Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

APRIL 6 2019

THE FOOLS

Who are the fools? We are! All of us. No exceptions.

I love the Psalms. Every morning – before breakfast – except on Sundays – now in our 66^th year, we have read a Psalm or a portion thereof. I continued a custom started by my parents who probably inherited the act from their parents.

I imagine that I have gone through the Psalter more than 50 times during our marriage. Psalm 119 – that really long one – has 22 separate sections of about 10 verses each, so reading that takes almost 4 weeks. Psalm 117, which is just one verse, makes for a quick turn to start breakfast.

I have read somewhere that monks in the early Middle Ages were required to know all the Psalms by heart. I went to a Christian Elementary School, and each weekend I had to memorize a rhymed version of a Psalm – which I did with the help of my mother – and my entire class – in turn – had to recite it.

So Psalms were drilled into me like no other portion of the Bible.

The Psalms contain a lot of wisdom. Take Psalm 14 with as heading, THE FOOLS. It starts as follows, “The fool has said in his heart: “There is no God above.” Their deeds are corrupt, depraved; not a good man is left.”

Psalm 53 has exactly the same title, THE FOOLS, and continues with exactly the same words: “All have left the right path… they never pray to the Lord, so they tremble with fear without cause for fear: for God is with the just”

We are these fools.

It’s not that we are stupid. It’s not that we are atheists, because is those days, some 2500 years ago, everybody believed in Gods. Just read Homer in the Odyssey or Iliad: gods then were everywhere. Remember the apostle Paul on the Areopagus how he remarked that the place crawled with gods.

We are the fools, people who have our values all wrong: we are convinced that God will never take action.

Well, “the chickens are coming home to roost”, as the saying goes. God IS taking action.

The acts of us, fools, the works of all of us who have left the right path, are now becoming evident. Socrates started it all: he preached an ‘after-life’, away from the earth. He was the one who refused to see THE EARTH as HOLY, and the church has declared his Greek interpretation as holy. So, by adopting his Heaven Heresy, we have treated God’s creation as disposable, as evil even.

Now we all have a touch of GNOSTICISM, the real teaching of THE AMERICAN RELIGION, which confesses that the earth is the product of the Demi-Urge, an evil force. USA politics is dominated by this heresy, hence their evil policies.

Enter Jesus.

Jesus’ message can be captured in 5 words: “Seek First The Kingdom of God.” You know what that means? It means, SEEK THE WELFARE OF CREATION! It means to listen carefully to Creation; it means to examine it minutely; it means to reflect consciously on our interactions with our natural surroundings, with nature if you like. It means to be tuned to the Spirit of the Universe.

Creation is our full partner in life, our most meaningful companion throughout our entire existence: to negate its wishes, to thwart its desires, to override its inclination, is the same as to curse God, because, like no other entity, nature, creation, God’s handiwork, call it what you like, is God expressing himself to us in a purely miraculous way. That’s why I call it God’s PRIMARY OR DIRECT WORD.

To disregard God’s wonderful WORD is to ignore God, is to believe that God will tolerate everything, that he is some sort of good old, slightly senile man, whom we can treat as a person of no consequence, whom we don’t have to acknowledge as GOD, the creator of heaven and earth.

We are approaching the END, and before that happens, God asserts himself, shows the entire world his authority, now vested in his son Jesus Christ.

Already the signs are everywhere, as ubiquitous as plastic, the true symbol of our age. Oh, how I hate plastic. I hate it with a perfect hatred.

Plastic-pollution takes its toll on the soil and air and water, but it also affects our human mind. No wonder, because everything is connected to everything else. We don’t live in a vacuum.  

What is making the young killing themselves by guns and drugs? There are definite signs that pollution is affecting people’s mental sanity. Reports are appearing that pollution causes “subjective stress, depressive disorders, health-related quality of life and suicide.”

Our sins against Creation do not go unpunished, as evident in THE WEATHER.

Here’s what ARCTIC NEWS reports:

“On March 30, 2019, Arctic sea ice extent was 13.42 million km², a record low for the time of year.

With Arctic sea ice at a low, it won’t be able to act as a buffer to absorb heat for long, with the danger that an influx of warm, salty water will reach the seafloor and trigger methane eruptions.

As warmer water keeps flowing into the Arctic Ocean and as air temperatures in the Arctic are now starting to rise on the back of a strengthening El Niño, fears for a Blue Ocean Event in 2019 are rising, which would further accelerate the temperature rise as less sunlight gets reflected back into space.

In a rapid warming scenario:

(1)   A stronger-than-expected El Niño would contribute to 

(2). early demise of the Arctic sea ice, i.e. latent heat tipping point.

(3)  associated loss of sea ice albedo, 

(4)  destabilization of seafloor methane hydrates, causing eruption of vast amounts of methane that further speed up Arctic warming and cause.

(5)  terrestrial permafrost to melt as well, resulting in even more emissions,

(6)  while the Jet Stream gets even more deformed, resulting in more extreme weather events

(7)  causing forest fires, at first in Siberia and Canada and

(8)  eventually also in the peat fields and tropical rain forests of the Amazon, in Africa and South-east Asia, resulting in

(9)  rapid melting on the Himalayas, temporarily causing huge flooding,

(10) followed by drought, famine, heat waves and mass starvation, and

(11)  collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

We are not only fools: we are out of our minds. We are not only inane: we truly are insane, mad, deranged, idiots. How else can we explain our total failure to prevent Global Heating, our so disastrous excursion into Climate Change. We are so bewitched by our technical tricks, by our miraculous machines, by our prowess to overpower nature, that we have lost all sense of proportion, all traces of wisdom.

We are the dumbest, the most infantile, the most stupid generation the world has ever experienced. We have lost our bearings in politics, in the economy, in religion, in everything, everywhere, especially in Creation.

We no longer know what is right and what is wrong: we are rudderless, have no longer any idea what is normal.

Climate change is already worrying enough — now a report from the U.S. central bank cautions that rising temperatures and extreme storms could eventually trigger a financial collapse.

A Federal Reserve researcher warned in a report last week that “climate-based risk could threaten the stability of the financial system as a whole, along with an aging population and rapid advances in technology.“

Climate change could soon hit the banking system “by storms, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme events” making it harder for businesses to repay loans.

Already one million waterlogged acres in the farm belts of Nebraska and North Dakota, signal rising food inflation. Already the insurance industry is saying that climate change could soon make insurance unaffordable for most people, because of growing evidence that climate change poses an existential threat to the world.

TURMOIL

I like that word TURMOIL. It sounds like what it portrays.

On TURMOIL, here’s what my muse made me do:

Our world today, by using oil, 
Has done away with human toil,
But poisoned our so precious soil, 
So will it end in great turmoil?

The ocean waves already boil
The forests burn and tempers roil
Our rulers lie and truth despoil
Yes, it will end in great turmoil.

Soon there’s nothing left to spoil
Then all of nature will recoil    |
Who do we think we can still foil
Before it ends in great turmoil?

When there’s nothing left to moil
When ev’ry thing’s beyond recall
Then Jesus comes to fix it all.
Forever end the great turmoil.

(Yes there is a tune to sing this.)

Turmoil is the trend: wherever I look matters are in motion, often violently.  

We have been warned.

Jonathan Wiener, in 1990, wrote, “THE NEXT ONE HUNDRED YEARS, Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth”. He relates how already in 1896, a Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, wrote, “We are evaporating our coal mines into the air. …Eventually this change might very well heat the planet to heights outside all human experience.”

Wiener relates how Charles David Keeling, 60 years later, in 1956, when 26 and with a fresh Ph.D. in chemistry made it his life’s goal to measure CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide is the gas that our cars exhale through their tail pipes, causing Green House Gases.

In spite of solemn pledges at the scores of the United Nation’s Climate Change meetings to reduce CO2, it is still increasing. And the dangers are increasing exponentially as the Arctic melts. 

1 John 5: 19, an obscure text in a seldom read Bible book, confirms what Jesus already said in John 17, that, “The whole world is under the control of The Evil One.”

Yes, now, with Satan in charge, ALL THINGS are about to change, in the air, in the soil and in the seas, in politics, in people’s minds, including all that is not visible such as the airwaves, the rays that are bounced to and from the satellites, the TV streams that we receive via the dishes sporting on our roofs, the thoughts that penetrate our minds: all these invisible things shape our minds more than the sermon on Sundays: everything is about to change; nothing is stable anymore: TURMOIL is the new state.

A Chinese curse is with us: may you live in interesting times.

As we well know, all is not well, and it is going to get worse.

As a prelude to THE END, the Bible Book REVELATION mentions EARTH QUAKES, especially in Chapter 16: 18: “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.”

You can imagine how the seismographs in the capitals shake wildly in record numbers beyond any ever registered. You can visualize how the houses tumble, the palaces are flattened. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.

The catastrophes mentioned here extend to the entire cosmos. They affect people everywhere. In the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Here only the first type is mentioned. It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as his own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become recalcitrant, and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity.

And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, her mighty medical system, her military might, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immensely important and strong, these same men and women are now in a totally humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.

THE FOOLS: Who are these fools? We are!

 

MARCH 30 2019

THE CHURCH OF TOMORROW.

 “The lesson of history is that no one learns anything from history.” 

The Old Testament relates the history of the Jacob clan, the people of Israel. Time and again these blessed people rebelled, time and again God punished them, time and again they turned back to God….. until God said, enough is enough. 

Thomas Homer-Dixon, in his book THE INGENUITY GAP set out to prove that deranged nature caused deranged minds. He didn’t quite succeed in accomplishing his goal, because it is the other way around: Hosea 4:2,3 observes how human conduct causes creational chaos,

“There’s only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery….. THAT’S WHY the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.”

So don’t expect success in the battle against Climate Change, because “everything is connected to everything else”: minds rule matter. Only a complete conversion of the entire human race can undo the dawning disaster. Only the church can prevent this. Will it? Can it?

One of the basic truths of Scripture – see Psalm 119: 105 – is that, “Your Word is a lamp for our feet and a light for our path.”

This really means that we can’t have the one (Scripture) without the other (Creation). Scripture is like a mining light that beams a ray of light on creation: you can’t have one without the other.

That’s the fundamental TRUTH the church has neglected: before the END comes, all must be revealed, as the TRUTH must emerge, and with it THE CHURCH OF TOMORROW.

Basically this means that for the last 1500 years or so we have only experience a half-truth, which for a long time did not really matter because Creation remained basically untouched. Now, in the End Times, where insects and elephants, whales and turtles are endangered, Hosea’s words keep on haunting us:

“the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.”

That is the direct result of the half-truth the Church has proclaimed by failing to see that Creation and the Bible complement each other.

The Bible is very clear that “soil we are and to soil we shall return.” Genesis tells us that God used ‘earth’ to form to first human being, and, once given shape in the form in which you and I move and exist, God blew a life-giving entity into the form and made it whole.

Nietzsche, in his THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA wrote,

“I entreat you, brothers, remain true to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of super terrestrial hopes! They are poisoners, whether they know it or not…… “To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful offence…”

We are earth. The earth supports us, feeds us, clothes us and provides us with beauty and splendor. When God made trees to come forth, he described them to the human pair as “beautiful to the human eye, and good for food.” Note, the aesthetic came before the economic (Genesis 2: 9). When the Great Seducer described the tree (Genesis 3:6) the order is reversed, the economic aspect precedes the beauty factor.

Ever since then Capitalism has conquered, and now we have the bitter harvest. Existing in an artificial world, we have lost our bearings and are blind to what’s happening out there, that’s why we are experiencing the REVENGE OF GAIA as James Lovelock phrased it. 

When the people of Israel were kept as slaves in Egypt, and Moses asked Pharaoh to “Let my people go”, his plea fell on deaf ears: they were too valuable for the economy to be released from their bondage. It took TEN plagues to force them to leave, and then the Egyptian population was so glad to see them go that they loaded them with all sorts of precious items: the death of all first- born was the last straw.

We too are unwilling to abandon our energy slaves, even though the fate of our children too is in the balance. Again, “The lesson of history is that no one learns anything from history.” 

We are in the home stretch.

I am a runner. Whenever the weather is too wet or too hot or too cold I run on my treadmill three times per week. I actually hate getting up from my comfortable chair, change into my running gear, but once I am going, I like it.

On my mill I gradually increase the speed, just as the human race, approaching the END, sees developments in the physical world accelerating, now rushing into dissolution.

THE CHURCH OF TOMORROW.

The first words of the Bible are: “In the Beginning God created”. Its very last chapter, Revelation 22, says that in the End everything will be revealed. The End will show that we have learned nothing from history. Biblical history shows that the people of Old Israel failed to mend their ways, because they failed to REPENT. Will the church repeat this failure? “If history….”

TWO WORDS FOR REPENT.

The New Testament uses two different words for REPENT. The one is METANOIA which basically applies to our thinking. META indicated a change, while NOIA has as root Gnosis, or knowledge, and indicates a total change of thinking. Sermons are supposed to do that, by appealing to our intellect. It uses the Bible to justify that approach.

For the church today the Bible is THE ONLY source of wisdom and the ONLY way to salvation, that’s why it’s referred to as THE HOLY SCRIPTURES.

I do not dispute that. Yet the Bible is a human book, written by humans, and only INDIRECTLY the Word of God. True, it is inspired; true, it is necessary, but for the longest time it was not available to God’s people.

The Old Testament did not attain its present form until during the EXILE some 500 years before Christ. Before that it existed only as rare rolls, to be perused by the few priests who only had access to them.

The entire Bible came into being at the Nicean Council in 325, some 1,700 years ago, with some books, such as the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes and Esther, barely making it when the vote came, with Constantin, the unbaptized Emperor, presiding over the proceedings.

So, yes, the Bible is a human book. It is God’s secondary or INDIRECT Word, basically appealing to the Metanoia, the Mind Business. No wonder when Paul spoke on the Areopagus, the place in ancient Athens in the year 40 AD, where the brains of Athens were gathered and people debated all day long, the word `metanoia` was used.

Acts 17: 22 attests to this: “Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious,” pointing to the number of gods, including one dedicated to The Unknown God.

HOWEVER.

The philosophers in Athens – especially Socrates and Plato – had one thing in common: they welcomed death. Plato depicts Socrates’ last words before his death, “I’ll no longer stay put, but will take my leave of you and depart for certain happy conditions of the blessed”. Socrates died to celebrate death, and his followers adopted this philosophy: death and heaven were to be preferred over life.

So when Paul mentioned RESURRECTION to them, they stopped their ears because resurrection clashed with their belief. That’s why Paul uses the word Metanoia: their minds had to change, but since Paul’s words were contrary to their pre-conceived notions, a mind change proved to be impossible. Paul’s mission to Athens was a failure.

Well, this heathen heaven notion has pervaded the church until this day. It originates right there on the Areopagus, where Paul failed to convince these wise men there that not heaven, but a resurrection life awaits us on the earth.

THE CHURCH OF TOMORROW

The Church of Tomorrow must celebrate LIFE ON EARTH now.

That’s why there is another word that Paul uses: EPISTROPHE which indicates a NEW EARTHY LIFE STYLE, which brings me to what I refer to as God’s Primary or Direct Word: CREATION.

By God’s act of creation “Ex Nihilo”, out of nothing, God spoke and it came to be. That’s why in the Lord’s Prayer, the first line after the invocation is, HOLY IS YOUR NAME referring to the Created Word, the WORD and WORLD that carries his signature.

Wherever else the apostle Paul brought the good news he proclaimed the need for a total change of life, from pagan rituals to a Christ-centered belief, as expressed in the Creation Word, God’s DIRECT or PRIMARY Word. He always started with God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, the Living God.

And THE CHURCH?

In the church of tomorrow we need both. We not only have to attain a different mind-set, metanoia, a turn toward biblical thinking, but also a Creation-centered commitment, a new way of acting away from Carbon-Based luxuries and atmosphere-despoiling habits, to an earth-loving life that is valid for eternity.

TO BECOME THE CHURCH of TOMORROW THE CHURCH TODAY MUST CHANGE.   Change won’t be easy. No wonder Jesus lamented, “For many are invited, but few are chosen.”(Matthew 22: 14), and (Luke 18:8), “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”   I find it striking that in Revelation 21: 22, where the Holy City is described, there’s a total absence of religious symbols: no church building, no altars, no bible. This suggests to me that we must slowly chuck the church and more and more steer toward the lasting life-style mode, because there’s where eternity is at play: the conversion to total permanence and complete sustainable living.   Our entire world now pivots on that very matter.   It is again a sign that we are approaching the END when it becomes more evident by the day that the way we live and move and have our being, must end, and be replaced with creation-loving actions, where our entire mindset and our complete plan of action is geared to permanence.   As Christians our only goal in life today, now, and tomorrow and the day after must have THE HOLY CITY in mind, the future of the church, which ceases to be church, but becomes life living to the full.   That’s why now, Twenty-Four/Seven/Three Hundred and Sixty Five (24/7/365) our LIFE must be geared to Holy Living, in line with what we expect in eternity, and what the Bible tells us, in The New Creation.   Paul encountered heaven talk on the Areopagus in Athens which prevented him from bringing the gospel of the Living God, the Creator who had made heaven and earth.   The only RELEVANT message today is to preach and practice PERMANENCE, by setting the example for all to see.   How then shall we live?   That’s the burning question today. Perhaps we must start a variation of the AMISH way of life. Perhaps we must initiate a sort of Benedict Monastery life for families. Perhaps we must imitate what the early Christians in Jerusalem did by sharing so that all have enough. Perhaps it is none of the above, but merely a desire to do what is possible and feasible in these fractured times where we have painted ourselves in a corner, and have been lulled into an existence where the only way left is to pray for forgiveness.   Perhaps the Lord will forgive us when there only is a will to change, because all other options have become impossible, because we have been sucked into a way of life from which any escape has been eliminated.   Perhaps all that is left is TO PRAY: FORGIVE US OUR SINS against Creation and against our fellow humans.   What we can do and must do is to have days of Atonement, fervently ask for forgiveness. However,  “the lesson of history is that no one learns anything from history.”

MARCH 23 2019

HOW ARE WE GOING TO COPE?

No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,but only the Father.  As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man.  For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark.  And they were oblivious, until the flood came and swept all the sinners away. So will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. 

You may recognize the above passage as a quote from the Bible. Yes, it is part of that terrible chapter Matthew 24. In it Jesus describes in devastating detail the situation that now is unfolding this very minute, with the reports becoming more ominous by the day.

Of course there are people who deny this Climate Change matter, calling it a conspiracy, a hoax, see it as trumped up treason to torpedo our Capitalistic system that has brought us prosperity unequaled in human history. Not surprisingly the Bible has a text for that mindset as well. Psalm 17: 14 reminds us that the beneficiaries of our economic system are having their reward in this life: “By your hand save me from such people, LORD, from those of this world whose reward is in this life”.

“In this life” implies that there is another life to come. Those who want to cramp in all the sights of the world, and fly everywhere – always at great environmental cost – could well forfeit the unimaginable delights in the New World to come.

These same people are part of what I call “the FIVE “D” crowd” who, as far as Climate Change is concerned, “Deny, Delay, Divide, Dump, Dupe”. They have taken their cue from the Tobacco Industry which did exactly that, in spite of overwhelming evidence that smoking painfully shortens life.

We now have an immensely more major calamity emerging: our ferocious use of fossil fuels frightfully fractures ALL life on the planet. Where, with a bit of willpower people could quit the nasty tobacco addiction (I did), the carbon-induced global death-threat is so ingrained in society that quitting it cold turkey means another “D”: DEATH of society as we know it because we can’t function without fossil fuels. But if we don’t take action, we are in for an even more disastrous situation, it means – like lung cancer – sudden death of all that lives.

Thus the choices we all face are a ‘lose-lose’ proposition: no matter what we do we end up worse off.

It is that choice that faces us as a society, especially the “educated” Western section because WE caused it all.

As certainty and confirmation of Climate Change becomes ever more pronounced, paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and resignation are appearing.

A few examples.

“The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells’ new book about how Climate Change, has as its first sentence, “It is worse, much worse, than you think. In superhot cities, roads will melt and train tracks will buckle. At five degrees of warming, much of the planet would be in constant drought. With just six meters of sea-level rise—an optimistic projection—land where three hundred and seventy-five million people currently live will be underwater.”

Already all the signs are there: right now, as I write this, thousands are fleeing ferocious floods all over the globe; late last year thousands again were frantically fleeing fierce fires in the Paradise Camp Fire finding themselves sprinting past exploding cars, their sneakers melting to the asphalt as they ran.

To anyone who has been paying attention, the broad strokes of “The Uninhabitable Earth” come as no surprise. We are racing toward—in fact have already entered—an era of water shortage, floods, wildfire, sea-level rise, and extreme weather.

How are we going to cope?

People are starting to ask hard questions about their own future. When will the place where I live be flooded or burn? Where should I live when it does? Where will my future children live? Should I have children at all?

Last week, John Vidal, of HuffPost US wrote, “The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change.”

The article opens with words as frightening as David Wallace-Wells’ book about how Climate Change, quoted above: “Nature is in freefall and the planet’s support systems are so stretched that we face widespread species extinctions and mass human migration unless urgent action is taken. That’s the warning hundreds of scientists are preparing to give, and it’s stark.”

Last year has seen a slew of brutal and terrifying warnings about the threat Climate Change poses to life. Far less talked about but just as dangerous, if not more so, is the rapid decline of the natural world. The felling of forests, the over-exploitation of seas and soils, and the pollution of air and water are together driving the living world to the brink, according to a huge three-year, U.N.-backed landmark study to be published in May.

Increasingly climate experts are blaming industrial farming for much of the loss of nature, claiming that the food system is the root of the problem. I agree.

I live in a rural area, where beef cattle roam in a meadow across from us. Daily I see how the farmer travels with his diesel-powered tractor to bring a big round bale of hay, totally wrapped in thick white plastic, to feed his methane-belching cows, at an all-round cost to the environment.

To follow these cows through to their final destination as a piece of steak on the plate of a consumer, from the field to a slaughter house hundreds of kilometers away, back to the local store, where a consumer drives a car to buy it, once ingested impairing the consumer’s health, all at a cost of some 20 energy calories for each edible one. Never is the cost of ecological degradation considered in the price we pay for food. This example applies to the entire food industry.

How are we going to cope?

And then there are insects, vital to the diets of other animals, as well as the pollinators of our food: they are facing a bleak future as their populations appear to be collapsing. Land use changes and increased pesticide use are destroying habitats and vastly reducing their numbers. In Europe, up to 37 percent of bees and 31 percent of butterflies are in decline, with major losses also recorded in southern Africa, according to the pollinators section of the report.

Over 70 percent of freshwater species and 61 percent of amphibians have declined along with 26 percent of marine fish populations and 42 percent of land-based animals … It is a dramatic change and a direct result of the intensification of farming.

No wonder that people are realizing that, “We are facing the greatest struggle in human history, one whose outcome will determine the fate of humanity for eternity. We cannot dither or postpone or wait for the next generation to deal with this. We must act right now, and knowing human nature, “We Will Not Act!”

“How are we going to cope?”

Psychologists are observing how people are dealing with the enormous challenges now emerging. Their findings are that many just ignore it, shrug it off as not important, or claim that they mistrust the science or deny that there is a human connection. Some simply say that their actions would be too small to make a difference and choose to do nothing.

It reminds me of a text in the last Bible book, Revelation 22: 14, where it says,

“Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city”. 

This text directly points to personal action that leads to eternal life.

J. H. Bavinck in his unique, “Between the Beginning and the End, a Radical Kingdom Vision”, points out that “The people of the Ancient Near East see their clothing as expressing their personality….. It reveals something of their very being and their authority.” This indicates that clean robes mean an un-polluting and cleansed self.

So doing nothing is no option. Ignoring is no option. It is our holy duty to take action, personally, NOW, because, as the text quoted at the very beginning says,

“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,but only the Father”.

It is a fact that we are on the final stretch of life on the planet. There are a few pointers that confirm this:

• It will come, there’s no doubt about it. Both the Bible and our unbiased observations confirm this.
• Humanity will be blind to all the signs. Throughout the millennia people have not changed: just as in Noah’s days, so too today they go their merry way, ignoring the obvious.
• The End will come as a total surprise, because
• The Bible tells us that there is a tipping point that comes without a warning.  

The text has a mysterious line: “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,but only the Father”.

That last line “only the Father” puzzles me. The Bible tells us that the Father has given all authority in heaven and earth to Jesus, so how is it possible that Jesus too is ignorant about the day and the hour of what I call, “The Tipping Point”?

Richard Elliot Friedman in one of my favorite books, THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD, ends his masterpiece with, “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.”

James Lovelock sees the entire world as a living entity, something confirmed in both the Old and New Testament: both give definite hints that creation is alive, and is now dying, as Romans 8:22 tells us, “Creation is suffering unbearable pains”.

Back to “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.” If that is the case then only Creation herself, has the answer and only by listening to her cries, can we estimate the time of ‘the tipping point’, the period, not the day or the hour, but the approximate time, because Jesus gives some hints, pointing to “the devastation mentioned by Daniel”, something we very much see today, and leaving other pointers, clearly referring to The End.

How are we going to cope?

Yes, there is growing anxiety out there, as we observe the death struggles of creation, which also signifies our own demise. Ignoring these symptoms is no solution. Admitting them is the start of coping and seeing it as God’s plan, as the beginning of redemption. Forget about Rapture and going to heaven: that’s pagan prattle. God made the earth, that’s why it is holy: it is God’s Primary Word. Treat it as such, starting today.

Christ died to restore creation. That being accomplished, we now eagerly wait for our adoption as God’s children, the redemption of our bodies, as Romans 8: 24 attests, “for in that hope we are saved!”

We have lived the life of destruction. We have left to our children nothing but chaos. We need to apologize to them for the unrepairable mess we have created. The world now is full of our toys, but empty of God’s creatures, full of chaos causing Climate Change but empty of fish, fowl, and foliage.

We have to fit on the new clothes, meaning adopt a new way of life: “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the Tree of Life and may go through the gates into the City”. 

We have to thoroughly clean ourselves of the stains, the creation-destroying elements, which are leading us to gloom and doom. Only then may we claim the right to the TREE OF LIFE and enter into THE ETERNAL CITY, the NEW JERUSALEM.

That’s the only way to cope today.

More about that next week

MARCH 16 2019

OUR MOVE AWAY FROM THE CITY.

In 1951, freshly discharged as a sergeant in the Dutch Army, having served 18 months of conscripted military service, including an 8 months stint at a training school, I emigrated to Canada.

Army life did not suit me: being too much of an anti-disciplinarian. So I, city-born and bred in the Netherlands, was off to Canada, officially as a farmhand. And, indeed, for 2 months I worked on a grain farm, living with the farm family, the very best training to get a good grasp of the language, of which I already had a better than average understanding. It also was a great help that the farm woman was a former teacher, while the farmer husband taught me a lot of swearwords.

In the late 1940’s and early 1950’s a sudden mania to emigrate engulfed the Netherlands, with Canada being the destination of choice for the bulk of those wanting to leave. It seems to me that there were a number of reasons why this happened.

• There was the Russia scare. After having endured 5 years of German occupation, many were afraid that a similar situation could develop if Russia were to attack the West.
• In the army I was trained to go to the Dutch East Indies, where a war of liberation was waged. Many feared that the loss of these colonies would impoverish the Netherlands.
• The rising popularity of the automobile and the mechanization of agriculture drastically changed the economic landscape threatening the livelihood of small storeowners and farmers.
• Conflicts in the Protestant church were a factor as well.

So people emigrated by the thousands, my younger brother and I among them. My reason? Canada was seen as a land of greater opportunities.

After leaving the farm I settled in Hamilton, Ontario, where I started selling life insurance. I got married to my fiancé in 1953, (we had been engaged since 1950 and she came over in 1952). In 1955 we moved our small family to St. Catharines. Once there I branched out to include fire and car insurance. In 1963 I became a Real Estate Broker as well.

We lived in the Garden City, as the place was called, for 20 years, expanding our family to include five children. In 1963 we had an 1800 square feet new house built to my specifications, on a main thoroughfare, also housing my insurance and real estate office.

A turning point.

The years 1971-3 were a turning point in my life. Two books came my way via two friends, one who gave me, THE LIMITS OF GROWTH, written for and by the Club of Rome, and another, AFTER DEATH… WHAT?, was by a Dutch theologian.

The first book convinced me that we live in a FINITE WORLD, and the second brought home to me that Jesus did not come to save me from my sins – that too – but primarily to bring back upon his return, THE RENEWED WORLD.

In 1971 the Real Estate Institute of Canada of which I was a member, issued a call for articles relating to its field. With my recent readings fresh in mind, my thinking was focused on energy and ecology. I decided to begin exploring an article featuring these facets, and the result was my essay, THE CITY, KEY TO SURVIVAL, with as subtitle, An Essay on Ecology and Urban Living.

To my pleasant surprise it was chosen from a Canada-wide field, including University Professors. It was published in its Journal in November 1972.  A substantial cash prize was presented to me at the institute’s annual convention – all prepaid – in Vancouver.

I concluded my contribution with, “The city is the key to the future. Let’s hope that the people of the city will find the door – the key is not enough.”

This 5000 word article was meant for ‘secular’ consumption. It was impossible to express my secret thoughts. By “The City” I actually meant “The City of God, the New Jerusalem”, and “The Door” really pointed to Christ.

Through my readings and thinking, I started to realize that the City as it had developed, especially in recent times, had become the new Tower of Babel, a place where God is hard to find. I basically had come to the conclusion that the CITY really revolved around money – the desire of which is the root of all evil – and almost entirely embodied the human aim to reject God and become autonomous. This constituted a turning point in my life.

Me: the idealist.

So, idealist as I was, and still am, my thinking started to change, and my thoughts turned to different ways of living, not in the city, but somewhere in Ontario where I could incorporate a more responsible way of life, based on the laws of ecology, formulated by Dr. Barry Commoner:

• Everything is connected to everything else.
• There is no waste.
• Nature knows best.
• Nothing comes free.

I always have been a person who believed in action, and ready for a radical change. I was tired of my insurance business, partly because my so efficient secretary left. Also, having for two decades lived in the Niagara Peninsula, I twice had run into trouble with the church. I had been an elder in the Christian Reformed Church, had a disagreement with my minister, resigned as an elder and switched to a sister church in the same city. When, after a few years, a new minister came, a real dogmatist, I chose to leave the church and become part of a house church.

The 1973 Energy Crisis.

Then, in 1973, there was the energy crisis. Because the United States and other industrialized nations in Europe supported Israel during the Yom Kippur War, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OAPEC) declared an oil embargo against those countries. This included a 25% decrease in production of oil, causing an energy crisis, which drove up the cost per barrel from $3 to $12 by 1974, the equivalent of $100 per barrel in today’s money. In 1973, the US’ daily consumption then was 18 million barrels of oil, so its total daily spending jumped from $54 million to $216 million, quadrupling its total outlay.

Emergency 

Because of the massive shortage of oil, the United States and other countries began rationing oil consumption, limiting the amount of gas that could be pumped at gas stations, restricted what days cars could fill their tanks based on license plate numbers, and closed stations on Sundays. European countries instilled similar restrictions, including a three-day workweek as well as curtailing non-essential Sunday driving.  

Had these cuts been maintained, Climate Change could have been avoided.

However, not all of the effects of the oil embargo were negative. To conserve oil, more energy-efficient appliances and cars were designed, buildings were constructed with better insulation leading to reduced use of heating and air-conditioning, mass transit was slowly expanded, and alternative energy sources were explored.

My efforts.

That was the situation in 1973. I became increasingly convinced that hard times were coming, that perhaps the entire economy could collapse. So in 1974 I made the decision to move. Friends had bought a 200 acre farm in Tweed. From them I acquired a 50 acre parcel, sold my insurance portfolio, and in June of 1975 started to build a house I had designed.

Tweed itself is situated midway between Toronto and Ottawa, Ontario’s biggest cities, both some 200 km away, too far to walk in case cities were to become uninhabitable. Our new location was some 5km from the tiny village of some 1800 inhabitants, with a large proportion of seniors.

The topography of the land we bought was typically Canadian Shield, open sections interspersed with rock outcroppings, tree covering and wetlands. After deciding on the precise location of our new home, partly into a hill, a well ‘witcher’ was found who advised us to drill where two underground streams crossed, some 70 feet underground. Indeed, after drilling at that exact point, an abundance of pure well water gushed up – 150 liters per minute – sufficient to provide 10 households.

Being totally unskilled, I hired a good friend, a jack of all trades, and master of all, under whose direction and action the house was constructed in three months.

What sort of dwelling did I design?

With energy in mind, and guided by the laws of ecology my design was a two storey building, facing south, without a basement. I insulated the foundation with 4 feet of solid Styrofoam and erected the dwelling with 2×6 studs, filled with R20 insulation, R40 in the ceiling.  

Large windows catching the low south sun in the winter did indeed warm the house, even with 40 below weather. On the north and west side insulated window shutters helped to keep the cold from penetrating the bedrooms there. A masonry chimney with two flues was placed at the center and so was the bathroom so that heat emitted from these two sources would spread to the surrounding spaces. The side door on the East side was provided with a slightly lower airlock while the outside door, mostly insulated glass, faced south. Our living quarters were on the top floor – as heat rises- while the ground floor had two extra bedrooms, a bathroom, my office and a utility area with a woodstove and cool-heat pump.

Recent developments.

In 1975 I was 47 years old, with our oldest son away in Dordt College and 4 children of various ages, the youngest being 10 years old. Two were of high school age and attended school in a nearby village. The two youngest learned by reading and receiving art lessons.

I set out to retrain for professional real estate appraiser. I took my missing courses at York (leases and mortgages) and Trent Universities (urban geography) and a correspondence course at Queen’s (economics), all needed to complete the academic requirements for becoming an Accredited Appraiser of the Canadian Institute (AACI). To prove my skills I had to submit three 100 page appraisal reports, written according to the prescribed methods: a single family dwelling, an apartment building and an industrial property. These three ‘master’ appraisals, earned me, in 1978, my professional accreditation.  

With my business rapidly expanding, I had a separate building constructed to accommodate an office manager and three residential appraisers, each specializing in South, Central and North Hastings County, while I valuated commercial properties in that vast 200 km long area, among them river dams, a former RAF Spitfire training base, summer resorts, an uranium mine in the Bancroft area, as well as the entire Bruce Peninsula for a First Nation land claim: 500,000 acres!

Immense blessings.

Our move away from the city proved to be a real blessing.

The collapse of the economy did not occur. I still believe a much larger collapse is in the offing, with Climate Change becoming more real by the day. To safeguard our water supply, I installed a hand pump on the well.

Over the years I developed a 2,000 square feet vegetable garden, planted 4,000 trees, as well as 3 apple trees, and so attained a degree of self-sufficiency, including solar panels to defray the high cost of rural hydro and provide lights when there is a power outage, expected to become more frequent as the weather become more violent.

Oh yes, I quit smoking in 1959 and started running. I still do this 3 x per week, indoors in the winter, of course. I also bike a lot, also both inside and outdoors. All these actions keep me mentally and physically in good shape.

I sold my business in 1993, when I turned 65, but stayed on as a consultant. With more time available I wrote a couple of books, translated 4 manuscripts – all published – and started a weekly column for the regional daily. Cost cutting in 2010 cost me my column which I then expanded from 800 words to 2000, appearing weekly on my blog, www.hielema.ca with readers all over the world, as seen below showing the 10 top countries:

Rank	Flag	Country	Visitor Count
1		United States	369
2		Canada	46
3		China	40
4		United Kingdom	25
5		France	18
6		Germany	16
7		Netherlands	12
8		Japan	9
9		Russian Federation	7
10		Italy	6

Yes, our move away from the city proved to be a real blessing and steered me into interesting ventures.

MARCH 9 2019

BE NOT AFRAID

Have no fear of sudden disaster

or of the ruin that overtakes the wicked,

for the Lord will be at your side

and will keep your foot from being snared.

                                      Proverbs 3: 25-26

These are wise words when everything is trapped in tragic turmoil. I cannot recall a time when there was so much uncertainty about the future.

During the 1939-45 war in Europe and the Far East, there always was hope. Having consciously lived through that period I never noticed despair: people always believed in a better future. Although it was then forbidden to listen to the BBC – it was even illegal to own a shortwave radio – nevertheless we listened to London as the German news was truly FAKE. The Dutch broadcast from England always started with the line, “Hoe moeilijk de dag, hoe zwaar ook de tijding, we zijn weer een dag dichter bij de bevrijding”, translated as “However difficult the day, however much evil in the nation, we are one day closer to liberation”. That was the hope all of occupied Europe lived by.

Today we exist in a world where hope is on the way out. Of course the politicians deny this, and so they add to the confusion, but in the bottom of their hearts they too are scared.

We, citizens, hear mixed messages. On the one hand, to avoid global disaster in the form of a catastrophic temperature rise, we are told – while everything still seems sort of normal – to enact a much more sustainable lifestyle by lowering our carbon use, by cutting back on automobile use and flying, and, in general, live so that the use of fossil fuels is drastically reduced.

On the other hand, while Governments encourage these measures, yet they still aim for economic growth, they still approve oil pipelines, because they desperately need the extra income, as the call for public assistance is growing with an aging population requiring greater medical expense and increased pension outlay.   

Combine this with a complete absence of vision, and the result is that psychic diseases accelerate and physical violence flourishes.

Of course the Bible has a line on that too,

“Where there is no vision, people cast off restraint”.

Proverbs 29:18.

Confusion is not confined to personal matters.

Take Brexit.

In three weeks, at the end of March, the person in charge – PM Theresa May – has no coherent plan to execute the parting of Great Britain from the European Union.

The vote, almost three years ago, was 52/48. After three years of haggling the political class has been unable to come to any serious conclusion about what kind of Brexit it wants. The result: confusion, the clear result of lack of wisdom:

“Where there is no vision, people cast off restraint; but blessed is the one who heeds wisdom’s instruction”. Proverbs 29:18.

When people see that there is no real leadership, when there is no obvious strategy, they say, “the heck with it”, and become indifferent and also uncooperative, which leads to the opposite of wisdom.

The times are fascinating, nevertheless.

Last week I did something I seldom do: watch day-time TV. I followed Michael Cohen’s dramatic appearance. One of the most revealing lines of his testimony was,

“Given my experience working for Mr. Trump I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power, and that is why I agreed to appear before you today.”

For Trump, losing is the deepest form of humiliation, and humiliation is intolerable.

Just as voting for Brexit placed Great Britain in a state of total turmoil, so too choosing Trump for president placed the Devil in charge whose sole aim is to sow dissension and force people to make the wrong choices, precisely at the very point in history, when the deepest version of wisdom is called for.  

Never argue.

In the past I have argued with people who favored Trump. Since then I have refrained from doing this, because voting for Trump is not a matter of reason: it is a matter of faith, and one cannot win a dispute that is not based on logic, or on commonsense or rationality but on some sort of fanatic belief beyond my comprehension. It’s the nature of faith that it cannot be proven.  

My gut feeling is that the hidden, unacknowledged reason for a person preferring Trump or choosing Brexit is that “All my life I have been screwed, have been taken advantage of by the rich and the elite and especially by the politicians. I have been treated as dirt by everybody, and now I will take revenge.”

I believe a significant section of society – 40-50 percent –realize instinctively that there is no rhyme or reason to their stance, but, seeing no hope for improvement, and no longer having faith in promises, they, with the famous economist, John Maynard Keynes, shrug their shoulders because: “in the long run we are dead anyway.” And that may happen sooner than later.

Today we encounter pure NIHILISM, also evident in the Rapture phenomenon, which also has a religious component. Most American RAPTURE proponents are convinced that “true believers” will be fetched up to heaven and leave behind the sinners on the evil earth, while, actually, the opposite is true. More about that later.  

So with Trumpians and with Brexiteers it’s no use to argue: their position is beyond reason, but the sad truth is that these unstated differences are ripping two countries apart, leaving both the USA and Great Britain more polarized than ever.  

And worse is to come.

 “Where there is no vision, people cast off restraint.

Proverbs 29:18.

We live in different times, godless times. No wonder people have lost their footing. Having grown up without any notion of religion, having endured 12 years of public schooling where God is never mentioned, where any reference to religion is systematically avoided, where the unspoken assumption is that the future will be like the past, a continuation of wealth and welfare, there suddenly looms a darker scenario, a less rosy prospect, especially for the male portion of the population.

One hundred or more years ago, when the machine age was just starting, younger men followed in their fathers’ footsteps and looked at the future with some confidence as tomorrow would be as yesterday: there was predictable continuity.

Even 68 years ago when I arrived in Canada the outlook was encouraging: I was able to build up an insurance business, expand it to include a real estate brokerage, and round off my business career with starting a real estate appraising career in a totally different geographical location.

Now everything has changed: anybody can be an appraiser, any bank employee, thanks to Google maps and readily accessible real estate sales information, can, with a little coaching, acquire sufficient comparable sales data to arrive at a reasonable opinion of value when a mortgage is required.

Also Artificial Intelligence and versatile robots will further eat into the job market, affecting especially men, further increasing confusion and anxiety.

The Revenge of Creation

And then there looms the Mother of All future-killing elements.

There’s a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions unfolding. Life is disappearing from the Earth and all life could be gone within one decade. Study after study is showing the size of the threat, yet many people seem out to hide what we’re facing.

In the Arctic alone, four tipping points look set to be crossed within a few years, perhaps as early as this summer:

1. Loss of the Arctic sea ice’s ability to act as a buffer to  absorb incoming ocean heat
2. Loss of Arctic sea ice’s ability to reflect sunlight back into space (albedo)
3. Destabilization of sediments at the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean 
4. Permafrost melt

Crossing these tipping points will trigger a number of feedbacks resulting in even more absorption of heat by the Arctic Ocean.

We already experience constant changes to the Jet Stream, and in the immediate future even more extreme weather can be expected. The greatest danger, however, is the release of seafloor methane. This will cause an immediate spike in temperature and further disastrous emissions from land such as methane, nitrous oxide and nitrogen oxide.

With the permafrost melting, with more storms and forest fires, temperatures will rise even more over the next few years as more black carbon and brown carbon is emitted and more wood gets burned and more forest fires occur.

Can we still change course? 

In one word: NO.

And for that answer I again rely on the Bible.

There are several passages both in both the Old and the New Testament that give us a rather accurate picture of what awaits us, not in the distant future but soon, perhaps very soon.

All  of you’ve heard of Noah and the Ark. Well, once that massive vessel had touched land again, God ( see Genesis 9) said, (verse 8-10):

“I now establish my covenant with you, and all humanity, and with every living creature that was with you”.

Verse 16 reaffirms this, “an everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”

A covenant is a solemn treaty between two parties considered equals, in this case between God and us. In it we promised under oath to treat all of creation as divine, as holy.

Jump to Isaiah 24: 5-6,

“The earth is defiled by its people; they have disobeyed the laws, violated the statutes, and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse consumes the earth; its people must bear their guilt. Therefore earth’s inhabitants are burned up, and very few are left.”

The prophet Hosea connects human behavior with creational pain. Hosea 4: 2-3 tells us that,

“There’s only cursing, lying and murder, stealing and adultery….. Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying.”

Please note: The Bible sees a direct connection between human moral conduct and climatic conditions. Of course: “everything is connected to everything else!”

The New Testament records the very words of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who calls himself the Son of Man, Humanity Personified. In Matthew 24, that terrible chapter, he said: (Verse 10), “In the end many will turn away from the faith… there will be an increase of wickedness …and distress unequaled…”

Foreseeing the false gospel of RAPTURE, he also gives the answer to that LIE. (Verse 38-39): The sinners will be “Eating and drinking until the flood came and took (all the sinners) away. That’s how it will be at the coming of the Son of Man!!”

In other words: God’s People remain(!) on the Earth!! The sinners vanish! The earth is ours FOREVER.

There are plenty of other indications in the Bible pointing to the time we live in. Take 2 Peter 3: 10,

“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.”

Then there is Revelation, the last Bible book.

Chapter 16 has the heading, The Seven Bowls of God’s wrath. They are: (1) painful diseases (Ebola, Aids), (2) everything in the seas dies, (3) including rivers and lakes, (4) the sun becoming dangerous: (5) terrible heat, (6) utter darkness, (no electricity?)

All these all events are occurring NOW.

Then to top it all, the seventh angel (verse 17) announces, “a tremendous earthquake, unequaled ever.” 

Bonhoeffer has pointed out the task of the church:

“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.

Because the church has failed to do this, universal confusion is the reigning mind-setter today; people don’t know where to turn; Climate Change is beyond repair; economic problems, especially debt-creation, have no other remedy than bankruptcy: all human efforts have become fraught with disastrous outcomes.

Nevertheless.

Have no fear of sudden disaster

or of the ruin that overtakes the wicked,

for the Lord will be at your side

and will keep your foot from being snared.

MARCH 2 2019

SEX AND THE CHURCH

Of course I mean the Roman Catholic Church, our mother church and the largest Christian Denomination. Almost all churches have a hymn with a march-like melody and war-like words, “Onward Christian Soldiers, marching as to war” and “Like a mighty army moves the church of God”, totally untrue today, of course, but still appropriate because the R.C. Church is organized like an army.

Here’s the striking comparison: We all know that an army has a commander in chief: well, the church has the Pope; the army has generals, and the church Cardinals; the army has colonels, and the church Bishops, the army has officers and the church Priests; the army soldiers and the church the lay people.

For a long time, the army had no female officers, just as the R. C. church still has no females in its ranks. In the army just like any church where God is male, male is God, and that, of course, means sexual trouble.

Looking back

There was a time, long ago, when sexual matters were less complicated. Take Abraham. When this wise man charged his most trusted servant to go to his ancestral grazing grounds to find a wife for his son Isaac, the Bible tells us that Abraham secured his servant’s oath by commanding him to place your hand on my thigh.

The thigh in the Bible is often used as a euphemism for sexual organs, which represent the source of Abraham’s reproductive powers and the fate of his progeny. The image of having someone swear an oath by placing his hand on another man’s genitals might jar us, but this practice speaks to the lack of prudishness in ancient times. Actually our word ‘testify’ is based on the Latin word testes or testicles and derives its meaning from this custom.

“Pen is” becomes “Penis”

It plays through my mind that the saying, “The ‘PEN IS’ mightier than the sword”, should slightly be shortened to read, “The PENIS mightier than the sword.” Indeed, the PENIS is destroying the church. The PEN, the written and spoken word, has gone out of fashion with Fake News and a US president whose total being reflects that.  

The same is true of the church. It is not that the Bible is wrong: where the church errs is that it sees Scriptures as the only HOLY WORD, while God’s Created Word is not recognized as HOLY and thus abused to the point of DEATH.

Sex is part of the Created Word. We all are sexual beings. To deny this is to deny our humanity.

The trouble is that the church in general lives on two planes: The Sacred and the Secular. It sees the Bible and the church as HOLY, and the rest, including humanity, as secular. THAT IS WHAT IS WRONG. Sex is as sacred as the Bible, because it is created by God, and hence holy.

The church, as an institute today, has become an anomaly, is no longer a viable entity because it does not recognize CREATION as divine, which debases the value of the church.

The same happened to the Jewish religion, which was based on temple service and on a hierarchy of High Priests and lower ranks, on animal offerings and Mosaic Laws.

When Christ pledged his life to restore Creation, he made LOVE his law, so the temple became superfluous. At the precise moment Jesus died on the cross the heavy curtain between the Holy and the Holy of Holies was severed from top to bottom, a sign that Temple worship had reached its “best before date”, even though there still was forty years of grace before the temple was destroyed in 70 A.D.

With the church, as an institute, on its deathbed today, with the Bible as a guide, our main focus should be on CREATION, God’s Primary Word and the church’s ultimate destination. By denying human sexuality the church has written off creation as being God’s precious work of art.

Already in the Garden of Eden the two different sexes were present, first in animals, then in humans. That is the creation order. Just as there is homosexuality among animals, so it occurs among humans. Get used to it: it’s natural.

Jesus told us that in the New Creation there will not be marriage. This doesn’t mean that there will not be sex: of course there will be. Of course people will fall in love. Of course Jesus fell in love: he experienced all human emotions. Of course the saints in the New Creation will express their humanity in all possible ways, artistically, musically, literarily, and also sexually. How all that will be expressed, is still a mystery, but it all will come out, and is something to look forward to. It is about time that the church confronts the truth that God also created sex, an undeniable human trait.

Everything will be revealed.

We live in eschatological times, which mean that the TRUTH of all human actions will be exposed.

That was evident again when Pope Francis held a 4 day conclave involving some 190 clerics, mostly cardinals: it was all about SEX in the church. And nothing was solved. Latin is the official language of the church, so “Pariuntur montes, nascatur ridiculus mus”, is fitting: The Mountains – the Big shots – copulated and the result was a ridiculous small mouse – the results were peanuts.

How totally outdated was that spectacle, that gathering in Rome! All male, all uniformed, all only half-way formed, as a good marriage makes a person whole: woman and man are made for each other.

What the clergy in all faiths forget, is that we live in different times: the old answers are useless. I don’t think I am wrong when I say that God is not dead, but he’s no longer active: Jesus has taken over. 

Last week I spoke with a retired Roman Catholic teacher. The informed laity is fed up with the church. Basically its structure has become irrelevant: in a sex-saturated society where little is taboo, she simply stated that clergy should be allowed to marry and women ordained. That would solve the sex-problem in the Catholic Church and fill the many vacant clergy positions as well.

Morris West – who was a monk for 12 years – wrote a trilogy on the papacy: “The shoes of the Fisherman”, “The Clowns of God”, and “Lazarus”, all good descriptions of Vatican intrigue and the stubbornness of the Curia. It seems to me that Pope Francis has become a victim of the bureaucracy there. Too bad: I had high hopes for him.

New Reformation impossible.

By failing to recognize CREATION as God’s PRIMARY word, I am increasingly convinced that the church, any church, is beyond reform: most buildings are ecological disasters, the ecclesiastical offices too ingrained, the confessions too ossified, and the preachers too prone to please. So the churches slowly die, and in their dying cause a lot of grief, because, I must confess, I love the church.

Yet there are refreshing voices.      

One of them is Hans Küng, now retired- he’ll be 91 in March – and living in Switzerland. He is the most famous Roman Catholic theology professor, author of many books, of which I have a number one simply entitled, The Church, another Eternal Life?

Here’s what he wrote a while ago:

The rule that Catholic priests must be celibate is responsible for the crisis in the church. Now is the time to challenge that requirement. From the United States to Ireland to Germany, the widespread abuse of children and adolescents by Catholic priests has done enormous damage to the image of the church. It also reveals the depth of the crisis.

In Germany Archbishop Robert Zollitsch of Freiburg, speaking as chairman of the Conference of German Bishops, has made a public statement on behalf of the Church. His declaration that the cases of abuse were “heinous crimes”—together with the bishops’ statement of February 25, 2010, asking forgiveness from all the victims—are first steps toward dealing with the crisis. But much more must be done.

Zollitsch’s statement, moreover, contains serious misrepresentations that need to be challenged.

Consider his first claim: sexual abuse by priests has nothing to do with celibacy. Objection! Although there is no question that abuse also occurs in families, schools, and youth organizations, as well as in churches that do not have the rule of celibacy, why are there such an extraordinary number of cases specifically in the Catholic church, whose leaders are celibate?

Of course, celibacy is not solely responsible for these crimes. But it is the most important structural expression of the Catholic hierarchy’s inhibitions with regard to sexuality, evident also in its attitude toward birth control and other questions.

In fact a glance at the New Testament shows that although, Jesus and Paul led celibate lives, they left others complete freedom to do so or not. Based on the gospel, clerical celibacy can be advocated only as a freely-chosen calling (charisma), not as a compulsory rule for everyone.

Paul decisively contradicted those contemporaries who were of the opinion that “it is good for a man not to touch a woman.” As he wrote, “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband” (1 Corinthians 7: 1-2). According to 1 Timothy 3:2, “A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife” (not “of no wife”!).

During their ministry, Peter and the other apostles were married. For many centuries, married life was normal for bishops and presbyters and—outside the Roman Catholic Church—remains so today, at least for priests, in all the churches of Eastern rites united with the Holy See as well as in Orthodox Christianity. Rome’s rule of celibacy contradicts the gospel and ancient Catholic tradition. It should be abolished.

The second claim by Archbishop Zollitsch: it is “completely false” to trace the cases of abuse to defects in the structure of the church. Objection! The rule of celibacy did not exist during Christianity’s first millennium. Under the influence of monks (who lived in voluntary abstinence) it was instituted in the Western Church during the eleventh century, in particular by Pope Gregory VII, against the staunch opposition of the clergy in Italy and especially in Germany. Only three German bishops dared to promulgate the decree from Rome; thousands of priests protested it. In a petition at the time, the German clergy asked rhetorically whether the pope was “unfamiliar with the word of the Lord: ‘He that is able to receive it, let him receive it?’” (Matthew 19:12). In this, his only statement on the question, Jesus advocates voluntary abstinence.

Yet the rule of celibacy, together with papal absolutism and exaggerated clericalism, became one of the pillars of the “Roman system.” Unlike priests in the Eastern churches, the celibate clergy of the West remain completely separated from the laity, primarily by abstaining from marriage. They constitute a dominant social class of their own, fundamentally superior to ordinary Christians, but completely subordinate to the pope in Rome. The rule of celibacy is the main reason for the catastrophic shortage of priests, the serious neglect of the Eucharist, and the widespread breakdown of pastoral care—a problem that has been papered over by merging parishes into “pastoral units” ministered to by badly overworked priests.

What would be the best way to attract more young people to the priesthood? Abolish the rule of celibacy, the root of the whole problem, and allow the ordination of women. The bishops know this and should have the courage to say it out loud. They would have the vast majority of Catholics behind them. All recent polls show that the laity favor allowing priests to marry.

So far Dr. Hans Küng.

The Roman Catholic Curia will not heed these words, and so keep on tacitly condoning sexual abuse and prolonging the crisis besetting the entire ecclesiastical system.

In these last days everything is coming to a head. All human structures are being challenged, and found wanting, including the ecclesiastical entities.

It simply means that we must get ready for the Greatest Surprise of all times: the sudden and unexpected return of Christ in all his glory.