Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

MAY 6 2017

WHAT CONSTITUTES THE GOSPEL’S CORE MESSAGE?

What sort of MESSAGE do we bring to a world that is choking on fumes, drowning in water, and suffering from drought?
Let me start way back, all the way back to Noah who was building an enormous container ship in the middle of a massive forest. It must have taken decades to complete. But then in those days people lived real long lives.

Just a note to the RAPTURE crowd: Noah and his wife, three sons and their wives – no children? Of course they had lots of children – were the only ones who were LEFT BEHIND on the then known world. Their act of defiance, their ostentatious display of putting their faith to the test – totally banking that God’s weather forecast would be accurate – is an eerie reminder that history is about to repeat itself, be it in a different form. This time too there will be few takers, just as in Noah’s days, because the Noah phenomenon reminds me of Jesus’ saying (Matthew 22:14) “Many are called, few are chosen”.

In that same Bible book, a few chapters later, Matthew 24, Jesus directly refers to Noah and his family, and I quote (verse 37) “As it was in the days of Noah, so it will be at the coming of the Son of Man.”
So, history will repeat itself. The LEFT BEHIND will be those who have loved the earth (John 3: 16). Now too almost all people will ignore all the indications of total disaster, thinking that science will rescue them or technology will fix the problems or, as in Noah’s days, simply ridicule the issue.

Today we are in the same situation as the world’s people before the FLOOD. Now it will not be water, but fire, with GLOBAL HEATING already in overdrive.

For decades I wondered how the earth in its entirety would catch fire in a total conflagration, but today I can clearly visualize this. Picture the trillions of tons of methane hydrates, buried in the shallow Arctic Seas, suddenly exploding and, as ARCTIC NEWS reports, causing a totally devastating and rapid TEN DEGREE Celsius rise in the world’s temperature.

Take a look at the April 24 issue of ARCTIC NEWS. Already now, with a bit more than ONE DEGREE Celsius increase on record, the weather is totally wacky. Just imagine TEN DEGREES!!

My question: “How do we bring the MESSAGE in extreme times like ours?” That is our Christian calling because there are a lot of concerned people out there, people who fear the future.
What do we tell them?

I have this tattered book, written 60 years ago by ARNOLD TOYNBEE, famous British historian.
In 1955 – he died in 1975 at the age of 86 – he presented a series of lectures to the faculties of three East Coast Protestant seminaries, entitled CHRISTIANITY AMONG THE RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD.

I love reading historians. They often have the right perspective because they basically deal with the follies of humanity. Here is one of Toynbee’s saying, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder”, quite evident from the way both China and the USA are acting.

ARNOLD TOYNBEE

Rereading his book last week filled my mind with many new ideas, both his, but also inspired by him. Toynbee looks at Christianity world-wide. He sees how countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, have all but abandoned formal Christianity, but, in their actions, by being among the largest donors to help poor nations and by turning to renewables, show their Christianity in deed, while formally Christian states, such as the USA allot a pittance for these purposes.
He writes, “So it looks as if the provinces of Christendom which are the most Christian in conduct are those that have gone away the farthest in repudiating the profession of Christianity.” Hmmm.

In his book he looks at different religious movements and laments how all of them have emptied NATURE of her divinity: “by winning a new vision of divinity as God or some other form of absolute reality beyond Nature, instead of seeing his presence in the Universe that is higher than Man as being immanent in Nature herself………….Technology has given nature worship a death-blow by making Nature manifestly Man’s slave, for one cannot worship something which one feels that he has mastered.”

Toynbee is a sincere and open-minded Christian. He looks at Christianity from a distance and he sees PRIDE, not the pride that today is associated with same-sex and its various expressions. No, in Christianity he sees the old-fashioned kind of PRIDE, the one that becomes before the fall, true to Proverbs 16: 18, “Pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall.”

Toynbee writes, “In the 17th Century Christianity was rejected first by the Japanese, then by the Chinese, and today by the intellectual leaders of the Western world in Western Christianity itself, and in every case for the same reason: the same Christian arrogance. If Christians fail to purge it out of Christianity now, it will lead to the rejection of Christianity in the future”.

Toynbee asserts – and I agree with him –that Western Christianity is not the last word. We all know that “We see through a glass darkly” as the ancient St James version put it.

Today we see ever more clearly what the “Christian” West has done to God’s world, and still is doing, that’s why we must acknowledge that we have been wrong and many of the native cultures have been right.
He states that the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi’s non-violent approach resembled Christianity more accurately than today’s armed to the teeth Western world. In God’s grace his inspiration has not been confined to the white race exclusively.

That brings me to the difficult question the church faces, because Jesus gave us a special mandate: “Make disciples of all nations” (Matthew 28:19).

What is that mandate? What constitutes THE GOOD NEWS TODAY? How can Christianity become more attractive to a wider range of people?

Let’s be honest: the current course of (in)action is no longer an option. Right now, in a time which, perhaps, is the most bewildering period in history, apart from the Black Plague that hit Europe in the 14th Century, we are experiencing a definite drift toward NIHILISM, evident in most governments world-wide but especially in the White House.

We need a NEW form of EVANGELISM. The word “Evangelism” is derived from two Greek words: Good- eu in Greek – and Message –angelos in Greek.

AMOR MUNDI

These two Latin words stand for LOVE OF THE WORLD, and by THE WORLD I mean our planet, this earth on which live, from which we derive our living, which feeds us and clothes us, from which we were formed, which provides our ultimate resting place, and for which Jesus Christ sacrificed his life to ensure eternity for his followers.

We have two sources that point to THE GOOD NEWS: the Bible and ‘the earth’.
J. H. Bavinck in his book BETWEEN THE BEGINNING AND THE END – A Radical Kingdom Vision – makes abundantly clear that we can only understand the Bible when we have a clear concept of Creation, and we can only understand Creation when we rightfully see the Bible as God’s Word.

He makes the radical statement that our own salvation and that of creation are two sides of the same coin: we cannot be saved if we regard creation as disposable.

In Reformed parlor the Belgic Confession categorically states that, when asking in Article 2: “The means by which we know God”, the answer is:
“First, by the creation, preservation and government of the Universe, since that Universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: his eternal power and his divinity, as the apostle Paul says in Romans 1: 20. All these things are enough to convict us, humanity, and to leave us without excuse.
Second, he makes himself known to us more openly by his holy and divine word, as much as we need in this life, for his glory and for the salvation of his own.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer says exactly the same. He sees John 3: 16 as the most important text in the Bible. “God so loved the world”. Amor Mundi. Bonhoeffer sees it as the basis for Christian existence in the here and now of the world, embracing the totality of the person. It is the very foundation of the Christian Life and determines the way we must live.

It is for this exact reason why, when we approach the non-church person – and sad to say also the average churchgoer still sold on heaven – LOVE FOR THE EARTH should be the opening point, because it is precisely there where we can communicate with a lot of people who otherwise would never even entertain a discussion with a Christian.

I know this is hard going. The New York Times on April 28, in an editorial piece quoted Billy Graham, still the reigning authority for American Christians: “We are pilgrims here on the way to heaven.”
As long as that ‘heaven’ fallacy remains the uppermost “Christian” doctrine, there is no way we can approach the ‘world’. The real reason why Christ lived and died was to ensure that his beloved earth would be restored to its pristine state.

Nietzsche, steeped in the gospel, whose father and both grandfathers were ministers in the German Lutheran church, left the church, condemning it for its heaven stance.
In his THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA he is blunt:”I conjure you, my brethren, REMAIN TRUE TO THE EARTH, and believe not those who speak unto you of super-earthly hopes! Poisoners are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying ones and poisoned ones themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so away with them!”
He continues: “Once blasphemy against God was the greatest blasphemy; but God died, and therewith also those blasphemers. To blaspheme the earth is now the most dreadful sin, and to rate the heart of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth!”

Nietzsche’s radical words are echoed in Romans 1: 20, on which the Belgic Confession bases its belief that THE EARTH IS GOD’S PRIMARY WORD. If people are condemned by not seeing the earth as created by God, then my heartfelt belief is that a gracious God makes the opposite to be true as well: those who see the earth as being of divine origin, and love it for its beauty, coherence, and harmony, will find a place in the Kingdom to Come. I believe that these people – and there are many – are open to an ‘earth-centered’ gospel.

That’s why the church MUST reach out to these people because they deserve to have eternity. The church, the Kingdom, needs these people, because among church people there is a gross shortage of ‘earth-minded’ and ‘earth-expertise’ people. I wholeheartedly believe that to have eternity to pursue a certain aspect of creation, of whatever kind, must be attractive to many, especially since it will take place in a perfect world.

That’s the core message of the New Earth promise.

That’s why Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when he was led from prison to be hanged in April 1945, a few weeks before the Fall of Germany, said to his fellow prisoners: “this is to me the beginning of life”.

For Bonhoeffer love for the world sprang from the midst of his faith. It was the basis for his Christian existence, it presented to him the possibilities to the question, How are we to live?

The answers today, in a world totally different from the 1930-40’s in which Bonhoeffer lived, are much more evident. The seeds of destruction now have sprouted and are plainly visible to the eyes and minds of the discerning observers, that’s why concrete steps can be taken, steps not to avoid the looming dangers, but steps to prepare for THE LIFE HEREAFTER.

There’s where the church has to focus its attention. Not a life in heaven, the ultimate falsehood, but a life on a renewed, totally new earth, forever remaining pristine, with the extra exciting advantage that then, under perpetually perfect conditions, it will come to its full deployment, under the infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit.

That ‘evolution’ will take eternity to complete.
Hallelujah.

h

APRIL 29 2017

IS IT LATER THAN YOU THINK?

The Good news.

We all know that we will die someday. For many of us, however, thanks to better medical care, a drastic reduction in smoking, greater awareness of diets and exercise, it’s actually earlier than we think because we live longer and healthier, so the day of death has been pushed back by many years.
I saw a startling statistic last week: for each hour of running – not walking or biking – our lives are lengthened by 7 hours. I have been running since 1961, and still run 3x per week. Since our bodies are holy – made in God’s image, resembling Jesus, the first-born of humanity – that’s one way well within our power, to prolong our lives. Somehow those who expect to live eternally – a promise given to God’s children – must already now try to do that. Or is that too presumptuous?

The bad news.

Nevertheless, while we have been successful in pushing back our personal timeclock, the same cannot be said for the planet we live in: there definitely it is later, much later, than we think which is both good and bad news. The good news is that it will advance the coming of the KINGDOM; the bad news is that it will entail tremendous suffering.
Jesus made “Seeking the Kingdom” a priority for his followers 2000 years ago. Peter in his letter (2 Peter 3: 12) tells us to speed its coming. How do we speed up the coming of the Day of the Lord?

One possibility: Support Donald Trump! I sincerely believe that he is God’s agent in speeding up the coming of the Kingdom just as Nebuchadnezzar long ago was used by God to teach God’s people a lesson. That Persian Old Testament king also was God’s agent to punish his chosen people Israel by destroying the temple, exiling the flower of that nation, for which he later was called on the carpet by God.
By the way, he was dethroned – impeached in today’s language – for acting erratically. Will history repeat itself?

Truly, TRUMP is God’s agent too. By promoting the polluting of the oceans, by failing to stall the felling of the forests, by proceeding with the poisoning of the atmosphere, and so collapse the already frail economies, he speeds up the Coming of the Kingdom, that glorious New Creation. But I don’t think that Peter had that in mind when he asked us to speed its coming. I believe he meant praying “Maranatha, Lord, come quickly.”

So what is our priority: is it urgent to prepare for the Kingdom, or do we have lots of time?

The church seems to think the latter, because it seldom touches upon the matter, and when it does, it’s pretty vague about it, never really spelling out what the Kingdom is all about, possibly because the church really has no clue what “The Coming of the Kingdom” entails.

Last week I stated that the church, by and large, has little use for the earth, making heaven the priority, while I, banking on Bonhoeffer and Bavinck, saw the kingdom as the New Garden of Eden, the New Paradise right here on Terra Firma, the very soil which feeds and sustains us.

If I read the times right, then I see that the pace of perilous events is increasing, with uncertainty and global destruction accelerating. We are speeding towards dissolution. Every day we read about some species disappearing. Every day we read about warmer temperatures, especially in the Arctic and Antarctic. That means that it is much later than people, especially church people, think.

I see glimpses of history being repeated: when Jesus was presented in the temple only 2 old people, Anna and Simeon, expected him, yet the church then was directly confronted with his birth when the three Wise Men came knocking at Herod’s palace door.

Events are speeding up. Thomas Homer-Dixon, in his THE UPSIDE OF DOWN, “Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization”, predicted in his now 10 year old book that the melting of the permafrost would not occur before the mid-2020s, 10 years from now: it’s already old news.

Face it: we are reaching the end of the line. The economy is getting very close to shrinking. When this happens, we are approaching economic collapse–the economic circus is starting to “leave town.”

Gail Tverberg, an actuary, in her blog THE FINITE EARTH writes: “People who think our only problem is “running out of oil” and “high oil prices” don’t see that the problems the economy is facing have a devastating effect. The Federal Reserve talks about inflation rates above 2% being too high, but inflation rates below 2% are at least equally problematic. Somehow, the debt system needs to keep operating for the whole system to work.
“We are now at the point where the economy is decidedly unstable. Little things can affect it, like the Affordable Care Act (Obama Care) requirement that uninsured people buy healthcare insurance, or pay a penalty. Low commodity prices make debt repayment more difficult in countries producing those commodities.”

She continues: “We should not be too surprised if the economic circus starts to leave town. There are simply too many pieces that are now unstable. The US Government is facing a shutdown in the near future, unless its debt ceiling can be raised and funding can be enacted. The world is depending on China for economic growth, but China’s debt is becoming unmanageably high. Japan’s debt is also unreasonably high. Oil exporters are becoming increasingly unstable, with the continued low prices. We can find problems in almost every country of the world. It looks like it is only a matter of time, until one of these problems starts a downward spiral.”

And she is not alone in predicting a dire outcome.

NAFEEZ MOSADDEQ AHMED writes that Donald Trump is not the problem – he’s the symptom. He writes, “Trump is what happens when you fail to understand our global problems in their interconnected, systemic context.”
This British investigative journalist has been connecting the dots on energy, climate change and globalization for years. The title of his latest book sums up our current predicament: FAILING STATES, COLLAPSING SYSTEMS: BIOPHYSICAL TRIGGERS OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE.

Net energy declines.

The whole mess begins with net energy declines. Here is what’s happening: the world is running out of cheap fossil fuels, so the oil industry has switched to earthquake-making shale gas fracking, Alberta’s messy oil sands projects and deep offshore oil.
But these extreme fuels require complex technologies to extract, and are poor substitutes for cheap oil. They not only return less energy but also require more capital, water and energy to extract.
Our current economy is shaped by the high-energy returns of cheap fossil fuels – 100 calories return on 1 calorie invested. Now it doesn’t know how to transform costly fuels 11 calories return on 1 calorie invested. Also we can no longer hide the side-effects: melting ice, fostering extreme weather and acidifying oceans.

Polar bears and oil.

To visualize the great energy decline, think for a moment about the predicament of polar bears.

Transpose yourself to the Far North. It used to be that the Arctic was all frozen, making life easy for this large white animals whose diet was mainly eating seals. Catching seals at ice holes — a largely sit and wait game — netted high energy returns and made the polar bear empire fat and healthy. But something happened to the ice.

It is disappearing, making catching seals much more difficult. The bears now have to expand more energy to get less. As it gets more “expensive” and complicated for the world’s 26,000 polar bears to survive, some starve, some fail to reproduce, some mate with grizzly bears, some try to replace the declines in protein by foraging for goose eggs and blueberries.

But all that kind of long-distance hunting takes more energy while the returns decline. So polar bears suffer and die. Exactly that same phenomenon is happening to our oil industry today.

Ahmed writes that “The human economy, which still depends on rich diet of fossil fuels (80 per cent of our energy sources), grew as fat as the polar bear on cheap 100 to 1 energy.” The result was the adding of an extra ever more greedy 6 billion people in 200 years.
Said he: “When oil prices were low, human economies gobbled oil and expanded like clownish balloons, but when prices rose and oil demand slackened, and the economy shrank.”

We now are in the sparse ‘Polar Bear” diet stage, and the economy is having trouble digesting a new food regime: unconventional fuels and in some cases, renewables, all delivering diminished returns and funded by easy credit and wild debt.

As the quality of fuels decline, the global economy, a highly engineered tree fertilized by cheap oil, has registered the change as “economic stagnation” and stopped growing. Yet the Trump regime banks on GROWTH to fuel the job market. No such luck.

Writes Ahmed, ”The shape of the descent will not resemble the shape of the ascent — a smooth bell curve — because of the Seneca trap.”
I never heard of the Seneca trap. So I looked it up. “Seneca effect” or the “Seneca cliff,” from Lucius Annaeus Seneca tells us that the more you employ artificial means to extend the peak, (as Trump is trying to do with tax cuts) the steeper the downslide that inevitably comes.

With the crash of fossil fuel production, already well along and scraping the barrel for the dirty, tarry scraps, greenhouse gas emissions may decline much faster than they grew up, which is good news. The bad news is that the world’s food supply, consumer goods and, yes, its population will decline even faster, causing tremendous hardship.

Two terrible events will happen: we will arrive at both the collapse of the global economy and runaway climate change, the two of them feeding off each other the way crumbling empires eat their seed corn.
In a number of historic collapse events, rapid-onset climate change was the triggering event.
Take Syria for example: its oil production dropped by half due to depletion. In the process, the government lost a key source of revenue that used to subsidize wheat prices. Then climate change amplified drought cycles in Syria, killing crops and depleting water resources. Hundreds of thousands of climate refugees poured into the cities while food prices triggered protests. The nation’s bloody civil war now threatens to unhinge Europe with millions of refugees.

Or consider the mayhem in Nigeria. Its population will rise from 160 million to 250 million by 2025 just as the nation’s key revenue earner, oil, experiences a serious drop in production due to depleted reserves and rampant corruption.
Meanwhile, the terrorist group Boko Haram recruits from areas ravaged by drought and food shortages. The forecast: an escalation of political violence.
Oil production peaked in the region in 2000, and the union’s dependency on foreign oil imports hit 87 per cent in 2014 — the highest level recorded in 25 years.
Unrelenting economic stagnation coupled by high unemployment has revived nationalistic movements while climate change could overwhelm the continent with more refugees from North Africa and the Middle East by 2030.

The greatest danger is CLIMATE CHANGE.

With forest fires almost everywhere, the CO2 count is jumping. With Arctic Ice disappearing there is a negative feedback loop occurring: less ice means more heat absorption there. Arctic News monitors temperatures everywhere on the globe. It keeps on pointing out that METHANE is the real threat. Last week I saw a scientist poke a hole in the permafrost and then held a match over it: a high flame showed the escaping methane, up to 100 times more dangerous than CO2.

Here’s what ARCTIC NEWS reported last week:
“When taking into account the many elements that are contributing to warming, a potential warming of 10°C (18°F) could take place, leading to rapid mass extinction of many species, INCLUDING HUMANS. So, how fast could such warming take place? It could happen as fast as within the next four years!!”

Do we only have FOUR YEARS?

Back to my original question: IS IT LATER THAN YOU THINK?
Yes, yes, yes, it is much, much later than we think.
Brace yourself. Live more simply. Relocate to rural areas where you can attain a degree of self-sufficiency. Join a church community where you find kindred people.

April 22 2017: EARTH DAY.

THE CHURCH AND EARTH DAY

If you want to find out what churches really think about the earth, look no further than the buildings they occupy and the hymns they sing. This elementary evidence – its body language if you will – explains volumes.

Consider these edifices: look up and the first thing you see are high ceilings suggesting salvation to come from on high with steeples pointing to heaven. This sort of architecture reaffirm the doctrine behind this: heaven is the goal for the pew sitters. The high ceilings represent the vault of heaven and the steeple is simply another pointer to the place where God and his angels dwell, soon to be joined by the true believers.

Granted some Protestant churches are more modest in this regard but the Roman Catholic cathedrals are basically replicas of what their leaders see as their future: way up there in heaven. Often the high ceilings there are adorned with the figures of angels, leaving no doubt that the church sees itself as the portal to heaven.

Once we construct buildings and incorporate our beliefs in their design, then it is very difficult to change direction. That’s the reason why it is almost impossible for the church to convey the biblical notion that God loves the cosmos (John 3:16), the Greek word for all that exist in nature and beyond. That our future is here on earth constitutes a hard sell, because the worship takes place in buildings that belie that belief.

There also is an additional factor, even more powerful, something that makes it very difficult to connect the church with the earth: the hymns the church sings are a constant celestial affirmation.

I grew up with it: in grade school – a Christian institution – I was taught all sorts of heaven songs: “Get in line, get in line, then follow the ‘to heaven’ sign” was one of them (Sluit U aan die mee wil naar de hemel gaan). Another song says “Heaven is the greatest place, the singing there beyond amaze.” (In de hemel is het schoon waar men zingt op blijde toon).

So how does the average Christians celebrate EARTH DAY?

Probably they don’t. A well-known hymn is a good example, ”Guide me, oh thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land.”
The tune is magnificent, especially for a male choir setting, but the words are revealing: PILGRIM through this BARREN land!
Pilgrim!! We are passing through! We don’t belong here! The earth we live in is barren land, a good for nothing desert, so let’s leave it, go to heaven where everything is honky-dory.

Oh yes? Where do we get that idea? Not from the Bible! There it says (John 3: 13) “Nobody has ever gone into heaven, except the one who came from heaven the Son of Man.”
Paul affirms that when he writes to Timothy: “God lives in inapproachable light who nobody has seen or can see.”
I once saw Larry King interview Billy Graham. Remember them? Larry asked Billy: “What happens when you die?” Billy answered: “Jesus will take me by the hand and bring me to God.” Oh ya? The trouble with Billy is that he does not know the Bible. God cannot be approached. Only Jesus, his Son can see God. For others seeing him means death.

Hymns!!

Oh these infernal hymns! There is a really old one, which says “Prostrate before Thy throne to lie and gaze and gaze on Thee.” Simply impossible. I imagine that’s what Billy had in mind when he spoke to Larry King.
Yes, the Heaven Heresy persists. “I am a stranger here, within a foreign land; my home is far away upon the golden strand.” Another downer on the earth. And the list goes on. In my Presbyterian Hymn Book almost every other song mentions heaven. Heaven is so ingrained in peoples’ psyche that it is impossible to eradicate, yet our eternal life depends on it, if we believe what John 3: 16 says: “God so loved the world, the cosmos, that he offered his only begotten Son as payment to buy it back from the Great Deceiver. Those who believe that will have eternal life. Here is the exact wording (NIV): For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

The heart of the gospel.

When God so loved the world, sacrificing his Son as payment to buy it back, should we not love it too?
I dare say that here we are at the heart of the gospel.
This text, as far as I know, is the only place in the entire Bible that makes attaining Eternal Life through believing in Jesus, conditional upon loving God’s creation. The two entities belong together, period.

Colossians 1: 15-20 explains Jesus more fully, making it one of the most prominent passages in the entire Bible.

15 Christ is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.
16 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 (ta panta in Greek) have been created through Him and for Him.
17 He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together.
18 He is also head of the body, the church; and He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He Himself will come to have first place in everything.
19 For it was the Father’s good pleasure for all the fullness to dwell in Him,
20 and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, having made peace through the blood of His cross.

The Christ so eminently described here is the one that was crucified, the most painful of all deaths, to restore creation, God’s work of art, that very planet we abuse now more than ever. To make ”heaven” the goal for eternity is a complete denial of Christ’s sacrifice and his divinity, and so gives a totally false interpretation of the real biblical message.

Bonhoeffer calls this sort of heaven-oriented-activity “pious secularism”. Bavinck categorically states that redemption of the person and redemption of the earth are two sides of the same coin: you cannot have one without the other.

That is totally revolutionary! It calls for a completely new approach to the Christian Religion!

Both men emphasize that we are fashioned from the earth, from this ‘barren’ land. We are called ADAM which means ‘earth’, the same good earth that feeds us, the same good earth that bears us, the same good earth that clothes us, and, yes, the same good earth that also is our final resting place.

The very last words of the book Daniel are (Daniel 12: 13): “As for you, go your way to the end. You will rest in the earth, and then at the end of the days you will arise from that earth to receive you allotted inheritance.” That reward is not heaven, but a renewed earth.

All who are dead will rise at the end of the days. David, Abraham, Daniel himself, all God’s children, still buried, will arise when the Lord calls them. Says John 5: 25: “the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live.”

That signifies a limitation: only those who have listened to the voice of the Son of God, honoring the earth, trying to curtail one’s CARBON FOOTPRINT will be able to respond to the call to life. The others will remain in the earth.

Back to that hymn with the beautiful melody: after the ‘barren land’ phrase, the next line is “I am weak but thou are mighty”.

Granted, we have the occasional weak spell, but the Psalm 8 describes us differently:” You made us rulers over the works of your hands, you put everything under our feet.” That refers to the earth, God’s precious planet. The globe he has given to us to look after and cultivate and cherish.

That is an awesome responsibility. Someday God will call us on the carpet, demanding an account, asking us to how we have dealt with creation, with the earth out of which we are fashioned.

Back to that “Guide me” song. There the next line is: “When I tread the verge of Jordan, bid my anxious fears subside, death of death and hell’s destruction, land me safe on Canaan’s side”.

Actually the entire heaven notion has been derived from Greek (pagan) philosophy. This is not only confirmed by crossing the river to come to safe ground, as in this song, because this river reference is also of Greek mythology origin, where the river Styx formed the boundary between Earth and the Underworld. This fits in with the heaven heresy, which too is a pure Greek (pagan) concept.
When Socrates died, he welcomed death. In The Trials of Socrates, Plato depicts Socrates’ last moments before his death. Plato quotes Socrates: “I’ll no longer stay put, but will take my leave of you and depart for certain happy conditions of the blessed”.

Socrates is certain that he’s on the way to heaven, and even says a prayer to the gods after drinking the poison: “‘One is, I suppose, permitted to utter a prayer to the gods – and one should do so – that one’s journey from this world to the next will prove fortunate”. Socrates died to celebrate death.

Mike Pence, the man who will take Trump’s place when he drops dead or is impeached, describes himself as “A Christian, a Conservative and a Republican” in that order. So how would he interpret Psalm 8, he who calls himself a Christian foremost?
By all indication he hates the earth, evident from his actions as enforcer of the planet destroying policies of his boss. One would expect that a Conservative would be in favor of conserving, especially the environment, but no, conserving applies only to such disputable items as heterosexual marriages and forbidding abortions under any circumstances.

Oh these American Christians. Bonhoeffer once wrote: “God has granted American Christianity no Reformation. He has given it strong revivalist preachers, churchmen and theologians, but no Reformation of the church of Jesus Christ by the Word of God. Anything of the churches of the Reformation which has come to America either stands in conscious seclusion and detachment from the general life of the church or has fallen victim to Protestantism without Reformation.”

All too evident in RAPTURE, A word NOT found in the Bible!!

This warrants a closer look at American Christianity. Dr. Harold Bloom has made this an object of a study, contained in his book THE AMERICAN RELIGION. He gave it a subtitle: The emergence of the Post-Christian Nation.
In essence he says that America thinks itself to be Christian but this no longer is the case. Now Gnosticism reigns.
This is all too evident in its treatment of the earth. Gnosticism believes the earth is evil. EVIL. So it can treat it as such.
Among themselves the US Church is divided between post-millennials and pre-millennials. The ‘premils’ believe that the world’s showdown battle (Armageddon) will happen before the Thousand-Year reign of Christ.
The view that the saved will be snatched up to heaven (the Rapture) before the battle, was first stated by Cyrus I. Scofield (1843–1921) in his (still) best-selling Scofield Reference Bible.
Hal Lindsey in his THE LATE GREAT PLANET EARTH, which sold 81 million copies, has had a lasting impact on Post-Christian America. The title says it all. The LEFT BEHIND books and videos picture airplanes where suddenly passengers and even pilots miraculously disappear while the sinners are left behind. One adherent told me that he believes that pilots and co-pilots must hold different views on these matters lest planes suddenly become pilot-less.
Matthew 24:39 tells a different story. There Jesus tells us that not the elect, but the sinners are taken away: the believers are LEFT BEHIND on the earth. Jesus mentions Noah, and then applies this to the saints of all times, who ARE LEFT BEHIND on the earth.

In summary: The Church, if it wants to be true to its mission, must attract earth-lovers – of which there are many. That means it must focus on the EARTH and ban the HEAVEN HERESY.

EASTER WEEKEND 2017: Good Friday

THE FUTURE OF MONEY; THE MONEY OF THE FUTURE. (3)

THE MONEY OF THE FUTURE

In the two previous blogs I came to the conclusion that money in its present form – created out of nothing – is a killer.

Already we live in a world where nothing is sure anymore: money has simply added to the turmoil and has plunged the world into the most perilous instability.

Having money is nevertheless the goal for most people. Money can buy multi-million dollar yachts, can buy respect and, for a while, fulfill our heart’s desire, even though we know that money cannot guarantee life or mental and spiritual security because money is a human invention and as such, in the end, all what is human fails.

Look at our world realistically, through the eyes of eternity, the only way a Christian can look at the future. Today, this very moment, there are more than seven billion people in the world. Most of them now huddled into cities that survive only by virtue of money which, in turn depend on a wider world that is increasingly subject to extremes in the weather: either too hot and too dry or too stormy and too wet, which makes the future more uncertain than ever. Also all cities live by the power of finite, polluting carbon power.

Already many millions are on the move from drought-stricken Africa, but increasingly also from the war-ravaged countries of Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, while each week we hear about unrest, bombing, and religious strife in Egypt, Pakistan, India and elsewhere. Add to this the global financial world loaded with debt, with its overextended banking and insurance industry no longer able to exercise the JUBILEE option, because this would cause their immediate collapse.

Then there is the natural or rather the unnatural state of the world because we treat our planet as if it is inexhaustible. A realistic look at the world around us tells us differently. The earth is a dissipative structure, which means that it is finite, has an expiry date. All signs today indicate that we have long passed its ‘best before’ date.

That happened centuries, ago. It could quite well be that the period 1600-1750 was the best, the time just before the CARBON AGE, the years in which Johann Sebastian Bach and G. F. Handel composed their music, the era in which Rembrandt and the other great masters created their ever-more valuable paintings: indeed the Golden Age of creativity.

Then the world had a mere One Billion people: basically the planet was still there to be discovered: the natives of Africa, India and China and the Americas still lived their sustainable lives, even though European sicknesses were already then were killing many there.
Perhaps even the Middle Ages were preferable. Harvard historian Juliet Schor cited leisure conditions during that time:
“The medieval calendar was filled with holidays …These were spent both in sober churchgoing and in feasting, drinking and merrymaking …All told, holiday leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one third of the year. And the English were apparently working harder than their neighbors. The ancien régime in France is reported to have guaranteed fifty-two Sundays, ninety rest days, and thirty-eight holidays. In Spain, travelers noted that holidays totaled five months per year.”

How unlike today.

Take the USA. There, in order to feed the family, maintain two cars, keep up with repairs on the single family dwelling and pay for medical care, almost every household needs two wage earners to stay ahead of bankruptcy. They have been lulled into a terrible trap. A great portion of the USA is so poor because they live too far from stores and work and need cars as much as they need food, shelter and clothing thanks to the structural suburban make-up of North America, dependent on cheap and abundant energy. There wage growth is stalled while everything else is going exponential: population growth, income disparity, energy consumption, Global Warming, Pollution, just to name the most obvious. Our entire system, our old-age pensions, our medical aid, our tax collections all are based on constant growth, plainly impossible in a Finite World.

The Middle Ages saw no growth at all! The Golden Age – 1600 to 1750 – saw hardly any. We have been conned to believe – blame corporate TV – that we always need more. And that’s precisely why we are heading for disaster.

That today a financial and atmospheric disaster is looming is evident in slowing growth, in old debts not paid off but rolled over into new, larger ‘assets’ which rapidly are becoming liabilities.

Tomorrow’s inflation, due to Climate Change, will make life more expensive at the same time when robots and higher interest rates will decrease income, accelerating collapse of financial institutions, insurance companies, banks, and pension plans. Already many pension plans are failing or cutting payouts. The impending failure of the financial system is likely to be at the center of the storm.

The greatest danger

The greatest danger is that we have built a system that has no fallback position: we cannot go backward. No longer can we return to a simpler society with horses and buggies, with localized economies, also because we have growing population pressures and shrinking resources.

Money now has become to us what the potato was for the inhabitants of the County of Mayo in Ireland of the 1840s. When money fails in its function, all cities, Toronto, New York, London, Beijing, Tokyo, Moscow will fail. China alone now has 100 cities with a population exceeding 1 million. All these cities will starve. Karl Marx, the famous author of Das Kapital predicted that every city has a little Ireland in it.

Under these conditions, what is the money of the future?

Money and the future are intimately connected because money represents FAITH, an item that is fading fast. In the Middle Ages everybody unashamedly had FAITH. Very few have so today.

After the war in 1945, with America expressing faith in the future of Europe, it donated via the Marshall Plan some Five Billion Dollars to Europe, the so-called Euro-Dollars, for the reconstruction of that devastated continent. That’s when a new car cost less than $2,000.
America has been the sole beneficiary of World War II, inheriting an up-to-date manufacturing economy, fully functional, while Europe’s industrial base was totally destroyed. It had to start from scratch, and the US dollars were a great help.
The result was that in Germany the Wirtschaftwunder (German for “economic miracle”) could take place, enabling the rapid reconstruction and development of the economies of West Germany and Austria after World War II.

Today, also thanks to thorough trades training there they maintain an economic advantage over the USA, where not manufacturing but money manipulation has become the main industry, thanks to the US Dollar being the World Currency.
That advantage is now disappearing with the rise of China and Russia who are basing their joint currency on GOLD.

GOLD and SILVER.

I believe that the collapse of the financial system and with it the collapse of society may and can occur in the near future. Anything can turn it on, either an immense natural disaster, such as an enormous earthquake – one is overdue on North America’s West Coast – or an unexpected default from a large institution, even the USA government with its enormous debt load and unfunded liabilities.

What I can say is that the money of the future will not be money as we regard it today, where the bankers are like God, creating it ex nihilo, out of nothing.

The historic function of money

Of course if we go back far enough, to primitive humanity, the so-called hunter/gatherer period, there was no need for money. There were enough edibles available in nature to sustain the rather small population in a world where game was abundant, where fish abounded, where wild apples or fruit of any kind were readily at hand. Then too there was total equality because there was no need to hoard.
The onset of agriculture created inequality: the clever became masters, the less qualified serfs.
God did not want this to happen so he instituted regulations as outlined in the Five Books of Moses the cancelling of debts and the restitution of lost properties. Of course, humans being human and greedy, never practiced these laws, and now never will.

Historically money has been gold and silver. When Peter and John encountered a lame person at the entrance of the Jerusalem Temple, who held up his hand for some monetary assistance, Peter said: “Silver and Gold we have not, but we can cure your paralysis”.
When Judas betrayed Jesus he received 30 pieces of silver.
When Abraham bought a burial site for Sarah, his wife, he talked to the owner who said (Genesis 23: 15): “Listen to me, my lord; the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver, but what is that between you and me? Bury your dead.” (16) Abraham agreed to Ephron’s outrageous terms and weighed out for him the price he had named in the hearing of the Hittites: four hundred shekels of silver, according to the weight current among the merchants.

The money of the future, for it to be trustworthy, will be based on silver and gold, substances compact and valuable because of their scarcity. In the past, these metals have always occupied that function. Considering the much sounder basis of gold and silver they are preferable to fiat money, strictly based in trust. That trust is now fading fast.

How God disappeared.

I vividly recall the Dutch war-time economy, heavily relying on the countryside to feed the city. Nothing could be imported, no bananas, no oranges, lemons, tobacco, or chocolate. Fortunately there were a lot of small farmers, making a living on 10-12 hectares – 25-30 acres – with a dozen cows, pigs, chickens, growing potatoes, wheat, oats, all cultivated by simple non mechanical means. A lot of this found their ways into the cities. My grandparents were that kind of country folk, so were my uncles.

Today all that is gone and so is God. Everything became industrialized, big barns with thousands of chickens, either for eggs or broilers. These people rely on the city as much as the city dwellers themselves. It all depends on carbon-based power sources and lots of money because the investments are huge: robot-milking machines cost $500,000 each. Once money collapses, everything does. Chaos, universal chaos.

I know, I paint a bleak picture. Yet when we look at today and project what will be the result, then the conclusion is dire. We have allowed ourselves to be caught into a trap from which there is no escape. With God gone we have set ourselves up for failure, relying on finite substances, that also prove to be totally poisonous, killing not only ourselves, but all substances on which our society depend.

A call to repent.

Fortunately the Lord, in his wisdom, has foreseen this. The germ of this situation was already present in the Garden of Eden. It needed a few millennia to develop to the point where it is today, but, it seems to me – and I realize that this is a guess – that soon the time will be full and we must prepare ourselves to face the ultimate reality: which is what James Lovelock has labeled: THE REVENGE OF GAIA and the Bible calls CHRIST’S SECOND COMING.

Money and the future are intimately connected: both are based on FAITH. The current world has put its faith in fiat – self-generated – money.
The real money of the eternal future is also based on FAITH. The real, infallible money of the FUTURE is the faith that is based on the blood of Christ, shed on Calvary’s Hill.

On this Easter weekend we know that He is alive, that he has prepared a New Creation which awaits our coming, paid for by his life-blood. That is the true “money” of the future. That’s why John 3: 16 is the most important text in the entire Bible.

April 8 2017

THE FUTURE OF MONEY; THE MONEY OF THE FUTURE. (2)

Sometimes – well quite often, actually – I refer to the Bible, that ancient book. The word BIBLE means BOOK, from the Greek BIBLOS, also known as the Book of Books (Ho toon(pronounced tone) Bibloon Biblos in Greek). To make it easier I usually indicate where to find the Bible story.

Take Luke 20:24: there the Pharisees ask Jesus a money question. “Dear Rabbi’, they say quite politely, “Should Jews pay the Rome-imposed head tax?”

Tricky question, this: these fellows were not stupid. If Jesus says “no”, then these church officials will accuse him of rebellion; if Jesus says “yes” then he goes against the crowd which surrounds him, all vehemently opposed to this hated tax.
Jesus – who never carries money – calls for a denarius, a common Roman money piece. Lots of people try to hand him one, eager to hear his answer. He takes it from someone near to him and gives him or her a wink. (A lot of women followed Jesus, and some actually supported him financially). He smiles at the crowd and then in general, asks: “Whose image is featured here?” The crowd promptly answers, “Caesar’s.” Jesus replies: “Give to Caesar what belongs to him and to God the things that are God’s.”

This seemingly simple answer has generated a tremendous a lot of confusion. On it the church has based the separation of church and state by interpreting this to mean that there are two important divisions in society: God and the State, Grace and Nature. We see this ‘dualism’ constantly displayed in our time. Both Paul Ryan and Steve Bannon, two prominent persons in the TRUMP administration, are devoted Roman Catholics. They totally separate God from their politics, something most church people do, believing that education, politics, business, or even the environment are neutral and have nothing to do with God or religion, separating grace- the church- from nature – the rest of life.

So what does Jesus’ answer really mean?

Jesus said: Give that denarius back to Tiberius, the then emperor. But, of course, we can’t do that because he doesn’t own that coin any more than the heirs of George Washington or Queen Elizabeth do own the bank notes which carry their image.
Jesus’ one-line reply is indeed inspired. He touches upon two important segments of society: the political-economic reality represented by Caesar and money on the one hand, and the eternal as expressed in the Kingdom of God on the other.
By identifying the denarius with Caesar – let him have it – Jesus implies that he would not support an armed revolt or even passive resistance to Rome, implying that the tax and the coins themselves are simply a human device and that all of life, including money, is religion, is eternal, is part of God’s kingdom.

Jesus’ radical message.

By proclaiming an almost puritanical and revolutionary renunciation of money by even refusing to carry it, Jesus demonstrates to us that we too must see everything in terms of The Kingdom to Come, his glorious new creation. The Church on the other hand, almost without exception, explains this passage to mean that most of life has nothing to do with the Kingdom, evident in the fact that it is failing to proclaim “Seek first the Kingdom”, the welfare of God’s Created Holy Word.

It’s exactly there where today’s Christianity – maybe I should called it CHURCHDOM – is flunking the ultimate test, just as it did 2000 years ago when it condemned Jesus, the Word become Human, to death. Here – and I cannot emphasize this enough – we come face to face with the failure of the church today.

Let’s face it: in our Western world, everything is about money: the stock market, the strength of the dollar, the price of gold: three items mentioned in almost every newscast. Mammon is God, the Dollar is King in the world and its possession a holy grail.
We now put a price tag on everything. First on Jesus – 30 pieces of silver – and now also on the rest of creation: the woods are paved, the mountains mined, the seas eaten, species eliminated: all because of money. We sell God’s kingdom again and again, just as Judas did.

We all participate in that criminal act. Jesus was sold for the price of a slave: we are selling creation to serve us as a slave. We, Christian North America, 6 percent of the world’s population, cause 40 percent of the world’s pollution, in perfect accordance with the aims of Capitalism which defines itself as Creative Destruction.

I am more and more inclined to think that Capitalism and its exponent, the global money economy, serves the Anti-Christ. I think that’s why Jesus feared money because he foresaw how destructive it would be for him, for his creation and for us. He died so that we too could be included in his life, a resurrection life, a far better totally earthly life than we can ever live in a money society.
If we want to share in that life then we must regain a new sense of value; we must reset our priorities to have our treasures expressed not in money but in love, in genuine compassion for all God’s creatures, humans, animals, trees, flowers, air, water. God so loved the cosmos…. (John 3:16)

Finally: the Future of MONEY

Sweden is on track to become the world’s first completely cashless economy: everything is transacted via a digital device, so that we – and the State – can totally check what we do with our money, and tax avoidance is prevented.
Perhaps the number 666 is the universal PIN number encoded in every transaction. It portrays the rule of the Anti-Christ as more and more nations go cashless. Last year November India got rid of its highest denomination bills, eliminating 90 percent of its paper money. Other nations are following suit.

The future of money is digital, with all the dangers involved therein, such as hacking, power outages, and especially FRAUD.
Cashless life is a win for big Government: they are in full control: no more tax evasion. The paradox is that money, in its present form, is the symbol of both CAPITALISM and CAPITULATION, the unconditional surrender of ourselves to the forces of evil: that’s why, just like Jesus, we must free ourselves from the clutches of money, because the future of a society dominated by money means death.

Consider Germany 1939-45. Hitler created money out of nothing to finance World War II. In the process 60 million people were killed and most of Europe destroyed. Today we do the same again, this time to CREATION, through Quantitative Easing in the USA and the Draghi measures in Europe. The result now will be the destruction of the entire planet and the death of billions.

CAPITALISM

Capitalism and the fossil economy go hand in hand. TRUMP, the ultimate capitalist, last week confirmed this by declaring Obama’s rules on the environment null and void, and that in a country, where 6 percent of the world population already produces 40 percent of the CO2 emission. Compare this to the 45 percent of humanity which is only responsible for 7 percent of Green House Gases. We, the rich, whether Christian or atheist, whether Muslim or Jew, we are primarily responsible for the climate disasters that await us, thanks to Capitalism, of which MONEY is its most prominent feature.

As I have stated, money is created through debt. When I approach the bank for a mortgage the bank uses my property as collateral and gives me a draft for whatever amount I need, creating the money out of nothing and burdening me with DEBT. The bank trusts that property values will not decrease because if the loan exceeds the amount I owe, we both are in trouble: I lose the house and the bank is stuck for some loss.

In many languages debt and sin are expressed with the same word. In the Lord’s Prayer we often interchange “Forgive us our debts” with “Forgive us our sins.” In German and in Dutch the word “Schuld” means both debt and sin.

As I have noted before, Debt, Schuld, now burdens the entire world, all too well illustrated in the USDEBTCLOCK.ORG, where on April 28 the US accumulated deficit will exceed Twenty Trillion Dollars, or more than $60,000 for each American. By law this amount may not be exceeded. This amount does not include state debt, corporate debt, mortgage debt, credit card debt, auto debt, easily doubling it. Indeed DEBT will do us in: debt will become death, affirming that what the Bible unambiguously has asserted: (The Lust for) money is the root of all evil.

Yes, the Bible does indeed speak to today’s secular world.

The world, now burdened by debt, has debt so great that it never can be repaid because it has exceeded all possible remedies. This would never have been the case had it followed the Bible, and the instructions as outlined in Leviticus 25.

THE YEAR OF JUBILEE

There it says (verse 8) “?‘Count off seven sabbath years—seven times seven years—so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years.
9. Then have the trumpet sounded everywhere on the tenth day of the seventh month; on the Day of Atonement sound the trumpet throughout your land.
10. Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan.
11. The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines.
12. For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields.
13. In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to their own property.
18. ‘Follow my decrees and be careful to obey my laws, and you will live safely in the land.
19. Then the land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and live there in safety.
23. The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.
24. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.

Leviticus 25 is about the year of the JUBILEE: “Each of you will return to his possession.” In Deuteronomy 15: “Let every creditor release that which he’s lent to his neighbor.” In Isaiah 61: “Release the captives, release the bond servants.”

The Bible realizes that people are not always wise and prudent: they get in over their heads and money problems can make people sick. Also the Lord hates inequality. There always have been people who are more clever, see opportunities where others pass them by. So they get rich, and, as Solomon advised us (Proverbs 30: 8) “Keep falsehood and lies far from me; give me neither poverty nor riches, but give me only my daily bread.”

The Lord, in his infinite wisdom, knowing human nature, decreed that every so often all debts be cancelled, all lands restored to its former owners, and all bond servants be freed.
That would prevent people from both being too rich or too poor.

People have not changed. Two Thousand Years ago Jesus went back to his roots: Nazareth. (See Luke 4). He knew the situation there. He knew that people in his hometown were in debt to some shysters, who controlled the town, but were prominent in the synagogue. Jesus, never one to shun the truth, said that the town should practice JUBILEE. (Luke 4: 18-19) That was the last thing they wanted to hear, so they set out to kill him.

Shakespeare comes to mind: This is a famous phrase said by Polonius in Act-I, Scene-III of William Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet. Polonius counsels his son Laertes before he embarks on his visit to Paris. He says, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be; / For loan oft loses both itself and friend.”

To be continued next week: THE MONEY OF THE FUTURE,

April 1 2017

THE FUTURE OF MONEY; THE MONEY OF THE FUTURE. (1)

I am not a fan of contemporary music. Most days I listen to the local (Belleville) radio station at noon for the regional news, which briefly exposes me to its repetitive and a-musical tunes, offensive to listen to.

In my younger days there really were songs to remember, such as Bridge over Troubled Waters and American Pie and, of course, the Beatles. Thinking about MONEY caused me to recall another oldie: MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL, TAKE IT AWAY. It parodies the Bible where in the letter to his protégé Timothy, Paul writes that THE LOVE OF MONEY IS THE ROOT OF ALL EVIL. Nevertheless there’s a lot of truth in the song suggesting that money itself has an evil root.

We live in a CAPITAL dominated society. The word CAPITAL refers to several things: it could be the governing city of nation; it could refer to capital punishment, but it usually refers to money: having capital, being rich. Living under a CAPITALISTIC system means that its main goal is the acquisition of money.

Today capital gain and retention is the main industry in such Western cities as London, New York, and Toronto. They exist for the purpose of managing, preserving, enhancing CAPITAL. Some 40 percent of its total workforce is engaged in that ‘industry’, doing nothing but sit behind a computer and try to gain or retain a monetary advantage.

The money industry, the banking, the stock market, the leasing and lending, the real estate buying and selling, the granting of mortgages and other securities is a very profitable business as long as times are good, as long as government is stable, trustworthy and forward-looking, and people are confident that good times are ahead. Granting CREDIT is based on trust. The word itself is derived from the Latin word CREDO, which means “I believe”. As long as we believe that the system is sound and trust-worthy, as long as we believe that TRUMP is good for the economy, as long as we believe, the stock market goes up. Once that FAITH is gone, once prospects for the future are no longer rosy, credit dries up, banks are loath to lend, and the CAPITALISTIC system sputters. Then all of a sudden DEBT becomes an issue.

DEBT

All money is debt. Debt is the only growth industry today, and it is created out of nothing. You need a mortgage? The bank will magically produce the money and so finance your house.
Take a look at USDEBTCLOCK. ORG. The figures are mind boggling, showing that US total debt is close to One Million Dollar per US taxpayer. The debt per person, thus all US people from baby to pensioners is $60,000. Median per-capita income is $15,480, which means that, in order to pay all debt, people have to devote all income from fulltime work for almost 4 years to pay this off.
As long as the future is an extension of the past, thus stable work, stable climate, stable economy, all is well. When this is not the case, trouble is in store.

Yes, all money is debt. Money is created through debt. Our immense debt is the reason why money is so cheap: car loans at zero percent; mortgages at 2-3 percent, driving up the price of housing.

My first and last mortgage in 1963 carried an interest rate at 6.25 percent, and that was normal. At that rate people earned sufficient interest to make retirement possible. Today retirement funds are in the red because people live longer and interest rates are low. All pensions are in peril, but when the interest rate goes up (it has to because inflation is increasing) debt becomes too expensive and cannot be repaid. So brace yourself. Anything is possible.

The power of money

In the church we say: Blessed are they who come in the name of the Lord. But both in and outside the church we confess: blessed are they who come in the name of silver and gold. By and large people are not measured by what they do or say, but by the amounts of possessions they have. Money is the most important rule in today’s society and the acquisition of it is seen as its highest goal.

Money, in short, is seen as the meaning of life: our actions are geared towards that goal, and if we can’t make it by working, perhaps playing the lotteries will do it, or a bit of cheating here and there might help as well. It seems that no institution or person has become immune to the power of a bribe. Nothing seems sacred anymore.

In spite of all its drawbacks, money, as a tool to facilitate the commerce between human beings, was and is, nevertheless, an inspired invention, with tremendous potential for both good and evil. That is why, when first invented, it was administered by the priestly class. Today, more than ever, money makes the world go round and goes around the world with a velocity equal to the speed of light and in torrents unequaled in history: the daily flood amounts to more than One Trillion Dollars. Because of Money the global economy is like a jet plane, fast, comfortable and when it crashes, its fall is also spectacular.

Jesus and Money.

Christians are supposed to fashion their lives on Jesus, taking him as an example.
When Jesus came to earth, forever to retain the status of both God and Human, he could have been a person of any description, stature, degree and condition; and yet he chose to be poor. The English poet Christopher Harvey said of him in the seventeenth century:
It was Thy Choice, whilst Thou on Earth didst stay, And hadst not whereupon Thy Head to lay.

No wonder that throughout the Middle Ages Jesus is appearing not just as God, but as a pauper. Curiously the fastest growing Protestant movement in Brazil, the Crentes, as the believers are known, preaches the theology of prosperity, which promises material success as well as eternal salvation, a puritan ideology imported from the United States. There the Prosperity Gospel has become a leading component of Christianity: being rich means that God is with you. Yet Jesus, in The Sermon of the Mount tells us that “Blessed are the meek, those who claim little or nothing for themselves.” So perhaps due to the contrast between what Jesus portrayed and advocated in his life, and what we see as the goal might be sufficient ground to investigate a bit closer the relationship between Jesus and money.

I think Jesus deeply disliked money.

I am convinced that Jesus had some basic misgivings about money – just like we do at times- because we all know that wealth and its acquisition makes people do crazy and often dishonest things. No wonder “The love of money is the root of all evils,” is Paul’s warning to Timothy. Jesus gave money a name: Mammon. He identified it with an idol, certainly a sign that Jesus did not like money.
If I understand Jesus correctly I think that with Jesus there also was a deeper reason, something very personal. I get the impression that Jesus went out of his way to avoid contact with money and was even loath to touch the stuff.
Why do I make that assumption? Well, Jesus has a perfect recall of everything, past, present and future and so had complete insight, hindsight and foresight. We may recall that his betrayal, his suffering and death was directly associated with money. How would we feel – how would I feel – if I knew that money would eventually kill me? Well, I think that this view governed Jesus’ attitude towards money and perhaps even towards economic theory.
I better back this up with concrete examples. Take the feeding of those thousands: Jesus knows that if these people had gone off to buy bread and fish in the neighboring stores, the merchants, being good businessmen, would have suddenly increased the prices of these basic food items because of greater demand. The law of supply and demand is certainly not a latter-day invention: it has existed as long as people have traded. That’s what economics is all about: charge high when everybody needs it.
So what did Jesus do to forestall this price-gouging? He simply by-passed the economic law of supply and demand and created bread and fish ex nihilo- out of nothing- well, almost out of nothing.

Then there is that so uncharacteristic incident where Jesus almost went berserk when he chased the money changers out of the temple, upsetting much more than the tables. After all having these business people do their work in the temple was an age-old tradition and necessary to keep the Jewish house of worship functioning properly because only certain kinds of money were accepted in the temple. And how else to get the proper animals for sacrifice? I think it was money and its abuses that made Jesus so angry. Another, more indirect, indication: I find it curious that Judas, the unredeemed among the saints, carried the purse and handled the finances: Judas, who loved money more than Jesus.

In the end Judas ended up with thirty pieces of silver and then discovered that money as an idol wants our very lives. In that sense we are much closer to Judas than to Jesus. With ‘we’ I include all people in the super-rich West. Also to me a tip-off was Jesus’ great disdain for the nominal value of currency, evident when Mary spent perhaps a year’s income on that precious oil. “So what,” Jesus remarked, “so what if such a large sum was spent. It is only money.” Or consider the occasion when Peter was asked if Jesus would pay the temple tax. “Of course,” is Peter’s immediate reaction, “of course Jesus pays.” (Matthew 17:24)
But for Jesus this was not such a straightforward matter. Why this reluctance to pay the temple tax? Well, I have my theory about this too. I think Jesus knew that perhaps this very money given to the temple was going to buy his life and ensure his death.
And then, in an ironic twist, with almost a touch of black humor, Jesus shrugs his shoulders and says: “OK, not important. Let me not major in minors. Go to the lake, catch a fish and there you’ll find a silver coin enough for the both of us.”
I like that. Jesus is never skimpy. And, of course, with this gesture, he shows that all the fish in the sea and- by implication- the cattle upon a thousand hills, are his. Here we see Jesus’ royalty coming through. Queen Elizabeth never carries a wallet. Wherever she goes on an official visit, she goes free. Jesus is the same and much more so. Here he shows that he is the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, but people do not recognize him that way.

Yes, Jesus had a deep distrust of money.

Today we see what money is doing. In 1492 Columbus landed in the Americas. In two or three years he sucked a thousand years of gold from the Caribbean and then extinguished all its human life. That destructive force now rages all over the globe, including the Polar region where money is melting their eternal ice cover, sealing doom for all of us.
Money has paved the woods, has mined the mountains, has eaten the seas, has annihilated many species, all the large land and sea animals of the earth, and many of its birds.
The future of money is directly tied in with the future of the earth. Money has become the great destroyer.
That’s why Jesus hated it.

More about that in the next two weeks.