Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

MAY 1 2020

FORTUNATELY: THE END IS NEAR.

My closest birthday is 92. I can unequivocally state that ‘my end is near.’ I may have a few years left, but I am a finite being: someday, perhaps soon, my perishable life will end and I will die, and will be resurrected imperishably: life without end. Amen. My daily prayer is Maranatha, Lord, come quickly.

Our earth too has a finite problem. The globe itself will always remain, but human life won’t. We all will die in one gigantic fire.

Sounds awful. It is. I go by what the Bible says in 2 Peter 3:

But the Day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar,
the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and its works will be laid bare.

Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be?
You ought to conduct yourselves in holiness and godliness as you anticipate and hasten
the coming of the day of God, when the heavens will be destroyed by fire and the
elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with God’s promise, we are looking
forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.

Just as the Coronavirus appeared out of nowhere, so too THE DAY OF THE LORD will come totally unannounced: could be tomorrow.

A riddle solved. Perhaps.

For a long time I had no idea how this would come about: now it has dawned on me that we ourselves will be the perpetrators. When the then known world drowned, the ARK was there to save a remnant. Then the Lord vouched never to initiate such an act again. Not necessary either: today we all can visualize life’s extinction. We see it all around us: we already live in a dying world judging by the disappearance of species. Someday, perhaps this year, 2020, Global Heating will reach the trillions of tons of METHANE, stored in the shallow waters of the Arctic Ocean. That will do it. METHANE is some 40 times more lethal than the GHG (Green House Gases) we emit whenever we ignite the engine of our adored automobiles.

The current VIRUS phenomenon is sure sign that the world population has outgrown its resource base. Returning to the 2019 economic enterprise will merely speed up faster disintegration.

Don’t expect that the UN or the USA or the European Union will magically devise a solution to the world’s plight. It’s not that we don’t know what to do: the recent close-down of some activities saw a rapid decrease in pollution. No, it’s not that the END is inevitable, but greed always triumphs: rain forests will still be leveled; carbon fuels will still find new applications; the rich will still be getting richer and the poor poorer; the weapon industry will still strive and infrastructure deteriorate: no, more of the same is not the answer, because it simply will push the economy farther along the route toward collapse.

The Bible tells us so.

No, I am not one of those fundamentalists who use the Bible as a guide to history, but the Bible, in a few words, tells us that God is the Creator, that humanity wanted to be like god, switching allegiance to God’s opponent, that Jesus, perfect human, perfect God, bought creation back, and will deliver the goods once humanity has succeeded in ending all life.

Yes, we are the culprits.

In Paradise we ended creational harmony with the most ominous results. We broke up the Kingdom! We distorted creation with disastrous consequences. “Cursed is the ground because of you” Gen. 3:17 tells us, with Monsanto monstrously magnifying that momentum.

Once sin affected just one portion of that beau­tifully holistic order, it infected its totality, slowly ruining the entire earth, because God, in his wisdom and humility allowed it to be sub­ject to destruction: Deuteronomy 31: 17, 18 expresses this without a grain of doubt, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”

God himself took this fateful step because we, humans, we wanted to be kings, because we refused to live in a world, even in God’s marvelous Kingdom, that wants to be subject to him alone.

So here we are.

We now live in a world without God. Now we are ‘gods’: we call the shots, echoing John Milton: “better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven”.

Now people like Trump and Boris Johnson and Putin and the Saudi Princes are in charge. And with them in control we daily exper­i­ence the terrifying consequences.

We now see God’s work of art embroiled in the power of demons. Satanic forces have thrown themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation.

And the church?

That’s something the church has never grasped. 1 John 5: 19, (located somewhere far in the Bible who very few read anyway) plainly says that “We are God’s children, but the entire world is in the power of the Evil One.” Sad, but true.

Jesus, of course, knew this, as is evident from John 17, where he tells his Father in heaven that ‘we don’t belong to a world ruled by Satan’, but the church has seen this as a sign that we are heaven bound: Christ’s followers belong to His kingdom!

Jesus saw the influence of Satan everywhere. When his disciple Peter’s mother-in-law suf­fered from a fever, Jesus “rebuked” the illness and “it left her” (Luke 4:39). When Jesus and his disci­ples were at sea and a severe storm endangered the ship, Jesus “rebuked” the wind and said to the sea: “Be still!” (Mark 4:39). The forces behind that storm and behind that fever are Satanic; the world of hid­eous demons plays a blasphemous role in these phenomena. Yes, the Coronavirus is a Devil’s tool!

Jesus shows us here a scenario regarding life in general—awesome storms, Climate Heating—and what will affect us in particular—mysterious diseases, Pandemics— replete with omi­nous con­se­quences. No longer is our universe one of simple beauty and harmony, but, especially in our days, one of unpredictable powers which threaten us with annihilation from all directions.

Demon-possessed.

The world in which we live is dominated by demons. Every hour we experience the terrible influ­ence of this satanic situ­a­tion.

It is impossible to visualize the immense difference between the majes­tic, harmonious unity of creation- God’s Kingdom! – as it emer­ged from God’s hand, and the frantic, demon?dominated planet in which we, the cursed human­ity, dwell after the fall into sin.

The horrible truth is that God’s Kingdom is in shatters: creation groans. That is the profound tragedy con­fronting the life of the world, the brutal and cruel consequence of the Satanic rule.

History in a nutshell.

There you have it: world history in a nutshell: God has surrendered his own creation to Satan and his followers, whose only purpose is to abuse it and destroy the Kingdom that comprises all things, all plants, all animals, all people, all angels. Yes, God’s King­dom, synonymous with light, peace, joy, service to God, in harmonious vene­ra­tion, this Kingdom is being destroyed, is coming apart at the seams: is close to death! Deuteronomy hit it in the nose: with us in charge there is decomposition, brokenness, frag­men­tation, enmity, contra­diction, meaninglessness, darkness, death. Everything that once was beautiful is now to be pitied and without hope.

Oh: we are so powerful.

Yes, we can do mighty things; yes, we can penetrate the secrets of creation, but all that no longer makes sense because we can never build a harmonious world; we can never restore its disorder, because our war against nature is destroying its existence: our oceans are acidified; our soil is polluted; our rainforests eradicated. All our effort and care are reduced to rubble under the weight of the curse that threatens all human life. There is no escaping it. 

Just like we, our earth has a finite problem. The globe itself will always remain, but human life won’t. We all will die in one gigantic fire. The Bible calls it, correctly: a purifying FIRE.

Fortunately our world is pregnant with a new earth: time for its delivery is imminent.

APRIL FOOL’S MONTH (3)

THE END IS IN THE BEGINNING

This is how the Bible starts: “In the beginning…. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”

Will the END have similar features?

J.H. Bavinck calls the beginning the URZEIT, the primeval period, the primordial time that preceded humanity’s appearance. He writes, “The URZEIT was when all things were put into place. What happened, then, became the measure for everything that would happen afterwards. In that era the basis was laid on which all subsequent events rest.”

Will the END see the same features?

A bit later in his Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision, he continues, “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……..Soon, at the arrival of the end-time our world will descend to the state it was before, and everything will revert back to what existed in the URZEIT, just as death is close to birth…………The end-time is nothing else but the return to the URZEIT”.

So there you have the Bavinck prediction, written as long as 70 years ago in the shadows of two world-wars and the dirty Thirties’ depression.

Put it another way: human history is a tiny island between the two immense oceans of URZEIT and End-time. We, you and I and the entire human race ever born, live and die between these two enormous entities, between a pollution-free and ideal conditions in the Garden, and Judgement in the End, followed by The Eternal New Earth.

Earth we are.

Genesis, the first Bible book makes it abundantly clear that we, with every atom and molecule in our bodies, are part of this earth: God formed us from the earth. That’s why we humans are adam, and belong to adamah, the life-bearing earth. That’s why our destiny is intimately intertwined with the fate of the earth. Genesis 3: 19 plainly tells us that “earth we are and to earth we shall return.” We and the earth are on identical paths: the state of the earth reflects our physical and mental state.

The VIRUS

The appearance of the VIRUS is no accident, is the result of us abusing creation. Now there are two destructive elements at work: (1) the COVID – 19 VIRUS destroying human health, and (2) we, humanity, destroying nature: We are the VIRUS and The VIRUS is us. Both bode ill for the future, and both lead to the sort of CHAOS that ruled IN THE BEGINNING.

To the world’s economy the Viruses are like the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. Don’t think for a moment that we can go back where we left off last year. The world’s economy is strained by at least three tremendous burdens: one is the increasing costs of production of mineral resources (don’t be fooled by the current low prices of oil: prices are one thing, costs are another). Another is pollution, and the third is accelerating Climate Change, the heat melting poles, already weighing on the economy. These three factors define the condition called “overshoot,” occurring when an economic system is consuming more resources than nature can replace.

Sooner or later, an economy in overshoot has to come to terms with reality. It means that it can’t continue to grow: it must decline. The VIRUS is that last straw.

An accelerating crisis.

It all started very early in human history. Something happened in Paradise, in the Garden of Eden, that caused its initial idyllic situation to stop: the Bible story centers on the taking of a fruit which God had singled out as a no/no. Whatever.

The result was our world, of which Cain became the prime mover. Jacques Ellul in his The Meaning of the City, writes that “Cain built a city, the city as opposed to Eden. The city is the direct consequence of Cain’s murderous act and of his refusal to accept God’s protection…….. The city is called Enoch, which means a new beginning….Creation is seen as nothing, and now a new start is made and it is no longer God’s creation, but a human concoction. Cain –we – takes possession of this world and uses it as he wishes, and the result is the CITY which represents the ultimate rejection of God. Today even the most remote places in the world are part of the City: the entire earth has become The City”.

Yet, Ellul sees The City of God as our final destination.

Extraordinary times.

Today these viruses are threatening the entire world. There is no antidote and the carnage goes on because WE will not change. On the contrary, even though ‘the lust for money is the root of all evil’, we pour money into the economy at a torrid pace never seen before. Last week I discovered that the Government of Canada had put $580 in my bank account, without ascertaining whether I needed it or not.  

April is April Fool’s month.

We fool ourselves when we think that we can pick up where the Pandemic started in 2020. There’s never a going back. The previous decade was the final ‘normal’ one, in which we thought we could have the cake and eat it too. Now the cake is eating us. Our exploitive actions are backfiring. We are forced to retreat, and retreat leads to defeat. Creation is mightier than we; the universe is uniting against us. The Poles, both North and South, band together to choke us by dispatching deadly methane and melting glaciers and ferocious winds our way.

We are mere mortals. “Who can endure the Day of His Coming?” laments Malachi, as the End ends in chaos, and the End is like the Beginning: an earth devoid of life, an earth depleted of essence, robbed of all sanity, deprived of LIFE.

Trump is tricking and treating his know-nothings “Christians”, his unaware ignoramuses, his overfed and undernourished followers, who now have become ready prey for the lurking Virus.

Yes, disaster is on the doorstep, with so far this year the hottest ever in the world, with the real heat yet to come, with only 13% of the oceans basically intact, and, with all the arable land, 40% of the earth’s surface, kept artificially productive, eroding the soil, poisoning the end product, famine looms: CHAOS is in the cards.

In the great scheme of Creation, God has given us, humans, a great degree of authority, subject however, to acting in harmony with the only wise will of God: as God loves his creation, our entire lives must mirror that devotion. Not doing this, not acknowledging God’s ultimate decrees, has disturbed the creation order and is leading to universal dissolution, from decay to total collapse.

The history of the world is determined by our never-ending attempt to establish a human empire, totally apart from God: simply another attempt to build a new Tower of Babel, and, just as the old one forever remained unfinished and led to complete confusion, so today it leads to CHAOS.

The real miracle is that straight through all these strivings to arrive at a human-dominated empire, God re-establishes his eternal and unequaled Kingdom.  

Yes: THE END IS IN THE BEGINNING, THE BEGINNING IS IN THE END.

APRIL FOOL’S MONTH (2)

CRISIS

The word ‘crisis’ is pure Greek. It means ‘decision’, it means stop and choose: going one way or another.

By now most of us know that the old way of burning carbon and so disrupting ‘nature’, was wrong. But is a new direction possible?  

The VIRUS was no accident: it was a direct result of our ‘way of DEATH”. Ordinary life before the pandemic had already caused a deluge of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality. Will the Virus change all that?

Crisis also means ‘opportunity’. We can make a new beginning.

I am a Christian. Let me explain that, because the term needs qualification today. To me the concept is captured in Jesus’ simple saying: “Love God above all else and our neighbor as ourselves”. To me loving God is expressed in loving his creation, taking the cue from John 3: 16, “God so loved the world, the cosmos, everything that lives and moves and has a being; and that God bought it back with the ultimate sacrifice: the life of his beloved Son.” He bought it back from THE EVIL ONE. See 1 John 5:19. It means that Jesus died to reclaim creation, Paradise, not just us.

THE VIRUS IS US.

Yes, the VIRUS is a result of us following THE EVIL ONE, God’s arch-enemy, who has taken possession of God’s world: temporarily I should add. This CRISIS is the result.

I see it as my CHRISTIAN duty to oppose THE EVIL ONE because I believe that my life is divided into two stages:

1. A short – 90 plus years perhaps – life under trying circumstances, on this side of eternity, and
2. Eternal life under perfect conditions, in the New Earth under New Heavens, cleaned of all pollution and space junk.

My current life I could call my “proving ground”, my ‘testing period’, which determines my ‘after life’.

Ever heard that before? Of course you have: the Apostles’ Creed says it plainly: “I believe in the resurrection of the BODY and LIFE everlasting. But……….

We have been fooled.

April is FOOL’S DAY month. Ever since in 1972, when I read Dr. Telder’s Sterven en dan? (After Death, What?), my life has changed. Suddenly I saw that HEAVEN was a myth, a Greek fabrication, based on Socrates and Plato, who saw death as an escape from a sinful earth and believed that death provided a means to be with the Greek gods. These Greek philosophers, these ‘wise men’, saw spirit as good and matter as evil, the earth as disposable and heaven as perfect, a teaching now recognized as GNOSTICISM. Implied in this ‘heaven’ belief is that humans are no longer part of the natural world and can create an autonomous ecosystem, separate from the rest of the biosphere. Covid-19 is telling us we cannot.

Yes, going to heaven is a hoax: a pagan Greek invention. John 3: 13 unambiguously states – “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven–the Son of Man”.

We have been fooled.

We fooled ourselves and this has led to our current situation, which will only get worse: our sinning against creation spells death.

I am writing this during the so-called HOLY WEEK, commemorating Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter. In my opinion there is no such thing as one Holy Week: all weeks are Holy: all of life is Holy. To set aside 7 days per year as Holy smacks again of Gnosticism.

Love Creation

J.H. Bavinck, in his book Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision basically says that personal salvation and restoring the earth go hand in hand: to be a Christian means ‘loving God’s Creation’. Period. When we love creation and humanity, then we will be assured to inherit the KINGDOM, God’s restored PARADISE: perfection in a renewed world. Not heaven, for Pete’s sake, but a pollution-free, a totally cleaned cosmos, fit for eternity.

Why? Because we have been created for LIFE

We have been created for LIFE, and that to the full. Jesus came, not to found a religion, not to start a Christian church, but to teach us how to live. His opponents called him a ‘glutton’ and a ‘winebibber’. Jesus lived life to the full: his first miracle was making wine, ‘wine that cheers the heart’, said Solomon. These Pharisees and theological theorists, the Scribes, burdened the people of Israel of Jesus’ time with stupid rules and regulations and were so convinced that they did God’s work, that they killed Jesus when he flouted their ‘religious’ ordinances. They saw a stipulated religious life as one that could earn eternity by following the prescribed path. There still are denominations that follow these same principles: follow the rules and the church assures entrance to heaven. They even claim that ‘Nulla salus extra Ecclesiam’, no salvation outside the church. The VIRUS has other ideas. Now, perhaps for months, we will be unable to attend church services. Is the Lord teaching us a lesson here?

In the church’s erroneous claim that we go to heaven, the “KINGDOM” has totally fallen by the wayside, in spite of Jesus’ priority: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6:33).

That spells it out. In our foolishness we have totally neglected that God’s Creation is his ‘beloved’ KINGDOM. By seeking its welfare, by promoting the well-being of ‘the natural world’, we also will gain everything else we require to LIVE. That is God’s promise, believe it or not.

So suddenly LIFE is different: a crisis is upon us!

The texture of everyday life is altering. A sense of fragility is everywhere. It is not only society that feels shaky. So does the human position in the world.

Crisis means decision time. Deuteronomy 30:19 says it so beautifully,

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.

Choose LIFE. Decision Time. Obey the rules of God’s Holy Creation – Holy because God made it. Obey God’s law of love.            

Bonhoeffer was right when he wrote:

 “Only he who believes is obedient, and only he who is obedient is a believer.” (Bonhoeffer was hanged by the Hitler regime on April 9 1945, 75 years ago)

Obedience means living in such a way that CREATION thrives: that’s how we honor THE CREATOR. Acting differently spells doom, causes PANDEMICS, results in CLIMATE CHANGE.

That’s what this CRISIS is all about! The Lord called “The Heavens and Earth as witnesses against us”. They are now testifying. God knows that the fate of the Heavens and the Earth is the most affected because our sin is against CREATION. Our disobedience is against God’s handiwork.

Please note: the Lord treats the heavens and the earth as living entities. A sin against these is a sin against God. That’s what this CRISIS is all about.

(By the way: The Bible recognizes three heavens: (1) The area under the Ozone Layer where we live, (2) the place where the stars and planets are and above all that (3) there where God dwells. See 2 Corinthians 12.)

APRIL FOOL’S MONTH (1)

MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL….

A long time ago when media songs still had some sing-able content, “Money is the root of all evil…..take it away, take it away,” was quite popular. Of course I know that money in itself is not evil: it’s the desire for money- greed – that is the real culprit, but, OK that’s how the lyrics went.  

I always have a song spinning in my mind. Perhaps it originates in a habit I have: Every morning, just before breakfast, I read a Psalm or a portion thereof, aloud. I’ve done this all my married life – 67 years. Psalm 119 has 176 verses, and is divided into some 10 verse sections, so it takes me some 17 days to read them all. But most Psalms are short, so it in less than a year I go through the entire Psaltery.

I read them in the GRAIL PSALMS version, a new translation. It’s a singing version, and now that I am alone – my wife being in a care facility – I, at times, sing them. Another reason I like the Grail Psalms is that it comes with short introductions. Take Psalm 14. It deals with THE FOOLS: “The fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” Here is what the introduction says,

“The “fool” in the Bible is not an ignoramus, not a theoretical atheist or agnostic. He has his values all wrong and is encouraged by past experience to behave as if God would never take action.”

Well, I sincerely believe that this applies to us! We are the fools! We have our values all wrong. For the longest time God has allowed us to muddle, to screw things up, to, by our daily habits, dig ourselves deeper and deeper into a situation from which now there’s no escape. Now Creation is revolting.

I have become more and more convinced that for us God speaks through his creation: creation tells us about God the same way the Bible does. Just as we know Bach, Rembrandt, van Gogh, through their artistic acts, so we know God through his ultimate creation act: THE COSMOS. The Gospel of John opens with these majestic words, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” No Bible then: only God’s CREATING WORD. Psalm 33: 9 confirms that: “God spoke and it came to be.”

The Bible is open to all sorts of interpretations – witness the HEAVEN HOAX – while creation speaks with one voice: we either LIVE when we love it as our origin, our mother, or we DIE, when we foolishly exploit it for monetary gain, the root of all evil, including the CORONAVIRUS.

Yes, the desire for money is the root of all evil. Governments everywhere have decided that we can vanish THE VIRUS with trillions of dollars, pounds, euros: FOOLISHNESS, PURE FOLLY: Curing evil with more evil, expanding the money tower beyond its carrying capacity, risks collapse.

Jesus and money.

Jesus had a decidedly disdain for money. When He came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a human being of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:

“It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay,

And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay”.

No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. Curiously the fastest growing Protestant movement in the USA is the WEALTH GOSPEL, the theology of prosperity, which promises material success as well as eternal salvation.

I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy and this probably was one reason why Jesus did not like money.

We will recall that Jesus’ betrayal, suffering and death was directly associated with money: 30 pieces of silver, the price of a slave. How would we react if we’d start to realize that money would eventually kill us, as is the case now? I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money.

This is what I believe: “money killed Jesus, the WORD become HUMAN; money is killing God, the WORD become CREATION”. Of course God is greater than his creation.

Today all governments act like God: creating money ‘ex nihilo’, out of nothing. The trouble is that money, once in existence, becomes real: it has to be paid back. The same is true of ‘nature’. We take from it, but someday soon we have to pay back what we have borrowed, a very painful process, and there is a way.

Dr. Barry Commoner formulated the FOUR LAWS OF ECOLOGY, outlined in the first chapter of his book, The Closing Circle.

These are:

1) Everything is connected to everything else;

2) Everything must go somewhere;

3) Nature knows best; and

4) There is no such thing as a free lunch.

The first law states what Commoner called “a simple fact about ecosystems” – all healthy ecosystems are interconnected and self-stabilizing: if any part of a natural ecosystem is damaged or overstressed it can trigger far wider problems. For example, the burning of fossil fuels is overloading the global carbon cycle, which in turn is triggering dramatic changes to climate, global ice cover, weather patterns, ocean acidification, farming yields, sea levels, government budgets and worldwide refugee figures. Cutting down forests – for money! – leads to PANDEMICS.

Any society that ignores Commoner’s first law – that everything is connected to everything else – invites ecological and social turmoil, so evident today.

Of the second law – everything must go somewhere – Commoner said: “One of the chief reasons for the present environment crisis is that great amounts of materials have been extracted from the Earth, converted into new forms, and discharged into the environment without taking into account that ‘everything must go somewhere’. The result, too often, is the accumulation of harmful amounts of material in places where, in nature, they do not belong.”

Commoner’s third law of ecology – nature knows best – is not an example of naive, green romanticism, but a rejection of what he called “one of the most pervasive features of modern technology … the notion that it is intended to ‘improve on nature’”. Rather, he said: “Stated baldly, the third law of ecology holds that any major man-made change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.”

Commoner said he borrowed his fourth law – there is no such thing as a free lunch – from economic science: “In ecology, as in economics, the law is intended to warn that every gain is won at some cost. In a way, this ecological law embodies the previous three laws. Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to overall improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis and the CORONAVIRUS are warnings that we have delayed too long.”

MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL….

We all have ignored these laws because we foolishly wanted to make a quick buck. We, fools, now pay the price.

At the root of this PANDEMIC is MONEY, monetizing God and his creation, greed in other words. It is making fools of all of us.

More about this later this month.

SPRING 2020

COUNTDOWN

Before a satellite leaves the launching pad there always is a countdown: 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, lift off. And whoosh, amidst noise and flames, smoke and explosions, an enormous projectile is pushed into the blue yonder.

There also in a countdown to The Lord’s Return. There is some similarity: it too will be a noisy affair; it too will involve flames and fire; it too will be dramatic. Malachi, the last book in the Hebrew Bible, comes to mind: “A refiner’s FIRE”…The earth will burn like a furnace”, with the fire coming down from heaven.

 That Countdown, that Cosmic Countdown, is not a simple reciting of a number: 10 days, 9 days, or 10 years, 9 years……… That countdown is more like 10 millennia, 9 millennia….. and just as changes in these previous 1000 year time periods were almost imperceptible, now, when ‘change and decay in all around I see’, suddenly the countdown to the Day of the Lord is like a rocket descending on us.

I was just talking to my wife, in isolation in a Nursing Home. She just said, (by phone) “Today it is good to be old. We have had the enjoyment to see kids and grandchildren. What is their future?”

REVELATION means just that.

The last Bible Book allows us to visualize the increasing pace of global deterioration. In Revelation 15: 5 till 16: 21 – look it up if you have a Bible – the last things are set into motion. The picture John, the author, provides us with is an accelerating succession of disasters, not unlike what happened in Egypt during the ancient Pharaoh regime, when Moses pleaded with the king there to ‘Let My People Go.’

Then the 10 plagues affected only the Egyptians, with the final calamity the death of all first-borns. This time also the liberation of The People of God is at stake, but now the disasters are not local, but universal and cosmic, much more intense and dangerous, and the people of God are victims as well.

But, as the Bible relates, for their sake God will speed up the COUNTDOWN. (Matthew 24: 22).

It’s not only the Bible that warns of imminent doom. Secular sources have come to the same conclusions, witness Yuval Noah Harari, the now famous Jewish professor and author of Sapiens. In a long article in a recent issue of the New Yorker (all articles there are long) he writes that “humanity faces three primary threats, “Nuclear War, Ecological Collapse, and Technological Disruption.”

Evidently his article was written before The Coronavirus appeared.

ARCTIC NEWS, which monitors the situation in the Far North, maintains that a sudden spike in temperature is possible. It writes that the trend indicates that 2°C was crossed in February 2020, and looks set to keep rising and cross 3°C in 2021, more specifically in January next year, which is less than a year away.

A 3°C increase means total disaster, means we all will burn to a crisp. That respectable scientists, whose life work is to study climatic conditions, offer this opinion, is more frightening than the Coronavirus, because it affects us all.

The appearance of the humble locust, swarming in their billions – as is happening now in Africa and the Middle East – is a symbol of evil and harbingers of change in the social order: see Exodus 10:1,4, 12-14.

It is all too evident that today the entire universe is implicated in the final demise of all of creation, because everything, everywhere, has become contaminated and despoiled by humanity: all the oceans are saturated with plastic and acidification of the waters are widespread. Even the highest heavens are chockful with satellites and other space junk. That’s why a total cleansing is needed, a process that might take thousands of years. But then “a thousand years are like a day” in divine terms.

Just imagine Noah – the ARK BUILDER – waking up: to him it would feel like he died yesterday. And so would Abraham and David and J. S. Bach and my grandparents………….

THE BIBLE IS NOT A HISTORY BOOK.

I know, the Bible is not a history book and neither does it provide a timetable for the future. It does, however, give us clear hints.

I see the current pandemic as a clear sign that we approach the End. Already the Coronavirus is a pandemic and produces panic in the planet’s population. Deadly droughts, hellish heat, and locusts devastate crops world-wide, indicating the onset of widespread famine.

It seems that everywhere the earth itself has become unsteady: storms, earthquakes, are rapidly increasing. In Revelation 16: 18 a dire prediction is made: “The culmination of the natural disasters and the pinnacle of pain are caused by an earthquake: “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.” The seismographs in the capitals shake wildly and record numbers beyond any ever registered. And the houses tumble, the high rises collapse. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.

In the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate from above, that find their source in nature, and there are those that are the result of human action. Today both are evident.

It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as our own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against us the tormentors. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become the enemy and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity. And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, her mighty medical system, her military prowess, her marvelous technical prowess, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immense mighty and strong, these same men and women are now in a total humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.

The COSMIC COUNTDOWN is upon us. Revelation 11: 18 comes to mind:

The nations were angry, and your wrath has come. The time has come for judging the dead, and for rewarding your servants the prophets and your people who revere your name, both great and small. (The time has come) for destroying those who destroy the earth.”

MID MARCH  

THE BLACK SWAN

The Black Swan.

I have a book by that name, written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The subtitle is The Impact of the HIGHLY IMPROBABLE. The sudden appearance of the Coronavirus qualifies as completely unusual, totally outside the realm of regular expectations: in other words: A Black Swan!

The most influential weekly in the world, is the British THE ECONOMIST. As its title suggests, it mainly focuses on financial matters. Each year, in January, it publishes an extra issue, looking forward what will happen in the coming year.

Its excellent editorial staff have usually been substantially correct, even though a famous baseball coach, Yogi Berra, once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Yet, nothing in that otherwise excellent issue, some 150 pages, with the presumptuous title, THE WORLD IN 2020, will pan out as these highly paid authors, the best of the world in their field, predicted, because THE VIRUS has emerged and the economy suddenly has stagnated: it now wobbles, and falls, with ominous consequences for us all.

Eric Hobsbawm, a well-known historian, in his book The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991, asserts that the 19^th Century ended in 1914, when, 100 years after Waterloo, a conflict began, now known as World War I. He also stated that the 20^th Century was short, only 75 years, ending in 1989, when The WALL in Berlin tumbled down.  

I agree with him on the 1914 date but not on the second statement: after the collapse of the old Soviet Union in 1991, the world continued on its capitalistic path, even expanded its reach to embrace the entire world, especially China, which today has more billionaires than any other country. I now maintain that the 20^th Century ends this year, in 2020, with the sudden – Black Swan – emergence of the Coronavirus, throwing the entire global situation for a loop. This PANDEMIC forces us to radically change everything, from manufacturing, relying on ‘just in time’ delivery, to debt service as payments are due while production has stalled, to air travel and cruises. Boeing, already on life support – the USA biggest exporter – may well crash entirely. Any bets on the stock market or gold?

Back in time.

Pandemics tend to cause sudden lasting changes. That’s why history never is a gradual affair. It is prone to jump.

In THE RISE OF CHRISTIANITY, Rodney Stark, a professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington, relates how Christianity found general acceptance during a PANDEMIC in the year 260 in Rome. While the pagans fled the city, “the Christian Community nursed the sick and dying and even spared nothing in preparing the dead for burial.”

Such action caused Christian growth. This PANDEMIC was instrumental in Christianizing the Roman World.

Something totally different happened more than a thousand year later, which Barbara Tuchman describes in her A DISTANT MIRROR, the Calamitous 14^th Century. The Black Plague PANDEMIC killed perhaps as many as 30% on Europe’s population. Then the church, with its humble beginnings after Pentecost in Jerusalem, had become a supreme power. She writes, “The plagues accelerated discontent with the Church at the very moment when people felt a greater need of spiritual assurance………Human conduct was found to be ‘wickeder than before’, more avaricious and grasping, more litigious, more bellicose, and this was nowhere more apparent than in the Church itself.”

As the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga in his HERFSTTIJ DER MIDDEL EEUWEN relates, the period following the Black Death in Europe turned out to be the “WANING OF THE MIDDLE AGES”. For him, the real story was not just the economic aftereffects of a PANDEMIC; it also put paid to the mysticism, irrationalism, and xenophobia that in the end brought an end to a basically ecclesiastical culture. Thus the Black Plague PANDEMIC paved the way for the Reformation.

Likewise, it looks entirely possible that COVID-19 will open the door to the “Waning of Capitalism”.

I believe that it took until the first two months of 2020 for the long Twentieth Century – 1914- 2020 – to come to an end. History jumps from one disastrous system – Capitalism – whose aim has always been ‘Creative Destruction’ in which it succeeded by destructing itself.

This will be the decade when the majority will come to understand that things are never going back to “normal.” Our bills are due: environmental, financial, ethical, social, even religious.

Capitalism.

For all of us Capitalism has become a quasi-religion: we, all of us, are paid-up members of the Church of Capitalism, whose creed is to “Shop till you drop.”

True, we greatly benefit from its products, from orange juice first thing in the morning, to television at night, touting the wonders of the current age. Not for a moment are we free from its influence. The Bible tells us “To pray without Ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17), but for most of us our real adherence, all the time, everywhere is to “Consume without Ceasing”, to the point where, for every calorie of food, we expend 10 calories of climate-wrecking carbon substances.

The Bible tells us of instances where parents sacrificed their children to appease the gods: we have gone a step further: we sacrifice our very lives on the altar of Capitalism.

And that is about to come true.

The Black Swan of a PANDEMIC rears its ugly head. Just as in the Third Century Christians willingly sacrificed their health and life in the service of their neighbors, and so caused to Good News to spread, just as in the 14^th Century the opposite happened, and a pandemic was instrumental in church reform, so now, in Century 21, a PANDEMIC will break the idol of Capitalism, and teach us the lesson how God will not be mocked, will not be taken for granted, teach us the lesson that creation is holy, is the apple of God’s eye.

Psalm 19 comes to mind:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

the skies proclaim the work of His hands.

Day after day they pour forth speech;

night after night they reveal knowledge.

Without speech or language,

without a sound to be heard,

their voice has gone out into all the earth,

their words to the ends of the world…..

      The Law of the Lord’s (creation) is perfect

Reviving the soul.

We have silenced that voice.

The Lord is coming back to reclaim the creation he paid for with his life (John 3: 16).

“THAT is the Ultimate Black Swan.”