Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

JUNE 30 2020

THE VERY LAST DAYS?

Gail Tverberg, an actuary, always writes an interesting and insightful blog, under the telling name of OUR FINITE WORLD. She sometimes quotes the Bible. I remember her citing Revelation 18:11 twice, “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her because no one buys their cargoes anymore”.

I believe that the last Bible book, Revelation, often depicts today’s circumstances! Today lots of merchants, lots of store-owners, lots of service workers, lots of tour operators, lots of large corporations are desperate, because suddenly their markets are gone, and that means deflation: nobody buys their inventory anymore.

That is just one sign. There are multiple others, of which the Pandemic, Locusts and Climate Change are just the most obvious.

Welcome to a New Economy!! Welcome to a New Church Scene. Welcome to a New Life-Style. Welcome to New Way of Living. Welcome to a new Virus-festering society. Welcome to The Very Last Days.

The Last Days?

Yes, I believe that the world is approaching more than a ‘fin de siècle’, more than just an end of an era: it’s approaching the END. Period.

Already we are thrown back to a more primitive status, almost each on their own. Will we ever go back to ‘normality’? Can we go back?

This begs the question, “What is normality?”

The word ‘normality’ has as its root the word ‘norm’, which indicates ‘the accepted standard’, which, in the last 100 years has seen drastic changes under the enormous increase of carbon fuels. The ‘normal’ has become ‘abnormal’. Suddenly we are confronted with ultimate questions, involving the essence of life, involving also the entire concept of ‘inclusivity’.

For centuries we white Westerners, have regarded the world as our exclusive domain. Everything revolved about our wishes, our desires, our goals and ambitions, to the exclusion of everything and everybody else. Actually we have gone further: the white face of humanity was seen as the preferred segment of society. That’s now changing, fortunately, to some extent, but we still exclude creation from our life. Our ‘normal’ includes global exploitation, totally part and parcel of business. Our ‘HEAVEN HERESY’ is at the root of our wrong approach. We love Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount but gloss over his words that ‘the humble will inherit the earth’. One translation of ’humble’ reads, ‘those who claim nothing for themselves’: we want everything.  

Love Creation.

Dr. Barry Commoner coined the four laws of ecology decades ago. I have cited them often, but they bear repeating:

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

These laws are gospel truths, in line with the principal Law of the Lord, which also bears repeating, “Love God – and his creation – above everything else, and our fellow humans as ourselves.” Loving God is not something abstract, uttering a few words of endearment: no, it is fulfilled concretely in loving his creation with – as Jesus put it – “all our heart, with all our soul, with all our mind and all our strength”. In other words: our entire human endeavor should be geared toward loving creation. God made it and thus it is holy. God made it and thus it is God’s Primary Revelation, his Direct Word. The Bible is God’s Secondary Revelation, his Indirect Word, of equal value, inspired, necessary to explain our faith and Christ’s mediation, but a human book nevertheless. The Scriptures will disappear: Creation will not. We have built our entire ecclesiastical enterprise on this wrong assumption.

Our ‘norm’, our life’s daily conduct, should be based on God’s Primary Word, but having failed the ‘love’ test we have sealed our doom and brought on our now looming demise and “The Last Days”.

The Bible repeatedly refers to The Last Days, not only Jesus in Matthew 24, but also John in Revelation, where a good portion is devoted to the global disasters preceding the final days, with earthquakes, pandemics and famines specifically mentioned.

Jesus tells us to always be on the lookout, because there will be definite signs, such as “the Great Desolation”, which we certainly are experiencing today in multiple manners, of which Global Heating and world-wide pollution are sure indications. Already earthquakes and volcano eruptions are increasing dramatically. Overall, there have been 2,267 earthquakes in California and Nevada over the last 7 days, and that is definitely alarming. Farther south along “the Ring of Fire”, Mexico was hit by a magnitude 7.4 earthquake last week.

Yet the End will come as a complete surprise.

Back to Revelation 18, and what it says of today.

The heading is The Fall of Babylon. In the Bible Babylon is seen as the world apart from God. The elite of Israel was exiled to the ruling empire of their days, Babylon, where they were forced to worship their gods. Those who refused were killed.

Today we all live in Babylon, and today we experience its Fall. Don’t for a minute believe that we can go back to ‘normal’. The ‘normal’ has directed us into the current abyss. The economy already was in poor shape, with many predicting a recession or worse. Then the VIRUS came along, the direct result of our riotous routines.

Revelation 18 directly speaks to us today:

“Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great!           

She has become a lair for demons
and a haunt for every unclean spirit,
every unclean bird,
and every detestable beast

All the nations have drunk the wine
of the passion of her immorality.
The kings of the earth were immoral with her,
and the merchants of the earth have grown wealthy
from the extravagance of her luxury.”

Then I heard another voice from heaven say:
“Come out of her, My people,
so that you will not share in her sins
or contract any of her plagues.
For her sins are piled up to heaven,
and God has remembered her iniquities.”

All these words directly apply to us today. I find it striking that this passage mentions unclean birds and detestable animals. The African Swine Flu and Bird Flu figure prominently in today’s pandemics.

Today all signs point to a Global Economic Depression, aggravated by Global Heating and abrupt Climate Change, witness the tropical heat in Siberia and Arctic Canada. There the world’s largest store of METHANE is about to erupt, 28 times more lethal than our carbon-generating economy: that alone will seal our doom.

Add to the normal economic crises an angry planet, evident in earthquakes, volcanism, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, pestilence, wildfires, and, perhaps, a pandemic or two, and we reach a tipping point, exceeding the earth’s capacity to absorb punishment. Today the difference is that these multiple catastrophes will affect already badly crippled economies and stressed societies. This time governments poured in the money, but tomorrow their wallets will stay closed.

No, there won’t be a return to ‘normal’, because we have abandoned the ‘normal’ thanks to our God-Eclipse. Normal is living according to the ‘norms’ of creation, as captioned in the Laws of Ecology, and Jesus’ dictum of ‘Loving God.’

We have been sucked into a Satanic trap.

How do we climb out of it? Can we still do that?

That is the topic of my next venture into the ‘unknown’.

JUNE 20 2020

WAR               

My views are biased: what I write comes from a certain perspective: I call it a Christian liberal point of view, not a doubting stance, not fundamentalist, not stagnant, but always expanding, and open to interesting interpretations. Writing a blog helps me to explore new ideas.

I do believe the Bible, keeping in mind that many explanations are possible, witness the great diversity in denominations. I also am convinced that no particular church or no particular person has the correct view, influenced as they are by ethnic traditions, history, clericalism, and especially deep-seated religious ignorance and persistent apathy.

With that in mind, I have a shot at REVELATION, the last Bible book, and particularly Chapter 12.

“And there was war in the heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon and the dragon and his angels fought back”.

War.

This really reads like a fairy tale, something from Lord of the Rings, or the Harry Potter series. But, no, this is raw reality, not some fantasy. It strongly suggests that heaven and earth are very similar. War, in heaven or on earth, means death, wounds, anger, hate, is a result of creeping resentment. War in heaven took place because the Son of God, always Jesus Christ, came to earth, the Son of Man, always human, was born there, lived, was killed, but then victoriously rose from the dead and ascended to heaven: the dragonish devil was unable to prevent all this, although he tried, continuously.

If all else fails: make war. And this ultimate conflict started in heaven. Heaven? Where God lives? War in Heaven? Yes, you read it right. So the Devil was defeated there, but not vanquished. He escaped. Where did he go? Not to some distant planet, no, he knows the Bible better than you and me. He knows that “God so Loved the World, the Cosmos.” And there’s where he went, next door to all of us, even right where we live, to continue WAR: peace in heaven but war on earth.

But first some backtracking.

Throughout history, right from the very start in Paradise, to the very end on Golgotha, Satan’s aim was to get rid of the Son, but when that misfired, he went after God himself and his precious creation. That’s what’s happening now.

How is it possible for the dragon, and its demonic power, to show up in heaven? What sort of status did he enjoy there, how could he even be there in the first place, a festering force amidst the holy angels?

I don’t know, but what I do know is that the insidious Satan, once there, conducted a constant recruitment campaign to dethrone God! And, amazingly, he found a lot of discontent there! He discovered that God wasn’t all that popular in heaven, just as he is on earth, as we well know.

It was plain that a substantial devil-crowd freely moved around in the heavenly realm, a designation so glorified in our pious hymns. Isn’t that strange? We’ve always been told by our ‘religious’ leaders that heaven was our ultimate goal: perfection guaranteed.

And now we read that even there, in God’s vicinity, evil lives!

From the Bible we know that the devil or Satan appears in the Bible always under two personas.

• He is in the first place the great seducer who tempted both angels and humanity right from the very start in paradise. Here, in Revelation 12, John calls the Satan the one “who seduces the entire world” (verse 9). Jesus depicts him as the ultimate deceiver, the “father of lies” (John 8: 44). He twists human thought in the web of delusion and conjures before the human eye the mirage of salvation and grandeur and drags the people, caught in the grip of falsehoods as an easy prey to their perdition. He is the king of conceit, the royal champion in mind bewilderment. Sounds like Trump!
• But the Bible also depicts this same Satan as the sly informer, who accuses the helpless, disoriented humans before God’s throne. That’s how he, as a prosecutor, appears in the first chapter of the book of Job in the meeting of ‘the children of God’. Scoffing cynically he hisses his poisonous accusation: “Does Job fear God for nothing?” He dissects the disintegrating human life, he picks it apart, he grinds it to pieces, until there’s nothing left but ruin and garbage, and then he triumphantly brings all this to God’s throne to show God that everything in this world has gone to pieces.

1 John 5: 19 paints the true picture:

We know that we are children of God, and that the whole world is under the control of the evil one.

The Bible says it like it is: The Evil One is in charge here, right here!

We, our houses and our world are saturated with satanic toys, all ‘war’ toys, all combatting the cosmos. We have become Satan’s devoted soldiers: willing workers in the war waged against God’s precious planet. 

This war contaminates the universe in all its spheres, and infects all facets of creation.  

War in heaven becomes war on earth.

Here’s Satan’s boast:

“This world, God, your own world, over which you at one time pronounced that it was ‘very good’, now this world, this same world, is, in my possession, distorted into dire destruction, everything in her is in pieces, is poisoned, is on the verge of collapse.”

That’s the Satan, the tireless accuser of all God’s servants. He is the one that carries the title of “the great accuser of all our brothers and sisters”. So, in that capacity, as the accuser of the human being, he has access to the heavenly realms. That’s the case because there is so much truth in his accusations, because, as a matter of fact, he has us in his grip. Satan has, to tell the bitter truth, truth on his side. The facts show that, indeed, we humans are completely corrupt. God is in no position to deny him that truth; God simply cannot ignore this as pure fiction.

The earth in the Balance.

“It is only a matter of time before a coronavirus that is far more lethal and contagious than this one emerges to ravage the world’s population,” says Prof. Dr. Haseltine, a respected epidemiologist. “When that happens, we will no longer be talking about a global death toll in the ‘mere’ hundreds of thousands.” He suspects the world is overdue for a deadly influenza outbreak capable of removing one to two billion people from the planet.

That’s just one example, because Satan’s ultimate aim is to destroy God’s creation. And, indeed, we are in an impossible quandary: thanks to that wonderful elixir, that magical potion that fuels our adored automobiles, and our ingenious flying machines, and feeds our entire food chain, we are toast when we keep on trucking, and toast when we stop.

Thank you Satan: you have been successful: you lost the war in heaven, but we, the earth-people, the God-Crowd in particular, have, by and large, been receptive to your wishes. Will you succeed here?

Fortunately your victory on Calvary was short-lived: PEACE prevailed! There is an ancient Dutch hymn, celebrating Easter. My translation is just that: a feeble effort. Here’s its last verse:

Want nu de Heer is opgestaan
Nu vangt het nieuwe leven aan
Een leven door zijn dood bereidt
Een leven in zijn heerlijkheid.

Now that the Lord rose from the dead
A sign of our new life ahead
Prepared by his three day’s demise
Forever in earth’s paradise!

JUNE 10 2020

HAS GOD DISAPPEARED?

Perhaps this time I may be overreaching, because God is the ultimate mystery, but I take Paul, the great apostle, at his word when he wrote, (1 Thessalonians 5:21) “Test everything and retain what is good.”

I am, however, emboldened by Bonhoeffer when he writes, “We must live in a world, and must indeed do so, “etsi deus non daretur”, as if there were no God.”

Years ago, I wrote, Day without End, a book wherein I envision Eternity. Jesus plays a prominent role therein, but somehow God never enters into the picture. I did not do that on purpose: that’s how the story enfolded. It is available on the web at a small charge, or free upon request.

One of my favorite books is The Hidden Face of God, written by Richard Elliott Friedman, a professor of Hebrew at the University of California, San Diego.

I bought it September 12 1998, and have often re-read it.

In The Hidden Face of God, Dr. Friedman traces God’s slow disappearance: “Gradually from Genesis to Ezra and Esther, there is a transition from divine to human responsibility for life on earth. The story begins in Genesis with God in complete control of creation, but by the end humans have arrived at a stage at which, in all apparent ways, they have responsibility for the fate of their world.”

He then describes how Abraham argues with God, while, with Lot fleeing from Sodom God says, “Flee quickly, because I cannot do a thing until you get there (Genesis 19: 22)….Humans are not independent of God here, to be sure, but, let us say, that the human voice in the story is certainly growing louder.”

Jacob struggles with God: it is a story of a man having a fight with divinity! Humans are confronting their creator, and they are increasing their participation in the arena of divine prerogatives.

That is confirmed already in Genesis 3: 22, where it says, referring to eating the fruit, “Here the human has become like us”. Later, Moses is singled out: “Now Moses speaks with God, the way a man speaks to another man”. (Exodus 33: 11).

The most remarkable event takes place with Joshua: He calls out for the sun and moon to pause in the sky – and God complies!

“Have we become of age?”

Both Bonhoeffer and Friedman pose this question, “Like children growing and separating from their parents, is the biblical story about the growing, maturing, and natural separating of humans from their creator and parent?”

Friedman, at the very start his amazing book, page 1 of Chapter 1, writes, “Among God’s last words to Moses, the deity says, ‘I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.’ (Deut. 31: 17, 18; 32:20). By the end of the story God does just that.”

So, is that still the case? Has God left us? It seems to me that this is the case: the current situation tells the story: we simply have to live with the consequences of our actions.

But really, nothing is lost: here’s how Dr. Friedman concludes his book, “There is some likelihood that, as some of the conscious matter of the universe, we are created more in the divine image than we have suspected. There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.” (Emphasis in the original).

Other sources confirm this.

Twice in the past week something popped up in my reading (both originating  from Dutch sources, sent to me by my brother Drewes in The Hague, a retired engineer) that touched on God’s presence in the universe, confirming the Friedman-Jewish perspective: (1) from a Protestant point of view and (2) from a secular source.

The second instance I found in a dissertation by Dr. C. Stam who wrote, “De Opstanding van de Doden” (The Resurrection of the Dead).  (I have translated four books, all published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids and Cambridge, so I am no stranger in that field.)

Dr. Stam, under the heading of “God makes himself known as Creator”, concludes that, “God has made our world visible as expression of his being, his essence.”

That to me suggests that, to get to know God and to honor him, we must also rely on creation, must honor and love it as a pure expression of His being.

The third source is taken from Civis Mundi, an online Dutch academic magazine. In its latest issue I found a synopsis of a book by Prof. Dr. K. van der Wal. I was struck by three observations, and I translate:

• He first discusses the pre-modern reality and its description of nature in which stories or myths concerning gods, spirits and ancestors are central. These higher powers have fashioned the world and still influence it. J.H Bavinck makes the same point in a book I have translated published as, “Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision.”
• Van der Wal quotes Sir Arthur Eddington: “Nature is not only odder than we think, but odder than we can think”.
• He also cites Albert Einstein: “Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.”

I believe that these three quotes are religious statements: creation is beyond human understanding. Only a God Creator is behind it all.

Can we know God by his works?

Can we deduce God’s greatness from his creation? Well, Sir Elliott Gardiner has done the same with Johann Sebastian Bach. He wrote a 600 page book on him, solely based on his music. He writes: “Bach had normal flaws and failings, which make him very approachable. But he had this unfathomably brilliant mind and a capacity to hear music and then to deliver music that is beyond the capacity of pretty well any musician before or since.”

Has God disappeared?

Yes and No. We read in the Bible that “God lives in unapproachable light: nobody can see God and nobody has seen God.” (1 Timothy 6:16). Basically, for all practical purposes, yes, God has disappeared, and he is and will remain the grand mystery. But just as Bach’s personality can be deduced from his music, so God’s being is present not only in his creation, but also in his Son, because fortunately, Jesus has become the embodiment of God.

One of the finest instances of revealing language is found in Colossians 1: 15-20:

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.

Jesus embodies the perfect humanity. Jesus Christ, God become human, will be physically with us in THE GARDEN OF EDEN to come.    

Has God disappeared? Yes and No. No: He disappeared to prepare us for eternity. Yes: I sincerely believe that today He comes to us both in creation, (that’s why it is holy!), and through the Son who restored Creation, makes eternal life possible.

Today the church must encourage us to pray for the coming of the New Creation, and set an example for this to happen, because our HOPE, our only hope, is Christ who died to regain CREATION for whose coming we must pray without ceasing. John 3: 16.

JUNE 1 2020

THE PATH OF LIFE ETERNAL

See that I follow not the wrong path and lead me in the path of Life Eternal. (Psalm 139: 24).

Life is making choices: wrong path, right path; wrong food, right food; wrong partner, right partner. Today all of life conspires to push us in the wrong direction, with life-threatening consequences. Not Jesus: he came to teach us ‘how to live correctly’, how to live as human beings in God’s earth; that’s why he came with a dual purpose, not only to save us but primarily to restore creation to her pristine state.

Fortunately, there is an awakening out there: we are experiencing a sudden jolt that might just work as a catalyst for change. And change we must, not easy because we are creatures of habit: we have our routines: wake up, grab a cup of coffee, have a bite of something, and back to the grindstone, because: “I owe, I owe, so off to work I go.”

Well, for millions that routine has suddenly stopped. We still owe, but for many the ‘work’ part has been deleted. We suddenly have time on our hands, time to reflect, or time to riot?

Time to change?

Ecclesiasticus 3 points to change:

To everything there is a season,

and a time for every purpose under heaven:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to break down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to search and a time to count as lost,

a time to keep and a time to discard,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

I believe that NOW is a time to mend, a time to kill the old order, a time to uproot what has become a destructive regime, benefitting the rich and killing the poor and fatally wounding creation. 

We are seeing the World Health Organization as irrelevant, we are seeing the United Nations as non-effective, we are seeing the European Union as fragile, unwilling to help Italy and Spain to fight to VIRUS. Instead borders are sealed off, while power has reverted back to national and local authorities.

And then there is the USA. Thanks to meat shortages President Trump has decided to open slaughterhouses, endangering the workers there: money trumps lives. My question: how essential is meat in our lives.

Fast Food Nation

This past week I have been reading, Fast Food Nation, and the astonishing rise of McDonald’s and other fast food outlets in the last 50 years. Their closure has led to a surge in ‘home-cooking’ and ‘home-baking’ and ‘home-gardening’, while farmers are forced to stop the factory farming of cows, pigs and chickens.

Eating meat is embedded in our culture, even though animal agriculture is a leading cause of global warming. Will the Covid-19 open the door to more healthy eating and greater awareness of Climate Change?

Yes, the path of Life Eternal is intimately connected to our eating habits. We now know that we cannot protect our environment – creation – while continuing to eat meat regularly. If cows were a country, they would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world after China and the USA.

For too long, especially in “Western civilization,” we have nurtured an opposition between “mind” and “body”. Even worse, we have held the body hostage to the mind. What the mind wanted, came first; what the body needed, came maybe second. This radical dismemberment of our very being has been at the root of so many of our contemporary illnesses. Even the treatment of illness follows this same duality: medications may be prescribed, but without psychological therapy. It is now more important than ever to let people’s minds become re-assimilated to their bodies, to restore balance. The church is no help there: it separates Nature from Grace, Heaven from Earth. The same split is evident in Human and Animal. The current pandemic is the result of our anthropo-human-centric life: we are seen as more important than the animals God created from the same soil, even though the abuse of animals is at the very centre of the pandemic.

Jesus taught us to be the servants in chief in creation, a service that includes animals.

Eating a plant-based diet is the most important contribution an individual can make in reversing global Warming: Following ‘the wrong path leads us away from the path of Life Eternal’. Life Eternal is exactly what it says: it means the earth being permanently capable of sustaining LIFE, because right here on terra firma we will spend eternity.

C. S. Lewis was right when he wrote, ““Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts”

Oops, that hurts. Our farming system is a road to hell, permeated with misery. Today’s chickens have been so genetically modified that their very bodies have become prisons of pain even if we give them their freedom. Turkeys are bred to be so obese that they are incapable of reproducing without artificial insemination. Mother cows have their calves ripped from them before weaning, resulting in such acute distress that we can hear this in their wails, while cattle are imprisoned neck-to-neck in feedlots and brutally slaughtered.

The road we are on leads to PANDEMICS: if some part of creation hurts, we all become victims, with the USA being the leader in animal cruelty and with Brazil openly encouraging rain forest clearing. Both are now Coronavirus champions: two countries led by presidents who call themselves Christians.   

Go vegetarian.

A 2015 study found that a vegetarian diet is $750 a year cheaper than a meat-based diet. It’s also healthier: less fat, less heart disease, less antibiotics in our diets, as its overuse is leading to reducing its healing powers.

There is a lesson here for eternity. The Bible tells us so. See that I follow not the wrong path and lead me in the path of Life Eternal. (Psalm 139: 24).

What is ‘the path of Life Eternal?”

And here I open up another animal aspect: a can of worms. The Path of Life Eternal leads through vegetarianism.  We cannot do God’s will by abetting animal cruelty. Today we eat the ‘Devil’s Brew’, born and slaughtered in pain and cruelty, saturated with growth hormones, with no regard for the animal’s wellbeing. In the very last text of the book of Jonah, God expresses concern for the welfare of the domesticated animals in Nineveh. God cares about them, and so should we.

Sorry to repeat my mantra about heaven: we won’t go there, ever. Our eternity will be lived – to the full, I should add – here, right here, on God’s precious earth. Life Eternal will be enjoyed, perfectly – in full loving care and symbiosis with ALL ANIMALS and ALL OF NATURE.

For our sake, our eternal welfare, now that we are on the threshold of a new phase in human history, now that we are at a historic moment in the tortuous tale of humanity, God calls us to reconsider how life should be lived. The path of Eternal Life leads through animal welfare and effective love for creation.

In a world threatened with famine, especially in Africa and South-East Asia, it is unconscionable to eat a product that requires close to 10 pounds of grain to produce one pound of meat, not counting the untold calories in refrigerated trucking to bring it to the table.

I may add that my wife and I have been vegetarian ever since we read 45 years ago Francis Lappé’ s book, Diet for a Small Planet.

EARTH

“In the beginning”.

I am going to examine the very first text in the Bible. I am afraid it will involve some speculation, because only God was there, but his great apostle, Paul, encouraged me in 1 Thessalonians 5: 21, to “Test, investigate everything, and retain what is good”. Paul, after all was the most educated of all God’s immediate followers, and a great scientist in his own right, as well as a literary giant: just read again 1 Corinthians 13.

“In the beginning”.

With these three simple words the Hebrew Bible starts. No speculation about the number of years ago. No indication where and how: just “in the beginning.”

Then the next line:

Now the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the
surface of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the
surface of the waters.…

These past days I have struggled to fill these words with meaning. Try to imagine the scene: total darkness, pitch-black everything. Not a star to illumine, no point of light anywhere.

Yet in that utter nothingness – I believe that I was there!  Not as my being as I type these words, yet I was there. I was there, among the thousands of trillions of random substances, in this light-less swirl of untold many objects, bouncing off each other, changing shape in the process, a scene that nobody ever has seen or could see or has seen, a seemingly chaotic cauldron of bits and pieces of floating something.

Here’s what J. H. Bavinck writes about that period:

“We are left with the core idea that the time in which we stand, the time is which history takes place, can never be understood in terms of itself. If we want to understand that—if we want to grasp the sense of history—we must go back to primeval times, to the events that took place before the ordering of this world. It was precisely then that the foundations were laid on which the structure of history rests.

    It is truly remarkable that this same primitive thinking that is always engaged with the happenings in the Urzeit is at the same time interested in what will happen in the end?time. The gods and the powers at work in primeval times fashioned our world as we now experience it. However, the existence of this world is no more than a brief flash between two abysses of deep darkness. Soon, at the arrival of the end-time, our world will descend to the state it was before, when everything will revert back to what existed in the Urzeit: just as death is close to birth, so the down­turn is not far from the upswing. Just as all that has been neatly ordered stems from chaotic disorder, emanating from the fog of the Urzeit, so the cosmos will disappear again in that same undefined state. The end?time is nothing else but the return to the Urzeit.”

That’s why Ecology and Earth systems, from which all life flows, should be at the heart of learning and preaching.

Bavinck needs requoting, “Just as all that has been neatly ordered stems from chaotic disorder, emanating from the fog of the Urzeit, so the cosmos will disappear again in that same undefined state. The end?time is nothing else but the return to the Urzeit.”

J. H. Bavinck calls that era, the URZEIT. Sorry, there is no English equivalent for that concept. My dictionary defines it as, “An unspecified time period extremely long ago, prehistoric times”. We usually label this time-slot as primeval.

All churches, and all educational systems, have utterly failed to make ‘living’ the center point of all teaching. Especially churches have completely fallen short there, because contact with the earth is the essential element of life. We are taken from the earth, we belong to the earth, and we live through the earth. Our bond with the earth is so strong that we cannot for a moment imagine existing apart from the earth.

Oh, that utterly lamentable heaven hoax: it has been the church’s main doctrine ever since not Christ but Aristotle became the ruling force in all religious expressions: anthropocentric, rather than ‘earth-centered’.

Nietzsche, the great Nietzsche, the much maligned Nietzsche, who pulls no punches, whos father and 2 grandfathers were Lutheran ministers, and who also was slated to follow in their footsteps.

Here’s a quote from Thus spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s famousbook, available on line,  

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.

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 dreadfullest sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!

Yes, in most evangelical Christianity of all stripes ‘heaven’ has been promoted, misleading the flock. That’s why “non salus extra ecclesiam”, no salvation outside the church, is not true. If this is what the church teaches, then the opposite has more weight: no salvation inside the church.

Today, fortunately, we are discovering that our dependence on the earth is elementary. That’s why John 3: 16 is one of the most significant texts in the Bible, if not the most important one. It bears repeating,

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Once, in a Bible study session I asked a participant what the word “world” included. The answer was ‘people only.’

That’s indeed the popular explanation. The Greek word for ‘world’ is ‘cosmos’, which any dictionary defines ‘anything that lives or moves or has a being.’ It generally refers to the earth and all it contains, including the stars and planets. That’s the world the Lord loves, as any great artist loves his own creation.

Jesus came to buy it back, buy back the cosmos, THE EARTH, he loved so much.

That’s the message to church still misses and is at the root of our troubles. That’s why we must ‘examine everything, and keep what is good.’  (1 Thessalonians 5: 21).

I also love John 1: 1:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

There, “In the beginning”, the foundation of all that exist, men, woman, animals, trees, everything, all of us, alive and dead, The Earth, in short, was made.

We, thanks to fraudulent theological views, have hastened EARTH’S demise. Jesus is returning to undo our disastrous deeds when he returns.

Soon I hope. 

Postscript.

Last week I was admitted to the regional hospital to discover that I had double pneumonia. After 4 days I was discharged on the promise to take it easy. I now recall that for years a dull pain in my chest was a harbinger. This time it was fits of chills and fever that set off my seeking medical advice.  

May 10 2020

IS RELIGION STILL RELEVANT?

God’s peace be unto you.

On March 10 1965 I bought Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship, new, for $1.45. It’s now a tattered copy, held together with black tape.

That was 55 years ago!

Buying that book then shows my thinking and my reading habits way back when I was a young 37 years of age, married for 12 years, a father of 5 young children, living in a newly constructed multi-leveled home, with a built-in office, chairing the steering committee charged with organizing a four day convention for some 3,000 CRC – Christian Reformed Church – young people from all over North America – a special train came from Chicago-land with 1,000 teenagers – an elder in a large CRC church, operating my insurance agency, and being brand-new real estate broker.

That huge church, seating 700 people, then full twice on Sundays, is now closed!

Is Religion still relevant?

Yes, it’s an altogether a-religious age now. Then young people still went to church and attended societies; then church attendance and weekly church-related activities were part of daily life. Now?

Now?

“You are the salt of the earth”, Jesus stated in the Sermon On the Mount.

Re-reading Bonhoeffer’s book last week I was struck by his statement, “That salt sustains the earth: the world exists for the sake of the disciples”.

That needs some explanation.

When Jesus said this, the 12 disciples constituted the entire church. They were then ‘the salt of the earth’. That humble flock of fishermen kept the earth intact. Bonhoeffer again, “In casting out the disciples the earth is destroying its very life.”

In other words, once the salt loses its ‘saltiness’, the earth implodes.

Is that the case today? Has the church failed in its essence?

Bonhoeffer thinks so.

Bonhoeffer, when in prison, awaited a trial that never came. Without any jurisdictional preliminaries he was hanged 75 years ago, his grave never found.

While in the Gestapo prison he had lots of time to ponder the fate of the church and the state of religion. In 1944-5 his isolation resembled our isolation, unable to gather with fellow believers.  Now our only ‘Christian Community’ contact is through telephone or Zoom or Skype or Internet. Then Bonhoeffer’s only link with the outside world was through letters with a believer-guard facilitating that process.

In these letters Bonhoeffer explored the state of the church. He gave as example something then current: in his days his (and my) parents and grandparents had a ‘best room’ that had nothing to do with work, everyday life and normality. That’s how he saw the church, a sugar-coated faith for Sunday services that turned Jesus into some moralistic figure – if he is mentioned at all. He wrote, “Christ has been banned completely from the house of life and confined to the temple and the church.”

And then this key statement,

“Christ does not call us to a new religion but to life…….Religious trappings go very much against my grain, often to the point of instinctive revulsion, and that is certainly not good.”

We do well to bond with Bonhoeffer here, because he was a visionary, a person who in prison found not a grain of religion among his fellow detainees, detected not a trace of faith in God there. That made him to write, “God is either 100 percent real in the world or not at all: there is no third possibility. God’s reality cannot be divided into religion on the one hand and reality on the other……It is impossible to experience the reality of God without the reality of the world, or the reality of the world without the reality of God…..Worldly existence and Christian existence are not simply two sides of a coin but they are at one and the same time the whole coin. If this is not the case the church degenerates into a ‘religious society’ (or, as my church calls itself, ‘a religious organization’), fighting for its own existence, and thus automatically no longer God’s church in the world……Without God, without humanity we lose the earth: God, humanity and the earth belong together”.

Yes, a religious organization stands on its own, apart from God and apart from the world: a mere human movement. A church should be a God-fearing, Earth-enhancing Community, because God, Humanity and the Earth belong together. J. H. Bavinck affirms this when he writes that redemption of humanity and redemption of creation – the world – go hand in hand.

That brings me back to The Salt of the Earth. That salt has now become defunct, and with it the earth ceases to be, something we experience today.

As I see it from my limited perspective: All churches, all ‘religions’, separate faith from day-to-day LIFE. And now it is no longer possible to live so that God, Humanity and Life are united. The church, seen as a ‘religious’ organization’ stands apart from life and thus separated from God: the church is there for itself, in spite of its pious utterances.

The VIRUS

The VIRUS we are experiencing is the result of a humanity living without God, without regard for John 3: 16, love for the cosmos. Loving the cosmos has become impossible, even though we must persist.

The Virus is the direct result of us forgetting that the earth must remain inviolate, that we, humanity, the earth and God belong together. By cutting down the forests everywhere, we disturb nature’s balance, and the animals’ viruses become ours. Even though we may find some sort of vaccine today, tomorrow an even more dangerous disease will emerge, because our ‘religion’ prevails, ‘the SALT’ has lost its flavor, sealing our doom. But ‘religion’ still lives on!  

The optimism, the youthful enthusiasm of the 1960’s, is gone, and with it our future. But ‘religion’ lives.

May 1, 2020

We know that our alteration of the atmosphere is leading us into a mass-extinction event, but we don’t want to change our habits: we are addicted and our lack of faith accelerates the disintegration, even though this disease can kill anyone on the planet: it’s invisible; it spreads because of the way we move and congregate. It now looks that in the choice between economic activity and health protection, the drive for the dollar has priority: we always choose death over LIFE.

Be assured that this is the first of many calamities that will unfold throughout the coming years. Now, when they come, we’ll be familiar with how they feel. This is just a dress rehearsal. Wait till Global Heating fires up: bound to come. Wait till the world runs out of potable water: bound to come. Wait till crops fail and famine stalks: bound to come. Wait till electricity ceases and the Internet is interrupted: bound to come.

All these are baked into the situation we’ve already created, in part by ignoring warnings that scientists have been issuing since the nineteen-sixties. Some shocks will be local, others regional, but many will be global, because, as this crisis shows, we are interconnected as a biosphere and a civilization.

The Salt has lost its favor: irrelevant religion is still alive but LIFE is dead, because we have separated God from creation and creation from LIFE.

Christ did not come to bring religion: that’s a manmade affair. Irrelevant. Christ came to bring us LIFE, Eternal Life, Life to the FULL.

Postscript.

On May 10 2020 it is exactly 80 years that the German army entered the Netherlands and for Five Full Years I lived under the cruel German Occupation.