Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

January 12 2019

SILENCE IN THE FACE OF EVIL IS ITSELF EVIL

Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
…By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes.
– William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I, 1606

“Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short”. (Revelation 12: 12).

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil – God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Yes, I’ll admit, judging by the above quotes, this is not going to be a cheerful piece. Sorry. One of the advantages of writing a blog is that I have to be my own editor: there’s nobody out there who will smooth my tale, take off the sharp edges and give my story an uplifting twist in the end, the usual way of editing.

What I am about to do is prepare me and you for what is to come. My tender tentacles tell me that 2019 and beyond spells trouble. The signs are all over: I see Lawless Trump as a sure sign that he is a true lackey of the Evil One; by his acts and words he daily welcomes Evil with open arms.

Trump now rules a society spiraling out of control. Trump is so popular because his lawlessness mirrors the lack of norms his constituents have: they have lost all ideas of right and wrong: they consume violent porn, subscribe to hateful ideologies, overdose on opioids, megachurches and Trump rallies, spend their last dollars on lotteries and casinos, while neglecting homes and spouses. Their health is poor, also because the cost of insurance and institutional care is prohibitive, beyond the reach of most.

Right now the last battle – between Good and evil – is being fought in every sector of the universe. Those who had expected that Christ’s great triumph here on earth when he rose from the grave on Easter would result in increasing peace and prosperity, is cruelly cured of this illusion.

“But woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! Filled with fury, because he knows that the time is short.” (Verse 12).

That’s what the angels sing. This means that the demonic armies have thrown themselves onto the world with such unbridled ferocity and awesome fury that it can only have the most terrible results.

We see it not only in Trump, but also in Brazil, in Turkey, in China, in Hungary, in refugees, in the Yellow Shirts in France: everywhere, especially in the Middle East. Also the transatlantic concord underpinning the West since the Fifties is dying. NATO, the G7, the G20, the WTO and the EU are all in varying degrees of crisis. The mayhem of May’s doing and the stupid shutdown in the USA are just the tip. Combine this with turmoil in the climate, and it points to universal breakdown.

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

This world, indeed, has become possessed. All factors that somehow acted as brakes to stall this development have been pushed aside; now that this process is in motion it speeds up disastrously, and nothing can stop it: only the word “exponential” expresses it correctly.

So why does God allow this to happen?

God has a reason why the demonic powers are allowed to pursue their relentless opposition; there is a reason why God has allowed a certain period in which life on earth goes on as if Satan and not God and his angels are calling the shots.

The reason is simple: matters are not yet what they are: everything still looks different than it is in reality. But a haze of untruthfulness hovers like a curse over the world and in that fog of uncertainty history marches on.
There’s where Trump fits in: through him the true face of humanity and the true nature of the church are becoming evident.
We have to become what we are: “the righteous more righteous, the evil more evil”, that’s the point of the last Bible book, REVELATION. Admit it: there’s a lot of rot out there: that’s what the economy is, that’s what humanity is, that’s what politics is. And, sorry to say, a religion that welcomes a Trump and a Pence, is totally degenerate. A religion that sees the earth as disposable, is cursing God. Name me a brand of religion that treats the earth as holy, as a gift of God.

Looking back.

There are parts in the world where for a long time hardly any change took place, where the old religions were kept in honor, and the old ancestral morals remained intact. Large parts of Asia, Africa and South America lived for centuries without undergoing any change at all.

However since the 1500’s the entire world has seen a very deep transformation, with Europe at the forefront of this wild ride. Then the center of gravity switched from the Mediterranean Sea powers to the Western countries, in particular Germany, England and The Netherlands, partly through the discoveries of new continents and the establishment of colonial empires.

That period saw deeply penetrating social changes, urbanization, and bloody revolutions. It also witnessed the birth of a global mechanical, physical science- dominated world with all its consequences.

All too evident also were the erosion of old moral principles. All too well-known were the World Wars, affecting and upsetting all that lives. Never before in the history of the world has so much in such a short time been demolished and radically changed, as in the last five centuries.

Today these immense changes are no longer confined to Europe and the USA, but now involve all people everywhere, imperiling the existence of all these countries and regions and increasingly cause unrest and confusion.

In this grand scheme of changes the many discoveries especially in the area of natural physics have played a significant role. We all know about the invention of the machine, steam, the motor, electricity, atomic energy, television, the Internet, just to name a few. Medical science gained new insight in the nature of diseases and the methods of healing. We saw new ways in agriculture, a great increase in world population, new methods of transportation, especially aviation, and communication such as the rise of the computer and electronic information.

We also witnessed the development of new weapons and greater possibilities for destruction. I believe that now, in the End Times, the dangers of a nuclear war are greatly increasing. Every day we read about new developments. As ever the probing human brain is searching for the secrets of the universe in the quest for new discoveries.

All this means an immense increase in human power. It almost seems as if God for centuries has blindfolded humanity to prevent them from seeing all the planetary powers and possibilities and then suddenly he ripped away the blindfold in our days so that the one perspective after the other opens up.

This wild, unrestrained progress of human thought and discovery came with both a good dose of triumph but also with visions of frightening nightmares. Now nerves are constantly at an edge, the pace of life is ever more hectic, undefined feelings of anxiety dominate the millions.
We are confronted with situations, internally, spiritually, and morally which make it impossible to cope, which make us feel helpless, and which give us the unnerving notion that we are racing toward indescribable confusion and degeneration.

There is no doubt that what took place in the previous five centuries has all the hallmarks of a wild and turbulent era, overwhelming all opposition, undermining all established certainties. As a furiously cascading stream it forces a destructive path to nobody knows where. Is that what is meant when it is said that ever since the Easter morning the world resembles more and more a possessed world?

Today the words of Revelation 12: 12 are being fulfilled:
“Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has gone down to you! He is filled with fury, because he knows that his time is short”.

John on Patmos knew nothing about Climate Change, which is bringing ‘woe’ to the earth and seas. Today evil forces are unloosened which as a tsunami are overwhelming the world. We now are in the eye of a cyclone: everything around us is cracking up, crashing, on edge and at the breaking point. “For this world in its present form is passing away”. (1 Corinthians 7: 31).

And that is GOOD NEWS.

Above this disjointed and utterly terrified world we see the sparkling sign of the Easter morning. All our dismay and bewilderment cannot erase the overriding fact that the demonic forces in reality have suffered defeat and that’s why their fury is merely a symptom of their defeat.

The forces of evil realize that they have ‘little time’, that their influence on earth is approaching its inevitable finish. That “woe on earth and sea” may be accompanied with feelings of untold anguish, yet they fully rest on the unbelievable sounds of jubilation coming from on high: “Now have come the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ.” “He has come!”

Above the screaming of ever more powerful hurricanes and typhoons emerges the over-riding call to joy beyond measure. It resounds like a loud trumpet blast penetrating to the utmost parts of the universe. It also echoes in our hearts, filled with anxiety and fear.

Where do we stand ourselves?

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil – God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

It is time to have a look at ourselves in an effort to find the meaning of all this for our personal lives. Bonhoeffer wrote this while living under Hitler. He spoke up and it costs him his life. Not to speak up would have cost him eternal life. A fellow prisoner later reported that when the German Gestapo came to fetch Bonhoeffer to be executed, Bonhoeffer’s parting words were: “Now my real life begins.”

We today face a similar choice.

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil – God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act”

God’s world is on the edge of extinction, and that involves us, of course, as well. “Humanity is facing the final, western corporate capitalist, fossil fuel initiated, catastrophic Arctic methane hydrate destabilization and Permian style methane blowout – firestorm that will culminate in 1 to 8 years (2020 to 2027),” reported ARCTIC NEWS a few days ago.

Not to speak up against Climate Change is saying that God’s creation is disposable that God is imperfect. Not to act against this looming disaster is demonstrating that Jesus died in vain.
To remain silent in the face of evil is itself evil.

Life always entails a choice.

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, as well as death and disaster. For I am commanding you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments, statutes, and ordinances, so that you may live and increase, and the LORD your God may bless you in the land you are entering to possess. (Deuteronomy 30).

That choice, more than 3,000 years ago, now applies to the entire world.
Life and prosperity awaits us in the New Creation, if…IF…we speak up in the face of evil. If…IF we live the LIFE God wants us to live in the New Creation.

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil – God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act”

January 5 2019

BROTHER, ARE YOU BORN AGAIN?

“Brother, are you born again?” I have been asked that question a number of times. Not in the Dutch religious community where I had been active for many decades, but doing appraisals in North Hastings County, around the municipality of Bancroft, where there are large charismatic churches. All I had to say was, “yes”, and I was accepted as being born again: no further questions asked.

When Jesus, in John 3, suggested to Nicodemus, an important member of the Jewish hierarchy, that he needed a re-birth, it was a concept totally alien to this religious leader.

Nicodemus took it literally, “simply not possible” he said, so Jesus explained to this leading clergyman that it requires a ‘metanoia’ a radical new approach to living, a different mindset. In his case – and he was rich – it may have meant to sell everything he had, including that burial cave where Jesus’ body later was stored after being crucified.
In the end when Jesus was dead, Nicodemus finally came out.

Back to that secret meeting that led to two of Jesus’ most important pronouncements. Here Jesus connected ‘being born again’ to his real mission. Nicodemus, that prominent leader, a member of the Jewish elite, was the first to hear the two most important rules for eternal life:
(1) We must be born again. “Being born again” literally means that we abandon the way we have lived before, and make a totally new start: leave behind the old, and make a radical break, a total metanoia, doing away with all the assumptions we have taken for granted, realign ourselves for what is to come: the Kingdom.

(2) God loved the world – the cosmos – so much that he gave his one and only Son as ransom to buy it back from the Devil. Those who follow in Jesus’ footsteps – loving creation with acts of kindness and devotion – shall not perish but will enjoy eternal life in a renewed creation.

Jesus told Nicodemus, and via him, us, that his mission was not to save sinners, that too, but that he primarily had come to wrest the cosmos, the earth and everything we take for granted, from the power of The Evil One, and to restore all this to its original, pristine, perfect condition.

In other words, Jesus came to accomplish total renewal of everything, soil, oceans, air, humans, our minds, bodies, psyches, animals, relationships: the list is endless.

Which then begs the question, “The Kingdom: what is it?”

Jesus, in the Sermon of the Mount, tells us to make our priority in life to “seek the Kingdom”. It is also the first petition in The Lord’s Prayer: Thy Kingdom Come.

There’s been a lot of confusion here.

The Roman Catholic Church maintains that its institution is The Kingdom. The Reformed Christian movement often sees Church, Family, and Christian Education as aspects of The Kingdom, but seldom do they see God’s Creation as The Kingdom, and yet, that’s what it is.

When Adam and Eve dwelt in The Garden of Eden, then, indeed, they lived in God’s Kingdom, the completed creation which God called ‘good’ seven times.

Based on that, God’s Kingdom has certain character traits, and here I rely on Dr. J. H. Bavinck, and on his books I have translated.

As I already mentioned, God’s Kingdom has a cosmic character, which means that it comprises the entire world as we have come to know it. Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the worlds of animals and plants.

This implies that originally all parts of the world were attuned to each other. Nowhere was there a false note, nowhere a dis¬so¬nant that disturbed the unity, as everything fitted harmoniously into the greater scheme of the totality.

This applied both to each individual specimen but today still equally to the various circles or spheres found in creation. The celestial bodies follow their orderly tra¬jectories and do so according to God’s royal will, obeying his voice. And so the stars in their courses sound a melodious note in the great concert in which all creatures participate. The mountains rise up high above the water-saturated earth, their proud summits piercing the clouds; yet even these mountains are nothing but servants of Him who has planted and secured them by his power.

On every page the Bible makes plain that the meaning of creation resides only in the one overarching motif: the motif of God’s Kingdom. That is why Scripture and Creation are never at odds: they always form a unity where the one reinforces the other, as Psalm 19 tells us, “The heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the firmament shows forth the work of his hands.”

Things have changed.

We still live in that same earth where Adam and Eve dwelt in total perfection. I am not sure how long that lasted: perhaps One Thousand Years, who knows. What we do know is that this ideal situation did not remain: perhaps they were bored: sinning is more exciting – for a while.

But sin means letting God go, and making ourselves gods. It also means leaving the Kingdom, abandoning Paradise, because there’s where God dwells, even now.

All that happened a long time ago, but it took many millennia to extinguish the heritage of the Garden of Eden.

It is our dubious honor, being among the last generations, to totally rebut the will of God’s and cause the entire world order to plunge into chaos.

Who knows: this might happen this year. Here’s a thought.

Any year ending on a “9” may have ominous content.
This past century in 1919 there was the Russian Revolution and that disastrous Versailles conference, which gave rise to Hitler and the Middle East problem still with us.
1929 was the start of the Great Depression.
In 1939 World War II began.
1989 saw the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
In 2009, just one decade ago, we experienced the Collapse of the Banking system, with the governments pumping in trillions of dollars.
Way back in 1789 the French Revolution occurred.

This year, 2019, we may well see THE ICE disappear from the Arctic, which more and more people see as The End of the World. Just look up NEAR TERM HUMAN EXTINCTION and an impressive list of concerned academics are of that opinion.
Here’s a quote from Guy McPherson:
“I, myself, doubt that many people reading these words have three years to live. Habitat for humans on Earth will disappear shortly after the Arctic ice is gone, which is likely to occur in the summer of 2019”.

Dr. Guy McPherson

Let’s not kid ourselves: we have ruptured the Kingdom; we have brought total chaos into the world order.

Today Satan rules.

We are now faced with a development in creation that we can no longer control, but of which we daily exper¬i¬ence the terrifying consequences. (1 John 5: 19)
We now see God’s work of art embroiled in the power of demons. Satanic forces have thrown themselves onto nature, onto us humans, onto the entire radiant creation.

The world in which we live is dominated by demons. Every hour we experience the terrible influ¬ence of this satanic situ¬a¬tion.

But, believe it or not: it’s all part of God’s great plan.

God never abandoned his Kingdom concept. On the con¬trary: he opted for an even greater and more conspicu¬ous version. Even though you may never have given it a thought, the Kingdom concept has become the most pronounced motif of the history of the world: everything today centers on the emergence, the new birth of the Kingdom.

This kingdom that God is busy realizing has a very particular char-ac¬ter. If we wish to some degree to fathom its superb beauty, we must point out some of its features.

The Kingdom of God is depicted in the Bible as a reality of the end-time: today all signs point to this: it will only be in the end-time that all the strands of world history come together again: today we truly live in the world: any event, however insignificant, is known within hours everywhere thanks to satellites, drones and email.

The Kingdom has always been.

Of course the Kingdom was there already in pre-historic times, the Urzeit, and straight through the rubble and ruins of history it will again be manifested before our very eyes as an overwhelm¬ingly grandiose reality: we are rushing to the End, and that means that The Kingdom is near.

Jesus made it his chief mission. In the Old Testament book of Isaiah the glorious future of the Kingdom forms the central theme which dominates all other aspects.

Its main premise is that on the Great Day of the Lord, in the end–time, the Lord God will reveal his kingly power and on that Day he will permanently expel all decaying and destructive forces that have penetrated his creation.

On that Day the indescribable glory of the new reality of the eternal Kingdom will appear in living colour, a reality in which all things will again have their rightful place.

Nowhere is this future better outlined than in Paul’s profound descrip¬tion in Ephesians 1:9–10, when “the times will have reached their fulfillment—to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.”
These times are about to come, perhaps as early as 2019.

Here is a mind-shattering statement.

It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one over¬arching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All sal¬vation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the King¬dom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.

I repeat: There is no such thing as individual salvation. All sal-vation is of necessity universal. Our goal in life is to become part of God’s Kingdom. Rapture is the most unbiblical concept.

WOW. That upsets the entire ecclesiastical applecart.

BROTHER, ARE YOU BORN AGAIN?

When Jesus had that dialogue with that member of the Jewish elite, when the discussion between an important theologian and the Son of God, took place away from the public eye, then Jesus summarized his teaching in stating that love for the cosmos was the nucleus of his message. The COSMOS contains all created matter.

Jesus later gave another directive: Love God – and thus his creation – above all, which automatically includes the human race as well, loving it as much as we love ourselves.

Loving ourselves automatically includes love for all things, because ‘everything is connected to everything else’.

This is my first venture into 2019, and it already shapes up like a disastrous year, even though it has hardly begun.

Are the churches up to this new phase?

No. No. They are becoming a hindrance, rather than pointing the way ahead. Not all, of course, but, in general they are an anachronism: the buildings energy hogs, the songs often praising heaven, the sermon approach an incentive to sever nature from grace, their parking lots an ode to GMC, Ford, Korea and Japan.

BROTHER, ARE YOU BORN AGAIN?

That’s not a question easily answered. If I am right in my analysis, then Jesus’ saying, “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many are called, but few chosen”, (Matthew 22: 16), makes sense.
Perhaps the last who shall be first are those who try to conscientiously and continuously minimize their carbon footprint.

If I am right in my analysis, then Jesus` saying, “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18: 8) makes sense.
Let it suffice to say that “Being born again” is not a simple matter.

Fortunately we know from Acts 15: 11, “We believe it is through the grace of our Lord Jesus that we are saved.”

P. S.
I love statistics.
Last year 26,390 people visited my website; I wrote more than 100,000 words in my columns – a good sized book of 300 pages. I also ran, biked, and walked 3,360 km, an average of more than 9 km each day, and drove a total of 5,700 km. I started running in 1959 when I quit smoking. Since then I have run every week.

DECEMBER 29 2018

THE FINAL REFORMATION.

I seriously wanted to write an up-beat piece. So I sat down and tried to conjure something positive. Hey, I thought, perhaps what I wrote last year at the end of 2017 might help me.
So I looked up my December 30 2017 blog. Here’s what I wrote exactly a year ago,
“Last week I was listening to Handel’s Messiah and the aria, “he was despised, rejected by men, a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief.”
No wonder. How would you feel when your Creation, your very finest work of art, is destroyed? How would you feel when the church, your very own people, is the leading agent there? Jesus himself tells us that we, his children, have to suffer with Jesus: no crown without a cross. Instead….

Of course we cannot expect the world to know better but for the church to reject its Saviour by destroying her creation adds insult to injury and most surely calls for LAMENT, LAMENT, LAMENT.

Look at the Protestant church: utterly depressing. Just imagine: Franklin Graham is now a Trump prophet. “Never in my lifetime have we had a President of the US willing to take such a strong outspoken stand for the Christian faith like Donald Trump,” tweeted Franklin Graham, the son of the evangelist Billy Graham.
The Dallas pastor Robert Jeffress sees a divine hand at work: “God intervened in our election and put Donald Trump in the Oval Office.”
That was part of last year’s final message.

Oh, dear I thought, if that’s how I felt a year ago, how about the end of 2018 when things look even worse?
So I gave up and let my fingers do the talking.
Here’s what my subconscious mind dictated to me via the motions of my hands.

One year later everything has worsened. While I am writing this, I happen to listen to Bach’s St. Matthew PASSION, just hearing Peter, his disciple, saying “Ich kenne den Menschen nicht”, (I don’t know the man) meaning Jesus, whom he then denied three times, and then “the cock crew.” (krähte der Hahn), and Peter wept bitterly.

That’s how I feel while I write this, looking back to the year of the Lord 2018. Indeed tears well up in my eyes.

Still, for us, this past year has been tremendous in many ways. We celebrated our 65th wedding anniversary, as well as our 90th birthdays. Even though since then my wife has had a mastectomy and failing immediate memory, and losing some of her body balance, she’s always cheerful, one more reason to praise the Lord who has blessed us greatly, including a new great grandson, whom I held in my arms only a few hours after he was born.

Although our extended family has done great, I must confess that I am saddened because I have alienated a dear friend, and doubly saddened that my attempts to heal the breach have been rebuffed, in spite of persistent prayers. I invite your prayers as well: it still hurts and has put a blot on the year.

I am sure that my sadness is also caused by the state of the natural world, where a dangerous tipping point may be reached at any time. That this is not openly discussed and has failed to be a matter of deep concern in the church is something I fail to fathom: we here are talking about God’s creation, his Primary Word.

Pope Francis recently said, “God always forgives, we humans often do that, but Nature never forgives.” Does that mean that sinning against creation is the sin against the Holy Spirit? (“Whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven; they are guilty of an eternal sin.” Mark 3: 29).

Chaos versus Cosmos.

I have always maintained that ‘everything is connected to everything else’. Chaos ecologically and chaos politically and chaos economically and chaos theologically, all are part and parcel of the same evil: estrangement from the Creator. Once we lose God or disconnect God from the Christ and his creation, everything turns topsy-turfy.

The United States has seldom seen a peacetime period of chaos remotely like the past two weeks. The Middle East is where life began, if we believe the events recorded in the Bible. It seems to me that it might end there as well.

Today US politics thrive on chaos. No wonder the stock market is down and gold is up. God created cosmos: everything orderly, each item, each molecule, each atom perfectly in place, to ensure that the world can endure into eternity. But as long as humanity has been on the scene, the perpetual struggle has been between cosmos and chaos, between good and evil, between God and his adversary, Satan, the Devil, the Evil One, whatever his title.

Today, not God, not cosmos, but Satan, chaos, is in charge, the personality who Jesus correctly called, The Prince of this World. (John 12: 31; John 14:30; John 16: 11).

The state of the world, in all aspects, resembles an out of control spiral, looks as if it is being sucked into a downdraft of disorder. Not only is the U.S. capital a portrait of chaos, but so is London, and the BREXIT debacle, and so is the world economy, based on the impossibility of infinite growth, and so is our very own life-style, founded on the premise that the earth has limitless resources.

So from the North Pole, where in this coming year the ice may well be gone, all the way down to the South Pole, where the enormous ice-fields also are on the move, and everything in between, chaos reigns.

There are cycles in history

Bad times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
Weak men create bad times.

There are numerous cycles in existence. For instance, history teaches us that every 500-600 years a new start is made in religion. Major religions seem to be born every five- six hundred years. Moses and the emergence of the Yahweh worship took place some 1200 years before Christ. About 600 years later the world saw the birth of three separate religious streams: Zoroaster in Persia, Confucius in China and Buddha in South East Asia, while the Solomon Temple in Jerusalem also was inaugurated in that period. The Christian Religion took off with the death of Christ, while Islam saw its rise with Mohammed who lived from 570-632.
The Crusades – 1096-1291- could be seen as a major change, as the church became militant. This was followed by the 100 YEAR WAR between France and England -1337-1453-, and especially the 14th Century Black Plague pandemic which killed at least one-third of the European population.

All this prepared the world for the next religious event, the Protestant Reformation, led by Martin Luther on October 31 1517.

Now, with the speeding up of history thanks to our carboholic addiction, 500 years later we are due for what I call the FINAL REFORMATION.

The Protestant Reformation, taking its cue from Roman Catholicism developed a two-realm approach: The Sacred, in the form of the church, and the Secular, accommodating the world, the division in essence based on ancient and pagan Greek philosophy.

No surprise, the ‘secular, the world’ dominated, and chaos triumphed over cosmos.

Now with everything everywhere in disarray economical, ecological, political, theological, sociological, matters are speeding to the end.

THE FINAL REFORMATION

Everyone has a religion. It is, in fact, impossible not to have a religion if you are a human being. It’s in our genes, and has expressed itself in every culture, in every age, including our own secularized – so-called religion-less- society.

Dr. Evan Runner coined the phrase, LIFE IS RELIGION, and, indeed, that is the case. We all have beliefs: they’re part of being human. The symbols are all around us, in churches, in sport arenas, in gold-tinted office towers.

So what is religion? It’s not some intellectual, even though that’s part of it. Descartes emphasized the mind in his well-known maxim, Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am). Religion is not a theory. Religion is not a set of dogmas, not a something that we memorize and then follow.

Religion is a ‘way’, is a path, which leads to a certain destination. That path is our life, we are born, we grow up, we live, and we die. In that life we are conscious that we die, and then what? Is that the end? There’s where religion points the way.

So what is Religion? By religion, I mean something quite specific: a practice not a theory; a way of life that gives meaning. For the Christian that means finding its source in TRUTH, and truth can only be found in God, the Creator, and thus in Jesus, who calls himself, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as expressed in John 14: 6, where Jesus says, “I am the WAY and the TRUTH and the LIFE. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

The Church in medieval Europe certainly had plenty of blotches on its record, one of them preaching the sharp contrast between HEAVEN and HELL. Nevertheless the church brought order where there would have been only chaos. Frightening depictions of Hell that made medieval life look cozy by comparison and kept the nobles from abusing the peasants.

AND TODAY?

Today the shining example of lawlessness is in the White House, to some extent held in check by legal restrictions.

Today the shining example of a humane person is Pope Francis, but the biggest obstacle to renewal in all denominations is its clergy. In the RC church the endless spate of sex-abuse allegations, a true indicator of clerical dysfunction, and in other denominations the refusal to see women as equals and, of course, the preaching of the heaven heresy.

LISTEN TO THE CRIES OF CREATION

The Final Reformation starts with listening to the cries of creation. There is no salvation apart from creation: we are saved as part of creation, not as a member of a church.
The TRUTH is that God created, that we left the path of life that assures us eternity. JESUS walked that path and did it perfectly to the bitter end, paying the ultimate price to make LIFE possible.

When we walk that path, when we with every action, with every step we take, with every breath we inhale, consciously navigate that PATH in creation, then we are on the way that leads to eternity: the Final Reformation.

Romans 1: 20 tells me that creation itself is proof of God’s all-encompassing wisdom: people stand condemned by denying this. The corollary, the direct consequence of this is that acknowledging that creation is God’s work of art, and honoring it as holy, thus following Jesus’ example, that redeems a person.

“Holy Living” gives our life meaning. Not the church, not whether we are Presbyterian or Baptist, Roman Catholic or Jew: all these labels today mean little or nothing.

What truly counts is our humble walk in life, amidst the people created in God’s image, amidst the trees, which give is oxygen, amidst the flowers, which give beauty and nourishment to the insects, valuing the wildlife, loving the soil from which we are formed.

Jesus, in his manifesto, the Sermon on the Mount, (Matthew 5: 5), said, echoing Psalm 37: 11, “But the meek will inherit the land and enjoy peace and prosperity”.

The “meek” are not some patsy sort of folk, some doormats, no, they are, as J. B. Philips translates it, “those who claim nothing for themselves”, who see themselves as servants of creation, and not lords over creation.

They are the ultimate winners, again quoting Jesus, “The first shall be last and the last, the meek, shall be first.”

So where do I base this on?

John 3: 16. If God so loved the cosmos that he offered his most precious son to buy it back, then we too must love the world and all that dwells therein.

THE FINAL REFORMATION does not come from the church; does not have rules and dogmas: it is LIFE and that lived to the full. “Those who claim nothing for themselves”, who see themselves as servants of creation, and not lords over creation, they will inherit the Kingdom, the New Creation.

Unbelievable: that’s what my subconscious mind dictated to me via the motions of my hands.

DECEMBER 22 2018

IS THERE A HELL? NO.
WILL THERE BE HELL? YES.

All requiems start with DIES IRAE (pronounced dee-es ee-ray) the entire text in church Latin. I have five or six CDs of different Requiems, my two favorites being the one by Berlioz with that magnificent Sanctus toward the end, and Brahms’ German Requiem.

They all follow the Roman Catholic liturgy, and all major composers wrote one. Even Bach, a confirmed Lutheran, composed a mass.
A Requiem is a Mass for the dead, and they don’t shy away from the Gospel truth: they all have the same wording, starting with “Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine”, Lord, grant them eternal rest.

All Requiems begin and end with lines the churches today are loath the mention: the Day of Judgement.
Dies Irae, dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in Favilla,
meaning,
“Day of Wrath, that dreadful Day:
it will resolve the earth in ashes.”

To retain the Latin rhyme, I would translate this as,
”Day of Wrath, that Dreadful Day,
the earth ablaze, immense dismay.

Perhaps the church kept these explosive lines in Latin on purpose, obscuring the true state of the world now becoming raw reality in Global Heating.
Toward the end there’s a repeat:
“Lacrymosa dies illa
qua resurget ex favilla
Judicandus homo reus”

which tells us that

“Mournful that dreadful day
when from the dust shall rise
guilty man to be judged.”

Handel, in his masterpiece, The Messiah, is also quite explicit in his wording. There, in a beautiful aria, also near the beginning of this universally admired oratorio, he quotes Malachi, the very last Old Testament Bible book:
But who may abide the day of his coming
And who shall stand when he – the Lord – appeareth?
For he is like a refiner’s fire.

The He is Jesus.

Today we are on the cusp of Jesus’ return. Jesus? Who is he?
The Bible, the record of happenings from the very beginning to the end, tells us that (see Colossians 1: 15-17):
“Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For by Him all things were created, both in the heavens and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.”

Here we have the true story of creation. As I see it: Jesus is the first human being, true God and perfect human. Whatever good exists is his doing.

We now own the earth.

The Bible story continues and we read that, as Psalm 115: 16 confirms, “The Highest heavens belong to the Lord, but the earth he gave to humanity.”

We all know all too well what we did with the earth. Today it is increasingly becoming clear that we have mismanaged that gift to the extent that we running out of options, the only way is death.

One of the miracles of creation is that it has a built-in destruction mechanism which is now being triggered.

At one time, near the beginning of history, when humanity had become so wicked that God decided to have a new start and asked Noah to build a life-preserving ARK, God pledged that this sort of thing would not be repeated knowing full well that in the End humans themselves would do the job.

We are now at that point of history.

Here’s how in a 16,000 word essay, Professor Dr. Jem Bendell of the University of Cumbria, in the UK, entitled, Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy, summarized it.
Conclusion.
“Since records began in 1850, seventeen of the eighteen hottest years have occurred since 2000. Important steps on climate mitigation and adaptation have been taken over the past decade. However, these steps could now be regarded as equivalent to walking up a landslide. If the landslide had not already begun, then quicker and bigger steps would get us to the top of where we want to be.
Sadly, the latest climate data, emissions data and data on the spread of carbon-intensive lifestyles, show that the landslide has already begun. As the point of no return can’t be fully known until after the event, ambitious work on reducing carbon emissions and extracting more from the air (naturally and synthetically) is more critical than ever.
That must involve a new front of action on methane. Disruptive impacts from climate change are now inevitable. Geoengineering is likely to be ineffective or counter-productive. Therefore, the mainstream climate policy community now recognizes the need to work much more on adaptation to the effects of climate change.
That must now rapidly permeate the broader field of people engaged in sustainable development as practitioners, researchers and educators. In assessing how our approaches could evolve, we need to appreciate what kind of adaptation is possible.
Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress.
Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations.
This situation makes redundant the reformist approach to sustainable development and related fields of corporate sustainability that has underpinned the approach of many professionals
Instead, a new approach which explores how to reduce harm and not make matters worse is important to develop. In support of that challenging, and ultimately personal process, understanding a deep adaptation agenda may be useful.”
(Bendell et al, 2017).

I emphasize:
“Recent research suggests that human societies will experience disruptions to their basic functioning within less than ten years due to climate stress.
Such disruptions include increased levels of malnutrition, starvation, disease, civil conflict and war – and will not avoid affluent nations.”

In the very short term, Dr. Bendell writes that we will experience drastic disruptions to our way of life. The Bible calls this The Day of Wrath: Dies Irae.

And that brings me to Gehenna.

For some reason Bible translators have substituted “Gehenna” with “Hell”. Thus if you look up Matthew 10: 28, you won’t find Gehenna –the word in the Greek – but HELL.

The same is true when Jesus had a temper tantrum and shouted to the Pharisees, the church leaders of his day (as recorded in Matthew 23: 33), “You snakes, you offspring of vipers, how will you escape the judgment of Gehenna?

So is Gehenna Hell? No, Jesus did not mention hell, he mentioned Gehenna.
Translators are humans. They are influenced by current doctrine which focuses on heaven. So they reasoned, if there is a heaven where believers go to – the overwhelming belief of church-goers – there is hell where unbelievers go to.
Makes sense, but is not true. Jesus did not mention hell, He said: Gehenna. And in that he pointed to a concept, quite familiar to the people of Israel.

Gehenna is the Greek and Latin version of the Hebrew word for the valley of Hinnom, the name of the ravine south of Jerusalem, which during the days of monarchy, was the scene of an idolatrous cult involving the passing of children through fire.

In the first century B.C. this name came to be used in a metaphorical sense to describe the place of fiery torment believed to be reserved for the wicked after the Last Judgment – Hell, in other words.

I believe that our god, Capitalism, (which according to Schumpeter involves ‘Creative Destruction’) is the one worshiped today, and Capitalism also requires us to sacrifice our children.

I better explain.

Thanks to our addiction to carbon fuels, only used because of their combustible potential, we are causing a drastic temperature rise, so high that in a few short years – and that means within a time span of 5-10 years – the world will burn to a crisp: exactly as the idol MOLOCH required, a pagan deity to whom human sacrifice was made.

Jesus, in his dispute with the Pharisees, by mentioning Gehenna, told them point blank that they were promoting the gospel of human sacrifice, that they were preachers of a pagan cult. No wonder he called them vipers, serpents, and offspring of poisonous snakes. I think Jesus here had the serpent in mind who talked to Eve in Paradise, a reference not lost on these church leaders.

The forgotten Covenant.

God made a covenant (Genesis 9) between God and humanity, a pure promise to be an equal partner with us and all created matter, including all animals and all that lives and moves and has a being – such as insects – implying that they too deserve total consideration as allies of humanity because they form an integral part of human durability: everything is connected to everything else.

God has abided by that solemn treaty. We did not. We now face the fateful consequences of breaking this covenant.

And here is where HELL comes in. God is angry at us. We have not abided by the terms of the treaty, the contract, the covenant, we made.

Handel, in his Messiah, quotes Isaiah 53: 6, “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way.”

Gehenna again.

Today we all are on our way to Gehenna. This means that we all have to go through hell, because we all have sinned against creation, we, the last generation, more than any previous one.

Why we and not previous generations?

I have a picture of my paternal grandfather, a country grocer, who, seated on his two-wheeled horse-drawn wagon, made the rounds of his clientele, including my maternal grandparents, often bartering eggs for coffee, tea, sugar, the only items they usually needed: the rest of edibles they themselves supplied.

That was sustainable living, a way of life long gone, a way of life we should emulate, but no longer can: we have gone too far on our road to Gehenna.

Oh, I find the parallel so striking. Those who burned their children in that dreadful place near Jerusalem are exactly the same people we are today: we now sacrifice our children and grandchildren to a future that inevitably leads to HELL, all-consuming fire.
That’s the ultimate result of Global Heating.

Since the year 2000 of the 18 summers, 17 have been the warmest ever, and, by all indications, next year will be the hottest ever, as El Nino is combined with an ever mounting CO2 rate.

Decision Time.

I see the coming years as decisive. I have long felt that we will see a confluence of events: huge earth-shaking events, comprising the economy, the weather, pandemic and war, likely including tremendous earthquakes, as we are distorting earth’s fragile balance.
All this assures that the DIES IRAE, the Day of Wrath, is imminent.

There’s no escape.

We all will have to go through this time of trial: we all are guilty as hell. We all have failed to detect the dangers we are in, and we all have to pay the price. That’s why there will be a HELL to pay.

But the Lord is gracious: for the sake of the elect he will shorten the days of trial. Still, we too have to go through the purifying fire, because our bodies are full of toxins: we are not allowed to enter the New Creation unless we too are clean, made clean by fire.
So, yes, there’s Hell to come, a place of our own making.

Pray that the Day of Trial may come soon. As the apostle Peter
wrote (2 Peter 3):

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

All is well that ends well.

DECEMBER 15 2018

LEARN TO LIVE ETERNALLY

My mother once told me that when she expected me she prayed that I would become a minister of the gospel, a preacher, in other words. Fourteen years later I was sent to the six year university prep school, an institution where only the last two years offered a choice: either a pre-seminary education, or a medical/legal career. When the time came, I chose the medical/legal option.

I now know the gospel-preaching venue never fully abandoned me. In a sense all my life has led to the point today where my goal in life is to focus on the Good News. Frankly, I am thankful that I never became ensnared into the ecclesiastical network: I probably would have been booted out.

Confusion abounds: clarity needed.

If there ever was a time of non-communication, it is now, in spite of Internet, Facebook, cellphones everywhere. Seeing these faces glued to communication devices often makes me wonder what they are talking about. To me it seems that it only adds up to more confusion.

No wonder that people are lost, are at odds with themselves and with society. Perhaps it stems from the growing uncertainty. Nothing is guaranteed anymore: life-time jobs are vanishing, long established patterns are disappearing, institutions are faltering, churches are closing, the gospel truth is watered down, marriage rites abandoned.

And then there is Climate Change. Of course, it poses no immediate danger to life, and, as long as this is the case, we won’t act, until it is too late. But the peril is real and that alone means that nothing can stay the same. Yes, nothing will be done about Global Heating, so it will get worse and worse, and thus everything will be much more different.

Collapse is in the cards, and then what?

We have tremendous traveling aids thanks to GPS navigating systems, guaranteeing that we will never get lost while driving, but there’s no such thing as a Global Spiritual System, telling us what to do before we die and where we go when we die. Such knowledge is now more important than ever.

Among all this confusion, among all these changes, all for the worst, what can I offer? Me? Who am I to install myself as a modern-day preacher?

Here’s one hint: The ‘fear’ of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. ‘Fear’ means seeing the Lord as the fountain of truth. That wisdom has two components: Bible knowledge and creational insight.

It is ADVENT time.

It is ADVENT time: we look forward to Jesus returning to earth. In the churches John the Baptizer’s words are read, “A voice of one calling: “In the wilderness prepare the way for the LORD; make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

We certainly live in the wilderness, a wilderness so immense that it is becoming denuded of all real life, real animals, real nature, real harmony. When wild-life vanishes, when insects disappear, then collapse is not far away. All human systems, built on infinite growth in a finite system, will fail, preparing for restoration which Jesus will bring.

John’s words are directed to all people of all time and everywhere: “make straight in the desert a highway for our God.”

We now live in the desert, a place increasingly becoming devoid of real life, of real nature, of real animals, of real wholeness and beauty. In that wilderness, in a situation full of man-made stuff, full of our toys, full of plastic and garbage, we have to again make place for God and his creation.

In spite of all the obstacles the Evil One has placed in our path, we must heed John’s words, “Prepare the Way of the Lord”.

In my youth I learned that we all are Prophets, Priests, and Kings. That office is more valid today than ever. And today, the Good News via the WWW, the Word-Wide-Web, is available to all. Preaching in a cavernous church building is no longer effective: monologues – sermons – are the least effective ways of communication: only 7 percent of a ‘good’ sermon is retained. Moreover, the message has become stale and so has the audience.

Why me?

I don’t know about you, but I do know about me.

In my journey of faith I have greatly relied on the teachings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and J.H. Bavinck. Actually I am a sort of expert on the writings of Dr. Bavinck, himself a missionary. I have translated three of his books and thus have his writings at my fingertips.
Both theologians are thoroughly “earth-minded”, of which Bonhoeffer is the more direct, calling the ‘heaven crowd” pious secularists. Churches – witness their hymnbooks – are anchored to a heaven mentality, which always has had a negative influence on the earth. Religion will not make a comeback unless it preaches the coming of A New Earth under a New Heaven, that’s why the words of John the Baptizer are extremely valid today: “Prepare the way of the Lord”. That way is not directed heavenward, but concerns one hundred percent the earth, God’s Holy Creation.

It’ll get worse before it gets better.

The world is desperate, desperate enough to listen to the only Good News out there: The imminent coming of the total renewal of planet earth where everything will be perfect and remain perfect, because the people have learned the hard way that ‘the wages of sin, greed, pollution, is death.’

But before that Total Renewal takes place, there will be hardship, severe trauma, worse than the world have ever experienced. Faith will be tested as never before. Jesus warns us explicitly in Matthew 24, the very chapter whose prophesy is now in its first phase: “And if those days were not shortened, no flesh would have been saved but because of the chosen, shall those days be shortened”.

LEARN TO LIVE ETERNALLY

Jesus taught us how to live. Yes, Jesus loved all-round LIFE, a true example for all. His first miracle was to make wine: wine, the best wine ever, wine to get drunk on! He told Israel to come and be alive; he told us to dance when dance is called for, to shed tears when sad things happen.
My life, your life must be a reflection of the life to come, when life can be enjoyed to the full.
Eternity starts here. If writing is your talent, write. If painting is your talent, paint. If creating sculptures is your talent, go ahead. If growing food is your talent, do so organically. If making toys is your talent, continue. If making clothes is your talent do so at your heart’s content.
My life.

I started to write more than four decades ago. In October 1972, in a Canada-wide competition, my 5000 word article on THE CITY, KEY TO SURVIVAL, “an essay on Ecology and Urban Living”, was awarded the Claude Leigh Real Estate Award, at the annual Canadian Real Estate Association conference in Vancouver. It also involved a full convention package, with a free trip and a substantial cash award. The essay was published in the Real Estate Institute of Canada Journal.

From 2000-2010 I wrote a weekly column for the Belleville, Ontario Daily, THE INTELLIGENCER. Years before that I contributed feature articles on a bi-weekly basis to the CHRISTIAN COURIER.

Writing has been my hobby for many decades. I remember writing for the short-lived CHURCH AND NATION, and, also contributed to the CANADIAN APPRAISER, the professional magazine of the Appraisal Institute of Canada.

Actually, in my business career as Professional Appraiser, I had to write narrative reports on commercial and industrial properties, often amounting to 50-60 pages, including descriptions of the area, the buildings, its Highest and Best Use, and, of course, the future feasibility of the subject property. So, even in my professional career, I had to tell stories about the real estate I had to evaluate.

LEARN TO LIVE ETERNALLY

Now, in the tenth decade of my life, influenced by the swift passing of my years, and closer to the end of life than ever, my thoughts also go beyond the end of this world.

This past week has been remarkable in that respect. COP 24, held in Poland’s coal country, advocated the End of Coal, because that carbon product is the most dangerous for the Climate. The USA, already per capita the highest polluter (and very religious) is doing the opposite.

No wonder there is an air of pessimism in the world. The people who voted for Brexit and for Trump are asking: “What is the future? What is this existence for?”

All my life I have been a reader and book-buyer. Books are my passion, and now, while I should get rid of them, I still acquire more. You know what I do? At the HIDDEN TREASURES, a local store where the belongings of deceased persons end up I occasionally browse for interesting volumes available for a few bucks. I buy them because someday soon society will break down and we are thrown back to basics, such as reading real books, playing real games, entertaining ourselves without access to electronic gadgets.

My long life includes wartime conditions, when only home entertainment was available. This time will come again, because we are living on the edge already, and very, very few people are ready.

Just as retirement needs life-long planning so societal collapse requires even more careful preparation.

Already there is a point of no return for the climate. Already there’s enough CO2, carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere to make sure that it will accelerate the heating of the Earth. The warnings are becoming more explicit by the day in all segments of society. Since industrialization, since 1800, the Earth has warmed by more than 1.5 degree Celsius, with the pace of warming increasing rapidly. Knowing human nature, and believing what the Bible tells me, “The End is near”, is finally a fact.

Preparing for Eternity involves a learning process. This week I am reading LEARN TO GROW OLD, by Dr. Paul Tournier. Much of what he writes applies to the end times we now are experiencing. He specifically focuses on the meaning of life. We are in this world for a purpose: “The need to discover the meanings of things is impossible to eradicate from the human heart,” he writes, but everything today conspires to prevent us from seeking meaning.

John the Baptist, a first class naturalist, lived entirely from the edibles creation provided, eating wild honey and locusts, now seen as a most excellent source of protein. He, 2000 years ago, not only pointed to Jesus, but also to today: “PREPARE THE WAY OF THE LORD”, and especially, “REPENT FOR THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS AT HAND.” That KINGDOM is God’s precious creation, to be totally renewed: a fresh Garden of Eden.

Eternity is not a matter of singing in “White Robes”, reigning in Heaven, as the song, “By the Sea of Crystal saints in glory stand…” suggests.
It’s entirely a ‘down to earth’ life, the full implementation of “Love God – and his creation – above all and our fellow humans as ourselves,” a process that must start in our mortal stage.
That, today, is the heart of the Gospel.

Just like a meaningful retirement needs preparation well in advance of the actual start at 60 or 65, getting ready for eternity is even more necessary. Fortunately Revelation 14: 13 tells us, “they will rest from their labor, for their deeds will follow them.”

Today labor often is a drudge, deadening, mind-killing, involving insecurity and polluting practices. The ‘deeds’ are the matters we are proud of, that stuff we delight in: hobbies, genuine interests, sailing around the world, exploring unknowns, experimenting with different concepts, cataloguing the 100,000 kinds of ants, learning new languages by reading Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, his book on the conquest of France, 2000 years ago in Latin, tracing your ancestry all the way back. Whatever… Nothing will be impossible.
That’s what eternity is all about: being fully human as Jesus was fully human and fully divine.

There, by the grace of God, the impossible dream becomes reality, where our true talents are revealed. That life starts today.

DECEMBER 8 2018

WE ARE KILLING GOD!

When last week I read about the sad situation with our insects, I was overcome with emotion: tears filled my eyes. It’s not that I have a special love for bugs – I know they love me – still lately I have tried to catch them and release them in the open rather than swatting them. Of course: a bit of self-interest: I have 4 apple trees in my yard and getting a good crop depends on these little critters.

My sad state of mind was caused by the awareness that insects are a crucial part of creation, and that their disappearance signals our demise as well. It also seems that only the odd person is ready to lament this, with the emphasis on odd.
It reminded me of an ancient proverb,
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of message the battle was lost.
For want of the battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

For want of those pestering and pesky insects, THE KINGDOM that God gave us to cultivate and improve is being lost. In the process we are killing God as well.

Back to insects.

Here’s a lengthy quote from the New York Times Magazine:
By far the (insect) expert there is E.O. Wilson, who began his career as a taxonomic entomologist, studying ants. Insects are not what we’re usually imagining when we talk about biodiversity. Yet they are, in Wilson’s words, “the little things that run the natural world.” He means it literally.
Scientists have tried to calculate the benefits that insects provide simply by going about their business in large numbers. Trillions of bugs flitting from flower to flower pollinate some three-quarters of our food crops, a service worth as much as $500 billion every year. (This doesn’t count the 80 percent of wild flowering plants, the foundation blocks of life everywhere, that rely on insects for pollination.) If monetary calculations like that sound strange, consider the Maoxian Valley in China, where shortages of insect pollinators have led farmers to hire human workers, at a cost of up to $19 per worker per day, to replace bees. Each person covers five to 10 trees a day, pollinating apple blossoms by hand.

By eating and being eaten, insects turn plants into protein and power the growth of all the uncountable species — including freshwater fish and a majority of birds — that rely on them for food, not to mention all the creatures that eat those creatures.

Bugs are vital to the decomposition that keeps nutrients cycling, soil healthy, plants growing and ecosystems running. This role is mostly invisible, until suddenly it’s not. After introducing cattle to Australia at the turn of the 19th century, settlers soon found themselves overwhelmed by the problem of their feces: For some reason, cow pies there were taking months or even years to decompose. Cows refused to eat near the stink, requiring more and more land for grazing, and so many flies bred in the piles that the country became famous for the funny hats that stockmen wore to keep them at bay. It wasn’t until 1951 that a visiting entomologist realized what was wrong: The local insects, evolved to eat the more fibrous waste of marsupials, couldn’t handle cow excrement. For the next 25 years, the importation, quarantine and release of dozens of species of dung beetles became a national priority. And that was just one unfilled niche. (In the United States, dung beetles save ranchers an estimated $380 million a year.) We simply don’t know everything that insects do. Only about 2 percent of invertebrate species have been studied enough for us to estimate whether they are in danger of extinction, never mind what dangers that extinction might pose.

When asked to imagine what would happen if insects were to disappear completely, scientists find words like chaos, collapse, Armageddon. Wagner, the University of Connecticut entomologist, describes a flowerless world with silent forests, a world of dung and old leaves and rotting carcasses accumulating in cities and roadsides, a world of “collapse or decay and erosion and loss that would spread through ecosystems” — spiraling from predators to plants. E.O. Wilson has written of an insect-free world, a place where most plants and land animals become extinct; where fungi explodes, for a while, thriving on death and rot; and where “the human species survives, able to fall back on wind-pollinated grains and marine fishing” despite mass starvation and resource wars. “Clinging to survival in a devastated world, and trapped in an ecological dark age,” he adds, “the survivors would offer prayers for the return of weeds and bugs.”
So far the article.

WE ARE KILLING GOD!

Suppose we were to destroy all of Bach’s music, then, after one generation, he would be forgotten, historically dead. Suppose we were to destroy all of van Gogh paintings, would have erased all traces of this great painter, we effectively would have killed him.

By killing off creation piece by piece, insects today, bees tomorrow, birds another day, slowly but surely that would be it. That’s what we are doing to God.

COP24

This past week and next, the UN sponsored COP24 – dealing with Climate Change – is in session in Poland, a country where almost all electricity is generated by Climate Enemy Number One: COAL, Poland’s home-grown product.

Doom is in the air there in Poland. David Attenborough, celebrated TV personality and Britain’s foremost Climate Critic addressed the delegates from over 200 countries with the opening words, “Right now we are facing a manmade disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change. If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

Well, action is in the works but not the kind that will prevent doom: on the contrary.

France is in uproar: President Macron, a fervent environmentalist, imposed a tax on fuel, gasoline and diesel, in order to initiate more climate change measures, which initially would cost money, hence the extra tax. Rather than accepting this global warming – reducing incentive, the masses revolted, throwing France into chaos.

Macron capitulated, confirming once more that Climate Change is an unstoppable Climate Cancer. The common man – de gewone man (in Dutch) – will not cooperate, will not accept the higher taxes, will not fall into line and be compliant, because they don’t believe that those in power will do the right thing. This is good news for Trump and seals the demise of us all.

There’s another 16th Century saying: “you cannot have the cake and eat it,” which in this case could read, “You cannot have a reliable climate and yet abuse it left and right, in the air above and down the earth below. But that’s exactly what we are doing, and the trouble is we are too far down this road to change, at least I can’t see a solution to this situation. Do you?

Fact is, we are a spoiled generation, ruled by short-sighted politicians, who cannot look beyond their next election campaign. Personally I think we’ll get a little help from ON HIGH: not the solution that we can continue our wasteful ways, no, a little help to speed up the end.

Will the BIG ONE come?

For quite some time now I have been of a mind that soon there will be a convergence of disastrous events. So far in the past 100 years we have weathered two World Wars, one enormous pandemic, the so-called Spanish Flu, which killed especially young adults, perhaps the class of people in 1918-19 most affected by the ravages – physical and emotional – of World-War I.

Today the entire world population is compromised physically by foul air, foul water and foul food thanks to our Global War on our natural environment. In other words, the world is ripe for a pandemic.

Last week Alaska experienced a large earth quake. They are coming closer, these upsetting events. As you know, Alaska is near the Arctic, where trillions of tons of methane are buried. There is the imminent danger that earthquakes will trigger large amounts of ultra-dangerous methane to be released from the seafloor of the Arctic Ocean.

Warming caused by us, using carbon-based fuels, makes snow and ice melt, which is taking weight off the land and dumping it into the nearby sea. This change in weight can trigger earthquakes and seismic shocks that can travel over long distances and trigger further earthquakes elsewhere.

Earthquakes in the Arctic Ocean can destabilize methane hydrates and such earthquakes as well as the eruption of methane itself can in turn destabilize methane hydrates in nearby locations.

Especially vulnerable are areas near fault lines, because that same shifting of weight happens in California where disastrous fires have incinerated massive trees and reduced human habitat to ashes, also affecting the precarious balance in that vulnerable area. It so happens that the San Andreas Fault is the sliding boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate. It slices California in two from Cape Mendocino to the Mexican border. San Diego, Los Angeles and Big Sur are on the Pacific Plate. There’s where THE BIG ONE will happen.

There have been many small ones lately in the entire Ring of Fire and, as yet, The North American Pacific Coast has been spared. The Big One will come there some time in the near future and be the onset of a domino of disasters, setting in motion a series of calamities from which the earth will never recover.

Revelation, that fateful last Bible book does not give a time table, does not provide us with date and place of the events to happen: on the contrary, the Bible repeatedly tells us that there won’t be a warning, but there will be clear indications: they are happening now.

The Death of Insects.

That article in the New York Times Magazine set me off on a new train of thought.
In our world for all practical purposes God is dead. We don’t openly say that, because it sounds blasphemous, but we certainly live that way. We wantonly kill nature, wild animals, fish, fowl, and feel offended when we say that these actions kill God also.

In a sense we do the same with our bodies: rather than have the body heal the body by employing the body’s defense mechanism, we swallow drugs, all sort of chemicals, that may give a cure of sorts, but every drug has side effects, and we really don’t know or want to know what they are.

I am inclined to call a spade a spade, that’s why we too must give events names that portray their essence. Instead of global warming or climate change, the affliction should be called what it is: climate crisis or climate cancer. Or, instead of the cozy-sounding global warming, planetary destruction would be more appropriate.

We live in interesting times. Those who most loudly trumpet Fake News are the worst offenders themselves. No longer do they trust reliable science, and persecute the bringers of bad news.
My blog, mainly based on what the American Religion calls THE HOLY SCRIPTURES, would, in their eyes, be totally fake news, because in their Brave New World language True is False and False is True. No wonder people are confused.

Economic anxiety is now everywhere. The stock market is a good barometer, up one day, down the next, while suicides are at an all-time high, signaling sociological, psychological and spiritual decay.
For want of the battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

For want of insects our world is lost because it is dominated by The Evil One. The GOOD NEWS is that these events prepare us for THE NEW WORLD to come, for which Christ paid the ultimate price, as John 3: 16 tells us:
“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.”