Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

MAY 18 2019

FATE OR PREDESTINATION?

Last week I read an intriguing interview with Dr. Hannah Critchlow. She broached a topic that has fascinated me for a long time: the matter of METANOIA, the Greek word for MIND-CHANGE. Of course she did not mention metanoia, but the concept definitely was there. , funded by readers

In her new book, THE SCIENCE OF FATE, the Cambridge professor, a neuroscientist, examines the role of fate in our lives. She asserts that much of our life is predetermined at birth, which diminishes the extent how much we are in control of our destiny: “Once you build up a perception of the world, you will ignore any information to the contrary.”

She writes, “It threads through different cultures and is deeply rooted in the way that we speak today; for instance, we often say that babies are born destined for greatness…. The genes, the basic neural circuitry that acts as foundation for his life is already there.”

Dr. Critchlow writes that anxiety, obesity, depression and addictive behavior have all been revealed to have a quite high hereditary basis. But of course, all these behaviors may be amplified and reinforced by the decisions of our parents.

She also confirms something that I have learned in life: “opposites attract”.

Another angle.

My spouse became a Master Grapho-Analyst and in a course, taught by a priest who had a doctorate in psychology, also a grapho-analyst, he taught the same concept that ‘opposites attract’. This also was based on personality types, already discovered by the ancient Greeks: (1) the choleric; (2) the sanguine; (3) the melancholic; and (4) the phlegmatic.

This priestly doctor renamed the 4 classes as (1) elephant, (2) butterfly, (3) frog, and (4) turtle. We have 5 married children, all in long-time stable relationships, and none have married in the same category: all married opposites. And so did I.

My parents were a butterfly (my father) – turtle combination; my wife’s parents were a butterfly (he, a preacher), elephant pair. Often salesmen – my father – politicians and preachers are butterflies, whose characteristics are cheerful, extrovert, spontaneous, humorous, talkative, while elephants, people like me, are aggressive, competitive, strong, perseverant, arrogant, leaders. Frogs and turtles make an excellent fit. Frogs are serious, intense, loyal, friendly, and make good teachers. Turtles are calm, gentle, neat, stubborn, disciplined, make good lawyers.

Dr. Critchlow discovered the same: opposites attract.

The interviewer asked her, “What else does neuroscience tell us about a successful relationship?”

She answered, “If you image the brains of the couples who have been together for a long, long time and ask them to think about their partner, their brain will react in the same way as a drug addict’s. You can almost say this couple is addicted to each other.

And here comes the crucial question, “So what does neuroscience tell us about how you might go about changing someone’s mind or winning an argument?”

Dr. Critchlow answered, “It’s very difficult. Once you have built up a perception of the world, you will ignore any information to the contrary. Your brain is already taking up about 20% of your total energy, so changing the way that you think is going to be quite cognitively costly. And it might be quite socially costly too”. 

And coupled with that, came the next question, The subtitle of your book is “Why your future is more predictable than you think”; ultimately, you argue that there is no such thing as free will?

She said, “We are just processing information within the cartography of our mind that gives rise mechanistically to our behavior. So the decisions that we think we are consciously deciding on and making, actually it’s all just an illusion that can be reduced to what our brain is telling us to do.”

My question: “Does her thesis prove “Predestination”?

If I understand her correctly, then she proposes that much of what we do and think is already preconditioned by our genes and upbringing. This makes it very difficult to break away and become a new person, change one’s personality.

And that brings me to METANOIA, a change in our mindset. According to Dr. Critchlow, a change in one’s mindset is next to impossible.

This statement made me go to my library, where I pulled four books on HEALING AND THE MIND.

I first read a book by Dr. Bernie S. Siegel, a surgeon, entitled, “Peace, Love and Healing.” The book was published in 1989; I bought it in 1990, and have now read it again after almost 30 years.

Its subtitle is “Body-Mind communication and the Path to Self-healing: an Exploration.” Loving care, a cheerful attitude, faith, all aid recovery. Toward the end he quotes Henri Nouwen, a Dutch Catholic priest, a close associate with Jean Vanier; he lived for a while in one of the Arche communities. 

Here’s the quote, “In his book Out of Solitude Nouwen tells us what it is to care. He begins by explaining that caring is not the attitude of the strong toward the weak: caring takes place between equals. The word ‘care’ has its roots in the Gothic kara, meaning to grieve, experience sorrow, cry out with. The person who really cares must join with the person in pain. Sometimes it is all that can be done, which is hard for anyone to accept, especially hard for doctors, trained as we are to be fixers and mechanics, not healers or caregivers.”

Healers before penicillin were trained that way. As a 10 year old in 1938 I had a bladder infection. The doctor prescribed bed-rest and came every day. Doctors then had little in the way of drug treatments; instead they had to know their patients and the circumstances of their lives to heal them.  

My second book was by Dr. Herbert Benson, Professor of Medicine at Harvard, who wrote, “Timeless Healing: the Power and Biology of Prayer.”

He has devoted the last 35 years of his life to finding scientific evidence to provide an answer to the question, “Does prayer have a therapeutic effect?”

He sought to provide a “bridge” between Medicine and Religion, which would help find a treatment for many diseases. After so many experiments conducted over 35 years at the Benson–Henry Institute for Mind Body Medicine, Herbert Benson believes that there is indeed a relationship between prayer and health. He writes, “We found that there is a link between the physical condition of a person and any repeated activity of concentration he does, which involves control over random thoughts. Most people make it through prayer. So, we believe that when a person repeats a prayer over and over again, it can help cure a disease, especially if it is caused by stress.”

“Yes, there is a link between prayer and healing!” writes Dr. Benson. “We studied people who prayed repeatedly and were very focused during the prayer. The magnetic resonance imaging showed that there was a decrease in metabolism, heart rate, blood pressure, breathing rate and brain activity.

Thus, we gotscientific proof that prayer affects body functions and fights stress.

At the same time, the scientific team focused only on the possibility when a patient prays for himself, as the experiments were not directed towards the possibility of others to pray for a patient’s health. All major religions contain that power.

Bill Moyers, in his introduction to the third book I consulted, Healing and the Mind, wonders, “Why is it that about 60 percent of outpatient visits to primary care physicians are related to stress or mind/body interactions?” This is confirmed in ancient medical science, which told us that our minds and bodies are one.  The Latin phrase, Mens Sana in Corpore Sano comes to mind.

Under the aegis of PBS Bill Moyers wrote this beautifully illustrated book, dividing it into five major sections

• The Art of Healing
• Healing from within
• The Mind/Body Connection
• The Mystery of Chi
• Wounded Healers.

Bill Moyers interviewed numerous medical experts asking them how thoughts and feelings influence health and how healing is related to the mind. He even traveled to China to experience a culture whose model of human health is so different from the American one. In this 368 page book he convincingly shows that minding the ‘mind’ connection, patients heal faster, leave the hospital sooner and do better once they get home.

Dr. Deepak Chopra wrote Ageless Bodies, Timeless Mind, with as subtitle, “The Quantum Alternative to Growing Old”. In it he also pursues the mind/body approach, and shows that, by following his prescription for anti-aging, the effects of aging are largely preventable.

I can testify that, ever since I quit smoking in 1959, started running in 1960 and became a vegetarian a few years later this regime has paid off for me.

That the Mind/Body connection is important leaves no doubt. However the four books are more than 20 years old. Now, with organized religion rapidly losing ground, computerized medicine surging, information technology accelerating, and the personal touch lacking, the Mind/Body symbiosis is bound to suffer.

Will Dr. Critchlow’s discovery further stall that development?

Back to the beginning.

Dr. Hannah Critchlow, in her book, THE SCIENCE OF FATE, examines the role of fate in our lives. She asserts that much of our life is predetermined at birth, which diminishes the extent how much we are in control of our destiny: “Once you build up a perception of the world, you will ignore any information to the contrary.”

If she is correct in her assessment, this Cambridge professor and neuroscientist and an astute student of our nerve-system, further sets back the entire mind/body phenomenon.

Earlier I posed the question, “Does her thesis prove “Predestination”?

Predestination is the teaching that God foreordained all that will happen, including the salvation of some and not of others. She asserts that much of our life is predetermined at birth, which diminishes the extent how much we are in control of our destiny.

Romans 8:30 tells me that, “And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.” That to me points to predestination, that oh-so controversial doctrine.    

Yes, Dr. Hannah Critchlow asserts that much of our life is predetermined at birth. She believes that to a large extent our destiny is shaped at birth. She believes in FATE. I believe in PREDESTINATION. Are they the same?

Fate in Ancient Greece is a phenomenon that is inescapable; through interaction and close relationship with the gods, the fates of humans may be extended, but cannot be changed.

I am a religious person, and I believe that we are not mere random acts, creatures that are born, live and die, and then disappear into the eternal void, leaving little or no trace. I am fortunate that I have known my grandparents on both sides. I have lived with them and observed them in their daily lives. Both my paternal and my maternal grandparents were members of the same large rural church, and both were elders there. They too shaped me spiritually as much as my parents did physically.

I do admit that the Predestination concept is confusing. Dr. Critchlow claims that life is pre-determined, that we cannot change. Predestination says the same, but also implies that we remain responsible for our actions. Yet in many ways it resembles the Greek concept of FATE.

And how does all this relate to the Mind-Body phenomenon, to Prayer and Healing, to Peace and Love? Perhaps my reasoning here is somewhat farfetched, but I do believe that when we make Christ the center of our existence, see him as the ultimate human being and pursue the KINGDOM vision, where we consciously relate to the Earth and all that lives, then we will LIVE a Mind-Body-Spirit existence, the life God intended for us in the Beginning.

When all our actions – including seeing one’s body and all of creation as holy – are geared toward THE COMING OF THE KINGDOM, when we already now strive to live forever in perfection, then we are destined for eternity, where life-to-the-full will be experienced.

Christ did not come to bring religion. Christ came to teach us how to live.

MAY 11 2019

NEAR-TERM COLLAPSE

This year I actually welcomed the black flies. Fortunately I am immune to their bites. When I noticed them last week for the first time this spring, boldly buzzing around my head, I thanked the Lord: not yet a “Silent Spring”.

When Rachel Carson wrote “Silent Spring” – I received it as a member of a book club – I gave it away without ever reading it. That was in 1962: then I was totally oblivious to anything other than the generally acceptable opinions in all fields, including church matters, seeing my church as the only true one. 

Now, more than 55 years later, I have changed radically. Frankly I don’t trust public utterances anymore. I drive sparingly (so far 1,000 km in 2019) a VW diesel, buying the company line that diesel was the best car for the environment. It’s a 2002 model, and I will hang on to it, as, I am told, the carbon footprint of manufacturing a car is more than the fuel it will ever burn.

And then there is Boeing, which I also regarded as an honest company. That too is no longer true since their 737 Max deception. The plane is like the Chevy II which Ralph Nader labelled as ‘Unsafe at any speed.”

Bad news for the earth.

This was the week when one day was set aside to broadcast the bad news for the earth. Below are some quotes from 2 major newspapers, The New York Times, and The Guardian, commenting on the UN report that creation is in trouble.  

• The Guardian wrote that around the world, nature and the benefits it provides are in unprecedented decline – a trend that can be reversed, but only with a coordinated international effort and “transformative change” to the way humans draw food, water, energy and resources from the planet, a sweeping new report has found.
• The NYT said, “Human society is in jeopardy from the accelerating decline of the Earth’s natural life-support systems, the world’s leading scientists have warned, as they announced the results of the most thorough planetary health check ever undertaken. From coral reefs flickering out beneath the oceans to rainforests desiccating into savannahs, nature is being destroyed at a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10m years, according to the UN global assessment report. The biomass of wild mammals has fallen by 82%, natural ecosystems have lost about half their area and a million species are at risk of extinction – all largely as a result of human actions, said the study, compiled over three years by more than 450 scientists and diplomats.”

There it is. Don’t for a minute believe that it will mean change in human conduct. On the contrary: with an ever growing world population, more people are vying for a higher standard of living. However, due to drought, soil erosion and floods, expect higher food prices. The same will be true for energy and natural resources, as easy access is gone, and with Energy Return on Energy Invested decreasing there too expect inflation.

Let’s face it. We are dealing here with 8 billion human beings, all bewitched by pictures of opulence of preposterous proportions, in spite of panoramas of unequaled inequality; all enamored by visions of unprecedented prosperity: they will never voluntary surrender their privileged position; all denying reality; all cloaked in utopian stupor and hiding behind fumes of ignorance until the boom is lowered, and, like anaesthetized alcoholics, stagger into the oncoming avalanches, overwhelmed by raw reality.

The Bills are due.

For the last 200 years we have used soil, water, air as a gift of nature. But, as one of the laws of Ecology states, “Nothing comes Free.” For TWO CENTURIES we’ve had a free ride. The UN has estimated that nature has provided the economies of the Americas with $24 trillion worth of non-monetized benefits each year: free water, free air, free soil. Now nature is calling for payment: restore or collapse. Nature is not a patsy: it is unforgiving.

 “The most important thing isn’t necessarily that we’re losing .?.?. 1 million species — although that’s important, don’t misunderstand me,” Robert Watson, chairman of the U.N. panel that authored the UN report, told the Washington Post. “The bigger issue is the way it will affect human well-being, as we’ve said many times — food, water, energy, human health.”

In other words: Humanity is inevitably on a globe-spanning murder-suicide track. Yes, Near-Term Collapse.

I read last week, “Things that can’t continue usually stop too late.” We fail to remember that all 8 billion of us owe our existence to a six-inch – a mere 15cm – layer of topsoil and the right amount of rain: not too much, not too little. Now 75 percent, a full three-quarter of that soil has been tampered with, saturated with pesticides, clogged with carbon-based fertilizer, basically poisoned beyond belief and beyond relief. Good luck.

The UN report did not mention what happens way Up North, around the Arctic, where the global heating is double or more than elsewhere, liberating, if that is the right word, the much more lethal methane and the even more deadly N20, Nitrous Oxide, the same poison that I generate with my diesel motor. The only matter that can be predicted with a great degree of certainty is NEAR-TERM COLLAPSE.

Volkswagen, Boeing and the US government with Trump – who last week passed a real milestone: his 10,000^th LIE – all attempted to hide the truth, for the sake of profit. They rightly deserve to forfeit my trust.

History has shown that a civilization collapses when there is a collapse of trust. The same applies to fiat money. An empire, a state, a family, any social structure, rich or poor, powerful or weak, new or old, happy or sad, if there is no trust it cannot exist for long. That’s what happened to the Roman Empire; that’s what’s happening to us. As Matthew 12: 25 says, “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand”.

Ultimately, trust is based on truth. Without truth, there cannot be trust. “The Truth shall set you free”, Jesus said. In Roman times, the fight of Christianity against the Empire of Lies was more than everything else a fight to rebuild trust by establishing a new truth, the revealed one.

And now? We are rapidly entering a phase where the lies told to us by our governments and our elites are so huge, so pervasive, so blatant, that only the Devil can be the driving force behind all this, true to 1 John 5:19: “The whole world is under the power of The Evil One.”  

In the great confusion of our times even the good among us are confused, they can’t discern the truth anymore. And the time may have come when we need a new generation of Martyrs for truth is needed.

“Climate change modelers have not understood that one of the things that they should be concerned about is near-term collapse. The rising wealth disparity in recent years is a major indicator that the world economy may be headed toward collapse,” writes Gail Tverberg in her The Finite Earth blog.

Let’s face it.

The commitments made by countries in the Paris accord don’t get us to a 2 degree world unless of course the entirety of civilization does a 180 today, which won’t happen.

Insects are disappearing at 6 times the speed of larger animals and at a rate of about 2.5% of their biomass every year. These are our pollinators. These are links in our food chain. These represent the basic functioning of every terrestrial ecosystem.

58% of the biomass of vertebrate life on earth has been lost since 1970.

Drought – or too much rain – in nearly every food producing place in the world is expected to intensify rapidly and make them basically unusable.  

We can no longer save the society that we live in and many of us are going to be dead long before our life expectancy would suggest.

If your idea of hope is having some slightly modified Standard of living going forward and live to ripe old age… there is no hope. This civilization is over…

It all started in Paradise, the Garden of Eden.

Capitalism started in Paradise when the human pair saw the fruit tree there in a different light, re-arranging the priority from the aesthetic to the economic, from first seeing the Tree as an object of beauty – look at Genesis 2: 9-  and later – Genesis 3: 6 – “the tree was good for food”.

Once we abandoned the beauty principle and made the economic the measure of life, the chain of destruction was set into motion. We now gather the bitter harvest: cosmic disaster.

It reminds me of Revelation 18: 11-14,

“And the merchants of the earth weep and mourn over her, because no one buys their cargoes any more— cargoes of gold and silver and precious stones and pearls and fine linen and purple and silk and scarlet, and every kind of citron wood and every article of ivory and every article made from very costly wood and bronze and iron and marble,  and cinnamon and spice and incense and perfume and frankincense and wine and olive oil and fine flour and wheat and cattle and sheep, and cargoes of horses and chariots and slaves and human lives. “The fruit you long for has gone from you, and all things that were luxurious and splendid have passed away from you and men will no longer find them.”

That passage of the Bible outlines the END of Capitalism: economic collapse, societal collapse: lots of stuff on the market, but no buyers. The fruit in Paradise – see above – you longed for has gone.

Rather than pursuing beauty, as was the wish of the Creator, you, WE, have gone after things luxurious and splendid, and now we harvest the bitter results.

It is as plain as daylight: “The Bible tells you so”, as that simple children song has told us.

No, it is not too late. Yes, it is too late to avert NEAR-TERM COLLAPSE. That was evident already is Paradise: already then the first step to Collapse was taken. We now are at the end-game, almost at the finishing line. 

ENTER JOHN THE BAPTIZER

So…… What must we do? Good question.

Matthew 3 starts out with these words,

“In those days John the Baptizer came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, “Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is near.”

It strikes me that John chose the ‘wilderness’ to start his mission, just as today the WORD comes to us “in the wilderness” we have created. Why did John pick that location? Environmentalist he was, he did that for a purpose: all deserts were products of humans infringing on paradise. When God created ‘in the beginning’, the entire Middle East, the entire world, was tree-covered and productive. Deserts are the by-products of human exploitation and lead to war. Syria was the breadbasket of the Middle East until Climate Change and human stupidity made it food-deficient and caused the farmers to rise up in desperation. 

Today is the time for REPENTANCE. That’s the gospel we have to proclaim, “Repent for the Kingdom of heaven is near.” That Kingdom is the New Creation, the restored Paradise, the pristine Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve started out and failed: greenhorns as they were.

The Greek word for repentance is METANOIA, where the ‘meta’ indicates ‘change’ and the ‘noia’ points to ‘mindset’. We need a totally new way of thinking, from ‘profit’ to ‘beauty’, from exploitation to preservation, from destruction to enhancement of creation. With every step we take, with every thought we have, with every idea we conceive, the overriding concern must be the ultimate task we have: be servants to creation: honor God, the Creator, by word and deed, especially the latter.

It is too late to avoid near-term collapse. It is not too late to change, to undergo true METANOIA.

MAY 4 2019

THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS TRIO.

BUT FIRST….

Now that we are approaching the end of human society, it may be an opportune time to reflect on what we should have done as the human race or still are supposed to do at this late hour.

It goes beyond dispute that we are on earth for a certain purpose: we were called to do something specific. When we were created and so entered into history, God charged us with a particular mandate. That mandate was to cultivate creation, to look after the earth, the waters and the air around us. God specifically instructed us to become one with the earth – ‘earth you are and to earth you shall return’  – to serve creation in all its manifestations, not only to take care of all that lives and moves and has its being around us, but also, and especially to discover who we ourselves are and why we are what we are.

When we do this we will grow emotionally in line with our task,   and, by doing so, we also will increasingly mature mentally and spiritually so that we will be ready for the next phase and the next, because it is a never-ending assignment the Lord entrusted to us.

Therefore our task is two-fold: not only did God charge us to bring to fruition what in its essence was and is dormant in creation, both its human and non-human potential that is waiting to come into being, but also to preserve what is there, and to treasure and cherish what God already had entrusted to us as guardians and safe-keepers.

This dual purpose, this two-sided task of exploring and preserving holds for eternity as well: in the hereafter we simply continue what we started here, true to Revelation 14: 13, where it is promised that “our good deeds shall follow us”.

These ‘good deeds’ refer both to the positive actions and explorations we have done in creation and the intellectual and spiritual growth we have undergone. As a matter of fact only when we today are engaged with discovering what is latent in creation and in our own minds and with preserving of what is already there, then we are allowed to keep doing this into eternity, when both aspects will continue unabated but without the impediments we now experience in our sinful state.

We are called to fulfill this cultural duty while simultaneously striving for salvation, because salvation not only involves eternal redemption – honoring the Creator – but also fulfilling the creational laws. Or, as Dr. J.H. Bavinck formulated it, “personal salvation and creational redemption are two sides of the same coin: you can’t have one without the other.”

THE AMERICAN RELIGION

With that in mind I approach what in North America is labeled as Christianity, and why it has become exactly the opposite of what the Bible teaches.

Enter Dr. Harold Bloom, America’s foremost literary critic, who calls himself a gnostic Jew. In his THE AMERICAN RELIGION, subtitled, “The emergence of the Post-Christian Nation”, he identifies the American Religion as a variation of Gnosticism.

In my NIV Study Bible, in the introduction to the letters of the apostle John, there is a brief description of Gnosticism, which, it says, is “one of the most dangerous heresies”. Its central teaching is that spirit is entirely good and matter is entirely evil. Thus the body, anything substantial, such as creation, is evil. Salvation is escape from the body, such as going to heaven.

No wonder Dr. Bloom postulates that what commonly is called “Christianity” no longer deserves that label. He writes, “The American Religion masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian” Instead, “The flag and the fetus symbolize the American Religion”. He concludes his 1991 book, “The Twenty First Century will mark the full-scale return to the wars of religion.”

This prophecy is now being fulfilled: we have entered the most dangerous period in the history of the world, with two world-wars occurring simultaneously, both religious in nature: (1) The War against Creation; (2) The Middle East War.

Rapture and Zionism.

Almost all, 80% of white evangelicals – the adherents of the American Religion – voted for Trump in 2016, and his popularity amongst them remains high – in the 70s percent. Whilst other white voters may have become disheartened by Trump’s foreign policy white evangelicals have become his last, solid bastion. They are not insignificant either: they form some 25% of all Americans.

By now I hate the word ‘evangelicals’. Its root meaning is eu-angelos, which translates as “the good News”. In my opinion it now stands for the opposite. “Kak-angelist”, the bringers of Bad News, is a better designation. The Bad News consists of two teachings, which characterize these American believers: Rapture and Zionism. Both are totally unbiblical, by which I mean that there is no substantiation for these teachings in the Scriptures: on the contrary.

Based on some Old Testament passages proponents of the Zionism heresy argue that in Israel the temple will be rebuilt and then Christ will return. These beliefs clash with New Testament texts such as Hebrew 8: 13 where it says that, “By calling this covenant “new,” Christ has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear.” The first covenant was based on temple worship. The second, new covenant is based on Christ who is the head of the New Covenant.                               

Christ is the end/fulfillment (telos) of the law (Romans 10: 4 and 2 Corinthians 1: 20), thus the Old Testament cannot be used as support for the modern secular state of Israel. As a matter of fact, the rending of the curtain between the Holy and the Holy of Holies, in the Temple when Jesus died, was definite proof that temple worship was a thing of the past.

Zionists have donated millions of dollars to this cause because they see it as a necessary precursor to the Tribulation – the Temple must be re-established for the End Times scenario to be played out. The Christian Zionist organizations believe that the Old Testament prophets, when they talk about returning to Israel, refer to the future today. The Rapture is another fabrication, completely refuted in Matthew 24: 39, which categorically states that the SINNERS will be taken out and THE BELIEVERS left behind on the holy earth.

These dangerous beliefs are professed and pursued by two of the most prominent US government officials: Mike Pompeo, the US Secretary of State, and Mike Pence, the US Vice-President.

Both men are obsessed with these heresies and actually happy about wars and fighting in the Middle East, because they are the key preconditions for ‘Rapture’ and Armageddon.

Mike Pompeo and Vice-President Pence are strongly of this ‘Evangelical’ orientation, while Trump worships himself, seeing himself as god. Their ‘religious’ views deeply influence  their foreign policy: During his tenure as CIA director, and before that as a member of the House of Representatives, Pompeo has consistently used language that casts the war on terrorism as a cosmic, DIVINE battle of good and evil. He has referred to Islamic terrorists as destined to “continue to press against us until we make sure that we pray, and stand and fight, and make sure that we know that Jesus Christ is our savior, and is truly the only solution for our world”.

In connection with IRAN, Pompeo used identical language, implying that Iran is the cosmic ‘evil’.

This style of Apocalyptic or Rapture language has been adopted wholesale by Trump, and his Administration. “To worship our Lord and celebrate our nation at the same place is not only our right,” Pompeo told attendees at a Kansas rally in 2015: “It is our duty.” He added, “We will continue to fight these battles,” the then Congressman said at a church in Wichita. “It is a never-ending struggle … until the Rapture. Be part of it. Be in the fight!”

Pompeo’s reference to Rapture is important: The Rapture is a distinctively American theology that says Christians will be taken up, or “raptured,” into heaven, at the onset of the End Times … and a number of GOP politicians allow their belief in Rapture theology to influence their political worldview. Because the Rapture is ultimately desirable — it marks the return of Jesus Christ — anything that hastens it such as war, is desirable too.

For many evangelicals, apocalyptic “good versus evil” battles, particularly centred on the “Holy Land” of the Middle East, are signs that the longed-for end may be at hand”.

And then there is the Other War, the WAR against creation, which will immensely speed up once a hot war emerges. Already up to a million species face extinction, many within decades, according to a recent UN report, and three-quarters of Earth’s land surface has been “severely altered”.

A third of ocean fish stocks are in decline, and the rest, barring a few, are harvested at the very edge of sustainability.

A dramatic die-off of pollinating insects, especially bees, threatens essential crops valued at half-a-trillion dollars annually. The Trump regime does everything in its power to hasten this extinction process, believing that it is bringing on Armageddon, the end of the world.

The American millenarian ‘myth’, then and now, was (and is), similarly rooted in a messianic belief in the Manifest Destiny of the United States: ‘the New Jerusalem’ that would represent humanity’s best hope for a utopian future. This belief in a special destiny (being ‘chosen’) is reflected in a conviction that the United States must lead – or more properly, has the duty to coerce – mankind towards its universalist destiny.

Although Trump, when he was campaigning promised to end US involved in wars, his actions today speak otherwise. Such as providing lethal weapons to the Ukrainian military, or nixing the short-range nuclear missile ban, or joining the Saudi’s genocidal war on Yemen, or threatening to topple the government of Venezuela, or stirring up trouble in the South China Sea. At every turn, Trump has backtracked on his promise to break with tradition and “stop toppling regimes and overthrowing governments.” …’ At every turn, Trump has joined the ranks of the war hawks he once criticized.

Trump is now marching in lockstep with the foreign policy establishment. In Libya, in Sudan, in Somalia, in Iran, in Lebanon, he is faithfully implementing the neocon agenda. Trump “the peacemaker” is nowhere to be found, while Trump the ‘madman with a knife’ is on the loose.

This whole is underpinned through the extensive Evangelical base that forms Trump’s key constituency.

And with the resurfacing of neoconservative policies, comes, inevitably, their ancient attitude towards Russia as an existential struggle that can have only one outcome – Russia’s collapse, leading to regime change – either via war or means short of war. All elements of western policy are geared to that one inalterable objective.

Trump’s instinct has been to cling ever closer to his loyal supporters. Almost alone among major demographic groups, white evangelicals are overwhelmingly in favour of Trump’s border wall, which some preachers equate with fortifications in the Bible.

But here is the point: There lurks a major danger in this ideologically ‘non-rational’ set-up. One that threatens us all – and may explain the Russian raising of their ‘threat status’. Trump’s instincts still remain that a channel with Mr. Putin is essential. But the demonization of Russia has not been stilled with the publication of the Mueller investigation. It will just swap to a new narrative.

The pressures on Trump from his Bolton-Evangelical team, to hasten End Time with an Apocalyptic good-versus-evil struggle, linked the Christian Zionists’ Greater Israel ambition, will increasingly mount, with Trump offering up Iran, and so advancing Rapture, and immensely pleasing Pompeo and Pence.

The major danger is that Trump is not fearful of nuclear war – at least not in the way earlier generations of US leaders were. Trump has manifested a strange and worrying fatalism about nuclear conflict.

I deeply believe that, “personal salvation and creational redemption are two sides of the same coin: you can’t have one without the other.” The American Religion is the complete opposite: destroy creation because it is evil, and flee this evil earth to become gods. Trump, Pompeo and Pence in their respective offices strive for these goals which make them THE WORLD’S MOST DANGEROUS TRIO.

APRIL 27 2019

WHY THAT CHURCH FIRE?

To everything there is a season,
and a time for every purpose under heaven:
a time to be born and a time to die,
a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal,
a time to break down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,
a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together,
a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to count as lost,
a time to keep and a time to discard,
a time to tear and a time to mend,
a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate,
a time for war and a time for peace.

Yes, this is a passage from the Bible. You’ll find it in Ecclesiastes 3.  There’s a time for everything, even to read the Bible once and a while.

That same Bible book, Ecclesiastes, its first chapter tells me, “There’s nothing new under the sun”. That, I think, is debatable. There IS something new under the sun: universal pollution, of which plastic is a symbol, and Climate Change another example. Well, perhaps I am wrong here: come to think, there really is nothing new, because pollution is a form of SIN, perhaps the ultimate sin, because it directly affects THE CREATOR. Sin, of course, has always been there: what is new is its universal nature. But Climate Change – the direct result of SIN – IS new!

Yes, there is “a time to be silent and a time to speak”. Today it’s time to speak, to speak loud and clear, to speak in unambiguous terms: POLLUTING IS SIN. To be silent today when the fate of creation is at play is sin, is to discard The Message, which is all about God’s world, which he created to his glory, because “God So Loved the World!!”

I also believe that we are in the home-stretch: now that everything goes global, it’s also now or never. By that I mean that it soon may be too late to change minds. I base that on the very last chapter of the very last Bible book, where a curious text appears. Revelation 22: 11:

“Let the one who does wrong continue to do wrong; let the vile person continue to be vile; let the one who does right continue to do right; and let the holy person continue to be holy.”

These words suggest to me that the lines are drawn, that the lots have been cast, that minds have been made up, that there’s no turning back once the End appears. Perhaps, by the grace of God, there even may be such a thing as a last minute conversion.

And that brings me to the Notre Dame de Paris.

Nothing happens by chance. I see the fire at Our Lady of Paris, as a significant event, as a symbol of a changing world. The church took 200 years to build: it made unfit for service, in mere hours. Creation took millions of years to develop: we destroyed it in 200 years, mere minutes on the world’s timescale.

Yes, it is tragic; A Human masterpiece gone up in flames; a symbol of old-fashioned, dated, Christianity vanishing forever; a relic of antiquity gone; a work of art, the result of 2 centuries of painful exertion and sacrifice by thousands of the faithful, vanquished before our eyes.

The believers 800 years ago had a long-time line, just as the painstaking artisans in Barcelona still struggle after many decades to finish the Sagrada Familia Basilica designed by Antonio Gaudi.

Why did this fire happen?

Nothing comes about just by chance. What lies behind this disaster? Is it a symbol of the state of Christianity today, which itself, is in total disarray? Is it a foretaste of what is in store for the world at large? Is the rending of the curtain in the Jerusalem Temple, when Jesus died, invalidating the Old Testament rituals, similar to the destruction of Notre Dame de Paris? I think so.

That sign 2000 years ago, in Jerusalem, the very centre of the World’s monotheistic religion, also had a mysterious origin. I imagine that the Priests, on duty in the Temple when Jesus died, noticed that ostentatious opening in that heavy curtain, exposing the out-of-bounds Holy of Holies. Of course the temple warden, the overseer of that sacred building, questioned the staff then present, but all pleaded both ignorance and astonishment that this tightly woven, soundproof, ultra-thick piece of tapestry could be so brutally ripped. (See Mark 15: 38).

That this sacrilegious act was truly ‘an act of God’ and really signaled the end of Temple Worship, and the very start of the world-wide “Christ”-ian faith, was not understood.

I see the fire at the Notre Dame as similar: the end of institutional religion.

Fact is that all of Christianity is at a crossroad. The heaven destination is more and more being questioned, and with it, ‘heaven-resembling’ monuments, such as most church buildings.

It’s no secret that today the Roman Catholic Church has never been so divided. The Protestant portion – its main body being in the USA – has become a political movement, where tolerance is no longer tolerated.

The Notre Dame fire suggests to me that worshiping in buildings made by human hands is a thing of the past. It suggests to me that ALL of life needs a new approach. I also believe that, just as God’s hand was involved in opening up the church’s roof to the sun and moon and stars, so this same hand made sure that the 180,000 bees in three hives on the roof, were spared, protected from the intense heat.

A different era.

When the Notre Dame de Paris was built, all of life was focused on the church: everybody was automatically a member. The clergy saw itself as the “sole servants of salvation”. Latin was the church language and Nulla Salus Extra Ecclesiam – no salvation outside the church- was generally accepted as the real truth.

Also the original designers of the building had a different idea of life than we do, witness the Gargoyles on the periphery of the church roof. These half-human, half-beast demons carved out of stone, were a good indications of the general belief of the populace then: evil was always at the doorsteps.

Then the choice was brutal: either be faithful to the church and obey its dictates, or face the Inquisition and go to hell. That’s why the church was built as a portal to heaven: that’s why the ceiling in the church was so elevated, prominently featuring God’s angels.

Then there always was the stark choice, heaven or hell, and the church’s message was equally unambiguous: come to church, daily is better, confess sins to the priest, who’s there instead of God, and be saved.

Now, if you were allowed to enter that burned out hull today, the tableau is totally different: Open Sky. The walls are scarred, but access to the open air, to the sun and moon and stars, has been given free reign. After 800 years, God’s sunshine, God’s moonlight, God’s starry twinkling sky directly beams unto the debris now littering the floor where the footprints of some 20 generations of worshipers are embedded. The Holy Ground has been contaminated, just as the earth everywhere has been poisoned by us, screaming for deliverance.

Another church, another fire.

Years ago my wife and I visited Berlin and, in the city’s very centre, there were the ruins of an old church: no roof, open windows like hollowed-out eyes, charred, bullet-pocketed walls: the former Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, left in its war-damaged state: a silent, eloquent memento to what happened during World War II.   

It is my considerate opinion that Notre Dame de Paris also should not be rebuilt. It should be left a skeleton, a reminder to the world of our universal WAR against creation, just as that church in Berlin, also located in the very heart of Germany’s Capital City, still is a silent witness to the evil forces of warfare.

Yes, the church should never be rebuilt, in spite of solemn pledges by the suddenly pious plutocrats, who probably believe that this is a cheap way to heaven: after all what is 100 Million Euros when you have billions of that stuff. If there were a call to help the poor – would that same money be forthcoming?

Also, the rebuilding is now in the clutches of the bureaucrats, in spite of billions pledged, these pledges may never be cashed, because the entire process will be subject to all sorts of circumstances, such as safety concerns, design delays, economic turmoil, weather disasters, and clerical infighting.     

WHY THE FIRE?

Why the fire in what is known as Holy Week? Nothing happens by chance. The fire was pre-ordained. It was a warning that what happened on Monday April 15 was a prelude to what is coming on a day in the near future when, as 2 Peter 3: 10 has predicted,

“But the day of the Lord will come like a thief, in which the heavens will pass away with a roar and the elements will be destroyed with intense heat, and the earth and its works will be burned up.”

Today that mysterious fire signals to me the symbolic end of the ‘building-centered’ Christian religion. It is typical that Billions are pledged to rebuild this temple, while the real task of the church is to seek the lost and to help the destitute, and, above all, to treat God’s creation as holy.

The last thing we need is another building. There are more than 5000 church buildings in France alone that are in a poor state of repair and most of them totally under-utilized: empty all week, except for a few hardy souls, mostly old.

Thirteen Thousand Oak Trees were sacrificed to construct the roof alone of this building: tall, mature, straight trunks of pure wood. Are there still enough of those around in our age of forest’s massacres? Should we even try to find them, at a time when every single tree is needed to combat Climate Change?

From bad to worse.

The environmental news becomes more ominous by the day. Yet the Climate Change deniers are a powerful force. The nation of France is deeply divided, and this has spawned the Yellow Vest movement, objecting to a fuel tax that penalizes especially the less wealthy class. The same is true in Canada where in recent elections those who favor carbon tax have been defeated.

Yes, the news is bad. In ecological terms, things are getting worse faster than anticipated, leaving humanity with increasingly limited options or no option at all. Everyone agrees that there are no quick and easy fixes, so do not expect any truly sustainable fixes to emerge from the political or the industrial mind.

Yes, there is “a time to be silent and a time to speak”.

Today it’s time to speak, to speak loud and clear, to speak in unambiguous terms: POLLUTING IS SIN. It’s time to act, to escape the carbon trap. To not act when the fate of creation is at play is sin, is to discard The Message, which is all about God’s world, which he created to his glory, because God So Loved the World!!

News has a short lifespan these days: two weeks ago Paris. Last week, hundreds killed in Sri Lanka, both involving churches. Is the Lord telling us that Church buildings are becoming a trap?  

On Pentecost in Jerusalem 2000 years ago, the church too was on fire: people actually were sporting flames on their heads, signs of the presence of the Spirit.

Then the church had no buildings. From there on, for 400 years, the church grew and grew without any buildings, simply house gatherings.

Why that church fire? Is that a sign that the time for church buildings is over? Back to basics? Back to house churches? Back to neighbors inviting neighbors?

Why that church fire? Lots of questions.

APRIL 20 2019

WISDOM

If there ever were a need for wisdom, it is today, because the problems the world is facing are greater than at any point in history.

Paradoxically, if there ever was a lack of wisdom, it is today. The situation that confronts us stems from decisions made centuries ago, and to rectify these now deeply ingrained initiatives the world needs remedial measures that are nearly impossible to implement.

There is a consensus developing that the entire world is on the wrong track. People are perplexed, because the old is dying and the new has not yet been formed. People sense that the present situation cannot be maintained, even though it gave people jobs and great prosperity. That’s why many clamor for a return to the good old times, and fall for empty slogans such as Make America Great Again. They don’t want to admit that the past is the past.

Panta rhei, oude menei: everything flows, nothing remains the same: the ancient Greeks knew this already.

All living entities and all human enterprises are subject to birth, growth and decline.   

Take mobility.

For many millennia the horse and buggy and sailing ships were the only mode of transport, then motorized transport came, then airplanes. Next? Space travel?  A pipe dream.

Take cars.

Weird to the point of ridicule: the entire concept of “car” is bizarre: 1000 kilograms of steel, plastic and rubber to convey 80 kg of human flesh. Oil created the car, and oil created America, and oil made America great. And now the oil kills: now everything, including the USA, constructed on carbon content is lethal.

Me: I bike when I can.

I love my bike, my bicycle, my two-wheeler, my iron horse. I can lift it, I can service it. It always works: no key, no starter, no fuel, except my legs. A sustainable society can be built on a bike: not on a car: that’s why America will die, and never arise again.

Cars are crazy: they account for over ¼ of our greenhouse gas emissions. GHG does not stand for God’s Holy Grail. It stands for the complete opposite, Green House Gases. Today they fuel the world’s Gas Chambers made notorious by the HOLOCAUST that killed millions of Jews. Now we are our own executors. Weird, totally weird.

Or take communication: in Africa the tom-tom; flags were used on sailing ships, fire or smoke signals by the American indigenous population; then the telegraph and Morse-code, telephone, Internet, TV. Now the ‘smart phone’ is slated to kill the human brain.

Or take the workplace. When I arrived in St. Catharines, Ontario in 1955 (left in 1975), General Motors there employed at least 5000 men and a few women. That was the place to be: guaranteed wages, even when unemployed: pension, the works. Then General Motors had 50 percent of the automobile market in North America. Then there also were several other manufacturers: Studebaker, Hudson, Nash, Packard, now all gone, as well as the 5000 jobs. English Electric, Ferranti Packard, the paper mills: in the space of 50 years all these ‘man-sized’ jobs disappeared: gone. St. Catharines now exists on government-financed jobs; Brock University, Niagara College, the healthcare business, perhaps the wine industry, perhaps a bit of tourism.

Where have all the jobs gone? I read last week that 70,000 stores will close this year in North America. For the longest time women have had the edge there over men, even though the pay for these service jobs was less.

Today all governments work with deficits. How long will that last? How long can that last?

Automation. Robots. Artificial Intelligence. Predictions are that millions of jobs will disappear, taken over by machines, mechanical devices, computer-driven tools.

How about human bodies? Will they become superfluous? Idleness breeds evil; uselessness kills the mind; no gainful work causes illness, both physical and psychical. No work without leisure, no leisure without work. Unemployment requires government handouts. Unemployment causes violence. Unemployment kills. All require public help. All become a burden for the taxpayer, itself a disappearing phenomenon. All scream for money that isn’t there.

Enter Climate Change.

We now see it daily in the US Mid-West, America’s bread basket: rains, floods, tornados, all conspiring to make a harvest nearly impossible. The waters leaching all the agricultural poisons into the streams, further imperiling the already precarious state of health of the US population, while threatening food inflation imposed on an already financially stressed population, further causing hardship and mental turmoil.

So, after this brief summary of the state of our financial insecurity and the mental imbalance of a large segment of the working class in Canada and the USA, questions scream for solutions.

Are there still answers? Are there still solutions? Have we painted ourselves in such a tight corner, that there no longer is an escape?

Forget about Trump and his empty bombast, his childish boasting, his dangerous rhetoric. Forget about Doug Ford in Ontario, Canada, with his ‘buck-a-beer’, his anti-climate-change cheap shots.

YES, THERE IS A SOLUTION.

I always read something. Last week I reread a book, a special book, a book given to me by a friend to whom the book was dedicated: Mark Vander Vennen.

BEYOND THE MODERN AGE was written by Bob Goudzwaard and Craig G. Bartholomew. The title suggests that we have entered a new phase. The Modern Age is over. The problems have become too big to be solved. Going back to the time when America was truly great – witness the Marshall Plan – is now impossible, given America’s hundreds of trillions of debt and future obligations.

The days of ENLIGHTENMENT are over as well. That was the time, starting around 1650 – 1680, when “the more dramatic and decisive period of rethinking (came about) when the mental world of the West was revolutionized along rationalistic and secular lines…..Human logic, based on human wisdom freed itself from any attachment to God and the Holy, and pursued its own rationale.” This model has run stuck.

We now have entered the new Dark Ages, an era of desperation, false promises and lies.

It’s high time to reflect.

In God’s grace we are on a cross road. The current path has become a dead end, and there remains one small opening for those who seek. The opening consists of 5 words: THE FEAR OF THE LORD.

“The fear of the Lord” … is the opening line of many texts in the Bible. Psalm 19, one of my favorite bible passages, which, like no other passage of Scripture, extols the praise of creation, starts with the glorious line,

“The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the   work of his hands. Day after day they pour out speech; night after night they display knowledge…..Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the end of the world”.

And then, later in this poetic masterpiece the simple words,

”The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.”

Isn’t that mind-boggling? How can ‘fear’ be pure? We associate fear with negative aspects, with fright, with something to avoid.

Indeed, that text, and many others, begs the question, “what is meant by “THE FEAR OF THE LORD?”

That is just one instance where ‘fear’ enters in, a word that needs explanation. Psalm 111: 10 reiterates this theme,

“The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom; all who follow his precepts have good understanding.”

Job, in the book by his name, when he questions the origin of his unfortunate circumstances, which his friends blame on his sinful past, Job says, “The fear of the Lord – that is wisdom”.

So, a preliminary conclusion could be that ‘fear of the Lord’ and ‘wisdom’ are intimately intertwined.

BEYOND THE MODERN AGE tells me that , “Wisdom in Scripture is rooted in the doctrine of creation and espouses a doctrine of creation order.”

 I agree with this statement, but it is typical churchy parlor, and needs some clarification. A few lines later, it reverts to common day language and states, “Creation order alerts us to the fact that the world is shaped in particular ways, and it is only as we find those ways and walk in them that we truly flourish”.

I like the way J. H. Bavinck clarifies the creation order in a book I have translated, published by Eerdmans, “The Riddle of Life”. There Dr. Bavinck writes,

“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 thinks that it is there only for itself, but in 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.

Yet that law of serving is remarkable in more than one way. What is so truly amazing is that, as a rule, no creature is there for the sole reason of serving, as they all think that self-help is their sole goal, but all that serving goes automatically, and thus is simply an unconscious act. It is as if a mighty hand brings all this in motion and, in spite of itself, stimulates this self-less serving. This serving, therefore, is not a sacrifice, is not a duty, but an in-born act, without compulsion, without intent. Each single being is there according to its nature, but everything together is so oriented that the existence of the one supports the other and maintains it.”

That is the Creation Order. Bob Goudzwaard and Craig Bartholomew are correct when they write that the creation order makes us aware that the world is shaped in particular ways and that in finding them we discover wisdom.

On top of the SERVING pecking order, if I may use that term, are we, women and men, girls and boys. Our task is to serve consciously, just as Christ did, as stated in Mark 10: 45, “he came to serve and not to be served”.

We have reversed that order. We have made creation our slave. We, in our pride and arrogance, have subjected all of creation to our wily whims and capricious cruelty. We, in our idolatrous inclination, have rejected the notion that Creation represents God, which have made our greedy acts nothing less than rebellion and insurrection, and indeed blasphemy.

Wisdom’s Way.

Wisdom’s way is through humility; wisdom’s way is through service to the earth and all it contains, including our fellow humans globally; wisdom’s way is ‘seeking the kingdom”, the central theme of Jesus ministry; wisdom’s way is seeking the welfare of creation; wisdom’s way is “The Way, the Truth and the Life”, by following Jesus who taught us how to live.

If we want to find ‘wisdom’ then we have to look to creation, because “In Wisdom He made it all,” as Psalm 104: 24 informs us.

That’s why ‘the fear of the Lord’ is the first step in becoming wise. That fear really means: looking in AWE at creation, seeing it with the eyes of the author of Psalm 8, “O Lord, our God, how majestic is your name in all the earth.” That fear is nothing else but bowing humbly for God’s majesty.

That fear is all about honoring God’s name, his signature on creation, just as the name of “Rembrandt” on his paintings validates his masterpieces.

In the TEN COMMANDMENTS, God orders us “not to misuse his name”. That has nothing to do with swearing, and everything to do with treating Creation as holy, because in it God’s wisdom is revealed. In the LORD’S PRAYER the same emphasis is given: “Holy be thy name.”

Romans 1: 20 sums it all up,

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”

Saying sorry is not enough. Faith without deeds is dead.

Want WISDOM?

Love Creation, Love God, the Creator, Love LIFE.

April 13 2019

EXTINCTION

I worry. Fortunately it doesn’t affect my sleep. My three times per week of one solid hour of running 5 kilometer, of biking 5 kilometer and doing 50 pushups, outdoors when weather permits or on my three exercise machines, plus the extra hours of doing housework, preparing meals, and helping my spouse, ensures that when 10 p.m. comes along, I am tired and sleep quickly and deep. Oh, yes, I sometimes do have a 20 minute afternoon nap.

I worry. It’s not about me, my wife or our extended family. We have been blessed as no other family I know, in having healthy, intelligent kids, all well married, smart grandchildren, who are well educated and have good jobs, so my worry is not about them. And yet it is about them.  

I worry about their future.

I’ve had my life. I have enjoyed the most extravagant era of all times, even though I now realize that it was at the expense of creation. When I pray the Lord’s Prayer, and come to the line, “Forgive us our sins,” then my trespasses on creation come to mind.

In my line of work I travelled tens of thousands of kilometers to do appraisals as far away as Bancroft – 90km -, Haliburton – 130 km -, Minden  – even further -, the Algonquin Park, Barry’s Bay, to the North, Peterborough to the West, Picton to the South, and Smith’s Falls to the East, and places in between. Appraising commercial properties so far away was my profession: I was the only qualified person in my area.

And now I worry because my considerable contribution of Green House Gases has added to the Environmental Crisis we are facing, and the consequences my children and grand – and great grandchildren will face.

I have long maintained that we live in End Times.

Last week I reread THE SIXTH EXTINCTION. Elizabeth Kolbert relates how a mysterious fungus totally wiped out the Panamanian Golden Frog. The fungus spread rapidly from country to country, from continent to continent, and caused the sudden demise of most amphibians, world-wide, including those in my large beaver pond.

Last week I read, in the New York Times, where its lead article also was about a fungus, named Candida auris. It is spreading like wildfire through the world’s hospitals. Its fatality rate is 43 percent, and there is no cure. The fungus is airborne, water-born, clings to every surface, and is extremely difficult to eradicate. The New York Times reports that in a hospital room, ”Everything was positive — the walls, the bed, the doors, the curtains, the phones, the sink, the whiteboard, the poles, the pump, the mattress, the bed rails, the canister holes, the window shades, the ceiling, everything in the room was positive -”.

I suspect that hospitals and medical authorities are suppressing the knowledge of its existence. Since there is no antidote, the people in authority don’t want to alarm the public, and so it has been given the silent treatment, so to say.

There are different theories how Candida auris came about. Dr. Jacques Meis, a Dutch researcher, attached to the Nijmegen University, believes that drug-resistant fungi developed thanks to heavy use of fungicides on crops. These poisonous commercial pesticides suppress the immunity of the soil and free substances such as these fungi.

We really have no clue what we are doing to The Earth.

We are indeed speeding up the disintegration of the planet’s defensive system by introducing foreign substances to supposedly aid the growth of crops.

It reminds me of a wise First Nation elder, Marie Gladue, a Navajo elder,

Natural Law was here before and will be here after we’re gone.
Western law was not here then and will not last.

.Western Law is what we live by today. It only has one aim: exploit the earth for all it worth. That goal is failure-bound, a fact that is becoming more evident by the day. That’s why it is the appropriate time to echo the message John the Baptizer brought, “Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord.”

For me this character, John the Baptizer, is my prototype, my model. He was called to pave the way for the Messiah. I believe that this is the task of all Christians, and especially the Church. Dietrich Bonhoeffer saw the task of the church in completely eschatological terms, always pointing to the Eschaton, so he wrote,

“The Church of Christ witnesses to the end of all things. It lives from the end, it thinks from the end, it acts from the end, it proclaims its message from the end.”

The trouble is that the church sees heaven as the end. Every Sunday in church we read a portion of THE LIVING FAITH, the statement of Christian Belief of the Presbyterian Church in Canada. This past Sunday, we read,

Love is the greatest gift in the world
because it will last beyond this world
and is supremely pleasing to our Lord.
Love foreshadows life in heaven.

That’s a bunch of baloney. If that is the official point of view of a denomination, proclaiming that the end of it all is heaven, then God help us, because the church, the official mouthpiece of God in the world, has it all wrong. Bonhoeffer sees it differently. Here’s what he wrote:

“Christ does not lead us in a religious flight from this world to
other worlds beyond: rather he gives us back to the earth as its
loyal children.”

My other favorite theologian, J. H. Bavinck, wrote essentially the same,

“Personal salvation and the salvation of the planet go hand in
hand”.

Both Bavinck and Bonhoeffer see the Kingdom in eschatological terms: The New Creation to come!

“Personal salvation and planetary redemption go together!” That is revolutionary: it turns the message of the church upside down!

THE BELGIC CONFESSION confirms this. Here’s what this all- important statement of faith says about us knowing God:

“We know God FIRST by the creation, preservation, and government of the universe, since that universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book…. As the Apostle Paul says in Romans 1:20: “(the creation of) all these things are enough to convict men and to leave them without excuse.”

If we know God first through his creation, then there’s something drastically wrong with the Gospel business.

Let me give a closer look at Romans 8. It connects human suffering with the pains the earth endures.

Here’s the exact wording, verses 17 – 21,

And if we are children, then we are heirs: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him. I consider that our present sufferings are not comparable to the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the revelation of the sons of God. ……. For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. 

The HERITAGE awaiting us is THE NEW CREATION, if we share in the suffering.

Let me take a concrete example. Picture Johann Sebastian Bach, who composed an immense amount of music. Suppose that just like Christ, Bach had a mortal enemy, who got ahold of all his music before it was widely published, and before JSB’s very eyes, burn it, slowly destroying his entire portfolio. You can imagine that it would pain him no end, seeing his life’s work destroyed. 

But that’s what we are doing to Creation, God’s glorious work of art. That’s what EXTINCTION really means: we are extinguishing species after species; we are fouling everything else, turning it into poison; we are creating bizarre conditions, everywhere, turning benevolent entities, such as air, soil, water, into dangerous substances.

“And if we are children, then we are heirs: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him”.

We call ourselves God’s children. As children we are slated to become heirs, which indicate that we will inherit what now belongs to God. But it comes with a caveat:  today we all are continuously complicit in destroying God’s very good creation: we are sacrificing our inheritance just like the Prodigal Son! Read Luke 15.

We have become so immune to creation’s suffering, so enthralled with the tricks we can play on our machines, praising our accomplishments to heaven, we have become so addicted to everything technical, that all cries of creation are drowned out by the clamor we generate in our cities, where the towers scale ever greater heights, where the traffic congestion clams up all degrees of common sense, where the rich get richer and the poor poorer.

And Christ? And his suffering? We sing, “what a friend we have in Jesus.” But what is a friend for, if not to share in his suffering?

We no longer have a notion of the earth’s pains. Christ, seeing his creation going to hell, aided and abetted and encouraged by his supposedly very body, the church, is still suffering stupendously.

Judas was the lonely betrayer among the twelve disciples. Now, it seems, the entire official church, is betraying the Gospel, the Good News, and entirely misses Jesus’s proclamation: LOVE FOR CREATION. John 3: 16 proclaims this unambiguously: GOD SO LOVED THE WORLD!!

And We?

We have paved the earth, mined the seas, flattened the mountains, and with our high-up condos and cars, we have eliminated the in-built, original knowledge received directly from the Earth. And because we are being bombarded by information, toxins, and electronic signals coming at us faster than our bodies can process, our brains assemble fragments of information into a distorted composite from which we react rather than respond.

The fatal illness of our times is that we have lost touch with the earth, and have left God stranded in the process. Roman 1: 20 directly points to creation as the source of divine knowledge. We have forgotten that the physical landscape is an encyclopedia of wisdom, where everything serves everything else. We have forgotten that we ought to be Servants in Chief.

What to do.

Today there is no more important Bible passage than John 3: 16. It bears repeating:

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

The Greek word for ‘world’ is ‘cosmos’. Cosmos includes all created matter, from a blade of grass, to the stars and planets. Just as Bach loves his repertoire of created notes and tunes which he formed into harmonious melodies so God loves his creation, the immense, eternal, infinite, never fully grasped assembly of atoms and mountains, seas and prairies. God, in a fit of generosity – see Psalm 115: 16 – gave it all to us humans, hoping that we would take care of it, explore it, and further develop it to God’s glory.

Instead we became greedy to the point where we now face world-wide extinction, the death of everything and everybody.

Really, there’s no stopping the process. So Jesus – God’s Son – perfect God and perfect Human – descended to earth to wrest God’s creation from the hands of THE ENEMY whose sole aim is to destroy God’s work of art.

The Price? The Ransom?  The death of God, seemingly a victory for Satan, but really it restored Creation.

That is what the Church has to proclaim. In these last, these very last days, Satan will redoubled his efforts, will create unimaginable harm and chaos, and WE will suffer more than any earlier generation because we have failed to serve creation.

“And if we are children, then we are heirs: heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ—if indeed we suffer with Him, so that we may also be glorified with Him”.

Our suffering is different: our suffering is not for ourselves. Our suffering concerns creation. It is not about us, in the first place, but it is about the animals whose lives are eradicated, is about the plants that no longer see life.

I am not worried about myself. I worry about all those who shut their eyes to what is plainly visible, ignore the signs, and disregard the ever growing list of extinct animals and plants, which sooner than later will include us as well.

But those who consciously suffer with Christ, and mourn EXTINCTION, await a total rebirth, the true renaissance.