Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

SWITCH TO LIFE.

There’s a major misconception about the real reason why Jesus dwelt on earth. Ask the average church-goer this question, and the answer almost always is: “He came to save us from our sins”. Not quite correct. The real reason for Christ’s birth, life, death and resurrection is to restore creation and making it fit for the saints to inhabit and enhance. There’s where the church’s switch to life must come in, a total realignment in the Christian religion, a complete change from preaching to doing, from words to action.

On Calvary, that turning point in history, Jesus exclaimed, “It is finished”, and, in principle, restored the New Creation, affirmed by his resurrection three days later. When Jesus died, the curtain in the Jerusalem Temple, the very center of the Jewish religion, dividing the Holy from the Holy of Holies, tore from top to bottom, which clearly signified the end of formal institutional worship and heralded the beginning of LIFE. Instead, we perpetuated the Old-Time religion, not good for anybody except the clergy.

All this made Bonhoeffer write, “Christ came not to start a new religion but to teach us how to live.” He also wrote, “Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from the world to other worlds beyond: rather, he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children….. We have fallen into secularism, and by secularism, I mean pious Christian secularism….the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth…… This pious secularism also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things……(However) The function of the church is to witness to the power of God in the new creation.”

I believe this to be true, and forces me to categorically state that Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, their entire way of worship, under the veneer of religion, have ceased to be Christian, because they have failed and continue to fail to prepare the flock for life in the New Creation. That calls for a paradigm shift in church teaching and a transfer to real life. In my church’s hymnbook many, many songs celebrate heaven: they all have to go. In daily life, all ads celebrate consumption: they all have to go. We have to go back to basics: celebrate permanence and root ourselves in earthly living, anchored in enduring conduct, enveloped in love for LIFE: all in readiness for eternity.

THE KINGDOM CONCEPT.

That calls for being greener than green, questioning every action and each move in the light of eternity: sermons should cease and ministers let go, and ecclesiastical gatherings become communal gatherings to exchange creational insights and products, prayer, composing and singing new songs, and engaging in mutual encouragement, all in preparation for the Parousia, the DAY of the Lord.  

The Kingdom has become the forgotten concept in church sermons, pushed away by the HEAVEN heresy, even though Jesus famously said, “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6: 33) The real question is why the church placed the Kingdom on the back burner, while Jesus made it a priority. I believe this evolved because it’s much easier to believe in heaven, requiring no sacrifices, no hardship, no real efforts, while pursuing the Kingdom entails a radical change in living, treating the earth as holy. That has caused an unholy paradox, a life more resembling what CS Lewis wrote: “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” That’s what the heaven message has become, in my humble opinion.

So, what is the Kingdom?  

Here’s Prof. Dr. J. H. Bavinck: “The central point of the gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering: rather, its entire focus is aimed at the unique and powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom. It’s God’s intention to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one overarching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally enjoy God and be saved in him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the kingdom of God, where all things become unified under the one and only all-wise will of him who lives and rules forever”.

There is no such thing as individual salvation? That’s different!

Yet, the entire church setup is built on personal salvation! That’s why the church has totally underplayed the entire Kingdom matter which involves life here and now and life in eternity. Of course, Jesus saw that coming, and compares the Kingdom to a tiny muster seed – which exactly is the case today, as the Kingdom concept has become a miniscule part of the church enterprise, yet, in eternity it will overshadow all, because our eternal future is wrapped up in God’s Kingdom, his natural earth.

The Kingdom means that we are only saved in conjunction with creation. Our personal salvation and the salvation of creation go hand in hand. That is what Jesus meant when he told us to make ‘the Kingdom’ a priority in our life, and trust in him to give us our daily bread.

In simple terms this means that ‘kingdom living’ involves loving creation and enhancing its wellbeing, and making this the purpose in and of our life. That calls for faith and obedience, requires direction and discipline. Bonhoeffer again: “only those who believe are obedient, and only those who are obedient believe.” That’s also the reason why John 3: 16 is in the Bible: if God so loved the world, his kingdom, saw the earth as his greatest treasure, ‘the pearl beyond value” (Matthew 13: 45), should we not do the same?

HERE AND NOW

When I try to be obedient, acting out of my belief, then my life must be a reflection of my belief, and that belief must be visible in my actions in preparation for life eternal. My transition to life eternal begins here and now. It is not that when Christ returns, I suddenly become aware of my new way of life, no, that eternal life must a continuation of my present existence.

So, how do I recognize a fellow Kingdom traveler? Not necessarily a church member. Augustine some 1600 years ago wrote, “Many whom God has, the church does not have; and many whom the church has, God does not have.” Practical and devoted love for creation must typify the life of a Kingdom seeker, seeking ways and means to minimize environmental impact, in preparation for eternity which requires by definition a steady state of affair.

How then shall we live?

I learned from Dr. Barry Commoner, long-time and long-living professor of botany, the laws of ecology. The word ecology is pure Greek, made from 2 words quite familiar to all, oikos, the house – our world, and logos, the word – our reasoning.

Dr. Commoner coined four laws. They are very simple and easy to remember. Bind them upon your heart. Memorize them as the dictates for life. They are:

• Everything is connected to everything else. (Service is the key and we the master servants.)
• Nothing ever disappears. (That’s why we have Climate Change.)
• There is no free lunch. (We now pay dearly for ‘free air, free water, free soil’.)
• Nature knows best. (Listen to God and his creation, now in the grip of death, but also in pangs of the ‘new earth’ birth.)

Our new law for life: Seek first the Kingdom, the welfare of creation: our real destination! That is the pressing paradigm shift the Christian Religion faces.

EARTH VERSUS HEAVEN.

The world is struggling to keep the earth in check, and the UN is the major fighter there. Each year a stark reminder is posted by means of COP. COP – all Capitals – will in November, for the 26^th time, try to stem Climate Change. COP stands for the Conference Of the Parties; the parties being the world’s sovereign nations; the place of meeting this time is Glasgow Scotland, where the local brogue is totally un-understandable. When I lived in St. Catharines, On., I once talked with a welder who had just arrived from Glasgow. He could understand me, but I could not make any sense of his Glasgow brogue.

Let’s hope that the language spoken at this COP 26 will go to the heart of the matter. The words, first of all, should be one of expressing sorrow and pleading for forgiveness for our sins against creation, both in the past and today. Why these religious remonstrations? I believe that all COP meetings are, in essence, religious events, for the simple reason that they directly deal with the COSMOS, God’s Holy Creation Word. That’s why both the coming COP 26 and this past week’s President Biden’s valiant attempt to lower Green House Gases, world-wide, are ‘religious’ at the core.

The start of Climate Change.

I have to go back a long time, to the Garden of Eden, to pinpoint where Climate Change started. In Paradise God gave a lecture in Ecology, pointing out the importance of TREES. “Look at them”, he said, “these trees are beautiful to behold, and good for food.” (Genesis 2: 9) Notice the priority: beauty before utility. A bit later a similar scene took place there, this time a lesson by the great seducer, (Genesis 3: 6). He reversed the order: “Good for food” he said, “and pleasing to the eye.” Money before beauty, the first step toward Capitalism. There’s where Global Warming started: Satan, ‘the Prince of this world’ (John 12: 31), persuaded humanity to defy God, to defy creation. Since then, everything has changed, reason why all efforts to reverse Climate Change also will fail. It will fail because Earth’s future demise is already here, but only our subconscious has registered it.

Who is to blame?

It is no exaggeration that, next November, when COP 26 is in session, the fate of the world will be decided, that’s why, then and there and everywhere churches, if they want to be true to their mandate, must hold a three-week period of Atonement, asking forgiveness for having preached the “Heaven Heresy”, which, basically, gave Satan the opportunity to defile the earth. Had the churches truly seen the earth as God’s, and thus HOLY, the Climate Change would not have become an issue: the churches’ failure has caused Climate Change!

In Mark 16: 15, Jesus explicitly tells us to: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation. Please note the choice of words: World – Cosmos – and All Creation. It does not say ‘all people’, but ‘cosmos’, and ‘preach to all creation’: animals, trees, soil, air. Climate change has occurred because the church has almost exclusively concerned itself with saving human souls, and promising escape from this wicked world. Its ‘sins of omission’ have caused global destruction.

Life, also the Christian Life, is all-encompassing, that’s why COP 26 too, is ‘religious to the core’. Romans 8 tells us how ‘the whole creation is groaning as in child birth’, affirming that the planet’s sacrilege has been going on for millennia: at one time the earth had no deserts, no Sahara, no Siberia: a truly green globe.

This year’s COP.

A typical COP conference, hosting some 30,000 delegates flying in from all over the world, is held each year in a different location. I was in The Hague, the Netherlands, when the COP 6 was there in November 2000. At the time I was writing a weekly column for the regional daily newspaper and got a press pass, allowing me to attend this conference, at no expenses spared, as long as I paid them myself. Fortunately, we had free lodging and meals at my brother there. My press pass gave me gratis transportation on the local transit system, the only freebee I was allowed. Oh yes, I had a tote bag with tons of paper stuff. Trees anybody? 

Jesus promises that nature will truly become natural again. Maybe this is why humans now, in their subconsciousness, seek out nature in times of crisis, because it’s more than a place to exercise and socialize. There’s something about how our brains interact with nature that yields psychological benefits. Our guts know that natural landscapes activate a part of the brain that reduces stress; it knows that nature helps restore attention: even just seeing nature through a window has shown to boost well-being. People who see trees, flowers and grass recover from surgery faster (and take fewer narcotic painkillers), than those with views of brick or concrete.

The entire Bible promises a pure future.

I have been reading parts of the book of Daniel. It has an eye-opening ending, “As for you, go your way till the end. You will rest, and then at the end of the days you will rise to receive your allotted inheritance.” We will inherit the New Creation! That’s our future! John 3: 13 confirms that: “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven–the Son of Man.”

So, where does ‘heaven’ come in?

When Paul (Acts 17: 31) was in Athens, on that famous place called The Areopagus, where the intellectual elite gathered day after day, he mounted the rostrum and said, “For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”

This fearless preacher, the apostle Paul, knew exactly the reigning philosophy of the then intellectual capital of the world. Paul knew how Socrates had died and how Plato had recorded his last words, knew that when Socrates died, he welcomed death. In the Trials of Socrates, Plato depicts Socrates’ last moments before his death, quoting Socrates: “I’ll no longer stay put, but will take my leave of you and depart for certain happy conditions of the blessed”. Socrates is certain that he’s on the way to heaven, and even says a prayer to the gods after drinking the poison: “‘One is, I suppose, permitted to utter a prayer to the gods – and one should do so – that one’s journey from this world to the next will prove fortunate”. Socrates died to celebrate death, and embraced heaven, a heresy the church has adopted.

Paul knew that when he mentioned judgement and resurrection, he would offend these learned men, and, sure enough, they walked away thoroughly annoyed: they believed Socrates and Plato, while Paul brought the gospel of resurrection and Judgement.

Friedrich Nietzsche, that great prophet, saw through the church’s fallacy. Here’s what he wrote in his Also spoke Zarathustra:

I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of super-earthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. (Capitalization is his). Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them! Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the dread-fullest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

Nietzsche condemned the church-preachers in no uncertain terms by their promoting the Heaven-heresy. The church will not change. That’s why are we bound to fail in preventing ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE. We fail because we are comfortable in our arrogance; we fail because the church is a faulty institution; we fail because human nature will not change. ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE REQUIRES ABRUPT HUMAN CHANGE, a true METANOIA, A TOTAL NEW LIFE.

A good start would be to hold 3 full weeks of genuine ATONEMENT during COP 26 in November.

Wishful thinking?

MY JOURNEY

70 years ago, I came to Canada. Why did I come?

In September 1949, after graduating from my university prep school in July, I was drafted into the Dutch army. I was a heavy smoker then, and, as soon as I had received my uniform and army-issue heavy boots, I was told to run 3 km, which just about killed me, unfit as I was. Six weeks of primary training shaped me up, after which I was sent to a special school to become an instructor. Completed that course in 8 months, and with the disastrous colonial war in the Netherlands East Indies concluded, not surprisingly, the military brass suspended the draft, so, with no new recruits, I had become army surplus and on April 1 1951 was discharged from the Dutch army with the rank of sergeant, thoroughly convinced that army life was not my cup of tea.

So, there I was, 22 years old, engaged on August 31 1950 to my later wife. Dreams even 60 years after, revealed to me that, subconsciously, I was deeply worried how I would ever make a decent living, because my 8 years of secondary training – it usually takes 6 – in 6 languages and 7 mathematical subjects, had failed to train me in anyone particular way, except, perhaps, steeling my resolve to succeed. Also, what the private school – my father paid the tuition – had finally instilled in me, unruly youngster, was a measure of discipline.

Graduating from this drill school resulted in a temporary aversion to serious reading, perhaps partly caused by resentment to some of the teachers who were psychopaths, while all were quite impersonal and remote. The entire staff had doctor degrees and addressed us by our last names only. The dress-code was formal suits. Also, the school’s intellectual challenge, geared to the male offspring of the elite with inherited brains and born in academic households, was a far cry from my background, with both parents having only primary education, and I the first of the entire family venturing into this brainy atmosphere. In the end it was my Greek teacher, Dr. Abel Westerbrink, 1911-2008, who pulled me through my last oral exam, consisting of translating a section of Homer’s Iliad in front of a university professor. My final diploma depended on this: For years I had nightmares that I had failed.

Economic conditions  

Upon my army discharge, in 1951, a cloud of defeatism hovered over the Netherlands. The 5 years of German occupation, 1940-45, psychologically had caused the same effect as today’s period of a Pandemic: both had restrained personal development. With a direct Soviet-Russian threat looming – the Berlin Airlift being a clear example – plus the disastrous outcome of the Indonesian Colonial War, where some 150,000 soldiers had served and thousands had been wounded and died needlessly, the economic mood was grim. In addition, the corner grocer, the neighborhood baker, the average small storeowner, the 12 milk-cow farmers, all felt their livelihood endangered, due to consolidation and chain stores, so all at once, thousands of enterprising people pictured themselves as surplus, and looking for an alternative, me included. No wonder, emigration was seen as the solution, and became an unstoppable wave with Australia and Canada as favorite destinations, openly encouraged by the central government.

That’s how, three months after leaving the army, I ended up in Strathroy, Ontario, on a grain farm, where, at $60.00 a month with room and board, I came to live with a small, nominally Presbyterian family, where the farmer’s wife was a former teacher. It was an ideal beginning for me, an eager English student, ready to perfect the language. Within weeks I was able to have conversations, and take part in them.

That all happened 70 years ago this year.

With the harvest done, and little else to do, after two months I left the farm, boarded a bus to Hamilton and found a job in a feed mill in Grimsby, working a 58-hour week at 50 cents per hour, $29.00 per week. Did that for 6 months, then, after a 3 months stint at a finance company, I became self-employed as a life insurance agent. My fiancée arrived in Canada in September 1952, and worked as a nanny until we married in June 1953. By that time, we had saved enough to buy a bed, table, chairs, kitchen utensils and a small couch. Rented a basement apartment for $25.00 per month.

Now, seventy years after my transplanting from the Netherlands’ most northerly city, Groningen, an old university town, to urban Ontario, I am sure that my move has influenced my personality in different ways.

Change of name, a new language, and religion.

I was baptized with two names, both of which I treasure: Egbert Drewes, named after my maternal grandfather, a farmer, a man my mother adored. He, upon her marriage in 1923, gave her a dowry, equivalent in today’s funds to $100,000, enough the furnish a complete household, with enough to spare for my father to start and equip his own bakery-supply business, including an automobile. Nobody then called me Egbert: I was called Eppie, or Ep. My wife and siblings have always called me Ep, and my Dutch nieces and nephews still call me Oom (uncle) Ep.

Soon after arrival I adopted ‘Bert’ short for ‘Egbert’, a good Saxon name. The first English king was ‘Egbert’. A name-change also involves a personality change, I believe, a phase that took place over decades, greatly influenced by my marriage as well. The ‘Drewes’ part is also Saxon, and is derived from Druid, related to the ancient Celtic religion. Perhaps this explains my love for Celtic Christianity, a ‘nature’ based faith system. I now believe that John 3: 16 is the Bible’s most telling text, because there it says that God, “So loved the cosmos, the natural universe, (containing all that lives and moves and has a being), that he sacrificed his only beloved son, Jesus the Christ, to redeem (buy back from the Devil) his beloved earth, because only his death would give us ‘eternal’ life, not in heaven – a pagan notion – but on God’s eternal (and holy) earth.” 

My faith also tells me that, with Christ’s re-appearance – now fast approaching – the Bible and the church will disappear and Creation will be perfected, to serve us and for us to serve it (her) forever: a true life of service.

The name change, the rapid adoption of a new language, living in St. Catharines, with a growing family, 5 children born from 1954-1965, building in 1962-63 an 1800 square feet house with a home-office for my insurance-real estate business, still left me time to be deeply involved with Christian education locally and provincially.

And then there was the church!

Oh, the church!

Today I look at the ‘heaven-believing’ church with great anxiety and even with horror as it abuses or, at best, totally ignores the pre-eminent place ‘creation’ takes in our lives. When I met my oldest brother for the last time some 20 years ago in the Netherlands, his parting words were, “Meet you in heaven”, which left me speechless. The church, because I love it, has always spelled trouble for me. In 1966 I quit as an elder in one church, switched to another local one in the same denomination and, when a new minister came, couldn’t stand his legalistic views, so, rather than face another confrontation, sold my insurance business in 1975 and moved 300 km east to rural Tweed.

There, after taking three university courses and writing three 100 pages master theses on a single family dwelling, a 12 unit apartment building and an industrial property, I became a successful commercial real estate appraiser. My wife too – she died 6 months ago at almost 93 – thrived, becoming a master grapho (hand-writing)-analyst, giving workshops, writing a column, a recognized public speaker through Toastmasters, and an active participant in the local church where I too served in different offices.

Now, by and large, I see the ‘heaven-directing’ church as an obstacle to the Coming of the Kingdom, the New Heavens and Earth.

Seventy Years in Canada.

Looking back 70 years, with the insight of hindsight, I recognize my wife’s immense influence on me, her wisdom in preparing me for a life of independence, of gently – and sometimes not so gently – asserting herself, and especially being a great mother for our five talented children, endowing them with her intellect and common sense.

Had I remained in the Netherlands, I would never have had these experiences, would never have successfully translated four good books, (one even winning an award) and would never have become a religious blog-writer, with untold many readers world-wide.

The ways of the Lord are mysterious. Soli Deo Gloria.

DARE TO……..….

A few days ago, at the (new) Tweed Library the librarian handed me a book she had just received: Elizabeth Kolbert’s UNDER THE WHITE SKY, THE NATURE OF THE FUTURE. I have her previous book, THE SIXTH EXTINCTION, subtitled “an unnatural history”, in which this gifted writer relates – as the title indicates – the disappearances of species before our very eyes and suggests that this event is likely to be our most lasting legacy, forcing us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human. I am sure the Lord on Judgement Day will ask me about this as well, so I better be prepared. In Under the White Sky, she describes a process in which we, poor humans are trapped in some sort of technology supposed to replace the (divine) original, and not really succeeding. The ‘White Sky’ refers to an experiment to blog the sun to fight HEAT, causing our ‘blue sky’ to turn ‘white’, and, perhaps the sun to turn red.

Not surprisingly, “The Sixth Extinction” ends on a sour note: “It – the extinction – will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have – or have not – inherited the earth.” That’s the book’s very last sentence. It totally clashes with the Bible which says that “the righteous will inherit the land” (Psalm 37: 29), but then she never alludes to any ‘religious’ concepts, even though her predictions are quite biblical.

Dare to have hope!

Disturbing scenarios.

No doubt, Kolbert paints a bleak picture! Both books made me cry! Literally! The ‘Nature of the Future’ is a poor second or third to the nature I grew up in. Even though we are employing the full extent of our technological knowhow to restore the damage done to ‘nature’, we are failing miserably. Compare this to what my Bible tells me (Haggai 2: 9), “The glory of this present house (to come) will be greater than the glory of the former house,’ says the Lord Almighty”. As always, there is a choice: Kolbert’s Nature of the Future, or God’s Nature of the Future.

Dare to compare!

Major changes ahead.

I don’t know about you, but I believe that we are on the cusp of major environmental changes, all for the worse. Biden, Trudeau, all the world’s so-called enlightened leaders have only one mantra, one rule to rule it all: Economic Growth. It reminds me of the economist Kenneth Boulding who, in 1966, coined the well-known statement “anyone who thinks that economic growth can go on forever is either an idiot or an economist.” Or a politician, I should add.

I am convinced that what I read in 1 Corinthians 1 is true: “God will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”  Kolbert, in her latest book, sums it up, “This book has been about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Today we experience the fallacy of human wisdom that is not grounded in divine wisdom. Our self-reliance, our independence from God, our total disregard from creational wisdom, has over the centuries grown further and further away from divine, and now has reached a decisive point where all solutions are seen as technical. Jacques Ellul, 60 years ago, warned about this in his The Technological Society. It’s all to evident that God is destroying the wisdom of the ‘wise’. To sum up Kolbert’s books: We are starting to realize that our world has a fatal bout of cancer. All we are doing is to prolong life is by applying ‘chemotherapy’, unpleasant, but necessary.

Dare to admit our stupidity!

My mental stress.

The toll of the Pandemic goes beyond the physical: We, humans, are a totality: our body, mind, spirit, form a unity: when one aspect suffers, our entire being feels the impact. Let’s face it: we live in the full knowledge of our demise as humans. Of course, we all are mortals, but live knowing, realizing, that everything around us now has an expiry date: That is unique, that has never happened before, not even when 600 years ago the Black Plague killed more than half the population.

Dare to admit the truth!

And then there are our guilt feelings: what we have wrought is our own creation, has come about by listening and abiding by our baser instincts, by our own greed, by giving in to ease and comfort, and pushing back our saner options.

Here we are: faces buried behind a piece of cloth, deadly afraid to expose our real face, our real personality. The Bible is quite clear that sin has its own punishment: “Your wickedness will punish you.” (Jeremiah 2: 19), and Proverbs 1; 31, “you will eat the fruit of your ways.”

Dare to repent!  

Take Climate Change.

Here’s a quote from Kolbert’s latest book by Dr. Dan Schrag, of Harvard, and a ‘genius’ grant winner, “If we stop C02 emissions tomorrow, it’ still going to warm for centuries…So, in that sense, we’re already at 2 degree Celsius. We’re going to be lucky to stop at 4 degree Celsius. That’s not optimistic or pessimistic. I think that’s objective reality.”

Better get used to it: we are in the final stages of ‘sinful’ humanity. I know, ‘sinful’ is a dirty word nowadays, even the church shies away from this concept. It reminds me of Dr. Lynn White who, some 50 years ago, wrote a paper in which he argued that ‘[Western] Christianity is the most anthropocentric [human-centered] religion the world has seen’. He concludes that the modern technological conquest of nature that has led to our environmental crisis has in large part been made possible by the dominance in the West of this Christian world-view.

Of course, the church argued against this, but Dr. White was 100 percent correct in his assertion. Had the church, from the beginning, seen the ‘heaven heresy’ as an abomination, as a direct result of Greek-pagan philosophy, and had regarded the cosmos as divinely composed and thus ‘holy’, rather than fleeing the world to a safe ‘heaven’, today’s catastrophic conditions might have been avoided. Still: Semper Reformanda, always try to reform the church, remains my aim, impossible as it is.

Dare to reform!

Dare to believe!

We have declared God dead. The church, by promoting the heaven myth, is co-responsible for a ‘nature’ that now resembles our technological prowess and by killing it, has effectively killed God in the process. Sorry. That is the dirty truth. Kolbert has done us a great service by ‘telling it like it is’. The church already in the year 313 became a Constantinian Institution, existing for its own sake. Jesus always condemned ‘religion’, simply wanted us to be ‘human beings’, fully reliant on God, fully dependent on his creation as God’s most wonderful book.

I love the wording of the Belgic Confession. Here’s how it defines God’s Word:

We know God by two means:

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.

Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word,
as much as we need in this life, for God’s glory
and for our salvation.

Let me emphasize that first line: We know God First by his creation: THAT is God’s Primary Word, his DIRECT LOGOS.
Dare to believe!

DARE TO……..….

A few days ago, at the (new) Tweed Library the librarian handed me a book she had just received: Elizabeth Kolbert’s UNDER THE WHITE SKY, THE NATURE OF THE FUTURE. I have her previous book, THE SIXTH EXTINCTION, subtitled “an unnatural history”, in which this gifted writer relates – as the title indicates – the disappearances of species before our very eyes and suggests that this event is likely to be our most lasting legacy, forcing us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human. I am sure the Lord on Judgement Day will ask me about this as well, so I better be prepared. In Under the White Sky, she describes a process in which we, poor humans are trapped in some sort of technology supposed to replace the (divine) original, and not really succeeding. The ‘White Sky’ refers to an experiment to blog the sun to fight HEAT, causing our ‘blue sky’ to turn ‘white’, and, perhaps the sun to turn red.

Not surprisingly, “The Sixth Extinction” ends on a sour note: “It – the extinction – will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have – or have not – inherited the earth.” That’s the book’s very last sentence. It totally clashes with the Bible which says that “the righteous will inherit the land” (Psalm 37: 29), but then she never alludes to any ‘religious’ concepts, even though her predictions are quite biblical.

Dare to have hope!

Disturbing scenarios.

No doubt, Kolbert paints a bleak picture! Both books made me cry! Literally! The ‘Nature of the Future’ is a poor second or third to the nature I grew up in. Even though we are employing the full extent of our technological knowhow to restore the damage done to ‘nature’, we are failing miserably. Compare this to what my Bible tells me (Haggai 2: 9), “The glory of this present house (to come) will be greater than the glory of the former house,’ says the Lord Almighty”. As always, there is a choice: Kolbert’s Nature of the Future, or God’s Nature of the Future.

Dare to compare!

Major changes ahead.

I don’t know about you, but I believe that we are on the cusp of major environmental changes, all for the worse. Biden, Trudeau, all the world’s so-called enlightened leaders have only one mantra, one rule to rule it all: Economic Growth. It reminds me of the economist Kenneth Boulding who, in 1966, coined the well-known statement “anyone who thinks that economic growth can go on forever is either an idiot or an economist.” Or a politician, I should add.

I am convinced that what I read in 1 Corinthians 1 is true: “God will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate.”  Kolbert, in her latest book, sums it up, “This book has been about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Today we experience the fallacy of human wisdom that is not grounded in divine wisdom. Our self-reliance, our independence from God, our total disregard from creational wisdom, has over the centuries grown further and further away from divine, and now has reached a decisive point where all solutions are seen as technical. Jacques Ellul, 60 years ago, warned about this in his The Technological Society. It’s all to evident that God is destroying the wisdom of the ‘wise’. To sum up Kolbert’s books: We are starting to realize that our world has a fatal bout of cancer. All we are doing is to prolong life is by applying ‘chemotherapy’, unpleasant, but necessary.

Dare to admit our stupidity!

My mental stress.

The toll of the Pandemic goes beyond the physical: We, humans, are a totality: our body, mind, spirit, form a unity: when one aspect suffers, our entire being feels the impact. Let’s face it: we live in the full knowledge of our demise as humans. Of course, we all are mortals, but live knowing, realizing, that everything around us now has an expiry date: That is unique, that has never happened before, not even when 600 years ago the Black Plague killed more than half the population.

Dare to admit the truth!

And then there are our guilt feelings: what we have wrought is our own creation, has come about by listening and abiding by our baser instincts, by our own greed, by giving in to ease and comfort, and pushing back our saner options.

Here we are: faces buried behind a piece of cloth, deadly afraid to expose our real face, our real personality. The Bible is quite clear that sin has its own punishment: “Your wickedness will punish you.” (Jeremiah 2: 19), and Proverbs 1; 31, “you will eat the fruit of your ways.”

Dare to repent!  

Take Climate Change.

Here’s a quote from Kolbert’s latest book by Dr. Dan Schrag, of Harvard, and a ‘genius’ grant winner, “If we stop C02 emissions tomorrow, it’ still going to warm for centuries…So, in that sense, we’re already at 2 degree Celsius. We’re going to be lucky to stop at 4 degree Celsius. That’s not optimistic or pessimistic. I think that’s objective reality.”

Better get used to it: we are in the final stages of ‘sinful’ humanity. I know, ‘sinful’ is a dirty word nowadays, even the church shies away from this concept. It reminds me of Dr. Lynn White who, some 50 years ago, wrote a paper in which he argued that ‘[Western] Christianity is the most anthropocentric [human-centered] religion the world has seen’. He concludes that the modern technological conquest of nature that has led to our environmental crisis has in large part been made possible by the dominance in the West of this Christian world-view.

Of course, the church argued against this, but Dr. White was 100 percent correct in his assertion. Had the church, from the beginning, seen the ‘heaven heresy’ as an abomination, as a direct result of Greek-pagan philosophy, and had regarded the cosmos as divinely composed and thus ‘holy’, rather than fleeing the world to a safe ‘heaven’, today’s catastrophic conditions might have been avoided. Still: Semper Reformanda, always try to reform the church, remains my aim, impossible as it is.

Dare to reform!

Dare to believe!

We have declared God dead. The church, by promoting the heaven myth, is co-responsible for a ‘nature’ that now resembles our technological prowess and by killing it, has effectively killed God in the process. Sorry. That is the dirty truth. Kolbert has done us a great service by ‘telling it like it is’. The church already in the year 313 became a Constantinian Institution, existing for its own sake. Jesus always condemned ‘religion’, simply wanted us to be ‘human beings’, fully reliant on God, fully dependent on his creation as God’s most wonderful book.

I love the wording of the Belgic Confession. Here’s how it defines God’s Word:

We know God by two means:

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.

Second, God makes himself known to us more clearly
by his holy and divine Word,
as much as we need in this life, for God’s glory
and for our salvation.

Let me emphasize that first line: We know God First by his creation: THAT is God’s Primary Word, his DIRECT LOGOS.
Dare to believe!

EXTINCTION: US, WE, OURSELVES

When I was small, I wanted to become a missionary in what then was called The Netherlands East Indies, now Indonesia. Our denomination had two missionaries there, in a remote part of Celebes called Toratja Land, where ‘head hunters’ were active, not the modern ones that recruit up-and-coming executives for important positions in the corporate world, but natives who specialized in cutting off and bringing home the severed heads of their enemies. On the so-called ‘mission day’ these missionaries, on their furlough back home after 6 years of difficult work, would make the tour of the Netherlands, always showing off one of their converts, brown, small humans, then a novelty to behold. These missionaries had learned the indigenous language and used the Bible as the only tool for conversion to Christianity, declaring the native religions as pagan and devilish.

What these indigenous people knew, and the innocent white, did not, was that they, in their historic way, practiced population control, because too many people, too few animals, too little natural edibles, would soon lead to extinction and death for all. Granted, it was a cruel way, not at all the European way of thinking, but still, death for some meant life for others: the law of the jungle, and for them the only way to prevent overpopulation. We, smart Westerners, failed to check this overpopulation phenomenon and also over-expanded our resource use, so, now we, the supposedly more humane humans, are going extinct.

Are we? Yes.

The animals know this and, in the deep recesses of our hearts, we know this too. Sensing the imminent death of all species, the subconscious understanding of our common fate is making us ill, but our nervous and physical systems cannot bear this terrible knowledge, so we bury it deep behind our shadow with the obvious result that we unknowingly suffer from a novel mental disorder: our brand-new Extinction Illness. Yes, we all know it.

Is that really true? Yes, contemplating the extent and pervasiveness of despair and violence across the globe, the rapid growth of irrationality in human and animal behavior, the melting polar ice, the unstoppable methane release, I increasingly believe that all humans and non-humans know this: the animals, the trees and birds, the insects and fish, they all know this. There is something like a cognitive consonance out there: the news traveling from tree to tree, from bird to bird, whispering through the air, magically, and affecting also us, imperceptive and inconsiderate ignoramuses.

It’s not only the Pandemic, that’s only part of it: we all are being driven to some form of madness, pain, or dysfunction. For the animals, Bear, Wolf, Elephant, Whale this results in unavoidable and unmediated terror. We humans know, with or without awareness, that we are responsible. And so, we, entirely crazed, become a species that commits ecocide even as we die of it ourselves. The different signs and symptoms are ubiquitous and no one is escaping it.

We know we are going extinct. We know this consciously and/or unconsciously.  Each person on the planet knows this. Extinction is upon us and no one is immune to it. All beings sense our/their imminent death. Not only their individual deaths, but far worse, the death of their species. An unbearable thought. And beyond that, the death of all species ….

It is possible that Extinction Illness is the root of all contemporary mental, physical, and spiritual diseases. Extinction Illness, the essential cellular knowledge and terror that one’s life, one’s people’s lives, all life is threatened, that lineage is disappearing, that we all, may well become extinct within a very short period of time, that the future will be eradicated.

The fire of knowing sweeps down upon us like a tornado and there is no place to run. There is no escape. And worse, we do not get to live our ordinary lives until the moment of Extinction. Much suffering is inevitable before our demise in whichever way it will come to any one of us. That’s why the predictable prelude arises: Extinction illness – our bodies, minds, souls reeling with the terrible reality of what we have done, are doing, because extinction is our fault.

Believe it or not…….

Whether or not we ‘believe’ the scientists who say climate change is Anthropocene – human-induced – Climate Disruption, meaning we, mere mortals, are the cause: we know extinction and our role in it. Even those who don’t want to acknowledge or accept the reality of the 6^th Extinction or Climate Change or Disruption or recognize the consequences of the bleaching of the barrier reefs, the glaciers and poles melting, the acidification of the oceans, the extreme weather shifts, deadly floods, year-long and increasingly intense fire seasons, wind tornadoes and fire tornadoes, the insect apocalypse, the collapse of fisheries, deforestation, desertification and 17,000 species threatened at this time, they know. The unconscious knows. The soul knows. The connected life system knows even if the individual isn’t consciously aware. He/she/they/we were born into the network of all life and Life knows too. Christians especially should know: the entire Bible testifies to that event conclusively. Malachi – one of the many prophets – in the Hebrew Bible, Jesus in Matthew 24, Paul in Romans 8, Peter in 2 Peter 3, John in many chapters of Revelation: they all speak of the end to come in no uncertain terms. The entire Bible speaks with great longing for the Great Coming of the Lord, the so-called Parousia.

Warnings galore.

Yes, there are many warnings. The March 18 ARCTIC NEWS, endorsed by 30 scientists, is one of them: totally and frighteningly believable. It gives us no more than 5 years. Gail Tverberg, a knowledgeable actuary, in her March 20 Our Finite World, asserts that our financial system will collapse in less than 2 years, possibly taking away our electrical network: these blogs are there for all to see.

As there is no antidote for Extinction, the Extinction Illness is incurable: no anti-biotic, no anti-depressant or anti-psychotic, no sedative, no bone marrow transplant, no chemotherapy, no pesticide, no radiation therapy: not even fervent prayer will do it. There is no personal healing for these conditions and treating or focusing on the symptoms is counter-productive and exacerbates our common jeopardy.

Here we are. We are all suffering a life-threatening illness for which there is no discoverable cure. How shall we meet it?

As an innocent youngster I wanted to become a missionary. Good thing I never did, not really knowing the Message. I now know that we always lived on a planet which, almost right from the start was destined for extinction: God withdrew, and, as Deuteronomy 31 attests, “hid his face to see what our end will be.” Well, now we know the outcome.

However, Jesus God’s Son, came to restore creation and extinguish extinction. That will happen soon.

I love that text in Revelation 21, where all is well that ends well:

 Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. 

 I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying:

“Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man,
and He will dwell with them.

They will be His people,

and God Himself will be with them as their God.

 ‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,’

and there will be no more death

or mourning or crying or pain,

for the former things have passed away.”

When I was a grade school kid, I wanted to become a missionary. Perhaps that youthful desire really never disappeared. The most visitors to my blog, which I now see as a missionary tool, are from the USA, Canada, China and the U.K in that order.

P.S. I owe some of these thoughts to an article I read some years ago in TIKKUN, a Jewish publication.