Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

END OF FEBRUARY 2020

THE TWO WITNESSES.

The Lessing Version.

We must remember that Creation – God’s handiwork – always wins: Jesus’ death resulted in resurrection; Creation’s death will bring total cosmic renewal.

For my blog I often rely our divine guidance. This happened again now when I randomly took from my book collection Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing’s short stories, and discovered that there is more to Lessing than I thought: she also is a prophetess. I then read her short story: Report on the threatened City, and I was right away reminded of Revelation 11, which describes the fate of the TWO WITNESSES.

Doris Lessing must have used this Bible passage as her template, because there are too many similarities for it to be coincidental. With Doris the two witnesses come in UFOs, in a machine barely visible to the human eye. They come to warn the people in the city to relocate, because in 5 years it will be destroyed by an earthquake: they know that.

These spacemen are keen observers: They notice right away something they already had suspected:” the older these humans get, the less open they are to new thought material.” They kept on telling them the bad news of the coming disaster, but “their warning was like pouring a liquid into a container that has a hole in it”.

Generally, the feelings in the threatened city are best interpreted by a song a female vocalist has composed,

We know the earth we live upon is due to fall.
We know the ground we walk upon must shake.
We know and so…..We eat and drink and love,
Keep High, Keep Love, for we must die.

The spacemen also discover that the earth people have become so dependent on machinery that they have lost confidence in their own powers of observation. These two ‘witnesses’ (that’s really what they are) notice a lot about the psyche of these bi-pedal creatures because the two extraterritorial invaders can read the minds of the earthlings and have concluded that the young are in a state of disabling despair and “that society is indifferent to death and suffering.”

In the end, when the curiosity factor has vanished, their message causes hostility: “The mob was angered to the point of wishing to kill us….. so the mission must be regarded as failure.” And they returned in their UFO to their home.

The Biblical Version, found in Revelation 11.

Here also two missionaries, sent expressly from heaven. They are dispatched to warn the earth’s inhabitants of catastrophic happenings. The footnote in my Bible suggests that the two witnesses may symbolize believers who testify in the final period before Christ returns. That sounds credible, because I can hardly imagine that visible to the naked eye – and that today means appearing on TV – two celestial creatures descend from heaven, and start warning the people that THE END IS NEAR. What their coming does suggest, is that the church’s function is over: the two come because the bringing of the Good News by traditional ways no longer works, something that is now quite evident.

What both stories make plain is that we live in a time of apostasy, of chaos, and dissolution. Amidst this witless and disoriented generation people arise, such as Doris Lessing, an atheist by the way, and such respected scientists managing such websites as ARCTIC NEWS, and numerous books and articles, that warn us of our imminent demise– without much effect, I might add, as we keep on pursuing our carbon-rich path to perdition.

At this stage of history, by the Grace of God, contemporary technology can bring God’s message to the utmost ends of the world, and be read throughout the most distant countries, precisely at a time of immense insanity in an era speeding to complete collapse. Will these mini-sermons give new hope to a generation that is so tired and has lost its foothold? Will the Biblical truth that only Jesus Christ is Lord, and that in turning to him there is salvation, be proclaimed? Will a generation, totally estranged from the Gospel, still be able to adopt a new mindset?

Similarities

Exactly as in the Doris Lessing tale, in Revelation 11 too people, in their blind hate, will try to kill the bringers of the ONLY Good News. They won’t accept the truth that Christ will return to undo the environmental damage and renew the earth.

Why? The people of today cannot accept that message because it is too old-fashioned, too opposed to their deepest and most secret thoughts. After all these witnesses say things that have been heard from time immemorial and already then rejected as useless. These messengers bring something to the fore that, for centuries, has been repeated and already then seen as impossible for to embrace.

In both stories the witnesses come through as upright and strong, but the message is simply seen as dated, as belonging to earlier times. Their words convey strength but what they say has so often been heard before that it falls on deaf ears. No, even though they are well-spoken and their holy zeal impressive, the earth people refuse to become Christ’s disciples.  

The carriers of the very last exhortation on behalf of God, will vanish in the end, just as the words and warnings spoken by so many other prophets and apostles before have gone unheeded.

Revelation 11 also relates how the TWO WITNESSES are killed, their bodies publicly displayed: “For three and a half days people from every nation, tribe, and language will gaze on their bodies and refuse them burial. The inhabitants of the earth will gloat over them and will celebrate by sending each other gifts, because those two prophets had tormented those who live on the earth …………Then they went up to heaven in a cloud, while their enemies looked on”.

Both versions end in an enormous earthquake, so gigantic that a third of the earth is affected, with more disasters to follow.

Get used to it: The CORONAVIRUS pandemic is just the beginning!

FEBRUARY 15 2020

JUDGEMENT DAY

Believe it or not – and chances are you are not going to believe it – we are on the final countdown approaching JUDGEMENT DAY.

You may know that when the apostle Paul was in Athens, Greece that is, and made his way to the Areopagus, where the city’s  intellectual elite gathered, of all the topics in a the Bible he could have talked about, such as creation, or the place of the Jewish people in history,  or even the coming of Jesus, as Son of God, he chose JUDGEMENT DAY. Acts 17: 31-32 records his words, “Therefore having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now declaring to humans that all people everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed.”

That really means that there will come a time – and I believe it is not far away – when the Lord will act. Up till now he has allowed Satan, the Evil One, to call the shots. “He will judge the world in righteousness”, which simply means that he will set the crooked straight.   

My question, “Why would Paul, the most effective and experienced missionary the world has ever known, approach the then intellectual cream of the crop, with that particular topic?”

The Greeks then, and the church today, really does not believe in a ‘physical, living life’ hereafter. When Socrates, as recorded by Plato, drank the poison, he welcomed death. In “The Trials of Socrates”, Plato depicts Socrates’ last moments before his death. Plato quotes 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.

Here’s what was the result: when Christianity was sweeping over the “Greek” world, a dualistic heresy emerged: GNOSTICISM. It taught, following Socrates’ example, that matter and spirit are separate and not reconcilable. Socrates and Gnosticism taught that the spiritual world was pure and eternal, while physical reality was transient and an irredeemable ‘evil!’. Yes, creation is seen as evil!

Based on Socrates’ example, the church invented the Heaven Escape, and has adhered to that heresy ever since. Paul, when he mentioned ‘resurrection’, the unification with body and spirit, was chased from that market place, with the result that the Gospel according to Socrates has prevailed until this day.

Paul found no hearing in Athens, the intellectual hub of the world 2,000 years ago. Today the Socrates doctrine still rules the church, so it is not surprising that CREATION is seen as sinful, either openly or by tolerating its abuse. We sing, “This is my Father’s World,” but we act as if Socrates and not God’s Spirit is to be obeyed. If there ever was a generation that is guilty of murder, theft, habitat destruction, and almost any other sin, it is ours.

The Bible tells us how God created the cosmos – making it holy – that we uncreated it – commonly called SIN – and that Jesus’ sacrifice restored creation: we call that ‘redemption’. The overwhelming interpretation of Jesus’ death is that he died to save sinners. Not quite true. He died to restore Paradise, the Garden of Eden, that truly perfect world, that humanity defiled.

GOOD: SEVEN TIMES.

In other words: Creation equaled Perfection.

When God looked back on what he had done, when his beautiful creation was completed, and everything was there to serve everything else, a perfect example of how we too should live, a life of total service, God called his masterpiece ‘good’ seven times.

A while ago a demented man defaced one of the world’s most famous paintings: he was arrested and judged. Of course, that makes sense. Now a demented humanity repeats this act: dement because we are destroying the very earth on which we depend for LIFE.

 Do you really think that God will condone us polluting, poisoning, and rearranging the earth to suit OUR needs?

Well, in the thousands of years since creation was pristine, we have managed to do the seemingly impossible: we now are on the verge of total creational destruction caused by us humans. The church in Jesus’ days killed the Christ. We in our age are on the verge of killing God and his creation. That cannot go unpunished. Judgement day is the logical consequence.

Refiner’s Fire.

George Friedrich Handel, that great composer, a contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach, is best known for his oratorio THE MESSIAH, a perfect piece of music that is not only a symphonic masterpiece, but also a great exposition of the gospel. One of the most moving lines is a quote from the prophet Malachi, the last book in the Hebrew Bible, in Christian parlance known as The Old Testament.

Here is that haunting aria: 

“But who shall endure the day of his coming? And who shall stand when he appeareth? For he will be like a refiner’s fire.”

Malachi, Chapter 4, has as heading, The Day of the Lord. It too pulls no punches: “Surely the day is coming; it will burn like a furnace. All the arrogant and every evildoer will be stubble, and the day that is coming will set them on fire,” says the LORD Almighty. “Not a root or a branch will be left to them.

Paul’s effort to bring the gospel to Athens, met with failure: Gnosticism proved stronger than The Good News. The sad truth is that ‘The Heaven Heresy’ prevailed. No wonder that Jesus is quite pessimistic in his assessment of The Last Days: “Many are called, few are chosen,” he laments (Matthew 22: 14). He’s even more emphatic when he wonders, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (Luke 18: 8.)

All this makes me wonder whether churches today have become obstacles to the COMING OF THE KINGDOM, Christ’s re-entry into creation.

FEBRUARY 1 2020

TELL ME IF I AM WRONG……

But first…..

Mere hours, after I had posted my 1,000^th blog, I fell ill: a confluence of burn-out ( I had looked after my wife, suffering from dementia for more than a decade), and a potent stomach bug that lay me flat for a week, dehydrating me completely,  lowering my blood pressure to a dangerous level of 90/60 for days. (My normal is about 140/65). No fever, no pain, just fatigue. It took me more than 4 weeks to regain a level of energy.

I had great intentions for the year 2020. As usual I had bought a diary – I’ve kept a diary for more than 40 years – and intended to write a daily journal based on the Bible Lectionary. None of that happened: for the first time in decades I have not recorded one line in either book.

In the meantime the local Long Term facility – only 10 years old – phoned that there was an opening for my wife. In less than a week she was to move out and into an institution. After more than 66 years of marriage, this still takes a lot of emotional adjusting. That too has now happened – a bit of dying for both of us. Fortunately her room is light and airy, facing south, looking over forests. Our five children, from far and wide, came for various lengths of stay, to ease the transition.

MOIRA PLACE with 128 beds, and employing 150 full-and part timers – is less than 7 km away, making it possible to bike there, even though at time of writing, in the heart of winter, and still recovering, this seems remote.

My time of illness drained me also intellectually: my mind – always active – was closed. Yet my unconscious remained focused, helped by a book I read on and off, written by Jacques Ellul, MONEY & POWER, which proved disappointing. Usually I am a great fan of Ellul, but here, trying to determine the real poor in the world, I don’t think he offered a solution. I believe part of the reason is that it was written 70 years ago. The afterword of 1980 did not help.

DOUBLE OR NOTHING?

But, in a negative way, it made me concentrate on what the real poor are today, and I discovered that I am among the poor, even though by worldly standards I am rich.

That calls for an explanation. “Blessed are the poor in spirit: they shall inherit the kingdom…..Blessed are the meek, they shall inherit the EARTH.” (Matthew 5, the opening words of THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT).

Over the years the conviction has grown in me that we must completely reorient our religious thinking: from catering to the ‘inner man’ to embrace the entire personality. This has been forced upon me by a new concept of salvation I found in J.H. Bavinck:

“Personal redemption and the redemption of creation go hand in hand.”

That pure revolutionary! But John 3: 16 affirms this: “God so loved THE COSMOS: all that is, and moves, and has a being………”

You cannot have personal salvation without consciously working for the full restoration of the natural world. The entirety of Jesus’ most famous speech must be seen in that light.

I see ‘the poor’ as those people who see Jesus’ death on the cross not only as redeeming them, seeing Jesus as their savior, but with equal force and conviction believe in and act for the restoration of CREATION, the process thwarted by humanity in the GARDEN OF EDEN.

To them – to me – the continuing and accelerating destruction of the cosmos is becoming such a source of agony that it is resulting in mental anguish, being ‘poor in the spirit.’

The ‘meek’, or as some translations have it, ‘those who claim nothing for themselves’, see polluting the air through airplane trips and automobiles as sin– and ask for forgiveness each time they engage in these polluting actions.

The totally misunderstood and much maligned Friedrich Nietzsche, a former cavalry officer in the Hapsburg Empire, and a full professor at 22, completely lost his mind when he witnessed a horse being whipped to death. He embraced that dying creature, and for 12 years prior to his death in 1900, never uttered a word again, or penned a line.

Nietzsche was a devoted environmentalist, totally at odds with the church. In ALSO SPRACH ZARATHUSTRA he wrote, ”I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not.” Another sentence stayed with me – also decades ahead of his time: “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence…” Nietzsche truly was ‘poor in the spirit’, a man who knew his bible as no other: both grandfathers were bishops. He too was trained to become a minister like his father, but was so turned off by their ‘heaven’ talk that he totally turned against organized religion.

Because of the church’s unilateral approach to salvation – brother are you born again, or any variation thereof, catering only to ‘the inner man’ – the church today resembles a car without functioning rear wheels, without a functioning creation – preserving/enhancing policy. Pushing on the accelerator – concentrating on ‘the soul’ – results only in digging itself deeper in the mire.

The German church under Hitler fully endorsed this Nazi monster even though he killed 6 million of God’s Chosen People. Today the US church widely sides with Trump, the professed killer of creation.

Salvation means double redemption, is both personal and creational, but organized Religion has a vested interest in the personal aspect only: its entire structure prevents change.

Jesus knew that. His last act, just before he died, involved ‘religion’. “At that moment the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth quaked and the rocks were split”. (Matt 27:51).

That indicates to me the end of religion: all religion. The earthquake affirmed this. Religion killed Jesus. Religion is killing God’s creation.

Jesus taught us ‘how to live’, how to enjoy life to the fullest. That’s why his first miracle was making the best wine possible. His opponents called him a glutton and a winebibber.

Religion is the curse of humanity. The Crusades; the entire Middle East is at odds because of religion. The most disastrous European war in the early 17^th Century pitted Roman Catholics against Protestants. India is still at odds with Pakistan because of religion. Capitalism, still the reigning economic religion, is now dying, because it has killed all natural life.

Of course, especially the apostle Peter stuck with the Jewish rituals until God showed him. Now we are on our own: no divine intervention. It takes guts, but with divine help…………..

Creation is crying! The church is dying! Should we not be trying? TELL ME IF I AM WRONG…… TELL ME IF I AM RIGHT……

(From now on I will post a shorter blog once a month.)

DECEMBER 28 2019

THE STATE OF THE WORLD (2)

This is my 1000^th blog. From the year 2,001 through 2010 I wrote a weekly column in the Belleville daily, The Intelligencer, about 800 words each. I then combined two of them for publication in the Christian Courier every fortnight. They both paid me.

I quit writing for them in 2010, and expanded my weekly blog to 2,000 words, with the totally unrealistic and basically utopian aim to reform the church and also the world: an ongoing, never-ending and impossible project, which I will assume again in February, DV – which stands for Deo Volente or the Lord Willing.

Here’s my prediction for the 2020s.

I believe that the coming decade will be decisive for humanity. The Lord said in Matthew 24 that we can’t pinpoint the day and the hour of COLLAPSE, but he also mentioned that there will be definite signs to herald his coming again.

It’s all there in verses 15-16, “So when you see standing in the holy place the abomination that causes desolation spoken of through the prophet Daniel – let the reader understand – then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains.”

That’s happening now. So open yourself up to some prophetic proclamation as predicted in this Matthew passage and be painfully prepared to experience the events described in that text.

Here are my comments on this Bible passage.

1. Standing in the holy place refers to God’s creation in general, as Psalm 33:9 tells us, “He spoke and it came to be”. God, upon completing the world and all that lives there, called his handiwork ‘good’ seven times, and placed humanity there to make it even better. By and large Christians have failed to see creation as God’s holy place, and have done exactly the opposite to God’s intention.
2.  “The abomination that causes desolation”, refers to Climate Change, an absolute abomination, directly offending God’s creative act. That it causes desolation is all too evident in Global Heating.
3. “Let the reader understand,” applies to a time frame that can only be understood when the event occurs. Nobody 100 or even 50 years ago could have imagined the catastrophic changes now taking place in the seas, the landmass, the air, and in human beings.
4. “Flee to the mountains”. This tells us to get out of those places where the panic will be the greatest: the cities. As Jacques Ellul has pointed out in THE MEANING OF THE CITY, Cain built the city as a defiant answer to Paradise. He wrote that the city – human domination of creation – represents the ultimate rejection of God.

Collapse.

Back in 1974, Henry Kissinger said in an interview:

I think of myself as a historian more than as a statesman. As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. [Emphasis added.]

History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren’t realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy. As a statesman, one has to act on the assumption that problems must be solved.

Gail Tverberg, a prominent actuary who writes a blog, OUR FINITE WORLD, in her latest edition, quotes Revelation 18: 11-18. Here is that passage:

And the merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her, because there is no one left to buy their cargo— cargo of gold, silver, precious stones, and pearls; of fine linen, purple, silk, and scarlet; of all kinds of citron wood and every article of ivory, precious wood, bronze, iron, and marble;  of cinnamon, spice, incense, myrrh, and frankincense; of wine, olive oil, fine flour, and wheat; of cattle, sheep, horses, and chariots; of slaves and souls of men:

   “The fruit of your soul’s desire

has departed from you;

    all your luxury and splendor have vanished,

never to be seen again.”

The merchants who sold these things and grew their wealth from her will stand at a distance, in fear of her torment. They will weep and mourn, saying:

   “Woe, woe to the great city,

clothed in fine linen and purple and scarlet,

adorned with gold and precious stones and pearls!

     For in a single hour

such fabulous wealth has been destroyed!”

Every shipmaster, passenger, and sailor, and all who make their living from the sea, will stand at a distance and cry out at the sight of the smoke rising from the fire that consumes her. ‘What city was ever like this great city?’ they will exclaim.

Notice the suddenness of the collapse: In a single hour!

Once collapse comes, it comes as a total surprise: fast, ferocious and fatal.

Gail Tverberg disputes the common economic theory that when oil becomes more difficult to find and more expensive to distill, prices will go up. It’s her contention, and I agree, that “the market” will not tolerate higher prices of oil products, because stagnant wages prevents the consumer from paying higher prices. Thus the oil industry is caught in a real bind: they need higher prices for oil products because the easy stuff has been used up and EROEI = Energy Return of Energy Invested is higher.

Here what she wrote,

“The question of whether prices will rise to allow future energy extraction is another problematic area. If we believe standard economic theory, prices can be expected to rise when resources are in short supply. But if we look at Revelation 18: 11-17, we find that when Babylon collapsed, the problem was low prices and lack of demand. There were not even buyers for slaves, and these were the energy product of the day. The Great Depression of the 1930s showed a similar low-price pattern. Today’s economic model seems to need refinement, if it is to account for how prices really seem to behave in collapses.”

The 2020’s?

I believe that the 2020’s will be the most disastrous ever experienced by humanity. ARCTIC NEWS, administered by top climatic experts issued this warning:

“The above image (not shown here) depicts how humans could go extinct as early as 2020. The image was created with NASA LOTI 1880-Nov.2019 data, 0.78°C adjusted to reflect ocean air temperatures (as opposed to sea surface temperatures), to reflect higher polar temperature anomalies (as opposed to leaving out ‘missing’ data) and to reflect a 1750 baseline (as opposed to a 1951-1980 baseline), with two trends added. Blue: a long-term trend based on Jan.1880-Nov.2019 data. Red: a short-term trend, based on Jan.2009-Nov.2019 data, to illustrate El Niño/La Niña variability and how El Niño could be the catalyst to trigger huge methane releases from the Arctic Ocean.”

El Niño.

There’s an El Niño expected next year, based on the high water temperature in the Pacific. It invariably ups the heat everywhere, especially in the Arctic, where its rise has been double of that elsewhere. When the methane buried there is released, a gas up to 25 times more lethal than CO2, world-wide collapse is certain. 

OK: I have tried for 20 years.

For the past 20 years I have spun my yarn, in a sense a unique kind of writing because I don’t know of any other essayist who has combined contemporary information, and placed it in the context of the Bible.

I believe it was the great theologian Karl Barth who said, and I paraphrase, “sermons must be delivered with the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.” Well, I have done that, and next year February I hope to continue this venture, because that’s what it is: an exploration into the unknown.

I love Jacques Ellul’s writings. In THE MEANING OF THE CITY he states that “(It’s in the city) that the desire to exclude God from his creation is most evident…The cities of our time are most certainly that place where humanity can with impunity declare themselves master of nature. It is only in an urban civilization that we have the metaphysical possibility of saying, “I killed God.”

That is the State of the World, 2020: by killing nature, by saturating the elements with carbon content, by uprooting the decomposed vegetation buried deep into the earth, for times untold, we are the instruments of our own demise.

It seems to me – and this thought has tortured my mourning mind for a long time – that when collapse comes, it will be sudden and comprehensive: ecological, spiritual, financial, physical, geographical, economic, political, augmented by earthquakes and (un)natural disasters: totally total: not an area excluded, a convergence of all possible ills, including money, the desire for which is the root of all evil, certainly evident today.

Talking about money: There’s something crazy going on in the finance field. Over the course of 2020 $4,665 TRILLION of US Treasury bills (USTs) will mature and need to be rolled into new USTs. During 2019 the US budget was $1,022 Trillion in the red. The 2020 new deficit is already pegged at a minimum $1,183 Trillion. That means that the US Federal Bank has to monetize or print about $6 Trillion.

Again at a time of low oil prices, the then Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, on August 14 1998, said “There will be no ruble devaluation……….. The situation is entirely under control.”

Three days later, the Russian ruble dropped more than 60 percent. When this happens in the USA the US economy will crash much harder.

My historical religious basis.

I love the psalms: I read one of them aloud every morning at breakfast time. Take Psalm 115. I remember my paternal grandfather, at meal time start his prayer with the opening words of this psalm: “not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name be the glory.”

Not to us, O LORD, not to us,

but to Your name be the glory,

because of Your loving devotion,

because of Your faithfulness.

Why should the nations say,

“Where is their God?”

Our God is in heaven;

He does as He pleases.

Their idols are silver and gold,

made by the hands of men.

They have mouths, but cannot speak;

they have eyes, but cannot see;

they have ears, but cannot hear;

they have noses, but cannot smell;

they have hands, but cannot feel;

they have feet, but cannot walk.

They cannot even clear their throats.

Those who make them become like them,

as do all who trust in them.

That’s the sort of god we are worshiping continuously. Our gods are useless. Our ‘money’ god is a blimp on the screen nowadays. And we have made it a god. When money collapses, and it is merely a phantom, no longer ‘silver and gold’ which had real value, but any one number we type in, we collapse with it: our mortgages, our stock market, our fancy toys, our credit cards, our office towers, our cities.

Such is the STATE OF THE WORLD, A.D. 2020. A.D. stands for Anno Domini, in the year of the Lord.

Last week I quoted Deuteronomy 32: 17-20. It has a line referring to the State of the World, 2020, “And my anger will burn at them in that day, and I shall leave them, and I shall hide my face from them….and shall see what their end will be.”

The word ‘end’ here does not mean their finish, but rather their distant future, a future that has arrived, a future that is NOW, a society without God. And, indeed, the End is here. Not many people will like this sort of ending.

But it is not the ultimate End. Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5: 48, asked us, “Be Perfect.” That word ‘perfect’ in Greek is ‘teleios’ which is derived from ‘telos’ as in telephone, telepathy, television. It means ‘far’ or ‘the end’, the ‘distant future’. That ‘distant future’ is NOW.

Yes, the decade 2020 will be tumultuous, to say the least: it could quite well be the decade in which Christ returns.

Bonhoeffer called himself an “Anthropos Teleios”, a person who with every action tries to gauge the end-result of his action, and so be ready for eternity.

That too should be our aim in 2020 and beyond.

Nevertheless I wish you a blessed year.

DECEMBER 21 2019

THE STATE OF THE WORLD, 2020 (1)

I used to subscribe to the World Watch Institute publications some 30 years ago, buying its annual world survey, “The State of the World 1990” etc. but stopped after a few years. I had the sense that the World Watch organization was there to prolong its own existence by seeing the world through rose-colored glasses, with an eye to its corporate donors.

Well, I might as well say it outright and explain later: “The State of the World, 2020” is that God has abandoned us: we are on our own. For our own good, I might add.

I base this partly on Geert Mak, a well-known Dutch author, who wrote a book entitled: “How God disappeared from Jorwerd”. (I translated the Dutch title, of course.) Bonhoeffer too has influenced my thinking.

Jorwerd was –is- a village in the heart of Friesland’s farming country, a province in the north of the Netherlands, a region with its own language.

Some of my ancestors stem from this neck of the woods (no woods there, though, mostly meadows and lakes), as my surname suggests. The book traces the advent of the car-culture, and the effect of agricultural mechanization on rural towns such as Jorwerd in Friesland. Of course the carbonization of society has affected similar rural areas all over the western world, including Tweed in Ontario where I have lived since 1975. Our mechanical slaves have taken the heart out of all small municipalities everywhere and forced cities to mushroom.

How, you might ask. The car brought exurban development, with city people buying second residences, with farm hands becoming superfluous and drifting to the larger centres, and especially, with long commutes from country-side or suburbia, to employment opportunities far away. All this is now ingrained everywhere across the globe. This development has disrupted faith communities, killed off the local shops, created box stores, with enormous parking areas, severed ties with families and friends, and has brought us Trump, who promised to bring back the past.

The point Geert Mak – himself a lapsed church goer (his father was a minister in the Reformed church) – really made was that “God disappeared from Society”. And with God abandoned, our future too has disappeared.

We have no future in the sense that my grandparents had a future:  a future dependent on carbon use, however refined and technically clever, is no future, as we now are discovering.

Yes, we are a society without a future. The State of the World 2020 is one of death: no future, no life. We have no future because we have never dealt with the problems that arose: we always pushed them off to tomorrow, which now has come, and we are stuck: no way forward, no way back.

It reminds me of Barbara W. Tuchman’s book, A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14^th Century.

In its introduction she writes, “ (The 14^th Century’s) disorders cannot be traced to any one cause; they were the hoof prints of more than the four horsemen of St. John’s vision, which had now become seven – plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrection, and the schism in the Church. All but the plague itself arose from conditions that existed prior to the Black Death and continued after the period of plague was over.”

Now in Century 21 and the year 2020, the curse of the Seven Horsemen of Judgement also applies to today. Already evident are similar fault lines, such as famine (Southern, Eastern Africa), soil erosion (China, Iowa), forest fires (Australia, California), floods (everywhere), but also identical problems: war, bad government, schism in the church, as well as increasing incidents of earthquakes, hurricanes, and related natural disasters.

What struck me on page 96 of Tuchman’s book were two items I have mentioned before: “As if the world was indeed (1) in the grip of The Evil One, its first (black death) appearance on the European mainland in January 1348 coincided with (2) a fearsome earthquake that carved a path of wreckage from Naples up to Venice,….. and the destruction reached as far as Germany and Greece….The chronicler wrote, ‘And in these days was burying without sorrowe and weddings without friendschippe.’”

The second quote is to me an eerie reminder of the prediction made in Revelation 16: 18 of an enormous earthquake and related disasters.

Fact is that we have no future and that’s why Boris Johnson and Donald Trump, and Brazil’s Bolsonaro are seen as redeemers: they promise a fictive future, to gullible followers.

The only possible future is the past. It has been exactly the elimination of human labor that has created the current chaos in the world, brought on by our carbon-crazy society. This has necessitated COP 25 – which stands for “Conference of the Parties”, UN sponsored, a fruitless effort to stem and reverse the carbon age.

For the last 25 years this world body has met, and, with the last one just completed, has been unable to deal with our carbon addiction age and the resulting climate crisis.

In the Western world the three hold-outs are Australia, Brazil and the USA, three countries where ‘Evangelical’ Christians head the government. It is quite understandable that China and India, with some 40 percent of the world population, have not budged: they still want to match the Western world in prosperity and life style. Good luck!

Tragically, thanks to the “Christians” we are doomed. Take Brazil: its new motto is the 3Bs: Bible, Beef and Bullets.

Bible.

Bolsonaro sees the Bible as providing a mandate to dominate creation, influenced by the real American Religion, Gnosticism, which sees matter as evil. The same is true for Australia, also led by a “Christian” Prime Minister, and the USA, with ‘born-again’ Pence and Pompeo in charge.  

Beef.

Brazil loves Beef: it is seen as more important than trees, so destroy the Amazon.

Bullets.

Bullets are useful to exterminate the native population: they are godless heathens after all.

In other words: just as the church in Jesus’ days crucified him, so today’s ‘evangelicals’ crucify creation and so kill God by expanding carbon use and accelerating the race toward oblivion. The largest polluters, the USA and China, even refuse to hold the line, let alone reduce carbon emission, and so the future has disappeared and God help us, which he won’t do, because we are on our own.

Bonhoeffer.

In his Christmas 1942 letter to his fellow anti-Nazi conspirators, Dietrich Bonhoeffer asked, ‘Are we (Christians) still of any use?’  He wondered, “We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds; … experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use? What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, straightforward men.”

I should add that the German Lutheran Church fully sided with Hitler and the Nazi regime, which explains Bonhoeffer’s question, just as American ‘evangelicals’ worship Trump. Do you know of any church that has taken an effective and confessional stand against Carbon and its war on God’s Holy Creation?

Later Bonhoeffer wrote: “Humanity has come of age”, and suggested that God will leave us, because God wants to see us grow up and observe how we will end up.

It’s all in the Bible, of course!

Deuteronomy 32: 17-20 has a line referring to this, “And my anger will burn at them in that day, and I shall leave them, and I shall hide my face from them….and shall see what their end will be.”

The word ‘end’ here does not mean their finish, but rather their distant future, a future that has arrived, a future that is NOW, a society without God. And, indeed, the End is here.

All this is pedagogically correct.

We humans need a period of divine hiddenness, must leave the manifest presence of God, so that we can become all that we can be.

I myself had to go through this phase: I had to emigrate, to be away from my conventional parents and family, my oh-so orthodox church and develop my own religious way in life. Once I have become what I am, I shall be able to meet God in Jesus.

Fortunately there are some stirrings. The world is waking up. Wise people see the writing on the wall. Look at the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper. Last week it had an interesting article.

Here is its caption:

The climate crisis is like a world war. So let’s talk about rationing.

“It’s time for mandatory cutbacks on the kinds of consumption that threaten all of us,” writes Eleanor Boyle, a Vancouver-based writer, and author of High Steaks: “Why and How to Eat Less Meat, and her forthcoming book Mobilize Food! Wartime Inspiration for Environmental Victory Today.

She starts: “It’s too bad meat is so tasty, driving so convenient and airline travel so desirable. Because those all create large amounts of greenhouse gases and worsen the climate crisis. We know it, and some of us feel guilty getting on a plane, hopping in the car or eating burgers. But how are we to cut back when we’re not sure what level of a high-emission behaviour is sustainable – and when everyone else is doing it? Some environmental activists and leaders suggest we should practise moderation, take the bus, eat veggie burgers. But voluntary measures just can’t deliver when the problem is this big and time is so short. That’s why it may be time for mandatory cutbacks on the kinds of consumption that threaten all of us. It may be time for rationing.”

Let me stop her there. The article goes into details of rationing in the past and how populations – especially in Great Britain – complied.

I know all about rationing. I was 12 in 1940 when Germany invaded the Netherlands, and right away rationing was introduced, because the occupiers took the locally produced food and brought it to feed their own population, causing shortages at home. The first items to go were tropical fruits, as imports were impossible. Soon after that coffee, tea and, horror of horrors, tobacco disappeared. In some ways, cigarettes became the new currency. I remember sailing in 1947 from England, where cigarettes were in abundant supply, en route to Sweden, via Germany – for 6 weeks I was a paying guest on a 600 ton coastal vessel. In Kiel, Germany, I bought a glass of tepid beer for ONE cigarette.

Rationing remained in force in defeated Germany for years after the war ended, and also in Great Britain. It took years before it disappeared.

I believe the Globe article is timely. Wartime conditions will create the worst of all worlds: fearful food inflation, frightful asset deflation, and stagnant wages. The portents are everywhere. Our economy was based on the ‘free’ use of air, water and soil: the bills are due in real money, because the banks have created free money out of nothing: “nothing comes free!!”  is one of the laws of Ecology.

How are we going to cope with the looming shortages? Will rationing be the solution? I vividly remember the coupons for candy, for clothing, for sugar, for tobacco. How about access to electricity and natural gas? What about fuel for cars for the millions that live too far from stores?

If all carbon-based products are banned, because they are the root cause of the crisis, what about exurban and suburban housing, now totally dependent on automobiles, especially in the winter with snow and ice?

The questions multiply, and my next blog will deal with that. It also concludes 20 years of weekly blogs: an even 1000.

Postscript.

I will take off for a while, certainly one month. It is my intention to write a series of skits or short plays based on Bible stories for performance in our church: that’s how centuries ago the gospel was conveyed to illiterate masses. The old is new again, this time with the help of CDs and power point.

DECEMBER 14 2019

HELL IN HEAVEN; HELL ON EARTH.

The Bible gives a picture of heaven that is totally at odds with the portrayal I received when I was a kid, steeped in all things religious. I went to a Christian Kindergarten and Christian elementary and prep school, attended church youth and young adult clubs, sat faithfully in church twice on a Sunday, services lasting at least 90 minutes, churches always packed to capacity, at least 800 faithful, exposed to sermons where heaven featured prominently, always touted as the most desirable destination.

A word about heaven.

The Bible often speaks about heaven in the plural: heavens. Why? Because it recognizes three of them. Paul in 2 Corinthians 12 writes that he was caught up to the THIRD heaven. It sees the FIRST heaven as our domain: the atmosphere below the Ozone layer, the SECOND heaven as the place where the stars and planets dwell, while the THIRD heaven is for God and the angels.  

And God? 1 Timothy 6: 16 tells us that “God lives in inapproachable light, whom nobody has seen and nobody can see”. It reminds me of Billy Graham, the man who paved the way for Trump. I hardly ever watch TV but when the great evangelist decades ago, January 1988, was interviewed by Larry King on CNN, upon the release of his book, “Facing death and the Life After”, I watched the discussion. Larry, blunt Larry, asked Billy what would happen when he died. Billy, the pastor to presidents replied, “Jesus will take me by the hand, and bring me to God.” The poor man, now in the grave, did not know his Bible: nobody can see God.  

Back to my Heaven exploration.

Look at the book of Job. There’s that mysterious Satan figure floating around in heaven, reminding God that this rich guy, with his spoiled kids, his immense fortune, must be a fake. And God agrees, sort of.

And then there is Revelation 12: 7. It depicts WAR in heaven. WAR, bloody war, CIVIC WAR, the most cruel mode of all wars: angels fighting angels, total chaos, making hell out of heaven.

War is not war if there is no blood and wounded and death. For heaven’s sake! What’s going on up there! Satan, who had a free hand in heaven, acted there as an accuser, then wanted to be God himself: a step too far.

Satan created HELL IN HEAVEN.  “Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in heaven,” was Satan’s motto, according to John Milton in Paradise Lost.

No, heaven was not the peaceful place so celebrated in my old church – today still buoyant, still flourishing, still attended by some of my relatives – where one of the hymns I remembered went like this: “Get in line, get in line, then follow the ‘to heaven’ sign.” Another had this refrain, “In heaven it’s so good, always singing in the best of mood.”

Just imagine the atmosphere in heaven, prior to open warfare: a vicious hostility, open division between the pro-God and pro- Satan adherents. None of that open comradery that was evident in the fields of Bethlehem when Jesus was born. Two parties: no compromise possible, either for or against, until it all came out in the open. Something like that’s going on now in Britain, either pro Brexit or against Britain leaving the European Union, or in the USA: for or against Trump, but worse, far worse.

 No, heaven was a terrible place to be in! No wonder John 3: 13 tells us that, “No one has ever gone to heaven, except the one who came from there: the son of Man.” Please note the term “Son of Man”. Jesus did not identify himself as God’s son, but as a member of humanity. That suggests to me that Jesus is eager to come back to earth, where his real KINGDOM will be: “seek first the kingdom, the welfare of creation”, is Christ’s foremost commandment: Service, rather than dominion.    

Yes, there was war in heaven, and the Devil and his gang were defeated.

Michael and his angels are named here as their great opponents: Michael, an archangel, one of the generals among the celestial army. His name is actually a question: mi-cha-el?, which means “he who resembles God?”

So what triggered the war in heaven?

It started because the basic situation had changed, because Jesus Christ had ascended to heaven. Jesus had left, and Satan thought that now was his chance to take over the world and they who live there.

This is how the Bible informs us: “The dragon and his angels fought back: fought! With all the devilish devices at their disposal! But the Devil army was not strong enough and they lost their place in heaven”.

The dragon, in spite of all his pretensions and his filthy slander, was kicked out of heaven, shorn of his power and deprived of influence there: house cleaning in heaven. No longer was he able to stand before God’s throne with clenched fists and make accusations against God’s elect as he did with Job. He simply had lost his foothold. Totally powerless he was banned from heaven and thrown out as quickly as lightning. “He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him,” says the Bible.

And here he is, next door to you and me.

Yes, here he is, and his untold number of devotees. Here they are on the earth where you are born and I made a living, the earth where Jesus Christ himself cried as a baby, preached, performed his miracles, suffered and died, the earth that saw his resurrection, the earth from where he ascended to the place from which He came.

On this earth the dragon and his army landed, feet first. Here they are making this cruel, grim earth, this rebellious earth even more difficult to deal with, as we experience this every day, with worse to come. Now Satan has dominion over land and sea: earth’s remotest regions today his empire be.

The Satan and his cohorts know how precious the earth is to its maker, because God made it and loved it as his dearest possession, this very earth has now become a demonic world, because the battle is not over: the hell in heaven has become the hell on earth.

The Bible tells us this in somber notes: “But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! Filled with fury, because he knows that the time is short.” (Revelation 12: 12).

Woe to the earth and the sea! Filled with fury!!

Beware! Hell on earth. As Dr. Andrew Glikson, Earth and Climate Scientist Australian National University wrote in last week’s ARCTIC NEWS,

“Given amplifying feedbacks from land and oceans triggered by rising temperatures, the concept of an upper limit of warming determined by limitation on carbon emissions alone is unlikely, since, under a rising high greenhouse gas concentration, amplifying feedbacks triggered by methane release, bushfires, warming oceans and loss of reflectivity of melting ice, temperatures would keep rising. As an example, findings show that warmer ocean water is melting hydrates and releasing methane into the sediment and waters off the coast of Washington state, at levels that reach the same amount of methane from the Deepwater Horizon blowout. Carana (2019) finds a potential for abrupt warming of 18°C or 32.4°F.”

Yes, you read that right! An abrupt warming of 18°C or

32.4°F !! 2 Peter 3 comes to mind.

That means HELL ON EARTH!

That’s the situation TODAY!!

From now on world events will be grimmer, more frightening, accelerating with breathtaking speed, continuously assuming more ghastly proportions, dragging millions along in a maddening “danse macabre”, undermining all old established morals, speeding relentlessly to chaos and social upheaval. This world, indeed, has become possessed.

All factors that somehow acted as brakes to stall this development are pushed aside; now that this process is in motion it speeds up disastrously, and nothing can stop it.

Just look around you: everywhere in the world trouble reigns: war, discontent, strikes, demonstrations, repression….

Michael won the war in heaven, but Satan rules the world with lie and slander.

The naked reality to come.

It is here where we are confronted with the history of the world. It is this extremely remarkable phenomenon that matters are not yet what they are, that everything still looks different than it is in reality. The haze of untruthfulness hovers like a curse over the world and in that haze of uncertainty history marches on, and so does the TRUTH.

We are blind.

We are in a bind because we are blind: we don’t want to see the real state of the earth. COP25 is still deliberating. The number ’25’ tells volumes: this is the 25^th meeting where the fate of the earth is discussed, and each time the atmospheric news is worse.

The Arctic again.

The “entire Arctic” now emits more carbon than it absorbs, a fact that can only be described as worse than bad news. “Given that the Arctic has been taking up carbon for tens of thousands of years, this shift to a carbon source is important because it highlights a new dynamic in the functioning of the Earth System,” says Susan Natali at Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts (Source: Thawing Permafrost Has Turned the Arctic Into a Carbon Emitter).

How did this happen?

Developments were manageable until about the year 1800. In the last 200 years Europeans expanded upon vast and thinly peopled regions of the world, carrying with them their crops, animals, weeds, pests and diseases, devastating native flora, fauna and human populations in large portions of the world, and succeeded in establishing “neo-Europes” in regions of North and South America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, bringing their missionaries, singing “Christ – we – shall have dominion over land and sea”, expressing faith in the illusion of unlimited growth.

The industrial revolution and discovery of fossil energy sources further sustained the belief in infinite growth, still the reigning philosophy.

The Bible pulls no punches. 1 John 5: 19 states that “The Evil One is in control”, and he makes us believe that we are the superior race.

But human domination of nature is an oxymoron, for our “control” of nature can only be achieved by understanding its laws and subordinating ourselves to them.

Sorry to say: many religious leaders, like many politicians, actively resist the insights of ecology, for these ideas entail a fundamental reformulation of both liberal public policy and humanist belief in our contemporary world. Clearly there is much work for theologians to undertake in re-examining the received tradition.

That’s what it is: world-wide war against creation, under the direction of The Evil One, who rules the world with lie and hate. 

Actually, God wants to speed matters up, eager to establish the Kingdom, for which the Son already gave his life. The whole world is yearning for deliverance, for being freed from the pains inflicted by the human race. Romans 8: 22 tells us that “all of creation has been groaning, as in child birth”. And that was written 2,000 years ago…..

God wants to accelerate the process. God too is in agony for the suffering, the torture, the debasement of his creation, so, as many places in the Bible indicate, he allows the eclipse of the sun to take place, meteor showers to appear, and destroy those who have destroyed the earth (Revelation 11: 18).

And to show God’s personal involvement, Revelation 16: 18 says: “And there was a great earthquake, such as there had not been since man came to be upon the earth, so great an earthquake was it, and so mighty. The great city was split into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell.”

Hell in heaven; hell on earth. Trump may ridicule Greta Thunberg, TIME’s person of the year, for speaking out for creation, but as the Lord has repeatedly stated, “For we know Him who said, “VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY.” And again, “THE LORD WILL JUDGE HIS PEOPLE. It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrew 10: 30-31)

“Yes, I am coming soon.” The very last words of the Bible.