Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

AUGUST 3 2019

WE WORSHIP THE WRONG GOD

“We live at a time when our planet is becoming increasingly unstable and we are witnessing major earthquakes and enormous volcanic eruptions all over the globe on a daily basis now.

For a long time the United States had been spared, but on July 4th and 5th that suddenly changed.

Since that time, there have been more than 80,000 earthquakes in the state of California, and this is just the beginning of the shaking that is coming.”

L.A. Times, July 29 2019

The report continues to speculate that if California’s two major faults are affected the death toll would run into the thousands and damage into the trillions of dollars.

I should add that Revelation, that last Bible book, warns of an enormous quake heralding the End of Time.

We, as the human race are playing with more than fire: the delicate balance of planet earth is at stake. In the space of a few years, a bagatelle in earth-time, a few split seconds, we have caused trillions of tons of ice on both poles to disappear. This means that the carefully calibrated balance of the earth is wrenched out of kilter.

It reminds me of my back which occasionally gets screwed up. Fortunately we have an excellent chiropractor in the village whose services I can count on every other year or so. The Great Chiropractor in the sky – sorry about the somewhat uncouth comparison – will no longer intervene in the affairs of us, underlings because He “Is seeing what our end will be.” (Deuteronomy 31: 17).

This brings me to the recent Gwynne Dyer column in our humble Belleville Intelligencer Daily (in which I wrote a weekly column for 10 years). Its headline was “James Lovelock’s latest book foresees an approaching takeover by robots.”

Dr. Lovelock also predicts the demise of 80% of humanity, reducing the world population to perhaps 1.5 billion ‘humans’, all, by then, also robotic in appearance I suppose.

I agree with this learned man that we are at a cross roads. It’s “do or die” for the human race. No use any longer pretending. Lovelock is right. Humans are grandiosely failing to furnish a cure for the ills of the world. According to this well-known scientist, of GAIA fame, only benevolent, perfectly programmed machines, perfectly equipped with perfect artificial intelligence (A.I), will faultlessly function to make it possible for the best of the human race, carefully selected, of course, based on psychological and other tests, to be able to live (LIVE?) on a mechanical earth.

A tune plays through my head and words, so totally out of wack with Lovelock’s thesis that it almost sounds ludicrous:

Those the LORD has rescued will return. They will enter Zion with singing; everlasting joy will crown their heads. Gladness and joy will overtake them, and sorrow and sighing will flee away.

(Isaiah 51: 11)

We have entered a new phase in the earth, the very last phase, where aware humanity is grappling with the demise of everything that exists, including our very lives. This notion has not yet fully penetrated into humanity and, I presume, never will. What is certain is that nothing, nothing, nothing will be done – or can’t be done – to stop global demise: we have locked ourselves into a mode of life from where there is only one outcome: annihilation. 

What has happened is that we have bet on the wrong god.

Years ago a certain economist, by the name of E. F. Schumacher wrote Small is Beautiful.

In it he said that corporations have become so huge that they overpower democracies by creating a world-wide plutocracy solely geared to serve their own interests. Instead of growth that promotes LIFE, humanity must be subservient to economic GROWTH. And that’s what happened.

This anomaly has come about because we no longer regard ourselves as part of nature but as an outside force destined to dominate and conquer creation: thinking we are gods, superior to nature.

It is this mentality that has brought us where we are today: rather than live on the interest – the income we can derive from creation – we have squandered the capital, and now our irresponsible greed for ever greater economic speed has surpassed the possible limits and collapse is the next phase. That collapse will not only be material: it will involve everything: mental health, physical health, spiritual health, environmental health, economic health, ecological health, geographic health: not one facet of totality will be exempted.     

We simply “believed” that progress would continue forever. We simply “believed” that everything would keep getting better. We simply “believed” that tomorrow, next year, would see more prosperity, more income, more advances. We simply “believed” that the world will be great again.

Now that “faith” has been found wanting; the foundation on which we have built our life is crumbling, and we really don’t know how to handle this situation, this entirely new stage.

By our greedy grossness we have unleashed a monster, a beast so big, a danger so dire that it now dominates us and, instead of the masters we thought to be, we now are the slaves of the forces of nature, totally subject to the wiles of the weather.

Our political systems are not designed or capable to curtail our technological and economic ambitions, hamstrung as they are by our infinite inclination for more.   

James Lovelock is a good example of the perfect technocrat: his solution lies in Artificial Intelligence. We – so he reasons- have intellectually and religiously not kept pace. We have become dumber while only the brains of this world have the capability to find the solution: more technology.

A CRISIS SITUATION. 

Where did we go wrong?

Well, it goes back a long time. It all started with the TREE. We took creation for granted. We forgot that the purpose of life is not domination, but service.

The desecration of creation.

We have abandoned our awe and religious respect for creation. By and large we no longer are religious. By and large we no longer have a sense of anything that’s greater than us that we have to bow our knee to or that we have to humble ourselves before. Religion is something the old people do. Religion is something we do on Sundays for an hour. Perhaps. The number of people who darken the doors of the edifices are rapidly dwindling as they die off and not being replaced: their children and grandchildren don’t understand their rituals.

Part of the myth of progress that we believe in is the notion that we’re evolving beyond religion, but if we don’t have anything that we believe is beyond us then we become destroyers.

Go back we can’t. There’s nothing to go back to. The church preaches a fictional heaven, or Rapture.

So we go our merry way, having exotic vacations, where, thanks to our prosperity we escape to enclaves in a seemingly pristine places, a total illusion of course. We know we can’t go back to the world my grandparents enjoyed: we are trapped. Lovelock’s solution is no solution because he robs us of our humanity.

Here’s a quote from a book I have translated, THE RIDDLE OF LIFE, published by Eerdmans, Grand Rapids.

“Once we more closely have examined what goes on around us (in creation), then instead of mere admiration for the amazing newness of it all, we are struck even more by the unity and order that are evident everywhere, because everything on earth is somehow harmoniously connected to everything else. The one species influences the other and the one creature depends on the other. Plants cannot exist without the earth that feeds them. Animals, on the other hand, cannot function without plants, as these are often the sole source for their food.

The phenomena of day and night, of summer and winter, of rain and drought, of heat and cold, all are part of the grand chain of happenings, depending on where the sun happens to be and from where the wind blows. The one event influences another and yet the one cannot exist without the presence of the other.

By further investigation we discover that the order is one full of

purpose. The great connectedness of all these entities is at the same time the reason why the totality is served by it as well. We don’t even need to explore everything too deeply to discover the amazing fact that behind everything there is an invisible set of laws: that the one as it were serves to complete the other. The butterflies serve the flowers just as much as the flowers serve the butterflies. The sun, that big, beneficial celestial body, which from an immeasurable distance bathes the earth in multicolored splendor, is itself not conscious that from a distance of millions of miles it brings light and warmth. It is the sun that maintains life on earth. It is the sun that causes plants to sprout out of the moist earth. It is the sun that removes mourning and remakes it into merriment. If the sun had a mind of its own, then perhaps it would muse: I shine because that’s my nature: I delight in it; it’s the joy of my life. But it knows not that a Hand mightier than the sun has included it in the beautiful law of serving. Because, unknowingly, that so superior sun serves the tiny, tiny plant that full of life expectancy courageously stretches its stem to absorb its rays.

That little plant cannot think beyond its nature. It winks at the

sun and dreams of the joy that awaits it in a life of light and sunshine. But it has no inkling that it serves just as much as it is served by others. It serves the minuscule seeds it now carries and that later will form new plants. It serves the animal, looking for food, or is needed to help another plant using it as a crutch to climb higher. In manifold ways it serves other creatures that need support or shade or nourishment or moisture.

When we look around us with open eyes and minds, then there

is one thing that time and again touches us to the core: it’s all about serving. The law of serving is at the heart of every creature: it is the overarching purpose for every being. That law makes it possible for the entire world to exist. Every creature may think that it is there only for itself, but in the final analysis it is nothing else but a servant for others. To be alive, to exist at all, finds it destination simply in serving others. Without that law nothing else can be.”

YES, WE ARE THE SERVANTS IN CHIEF!

We are there, not to dominate but to serve. The great example always is Jesus Christ: “For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve others.” (Matthew 20:28)

ATONEMENT.

The people of Israel had a yearly day of ATONEMENT, a day especially set aside with prayer and fasting, to plead with Yahweh the creator, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end, for forgiveness.

Our own sins now are much greater: we have hurt God where it hurts the most: we have totally ruined his work of art.

In the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, God ordained this solemn ritual. “This is to be a lasting ordinance for you: Atonement is to be made once a year for all the sins of the Israelites.” (Leviticus 16: 34).

This was the only time the High Priest was allowed to enter the Holy of Holies, an indication how tremendously important this event was.

Take note: ATONEMENT IS A LASTING ORDINANCE!

Literally our sins cry to heaven. If there ever were a time for repentance, it is now. If the churches have any idea or notion why they are in the world, then a Day of Atonement should be held at least once a month.

Will it happen?

People are desperate. Desperate means “deprived of hope!”

Isn’t HOPE the church’s main message?

JULY 27 2019

DENIAL

In church last Sunday the reading was from Genesis 18. Here’s what it said in part, “Then the LORD appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre in the heat of the day, while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent”.

Two things struck me,

(1) Abraham knew the value of trees, and had settled in the forest. Trees are, next to us, the most important species in the world. Living close to trees ensures longevity and good health. And, indeed, Abraham lived a long time.

(2) Abraham relaxed. He wasn’t sending e-mails, he wasn’t talking on his mobile: he just was sitting there, at ease, perhaps looking at the leaves of the trees, perhaps contemplating their marvelous structure, perhaps day-dreaming, or praying, or recalling certain events in his life, how he had traveled hundreds of miles, away from his ancestral roots. Had there been a conflict then? Perhaps he meditated on the mysterious promise Yahweh had made to him that he’d be the father of many nations with offspring too numerous to count. Perhaps he shook his head a bit, as that promise didn’t seem to materialize at all. Perhaps he had trained himself in emptying his mind so that the Cosmic Resonance could enter, God’s spirit hovering over the universe.

Abraham was 175 years old when he died. I think his long life was due to a multiple of factors: there was no pollution; he lived among trees; no television; he lived close to God and believed his promises; he loved his animals; he was at peace; he was physically active; he meditated a lot, as he did when these three visitors came, whom he welcomed without any prejudice.  

In those days when life was moving at a snail’s pace, if at all, life was lived to the full: the past and the present flowed together. It reminds me of my schooldays from where a phrase pops up, Festina Lente”, translated as “Make Haste slowly.”

THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD

It also reminds me of a book I was re-reading last week: THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD. Why has Dr. Richard Elliott Friedman, professor of Hebrew cast such a spell on me with this book? I think because he so thoroughly knows the Bible, both the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament. He also treats Nietzsche with ultimate fairness, generally a much abused character in ‘religious’ circles.

Here’s what Dr. Friedman, a believing Jew, wrote, “Obviously there is much that the two faiths –Jewry and Christianity – have in common……Both appear to be more concerned with humans learning how to live, both with each other (“love your neighbor as yourself”) and in their relationship to God (“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.”)”.

The very last words in his fascinating book are, “it could well be that the universe is the hidden face of God.”

That makes eminent sense to me: after all we love Bach not as a person, but because of his music. We love van Gogh for the same reason.

If the universe is the hidden face of God – and I believe that – then denying Creation as divine is denying God.

By denying creation, we deny God. How can we love him when we treat trees as a commodity, soil as something to be soiled.

Digging in the soil – as I do often – has curative benefits; gardening has therapeutic results.  

We deny today’s ultimate threat.

Here’s what Dr. Guy McPherson wrote last week in ARCTIC NEWS,

“A catastrophe of unimaginable proportions is unfolding. Life is disappearing from Earth and runaway heating could destroy all life. At 5°C heating, most life on Earth will have disappeared. When looking only at near-term human extinction, 3°C will likely suffice. Study after study is showing the severity of the threat that too many keep ignoring or denying, at the peril of the world at large. Have a look at the following:

Crossing the 2°C guardrail

The image below shows two trends, a long-term trend (blue) and a short-term trend (red) that better reflects El Niño peaks.
(Go to ARCTIC NEWS to see the colored graph. There the red line shows 3C by next year. The blue line by 2016.)

The image confirms an earlier analysis that it could be 1.85°C (or 3.33°F) hotter in 2019 than in 1750. 
June 2019 was the hottest June on record, it was 2.08°C (or 3.74°F) hotter than the annual global mean 1980-2015, which was partly due to seasonal variations.

Back to C. G. Jung, whom I quoted last week also.

He wrote, in “Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Available free on the web):

 “Our souls as well as our bodies are composed of individual elements which were all already present in the ranks of our ancestors. The “newness” in the individual psyche is an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components. Body and soul therefore have an intensely historical character and find no proper place in what is new, in things that have just come into being. That is to say, our ancestral components are only partly at home in such things. We are very far from having finished completely with the Middle Ages, classical antiquity, and primitivity, as our modern psyches pretend.

Nevertheless, we have plunged down a cataract of progress, which sweeps us on into the future with ever wilder violence the farther it takes us from our roots. Once the past has been breached, it is usually annihilated, and there is no stopping the forward motion. But it is precisely the loss of connection with the past, our up-rootedness, which has given rise to the “discontents” of civilization and to such a flurry and haste that we live more in the future and its chimerical promises of a golden age than in the present, with which our whole evolutionary background has not yet caught up.

“We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.

“The less we understand of what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves, and thus we help with all our might to rob the individual of his roots and his guiding instincts, so that he becomes a particle in the mass, ruled only by what Nietzsche called the spirit of gravity.

“Reforms by advances, that is, by new methods or gadgets, are of course impressive at first, but in the long run they are dubious and in any case dearly paid for. They by no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications, which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est – all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say.”

So far a section of Jung’s biography.

We live in denial.

What Jung is saying in his memoirs is that we live in denial.

Denial today is all around us. We have cut off any contact with the past. We have severed the ties with the God of history. We have severed the connection between God and his creation.

It reminds me of Friedrich Nietzsche who was so obsessed with the direction the church was taking that he lost his mind. In his sane years Nietzsche associated madness with the death of God, and with the onset of his own madness.

In Nietzsche’s, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I was struck by one sentence, “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`s rebellion against the church originated from the preaching of the Heaven Heresy, still particularly predominant in the church today. The much maligned Nietzsche was a genius. His father and both his grand fathers were Lutheran preachers, one even a bishop. He was also slated to join the ranks of clergy but, seeing that the church was dead and so concluding that God was dead as well, he changed course and at a very young age became a professor of classical languages. 

Denial.

For those few who are questioning the course we are taking, it would be well to go the YouTube and listen to Paul Beckwith or Guy McPherson or Cambridge professor Dr. Peter Wadhams, all respected climatologists.

By denying the holiness of creation – which almost all church members do – we deny that we ourselves are part of creation and so we cannot experience that our consciousness also consists of the physical structure of the universe. Genesis 1-2 explicitly states that “earth we are and to earth we shall return”. The further we are from creation, the further we are from God.

Cosmic Resonance.

There’s such a thing as ‘cosmic resonance’. Dr. Friedman suggests that this phenomenon may explain how different Bible authors from so many different periods contributed pieces that form such a consistent picture of a gradually diminishing manifest presence of God over many centuries.

The universe is order that is made out of chaos. We are doing the opposite: we are making chaos out of cosmos. It is the “Christian” task to resist that. That’s why J.H. Bavinck in his BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END, a Radical Kingdom Vision, states that “The redemption of creation and redemption of the person go hand in hand: they are two parts of the same coin: you can’t have one without the other.”

We, in our lifestyle, in our day-to-day living deny this. We have painted ourselves in a corner. Today for every bite we eat we need 10 bites of creation-destroying carbon.

We must go back.   

We must go back to a degree of self-sufficiency where we no longer are totally dependent on creation-destroying elements.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer asserts that in everything we must keep the END in mind. He called himself an Anthropos Teleios, a person who always keeps the telos (the Greek word for END) in mind. Jesus himself in the Sermon on the Mount urges us to be Teleios, holistic. (Matthew 5: 48). We are part of the universe and living apart from the cosmos means in essence that we are gods, who do not need God.

We have made ‘idols’ of ourselves: that is the essence of GNOSTICISM, the heresy that the apostle John so forcefully condemns. It is the most dangerous of heresies, because it calls ‘matter’ evil. It so happens that creation is ‘matter’. Gnosticism asserts that salvation is escape from the body, achieved not by faith in Christ but by special knowledge. The Greek word for ‘knowledge’ is gnosis hence Gnosticism.

It is my assertion that all religions that do not practice that Creation as HOLY, are touched by Gnosticism.

It is related in the Bible how the apostle Peter denied the Lord three times. In that he voiced the opinion of all Jesus’ disciples, who, en bloc, where sorely disappointed that Jesus had failed to use his divine powers to free Israel from the Roman oppressor.

I wonder whether we are denying Jesus, whom, says Colossians 1: 15-20, “By whom all things –ta panta- were created, things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible,” when we cause the extinction of much that lives.

I know Jesus forgave Peter his act of denial. I know he will forgive us too, but for Peter it was quite the embarrassing experience. Peter wept bitterly when he realized his denial: he felt genuinely sorry.

I wonder: how will you and I, who live in denial, show our contrition? It is virtually impossible to change our way of life.

Last week I learned a new word: “Akratic”, coined by Aristotle. It means “a person who knows the right thing to do but can’t help doing the opposite”. Hmmm.

JULY 20 2019

HOW GOD DISAPPEARED.

“The less we understand what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves….Our ability to embrace anything new is limited because we are our ancestors and whatever they never knew we can’t make part of our lives.”

                                                                           C.G. Jung

A while ago a woman visited us and she confessed that at times she’d have dreams that caused her to even fall out of bed. My spontaneous answer was that perhaps she was struggling with an issue that had bothered one of her grandparents.

I too have these disturbing dreams where I fight an imaginary attacker and wake up with the sheets and blankets in disarray, sometimes crying out inarticulate noises. Can I blame this on my ancestors? I really don’t know.

My ancestors – let me go back 2 generations, as I have known my 4 grandparents quite well – all were rurally based. My parents were the first ones to settle in the city.

I was the fourth (in 5 years of marriage) of 9 children, so I experienced the birth of 5 of my siblings (there was a three year gap between me and my younger brother).

When a new child was on the way I was often sent to my mother’s parents, small farmers. They had a dozen milk cows, having names just as their children and treated as such. Milked by hand twice per day, with the milk cans placed at the edge of the canal in front of the farm, from where a flat-bottomed vessel, horse-drawn, would pick them up and bring them to the nearby milk processing plant. The same boat would return them, this time the cans full with whey – just for the pigs – and a supply of buttermilk porridge, thick with barley, my favourite dessert, which I was allowed to sweeten with corn syrup.

I vividly remember the trusted gray horse, the rattling wagon, the horse-drawn grass mower, the hay stacked high, and carefully pitched way up in the barn attached to the living quarters.

I should mention that my grandparents had no electricity: the light was provided by beautiful kerosene lamps. Meals were cooked on a woodstove, in a separate small building – the cook-hut – with two compartments, the eating area and the cooking space. I still recall the peculiar aroma emanating from this building.

Water was pumped from the cistern. Sunday meals where in the dining room where most of the time was spent. Only on special occasions was the living room used, with also had a built-in bed where my grandparents slept. After the noon meal my grandfather would have a nap, sitting in the chair, black cap lowered over the eyes.

When I was there I slept in the attic, right under the rafters, accessible by a steep staircase with shining treads, slippery on my stocking feet and no railing.

All this made eating and living conditions no different from 100, even 300 years ago. The only modern item were the bikes, sturdy 3 speeds.

A large vegetable garden – mostly potatoes – a bunch of chickens, a pig or two which provided the bacon and roasts, milk and cream and butter all home-made, as well as jams and bread:  totally self-sufficient existence, totally carbon free. My parental grandfather, a grocer, in his horse-drawn two-wheeled wagon, basically a box on wheels, came occasionally to barter coffee, tea, sugar and other essentials for eggs, so that little money was needed to maintain a healthy life.

Both my grandfathers were elders in the local church a few kilometers away, a church seating some 300 people, and full every Sunday twice: 10 a.m. and 2.30 p.m. When my grandfather felt sleepy in church, he would stand up.

The church also was the centre of midweek entertainment: my uncle Klaas was still single in the 1930’s and was a member of the brass band, while my aunt had her women’s group. Smaller children attended Sunday School. Teenagers had their own young people societies. Occasionally there were entertainment evenings where everybody was expected to contribute, a poem or a skit, a duet or some other musical contribution.

During the fall and winter these elders each week visited their assigned families, focusing their visits on their spiritual lives.

Yes, all this I vividly remember: another age, a totally different sort of life, sustainable in the real sense, as it had been for centuries: a God-fearing life, living close to creation, completely dependent on the weather and on blessings from on high. Two prayers were offered at each meal, spoken in high Dutch, as if the Lord could not understand the local dialect.

All this continued during the war 1940-45. When I visited the farm then, the area teemed with young men hiding from the Germans. My Opa died in 1940 and my uncle took over. He then housed and fed 4 extra young men, as all males over 18 were supposed to work in Germany.  

Small farming then saw its final glory days, growing potatoes, raising grains, providing milk and butter and eggs, feeding the city population, who were deprived of its regular supplies due to the German occupiers grabbing all the available food sources for its military machine and its own population back in Germany.

A sudden change.

Then, in the 1950’s and 1960’s it all changed: The automobile appeared and God disappeared at the dawn of the consumer society: the God-Creator died and the god-Carbon took its place. The ways of old were abandoned including The WAY, the TRUTH and the LIFE.

My uncle Klaas emigrated to Canada in 1951: his horse could not compete with tractors and his scythe was no match for a combine. A cousin took over the farm and built a large broiler facility housing some 40,000 chickens: industrial farming had come.

From the mid 1950’s to the year 2019, some 70 years of rural life disappeared. Land holdings expanded, farm labour no longer needed, farm hands drifted to the cities or emigrated, small businesses closed shop, the baker and butcher, the grocer and tailor, the druggist and florist, they all slowly faded away as greater choice and cheaper products were available in the larger centers, reached by carbon-based cars, while the small homesteads were sold to commuters, who needed Sunday shopping.

THE OIL WE EAT, THE GOD WE ABANDONED

The four laws of ecology come to mind: (1) no free lunch; (2) Nature knows best; (3) nothing disappears; (4) everything is connected to everything else.

Special as we humans are, we get no exemptions from these rules.

The automobile, the word derived from the Greek autos= self, and the Latin ‘mobilis’ which means ‘easy to move’, provided the tank is full of liquid carbon.

When the war broke out in 1939, Germany had no direct access to oil wells: in Europe they were in the Caucasus, in Southern Russia. That’s why Hitler launched his assault there. Once he was rebuffed, his war was lost.

Then the USA was the leading oil producer, with Esso, Texaco, Chevron, Sunoco the main companies. When the war finished in 1945, the millions of discharged soldiers, having witnesses how oil won the war put their trust in its magic powers, both in farming and in subdivisions: the auto-age the result. Oil was cheap: pennies per gallon.

So the laws of ecology were suspended: and “in Oil we trust” became the national slogan. God’s law that “Everything is there to serve everything else, and we are the servants in chief”, was overruled: now the only law reigned, “Creation is there to serve us.”

Primary Productivity

Yet there remained something called “Primary Productivity,” referring to the degree to which plants and algae convert energy.   Thanks to our voracious appetite, our insatiable thirst for ‘things’, we drowned out everything else, consuming now as much as 70 percent of all there is: trees, soil, oxygen, water, depriving everything else from being there, asserting ourselves as gods at the expense of God’s creation.

We, the almost 8 billion of us greedy customers, are simply stealing the food, so that nothing else can flourish, hence mammals, fish, all else dies, including the rain forests to grow soya beans to feed our methane-belching cattle.

Here’s a piece of irony. Look at Iowa.

Iowa is almost all fields now. Not too long ago- perhaps 150 years, when my grandparents were born – Iowa was prairie, with 2 meters of topsoil. Millions of buffalo grazed there to their hearts content, the native “Indian” killing the occasional animal for the meat, the hide and used the rest for some other utility.

Then the white man came, saw the golden soil and used it to grow corn and soya beans to feed that same number of animals, domesticated cattle, for meat, using oil to accomplish this. Utter foolishness!

We now eat OIL.

Where before there was an organic food chain, perpetual sustainable, where the prairie through solar energy converted mass to flowers and roots and stems, building up into a rich repository of plant energy, we used fertilizer, pesticides, whatever, after plowing away the prairie grass, to grow corn.

Now we have a problem. We are re-discovering that there is: (1) no free lunch; (2) Nature knows best; (3) nothing disappears; (4) everything is connected to everything else, but like the fools we are, we are redoubling the efforts, expecting different results.

Enter Climate Change.

What we have done is plain robbery. Hydrocarbons, trust fund of sorts, built up over many thousands of years, we have ripped from the earth and burned in such phenomenal quantities that even the immense oceans and the astronomical skies have become affected, turning from friendly organs to deadly enemies.

Having alienated the planet, we have banned God from creation. God, seeing that humanity broke the ancient COVENANT, as described in Genesis 9, left humanity to its devices, so that now 1John 5: 19 is in full force, “The whole world is under the control of the evil one, as well as Deuteronomy 31: 17, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”

There’s where we are at this point. God has withdrawn, the God of even 70-80 years ago, before Adolf Hitler came to power, has retreated from his creation, and we are on our own, a frightful situation.

The last 90 years.

Since 1928, the year of my birth, this world’s population has almost quadrupled, now nearing the EIGHT billion mark, and that at the precise moment when everything is under threat.   

A bit of history.

In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. Today the grinding, milling, wetting, drying, and baking of a breakfast cereal requires about four calories of energy for every calorie of food energy it produces, but by adding transportation the food-processing industry in the United States uses about ten calories of fossil-fuel energy for every calorie of food energy it produces.

That means our food = oil: 10 oil calories to produce ONE food calorie. Add to that the fuel used by millions of people driving to thousands of super discount stores on the edge of town, where the land is cheap, and the ratio is even higher, counting in the waste.

“The less we understand what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves….Our ability to embrace anything new is limited because we are our ancestors and whatever they never knew we can’t make part of our lives.”

By and large we are oblivious to what’s happening. We have left God, and embraced suicidal oil.

We can’t go back to the old, carbon-neutral world, no matter what politicians claim. We have unloosened the Devil, and must face the consequences. As the Guardian reported last week, “The true cost of cheap, unhealthy food is a spiraling public health crisis and environmental destruction.

Our fathers and forefathers consciously lived by the grace of God. They could not imagine a different situation. Today the God concept is gone. By making all of creation subservient to us, we have eliminated God in the process. Churches, by and large, have succumbed to pious secularism, confining God to one hour on Sunday, basically a meaningless exercise.

Deuteronomy 31: 17 bears repeating, “I shall hide my face from them. I shall see what their end will be.”

JULY 13 2019

EVERYTHING BETTER IS BOUGHT AT THE PRICE OF SOMETHING WORSE.

That is a quote from C. G. Jung, the great psycho-analyst who died in 1961. You want an example? Our adored automobile is an immense improvement over the horse and buggy, but the price? Climate Calamity.

There’s another Jung statement that struck me: “The less we understand what our fathers and forefathers sought, the less we understand ourselves….Our ability to embrace anything new is limited because we are our ancestors and whatever they never knew we can’t make part of our lives.”

Having lost the link to our ancestors, there’s nothing left to hold on: we have lost our anchor. The result is utter disdain for the natural world, loss of religious belief, rootlessness and global disaster.

Take Trees.

New research by two Russian scientists, Makarieva and Gorshkov has shown that there is such a concept as a biotic pump. They discovered that the ecosystem controls the Earth’s climate in a much deeper and stronger way than commonly believed: our forests are immense machines that pump water away from the oceans to the land. Forests, especially the Amazon Rain Forests are needed, not just trees, not just grass, not just pastures, not just cultivated fields. Only and only fully grown forests keep the machine running and provide the biosphere with the water it needs.

By now we know all too well that humans are destroying the world’s forests. We keep eliminating the things that make us live. Trees make us live and keep us healthy and wise.

It reminds me of that beautiful line in the Bible’s very last chapter, “The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” (Revelation 22: 2.)

Let me start with ‘nations.’ When in Matthew 28: 19 Jesus gives us the Great Commission, the same word ‘nations’ is used. It actually does not refer to individual countries, but to everything connected to people, such as races, sexes, ethnic and faith communities, economic classes, families, and tribes.

Thus “the leaves of the trees are for the healing of all humans in the world”, and also applies to the world itself, because humans and earth are one.

FOREST BATHING

This past week our oldest son gave me an amazing book to read: FOREST BATHING, by Dr. Qing Li, an associate professor of medicine at the Nippon medical school in Tokyo. I immediately ordered 5 copies of the book for our church’s Environmental Team. I also engaged one of our grandsons, an arborist to make some trails through the pine forest I planted some 35 years ago. Especially coniferous trees, such as pine, spruce and cedar generate a lot of oxygen and also emit such elements as “Phytoncides”. The word “Phytoncide” comes from the Greek ‘phyton= plant’ and ‘cides = kill’. These trees exhale these substances and so protect them from insects, bacteria and fungi. Through these chemicals they also communicate with other trees. Their concentration is the highest when the temperature is 30 degrees Celsius.

The learned doctor discovered that exposure to phytoncides increases the NK = Natural Killers count, which, he suspects, have anti-cancer effects. Yes, the leaves of the trees are healing agents, but our entire lifestyle enhances the tree- killing syndrome.

I read last week that 170 million trees in California alone are fallen victim to a voracious beetle and an Asian fungus. A few years ago, in urban Texas the prolonged heat there killed more than five million shade trees, and an additional half-billion trees in parks and forests. In the Amazon, prolonged severe droughts are killing many billions more in the rain forests, while the new right-wing government in Brazil is determined to clear more rainforests there to accommodate agriculture.

Should I mention Forest Fires?

Every tree that dies or burns adds to Global Warming. You may have noticed that Alaska has never been hotter: 35 C!!. These high temperatures there are also warming up the water of rivers, causing warm water to flow into the seas around Alaska, while the many fires there are causing soot to be deposited on mountains and sea ice, further speeding up the demise of the snow and ice cover in the Arctic.

Dying trees mean a dying planet. There is no doubt in my mind that ‘the creative destruction’ of capitalism will persist to its bitter end, when money, the all-consuming Mammon, will have accomplished what has been Satan’s aim from the beginning: to destroy God’s creation.

Just as Jesus had to go through death to achieve life, the Bible tells us that creation too has to go through death to achieve life, and this time we humans are the cause.

The New Testament, in 2 Peter 3: 10, makes clear that the days of the world are counted and that the end will come unexpectedly: “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 everything in it will be laid bare.”

So, let me go back to that poetic sounding sentence in the Bible’s very last chapter:

“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

The last two chapters of the bible, Revelation 21 and 22, picture a world where, as yet, no humans are present. But there are trees, lots of them.

The Garden of Eden had an identical development: everything there had to be in perfect shape before humans could appear. It is my argument that prior to the saints’ arrival in the new creation to come, the presence of trees will be instrumental for them to enter a virginal, pristine, unpolluted planet. I believe that the earth must first go through a recuperating process with trees as the primary agents of healing, because, basically, there is nothing wrong with God’s world that time – and the absence of sinful humans – cannot heal. And time is immaterial for the Lord for whom ONE day is as a thousand years.

We know about forest fires: they are a natural phenomenon, needed to rejuvenate forests, because a fire will kill the old and sick and bring to life the buried seeds. Peter was right about the all-consuming fire. For the new creation to come, our worn-out world needs a total conflagration to reveal the new to come, and trees play an enormous role in this process.

For that purpose a closer examination of what trees do is necessary.

We all know that trees are the lungs of the world. For humans to have one hundred percent pure air and ‘live forever’ a totally clean environment is required: hence the need for the new world to be fully filled with forests of trees.

Trees are more than oxygen providers. The tree’s underground system is as important as its foliage: the roots and its capillaries are just as essential for the welfare of the earth as the more visible branches, because a tree stands in its own decomposition. Much of the tree sheds its own weight many times over to earth and air, eventually becoming grass, fungus, and promoting the life of insects, birds and mammals. It is the cooperation of these many ‘by-products’ that make a tree so rich – they exist because of the tree, belong with it and function as part of it.

Birds nest, squirrels burrow and eat fungus, and insects prune and assist in decomposing the surplus leaves and activate essential soil bacteria. Animals are messengers to the tree and trees act as a garden for animals. This is an excellent example of life depending on life. A tree is a total being that involves minerals, plants, animals, debris and life. All of these elements make up the ‘tree cooperative’. All this has to be in place before the saints are coming home.

“The leaves of the trees are for the healing of the human population and for the earth itself.”

The leaves absorb the CO2 that has now made our weather so unpredictable and even deadly. The new earth, covered with healthy trees will completely heal the earth and clean the air, making it the perfect place for the ‘redeemed of the Lord, who will enter singing’ (Isaiah 35: 10) on the way to embrace their new abode.

So what about these leaves? Leaves have twice the specific heat capacity as soil, meaning plants can be about 9 degrees Celsius warmer than their surrounding environment. Consequently trees moderate extreme temperatures and humidity so it is tolerable enough to accommodate life. The leaves catch the rain, some of which the tree absorbs, and the remainder returns to the air through evaporation. Any rain that falls through the canopy has, on its way down, collected plant cells and nutrients and is much richer than regular rainwater. This through-fall is then directed to shallow roots, and serves all the needs of growth in that forest. Therefore trees use, collect, enrich and properly direct water so it can best be used in the forest system without human intervention.

Trees are not just here to convert carbon dioxide to oxygen for us to breathe. Their purpose reaches much farther. Trees fight drought, prevent soil erosion, stabilize earth, shade us from sun, are key in the conservation of water, provide us with heat, control the effects of wind, provide shelter for animals and encourage biodiversity and nutrients for soil. God created trees because the trees are life.

Yes, the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

Trees are not only for the earth: the seas too benefit as do the inland streams. Revelation 22: 2 again: “at each side of the river stood the Tree of Life.”  

Decades ago, Katsuhiko Matsunaga, a marine chemist at Hokkaido University in Japan, discovered that when tree leaves decompose, they leach acids into the ocean that help fertilize plankton. When plankton thrives, so does the rest of the food chain. Fishermen have planted trees along coasts and rivers to bring back fish and oyster stocks. And they have returned.

Before the humans return to paradise, trees have to clean it for them. Trees are nature’s water filters, capable of soaking up the most toxic wastes, including explosives, solvents and organic wastes, largely through a dense community of microbes around the tree’s roots that clean water in exchange for nutrients, a process known as phyto-remediation. Tree leaves also filter air pollution: indeed the leaves of the tree are cosmic healers!

So it makes perfect sense that the Bible starts with the Tree of Life, ends with the Tree of Life and has at its centre the Tree of Golgotha where our eternal life was assured. These three ‘trees’ are symbols of all trees explaining that simple sentence in the last chapter of the Bible which says:

“The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”

Here’s an interesting note: In the 17^th Century a Japanese delegation visited the Netherlands to investigate Christianity there. Reading FOREST BATHING I can understand why they rejected its Calvinist version. The merchants in the Dutch Golden Age lived by commerce, hauling trees from Sweden, slaves from Africa, gold from South America.

Here is a quote from that book, “Nature is not separate from mankind in Japanese culture. It is part of us. And the need to keep the two in harmony can be seen in every aspect of life, from the design of gardens that incorporate the natural landscape to the design of houses that blur inside and outside by means of translucent paper screens……….We are all connected to nature, emotionally, spiritually and physically.”

Who has the correct approach, the stern Dutch, dealers in timber, or the Japanese, lovers of timber?

It seems to me that we are going full circle. In the beginning the earth was fully covered with trees, as TREES were LIFE, assuring long, long lives.

Now, a denuded earth has become a death trap, as trees and their benefits are disappearing, making us yearn for their healing powers. The vanishing forests are finally focusing us to acknowledge how all of creation is of divine origin, while appreciating the healing power of TREES.

EVERYTHING BETTER IS BOUGHT AT THE PRICE OF SOMETHING WORSE. However there’s one exception: with Jesus’ sacrifice, his death on the cross, he brought about the new creation, making everything better: the price too was something better: RESURRECTION AND LIFE ETERNAL.

July 6 2019

SINGING

There’s one text I remember from a sermon, although I can’t recall what the female preacher exactly said. Here it is:

“Then Jehoshaphat consulted with the people and appointed those who would sing to the LORD and praise the splendor of His holiness. As they went out before the army, they were singing:

“Give thanks to the LORD,

for His loving devotion endures forever.”

The moment they began their shouts and praises, the LORD set ambushes against the men of Ammon, Moab, and Mount Seir who had come against Judah, and they were defeated.” 

Guts and faith

It takes guts and faith to meet the enemy not with swords and spears, not with bows and slings, but simply with song. That happens when we listen to the people, because democracy was at work here. The story says that the king first deliberated with the people. Jehoshaphat took counsel with the nation and together they decided to tackle the problem in a unique way: rather than blindly attack, somebody suggested something different: let those who can sing, men and women, come forward and face the enemy while praising the Lord in song.

That calls for a lot of trust. The beauty here is that the people decided: it was not a command dictated by the king, who actually had absolute power.  

Picture the scene here: God’s people are under attack. A mighty army has invaded the Holy Land. The people of Israel basically are farmers who know how to grow food and look after cattle, but fighters they are not. Once a year they all gather in Jerusalem in that grandiose temple built by Solomon in all his glory: a magnificent structure. When they walk there from every corner of the nation, they travel by foot, and you know what they do? They sing all the way. There’s always a person who plays the flute or strings a guitar equivalent, making traveling easier. Yes, that’s what they are good at: Singing, not fighting. Psalm 100 comes to mind:

Make a joyful noise to the LORD,

all the earth.

Serve the LORD with gladness;

come into His presence with joyful songs.

Know that the LORD is God.

It is He who made us, and we are His;a

we are His people, and the sheep of His pasture.

Enter His gates with thanksgiving

and His courts with praise;

give thanks to Him and bless His name.

For the LORD is good,

and His loving devotion endures forever;

His faithfulness continues to all generations.

People in those days lived by memory and storytelling. No books or TV. That’s how the Old Testament was preserved for us. And memorizing a poem was easier when it was given a tune. 

Singing

There’s something peculiar about singing: it binds the people together. Armies not too long ago marched on the tune of martial melodies. When, on May 10 1940, the German army occupied my hometown, they sang. The Russian Army has a famous male choir, well-known for its great performances. Yes, singing is universal.

 In my book, DAY WITHOUT END, I discovered lots of instances of singing. In Chapter 3, after meeting with my guardian angel, Cornelius, who is there when I wake up in the new creation, the first thing I do is,

“I start to sing, beginning a scale as low as I can manage and rising easily two, almost three octaves. My voice is pure and beautiful, or so it sounds to me. But, then, perhaps, in my exalted state, am I prone to exaggerate? So what?”

And then the next sentence is,

“Suddenly I stop singing, sensing that my voice has awakened the universe. As if shaken out of a deep sleep, I now hear the birds in the trees, the bees in the fields, the wind in the branches, the hum of the insects all tuned in a perfect harmony, singing to our God, Creator and Father.

“And then, as if on cue, the world comes alive. Out of nowhere, it seems people emerge: people, people, everywhere….I fall in line with women and men clad in colourful clothes that reflect their personalities and their traditions.

“Spontaneous singing wells up, starting at first as a song without words, resembling the humming of bees or the purring of kittens or the blowing of the wind in the trees. I raise my voice and strange, inarticulate tones emerge, melodious but wordless, resembling the wailing of sirens, the “all is safe” sign at the end of an air raid, a long extended sigh of solace.”

That’s how I described one scene in my book. I then continue on a personal note. Clarification: Melodia is the angel in charge of music. She was the one who organized the event that took place in the fields when the shepherds were told about the birth of Jesus.

Here she distributes sheet music. I continue citing my book:

“I have always loved singing. As a baby I hummed in my crib, my mother told me, and music has always been a part of my life. So, of course, I am ready to join Melodia as are many others. Our entire group comes over, some more out of curiosity than real interest in singing, and joins a group of about one hundred people. Melodia positions herself so that she is visible and audible to all.

“I return to my place and look over my part. Arctica is standing next to me. She has never participated in a choir before and has never sung from a score. However, the music is written in such a way that when the correct note is hit, the musical note glows a bit indicating the proper pitch. I find this a fantastic way of teaching both the untrained and those like me who have had a life-long exposure to choirs and singing. At first hesitantly, but with increasingly confidence, we try out our parts and with enthusiastic encouragement and participation from the notes on the sheets we soon sound quite professional.”

Later in the book, our group of 4, Arctica, Initia, Jethro and I, Novissimus, find ourselves in Africa, where we attend a concert, with Jesus, who is black, at the drums.

“Long after the concert is over, the singing-sounds within me continue. To me singing is worship and worship means singing. Now singing is embedded in the new creation. The song of creation is always audible.”

Read the entire book. Go to “Bert Hielema: Day without End.”

The Bible has many passages referring to singing. Matthew 26: 30 relates how after the last supper Jesus and the disciples “sang a song and went out to the Mount of Olives.” Yes, the last thing they do is ‘sing’, before that fateful night.

Singing has always been a part of my life. As a youngster, 6 years old, I was part of a large children choir. Our grade school teacher loved music and singing was a daily affair. As a teenager I was in the school choir, and later in life was instrumental in starting a male choir. Even today my only tenor voice has a place in our church choir.

In my youth singing was part of daily life. As a family we would assemble around the pump organ and sing. During the 5 year war 1940-45 after the Sunday meal, attended by some dozen people, our own family and always visitors, we would have a pretty standard repertoire of psalms my father liked, always ending with “The Wilhelmus van Nassau” the Dutch National Hymn.

Even today, as I write, there always is a song in my mind.

But back to choirs.

I believe being a member of a choir is an enlightening, communal experience. It requires a set of skills and enhances them.

Let me enumerate them as they come to mind.

Singing is an exercise in community. When I sing, I have to listen to the other singers, and not try to dominate but blend in so that the song becomes a harmonious entity. Also I breathe in deeply and exhale, which clears my lungs and gives health benefits. I must engage my brain by reading the notes and obtain the right pitch. Reading notes and listening to music is itself an enriching experience. Listening to music is an aesthetic exercise and makes a person wiser and adds to the lifespan. Being part of a group is a natural human trait, so much neglected in today’s individualistic society.

Yes, singing is universal: it is found in all cultures and, despite protestations of tone deafness, the vast majority of people can sing. Singing also often occurs in collective contexts: think about sports stadiums, religious services and birthday celebrations.

We now also know that feeling sufficiently socially connected guards against physical and mental illness, and increases longevity.

Singing bonds.

Few other activities have such great social benefits as singing together. While we sing our voices blend, and harmony is the result. I like that word ‘harmony’. It is more than a musical expression, that too because it adds beauty to the whole, but harmony does more: it spreads shalom, it enhances the human psyche, it – in church singing especially – is the only way the people of God are allowed to directly participate in worship.

 Bottom of Form

Singing bonds: it has an ice-breaker effect. People reveal themselves more quickly and, I have read, fall in love more easily when singing together. Singing is a form of promiscuity, in the good sense: our breaths mingle, as we suck in the ecclesiastical essence, and find pleasure in vocalizing our faiths.

Sometimes, when the words of the hymn move me, I choke up and stop singing. Sometimes when the words are overly pietistic or even gnostic, I don’t argue as I used to do when my displeasure came out in the open. Today I am mellowed, shrug my shoulders at the words that offend my understanding of the Bible or my notion what faith is all about in these last days. “Onward Christian Soldiers”, or “By the sea of Crystal”, or “Pilgrim through this barren land”, come to mind: nice tunes, terrible words.   

“When truth is replaced by silence, then silence is the lie”, I read last week.

There’s so much that is untrue in the church, that harping on it would be my constant occupation, so, perhaps my silence is a lie. God will forgive me.

I started out with

“Then Jehoshaphat consulted with the people and appointed those who would sing to the LORD and praise the splendor of His holiness. As they went out before the army, they were singing:

“Give thanks to the LORD,

     for His loving devotion endures forever.”

Just picture these singers, these courageous women and men, singing their hearts out, even as they are shaking in their boots, because what if……..

There’s magic in crowds. It only takes a few courageous leaders to instill confidence in the wavering mass.

So, what is my lesson for this week?

We, the church, the people of God, are again in mortal peril. Today it is no just that a few tribes are out to get us: the entire world conspires against the Truth, preferring the lie of constant economic growth and ever increasing standard of living, instead of facing the truth of Our Finite Earth, now on the brink of Collapse.

Jesus warned the people of his days- and, of course, us today – to be true to the circumstances of their time. He said, “We sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.” (Matthew 11: 17). To be truly human, we have to lament when sorrow strikes, and rejoice when good things happen.

And today? Today death is all around us: dying whales, slaughtered elephants, disappearing insects, forests aflame, the earth quaking everywhere, the Arctic melting, young people perishing from overdoses, lies tolerated. Where is the dirge, the plaint of mourning?

Today more than ever, our song must be two-fold: lament for all that is dying due to our cruelty and also songs of praise for what is coming: the glorious new creation, now being prepared for those who mourn the state of the earth and live in the expectation of the New Earth to come.

June 29 2019

THE END OF RELIGION?

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” Luke 18: 8.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in his introduction to his book on CREATION, basically an explanation of Genesis 1-3, the first Bible book, writes, “The church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”

Isn’t that curious?

And he is not alone in this.  Stanley Hauerwas, Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke University, in his APPROACHING THE END, makes an identical statement, when he starts his book with, “When I begin to think about what I should say about creation, the title “The End is in the Beginning” immediately comes to mind.

And then there is another voice that utters similar sounds, albeit from a different angle, but equally with the End is mind. Dr. J.H. Bavinck in his book on REVELATION, the last book of the Bible, wrote, and I translate, “Under the force of constant hammer blows, still raining upon this pseudo world, humanity finally becomes the humanity it was meant to be in the most detestable sense of the word. It becomes the real human, that is the rebel, the prisoner, the doubting, the unconverted.

“World history, stripped bare from all pretenses, is not simply a record of events: it is nothing else than that through all these happenings, through prosperity and adversity, through wars and peace, through increase in knowledge and culture, through all this and more, in the end everything becomes what it always has been. (My emphasis). That’s why the Kingdom of the Son of man, the reign of Christ who is Humanity Personified, can only come when the Kingdom of the Beast has had the entire world in his grasping hands.”

So Bavinck too states that the end is in the beginning.

In essence Bavinck says that before Christ returns the TRUE image of humanity will be revealed in all its depravity, in all its god-forsaken state of mind, in all its sinful condition, plainly evident today in our dealing with creation, God’s precious masterpiece. This indicates that we travel from Chaos to Cosmos, from Cosmos to Chaos, from Beginning to the End.

Yes, the End is in the Beginning.

The Bible starts with the three words, “In the Beginning”. Then continues, “The earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” Chaos, in other words, no sense of order, no structure whatsoever, yet, somehow, in the back ground, God’s Spirit is there.

Now that we are approaching the End, we are starting to see the same initial conditions: Climate Calamity, widespread destruction, water shortages, droughts and floods, rumors of war, looming epidemics, 95% of the arable soil contaminated… and the list goes on. Our End is like the Beginning, when through prosperity and adversity, through wars and peace, through increase in knowledge and culture, through all this and more, in the end everything will become what it always has been: chaos.

Also “In the beginning” humanity was so godless that God was compelled to make a new start with Noah and his family. He also vouched not to destroy the world again, fully well knowing that perverse humanity would cause its own destruction in the end, allowing for a New Beginning.

We are at that stage now.

Today chaos is universal. Even the vast oceans, covering 70 percent of the earth, are saturated with plastic particles. All the earth and air …….No, I don’t have to start listing all the ills in the world. I take great comfort from my daily Bible reading, and am especially intrigued by Matthew 24 where Jesus warns to be vigilant: The American Religion regards Trump as a demi-god, seen as appointed by God to deliver America from the godless Democrats. Matthew 24: 10-11 points to this, “At that time many will fall away and will betray one another and hate one another. Many false prophets will arise and will mislead many.” Yes, Trump is a false prophet.

Stephen L. Carter, law professor at Yale, in his book, THE CULTURE OF DISBELIEF, writes, “America’s civil religion portrays its people, often in comparison with people in other countries, as God-fearing souls, as champions of religious liberty, and in many instances as a nation God has consciously chosen to carry out a special mission in the world. (But) America’s civil religion consists of platitudes. They have no religion except a theology of “America First”.

That “America First” theology is sharply accentuated in Trump’s Campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” That speaks to the American “Christian” mind”, an altogether pagan notion, which has nothing to do with Christ and his core message, “Seek First the Kingdom of God”, which essentially means “to seek the welfare of Creation, God’s work of art and his precious masterpiece”. Exactly the opposite is the aim of Trump’s America.

Dr. Harold Bloom, America’s foremost literary critic and Hebrew Scholar, in his THE AMERICAN RELIGION, subtitled The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation, writes that “We think we are a Christian nation, but we are not…..The American stands outside creation, Gnostics, believers in individual divinity.”

Now that we see THE END OF NATURE, we also see THE END OF CHRISTIANITY. The love for creation has disappeared as we have shaped a society totally dependent on its destruction. Whatever we do leads to greater annihilation. This simply means that with every action we destroy God and with it the Christian Religion, the two go hand in hand.

That’s why Dietrich Bonhoeffer is important today. In his essay, “Thy Kingdom Come”, he writes, “Christianity is neither an archaic replica of the heavenly world nor a cluster of sacred shrines and hallowed sanctuaries, magic escape routes from earthly turmoil. Rather the Christian is to live faith as much in the marketplace and factory as at church altars. Faith is thus to be embedded in the way each Christian becomes strong in his or her service of EARTH and its PEOPLE……………..(But) We are Christian at the expense of the earth….We cannot bear having the earth so near……However Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world to other world beyond: rather he gives us back to the earth as its loyal children….We have fallen into SECULARISM, and by secularism I mean pious Christian secularism, the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the EARTH”

Here’s what Bonhoeffer says about the church, “The function of the church is to witness to the resurrection of Christ from the dead, to the end of the law of death of this world that stands under the curse, and to the power of God in the new creation.”

The church has totally failed on that score and has aided the Evil One.

Bonhoeffer sees John 3: 16 as today’s most important Bible text: “God so loved the cosmos that he gave his most precious Son to buy it back from the Satan”. 1John 5: 19 explicitly states that today, now, this very moment, while you read this, the Prince of this world, THE EVIL ONE, is in charge. And he holds sway, also over the church which, by and large, sees HEAVEN as the destination of its people.

Last week, as a caregiver, I had a meeting with other caregivers in a new nearby Baptist church. Of course I inspected the facilities, and in its news stand found a pamphlet on heaven. No surprise. The last words my oldest brother in the Netherlands who attended a conservative church, said to me, “See you in heaven.”

John 3:13 explicitly states that, “No one has ever gone into heaven except the one who came from heaven–the Son of Man.” “The Son of Man” is Jesus, the Son of God. He alone, nobody else, not you nor your pious parents nor the saints of old, will go to heaven or have gone to heaven: only Jesus did, from where he will return to announce and accomplish and establish The New Earth, the re-configured Garden of Eden.

THE END OF RELIGION.

What is meant by religion?

Religion involves the human psyche which makes it a complex phenomenon. The simple explanation is that all humans are religious beings, in the same way that we are sexual beings. Just as sexuality is going through a final phase, religion too is under constant debate. There really is no scientific consensus about the question, “What is the definite definition of ‘religion’”? Some point to the three Abrahamic ones, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, while others include Hinduism, Buddhism, Humanism, Shintoism, actually any “ism”.    

Andrew Sullivan tells me that, “Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized husk of a society.”

He writes, “By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning, a meaning that cannot really be defended without recourse to some transcendent value, undying “Truth” or God (or gods).”

He continues, “Which is to say, even today’s atheists are expressing an attenuated form of religion. Their denial of any God is as absolute as others’ faith in God, and entails just as much a set of values to live by — including, for some, daily rituals like meditation, a form of prayer.”

Bavinck also believed that the religious impulse of humanity would not disappear, not even with increasing secularity in the West.

He wrote this about 70 years ago. Since then a lot has changed, witness the advent of Television and the Computer, with all its technical gadgets.

Bavinck essentially took a psychological view. He could not foresee the immense changes in today’s society, where Trump is seen as appointed by God to lead America, where the mainline churches are aging rapidly, which basically means that the official Christian view is disappearing.  

Observing society in the Western world today, I must conclude that God has become a stranger in his world, even among the church which basically has become gnostic: God-consciousness has disappeared.

So, yes, religion is still out there, in the sense of “The Search for Meaning”, the name of a book by Viktor Frankl. Many still search, trying to come to grips with what’s happening in the world. Many more purposely ignore the signs, and close their minds to the dire state of affairs, especially climate-wise. But, as Freud has observed, “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive, and will come forth later, in uglier ways”.

These unexpressed emotions also apply to religious feelings, which suppressed, result in pronounced religious antagonism.

And Jesus?

Jesus did not advocate religion: he brought us LIFE and that to the full. Religion? He was thrown out of the Nazareth synagogue – his hometown. In the Jerusalem temple he chased out all the money changers. There he also argued with the religious leaders, calling them blind guides, who lead the people astray, and adders, who poison their minds. And finally, the church of his day killed him. No, Jesus was no friend of religion.

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” Yes, there’ll be lots of faith, but not in Christ’s Kingdom to come.

The late Dr. Evan Runner, professor of Philosophy at Calvin College taught me that “All of Life is Religion”

I believe that to be true. Its consequence is that Religion disappears and becomes anonymous with life, with oxygen, with air, with everything that exists. That’s why Revelation 21: 22 points to The New Jerusalem, and tells us that there is no temple there.

In the New Creation there is no need for Religion, because then LIFE is religion. Every action, all our thinking, will be geared toward the glorification of God and the beautification of his created word. That’s why the Bible will disappear. Then the Word will be in our hearts.

That’s how we have to live TODAY, even though it means the end of religion but not of worship!