and Jesus quotes it in that terrible 24^th Chapter of the book of Matthew, where the Christ looks ahead to the very days we live in, the year of the Lord 2021. 

What is the significance of these words: Abomination” and “Desolation”?

‘Abomination’ means ‘a terrible, criminal act’, something that goes against all normally acceptable conduct. The Holocaust is an example of such an event. Desolation too has purely negative overtones: its literary meaning is, “God forsaken”. A desert is an example of desolation, or the scenery after an earthquake, or the devastation caused by a hurricane, flood or tornado. Also, both abomination and desolation, point to our agricultural practises based on (oil-based) fertilizer and pesticides, poisoning the soil in the process, our clearcutting the forests, and our ravaging the seas with bottom-scraping devices: all that too fits the bill of ‘The Abomination that causes Desolation”.

There’s no doubt in my mind that “The Abomination that causes Desolation” of which the Bible speaks twice, applies to our place and our time. The little aside – let the reader be aware – means that only when it actually happens, do we recognize it. In addition, because of the world-wide forest fires, “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give light”: that too is happening right now where I am living, another quote from that same Matthew 24 chapter. 

What this really means is that “We live in the last phase before Christ returns, the beginning of incalculable disasters.”

We, the humans of the 21^st Century, face a lot of challenges, both physically and spiritually. Physically our lives in society are threatened constantly by yielding to the factory-prepared so-called foods, laden with sugar and preservatives, and the meat products which require a lot of cereals and carbon-rich fuels before they are ready for table use. A recent study by the Rockefeller Foundation outlines how the true cost of our food is three times the price we pay in the grocery stores. The real cost is now visiting us in the form of climate disasters.

“We are what we eat”. 

Basically, this means that we eat oil, and we now realize that oil is not good for our well-being, to say the least. That is not the only obstacle to good health: our bodies also are ‘oil-driven’:  we have become lazy: ‘use it or lose it’, is a well-worn wisdom, which we fail to implement in our own lives. Spiritually the entire commercial world – including the church – is basking in false optimism and refuses to face the ultimate consequences of our blasphemous lives.

Spiritual and physical fitness is needed to weather the continuing onslaught.

I walk 0ne Full Hour every day: Every Day. Walking has been clinically proven to not only energize our life and limbs, but also to tickle the brain and make it to retain its memory and thinking capability: mere walking. I’ve read somewhere that everyone of us has continuously two free personal health assistants available: our left leg, and our right leg. 

I almost always walk on the Canada Trail which runs through the centre of my village, the old CPR train track. Once outside the built-up area it’s like ‘forest bathing’, perfectly accessible to all its inhabitants. But walking does not seem a Tweed habit: running ATVs is: for every one walker on the trail, I meet 5-10 of these motorized 4 wheelers, noisy, heavily polluting, dust-causing, exercise-preventing contraptions, truly Satan-Inspired. That’s why I have very little hope for the population at large to adopt creation-saving ways.              

Oh, the Trees! 

When trees die—by natural processes, by fire, at the hands of humans— they release into the atmosphere the carbon stored within them, sometimes for as long as centuries. In this way, they are like coal. That’s why the effect of wildfires on emissions is among the most feared climate feedback loops. Today, this very hour, the world’s forests, which have typically been carbon sinks, are now cruel carbon sources, unleashing all that stored Carbon Dioxide that causes the heating of our planet.

We see dramatic pictures of the fires in North America every day. What we don’t see are those in Siberia and other remote regions, ten times as disastrous. We all are banking on the Amazon region to remedy our addiction: false hope, because they now emit more carbon than they absorb, thanks to Brazil’s “Christian” president. It used to be that the trees of the Amazon took in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet’s forests each year. But since 2018, when Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil, he promised to open the rain forest to development—which is to say, deforestation. How much damage can one person do to the planet? A group of Brazilian scientists has now estimated that between 2021 and 2030, Bolsonaro’s deforestation would release the equivalent of 13.12 gigatons of carbon. Last year, the United States emitted about 5 gigatons. This means that this one policy would have between two and three times the annual carbon impact of the entire American economy, with all of its airplanes and automobiles and coal plants. 

The world’s worst emitter, by far, is China; the country was responsible for 9.1 gigatons of emissions in 2020. This means Bolsonaro’s policy is the equivalent of adding a whole second China to the planet’s fossil fuel problem. No, believe me, there will never be an end to Climate Change ever: it will get worse ever faster.

There is a public health impact as well: every square kilometer of deforestation produces twenty-seven additional cases of malaria, thanks to what is called “vector proliferation”—when the trees are cleared out, the bugs move in, and a new pandemic explodes.

What must we do? 

Prepare and pray. Expect an enormous earthquake! It is mentioned not only in Matthew 24 (Read it aloud!) but in numerous places in the Hebrew Bible as well. Follow the Old Testament regulation of ATONEMENT. Leviticus 16: 34 prescribes the procedure, “This is to be a lasting ordinance for you: Atonement is to be made once a year for all the sins of the people”.

No generation in the entire history of the world has sinned more than ours, affecting the very essence of God, atonement not once a year, but every day and every week amidst God’s people.  

The disasters will simply multiply: James Lovelock called one of his books, The Revenge of Gaia. Bonhoeffer states that God and creation are synonymous: hurting creation, exploiting it, is a direct confrontation with God. Malachi, the last chapter in the Hebrew Bible simply says, “The Day of the Lord will burn like a furnace”. 

Back to Matthew 24 where Jesus displays his usual bluntness when he says, “For then there will be a great tribulation, such as has not occurred since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will. Unless those days had been cut short, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short”. 

For the sake of the elect……Romans 8: 18 has something to say there, “The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed………We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pain of childbirth. We wait eagerly for our adoption… for in that hope we are saved.”

Can we use the Bible to tell what is in store for us today? Yes, a definite YES.

DEPRESSING

Last week I left my rural location, midway between Ottawa and Toronto, for the first time this year, and, thanks to my oldest daughter and her husband, who almost every week come to visit for a few days, I was motored to their home in New Hamburg, just west of Kitchener via the 401, to celebrate the 3d birthday of a great-grandson.

What a contrast!! A different world on the way! Endless streams of trucks in both directions made me wonder how we can ever change to a cosmos-enhancing society. Electrify all these highway monsters? Will we ever be able to produce and buy locally, rather than depend on China and ‘just in time production’?

On a cheerful note: on the way we visited their son’s, my grandson’s workshop, in an abandoned abattoir downtown Toronto, where he, an arborist, and his team recycle Toronto’s fallen trees to craft beautifully creative furniture for a new hotel nearby and the University of Toronto.

The car trip there, depressing, the visit uplifting.

Contrast this with times gone past.

Can we ever go back? I was born in 1928, the year before the Great Depression. In the ensuing 9 decades of my life, the world population soared from two billion to close to eight billion. During that time, I have witnessed and been initially an active, and later a reluctant participant in changing my earth from a flourishing planet to one now very close to death. May the Lord forgive me my collaboration in this development: my bouts of depressive feelings originate there.

Where the ‘old times’ better?

I have seen how a sustainable way is possible. I clearly remember my two grandfathers, both born in 1870, both also elders in the same village church, the center of life in those days, where, apart from church activities, the village also hosted an interdenominational brass band, choirs and poetry reading clubs, and thereby bolstered a stable marriage atmosphere, as courting couples knew the ins and outs of their families – and in general people created social bonds far beyond religion. 

My grandparents lived sustainable lives, did without electricity, automobiles and radio. One had a mixed farm, the cash income coming from a dozen or so hand-milked cows, while some extra funds were gained from raising chickens whose eggs my other grandfather, a small grocer, exchanged for coffee, tea and sugar.

Hard work and simple lives.

I know, life involved a lot of drudgery work, cleaning out the cow manure, pumping the water, tending the garden, slaughtering the annual pig, daily hauling the milk to the pick-up point, gathering the cereal crops, all by hand: scythe the stalks, bind the sheaves, later haul it all to a central threshing machine: all back-breaking work, yet sustainable. People then knew how to read the weather, depended squarely on the Lord’s blessing and confessed that openly.

In my lifetime all this has changed. You know it; I know it: each of us now has One Hundred energy slaves at our beck and call, allowing us to ….no, I don’t have to spell out what we have done and can do! Neither do I have to repeat that, in my life-time, I and my 500 million fellow Westerners have all but destroyed the earth, to the point where its expiry date can be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy.

The uninhabitable world.

The real depressing prospect is that I have left a black future for my thirteen grandchildren and so far, 7 great grandchildren. There’s where my down-feelings find their focus: the world they grow up in, the world my generation has shaped, the world where my criminal ways are causing this calamity: we basically have made our world uninhabitable.

I have a book with that title, The Uninhabitable Earth, life after Warming, written by David Wallace-Wells. You don’t need any further information than the title which speaks for itself, as the book’s rationale is illustrated every day on TV where we see the droughts, the fires, the floods, the heat, the shrinking arable lands, the widening pandemic, and the inevitable famine that looms. 

It’s. been a long time coming.

Already 50 years ago I saw this coming. In 1971-2, as a real estate broker, I entered a Canada-wide contest to write a 5,000 words essay involving an aspect of real estate. I entitled the essay: THE CITY, KEY TO SURVIVAL, An essay on Ecology and Urban Living.

To my surprise my essay was chosen, and published in the November 1972 issue of the Real Estate Institute of Canada Journal. The award included a substantial financial compensation plus a free trip from Toronto to its Vancouver Convention for the presentation.

In my essay I cited the Four Laws of Ecology as a possible new way to regulate city life. 

These laws, formulated by Dr. Barry Commoner, I adopted as my rules for life in the city of the future.

These ecological givens are simple: 

1. Everything is connected to everything else
2. There is no free lunch
3. Nature knows best.
4. Nothing ever disappears. 

I used these laws in my essay, of which the final sentence was: The City is the key to the future. Let us hope that the people of the city will find the door – the key is not enough.

When I wrote that sentence my thoughts went to the New City, promised in Revelation, and to Jesus who, in Luke 13: 24 tells us to enter into eternity by “the narrow door.”

Fifty years later.

Back to ‘ecology’, where today, 50 years later, these laws are as relevant as ever.

Take the first law: God has created the universe is such a way that every creature serves every other one. The soil, the air, the water, all serve the flower, who in turn, serves the bee and the butterfly, who both are pollinators for the fruit trees that serve us, while we are the TOP servant. This process is found throughout creation, as everything is connected to everything else.

Law 2.

Nothing comes free. My grandparents knew this. We did not. We have exploited the free air, free soil, free water, and now the bills come due. Also, all the free money our generous governments have created, once it appears on the balance sheet, has to be re-paid. How in the world are we going to restore the earth, the water, soil and air, to their pristine state, with 8 billion people clamoring for more?

Law 3.

We must re-learn the lesson my god-fearing grandparents knew: Nature, creation, dictates its own laws, gleaned from the laws of Moses recorded in the Hebrew Bible. They knew from Psalm 24 that “The earth is the Lord’s and all it contains,” which makes it holy. They practised crop rotating, used manure for fertilizer, gave their cows names and treated them humanely.

Law 4.

Nothing ever disappears.

We are learning that lesson the hard way. Air, water, soil pollution illustrates the obvious fact that nothing ever disappears: we live in a closed system.

Our problems are beyond our capacity to remedy. Our entire existence is at risk, and there is no solution. It’s now up to the Lord Creator to repair what we have destroyed. Jesus did that when, on Calvary, he said: ”It is finished”. 

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In Real Estate terms we now find ourselves in that curious interim period when the final conditions have been removed, and thus the ‘sale is final’, Jesus paid the price in full, but the possession date has not yet come. That glorious event, the New Creation, is about to come! No time to feel depressed: Only every reason to rejoice!