Bert Hielema–Columns and Writings

JOB Then and JOB Now: Conclusion

part 3

To view all three parts go to www.hielema.ca/blog

The End is in the Beginning.

JOB’s three so-called friends, later joined by a fourth, fanatically believed in the equivalent of the North American doctrine that God rewards strict religious observance. They were convinced that somehow Job had deviated from that. Before his suffering JOB too had adhered to this orthodox teaching which he had held as gospel truth. However, after his encounter with a series of unexpected mishaps, JOB changed his mind: “No”, he defiantly told God, ”No, I have not sinned. No, God, you are making a grave mistake.” Consequently the book of JOB eases us into a revolutionary prospect that we can argue with God against God, and that this is our God-given duty. The book does this both beautifully but also in a somewhat mysterious way.
The book is beautiful because it reads like an ancient heroic tale. It is mysterious because it is almost certain that JOB never lived. I think it is in the Bible because there is an intimate connection between JOB Then and JOB Now. Here’s why.
(1) I believe that JOB represents not the people of Israel, for the simple reason that there is no real Jewish connection evident in the book of JOB at all, but the entire world, both ancient and contemporary. In other words, God is saying that Israel, as a nation, is no longer an exclusive people, but that everybody in the world, past and present, is included in his plan for salvation.
That would be a drastic change. Thus the writer of the book of JOB points to a new relationship between humans and God then and now, one based not simply on obeying God’s laws as outlined in the books of Moses, the Torah, or faithfully going to church, but especially on a vibrant, all-inclusive lifestyle, expressing a deep appreciation for creation, and thus living so that its wellbeing is constantly considered.
God wants all people, not only Jews, to be saved, a thought that met with a lot of denial and resistance in the pre-Christian church, so much so that some 800 years later, when Jesus appeared on the scene, his disciples still had not fully absorbed these new emphases. I also believe that God looks with compassion on those who follow his creational laws, recognizing Him as the origin of life, something Romans 1: 20 points to.
(2) And then there are these disastrous happening and the matter of this Satan figure. Where do this creature and these calamities fit in? Here I have to fast forward some 800 years again, to the New Testament time of Jesus at the start of his ministry as related in Matthew 4. There the Satan showed Jesus all the glories of the world, the Egyptian pyramids,  the Greek Parthenon, the splendor of Rome, the Inca institutions, the marvelous temples in Indonesia and Asia, and offered the entire world and its glories to Jesus, on the condition that Jesus bow down and worship the Satan.
Jesus does not dispute that Satan is the ruling power of the globe: on the contrary, he later calls him ‘The Prince of the World.’ Yes, the Satan, now more than ever, is controls the world, witness the Holocaust, Rwanda, AIDS, cancers, wars, Climate Change, the religious Right.
This explains also why this book is not popular with the theologians: it is simply too controversial. Is Satan in charge today? Yes.
(3) When finally God speaks to JOB, he opens JOB’s mind to some radical new thinking. The book tells us that we are never able to rest on past achievements, that there simply is no retirement for us ever.
Already the word “the land of Uz” gives an indication of this new meaning. Dr. David Wolfers, the author of Deep Things out of Darkness, a 550 page book dealing exclusively with JOB, translates the word “Uz”, (the physical location where JOB supposedly lived) as “the Land of Council.” He thinks that the book asks us to look at the Bible with a critical eye, to weigh its ideas carefully and consider them to see whether we express the right view. In other words, he recommends that churches, mosques and synagogues everywhere, must meet to discuss, probe, investigate and discover what the gospel means for us in this millennium. No longer are matters clear-cut: we have changed, circumstances have changed, the world has changed.
(4) And then there are the four friends. Dr. Wolfers, himself a Jew who devoted 20 years of his life to the study of JOB, thinks that they may stand for three or four ethnic minorities within the Jewish nation, with their different types of worship, all centering on a faulty view of God. Transposing the scene to the religious JOB Now, I believe it could well be that the first three friends, in our time, represent the three major orthodox religions: Judaism, based on the Old Testament only, orthodox Christianity, both the Protestant wing, mostly influenced by Gnosticism and hierarchical Roman Catholicism- still stuck on papal infallibility and male dominance- and Islam, later joined by the fourth in the form of the so-called Christian Right, all based on the false doctrine of either good works or a stagnant view of God.
Although JOB replies to the first three speakers, he wisely does not enter into dialogue with the orthodox Christian Right, which, he thinks correctly, is a waste of breath.

The most liberating element about the entire book of JOB is that here is a human being who is not a good and patient and pious God-fearer, but a person who fights God with all the passion he can muster. The New Testament speaks of such a person as one who is blessed because he or she hungers and thirsts for righteousness and is willing to die for that ideal.
JOB is suffering because God wants to teach JOB something. God wants to teach JOB that he must let go of some of the ideas he has about God, taught by previous generations, true for them in their time, perhaps, but not true for JOB now.
Only when God had personally spoken to JOB, only then did he understand for the first time in his life- and his suffering was the turning point- that God was different than he first had imagined. He expressed this when he said: “I have heard of you with my ears, but now my eyes have seen you.” JOB’s idea of God was based on the oral traditions: what his ancestors had told him, what he had heard in numerous sermons. But now something different is forming in his mind, some new thoughts and new ideas. The eye of his mind is seeing a new God and also, looking inward, is seeing a new JOB.
And what is it that JOB starts to see?

The book’s Central Point.

Here I come to the central point of the book, which makes it one of the most profound sources of contemporary spirituality. The accusing Angel believed that JOB was only obedient to God because God had made him rich and prosperous, and so the Satan thinks that JOB will curse God if his blessings are taken away. However, there the Satan miscalculated. True, JOB was initially very much concerned about himself and his family. He figured that, because he was so rich and so blessed with possessions, he was the centre of the universe.
The sin of JOB Then, the sin of Israel and our sin, the sin of JOB Now, is Anthropocentrism, the arrogant and deluded belief that the earth and the universe were designed for our benefit and control, something the entire World, including all religions, believes with a passion. John 3: 16 is always wrongly interpreted as if it reads: “God so loved the human race….” When God talks to JOB He says: “JOB, I’ve got a few questions for you. Where were you when I planned the earth? Tell me if you are so wise. Were you there when I stopped the waters as they issued gushing from the womb?”
For verse after verse the voice in the whirlwind rages on, outlining all the interdependent elements of creation- the winds, clouds, thunderstorms, the lightning, lions, antelopes, oxen, ostriches, horses, hawks, vultures, bulls, serpents. The voice lashes out at JOB’s and our narrow self-centeredness, admonishing that he can never understand the complexity and the functioning of the planet and cosmos. “Have you been to the edge of the universe? Speak up, if you have such knowledge,” a remark very applicable today when the Hubble spacecraft probes ever deeper into the universe and the pictures become ever more baffling, or when Mars is being explored and the questions multiply.
What we see here is the very opposite of a universe built for us to manipulate as we will. Instead of being given dominion over plants and animals, or a license to subdue creation, JOB Then is told- and we, JOB Now, with him- to bow down and be humble and love ‘the cosmos’. He and we are required to understand absolute humility before the face of God and thus JOB says in the end: “I have heard of you with my ears (heard the Torah, heard hundreds of sermons) but now my eyes have seen you. Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.”
The Hebrew word for ‘dust’ here is exactly the same word used in Genesis 2, out of which God fashioned Adam, whose name actually means ‘dust’. So the rebirth of JOB is akin to becoming Adam. He is the prototype of the New Humanity, in line with Jesus, God’s son.

As a parable JOB represents the New Adam, the New Humanity, fully at ease being human, being of the earth. Dust we are; ‘Adam’ we are and to dust, to ‘Adam’, the New Adam we shall return.

JOB’s Surrender

His ultimate surrender is not the sort of mindless obedience often required by orthodox religion. It is the kind of surrender that is “the whole-hearted giving of oneself,” a surrender to God’s creation, His Universe, arising from a humility that leads to wisdom instead of self-centered pride. JOB is born again, converted from an ego-centered person to an eco-centered consciousness based on awe for God and His great creation. That is the basic message of the book of JOB. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Theologian killed by the Hitler crowd in April 1945, just before the end of World War II, says in Schoepfung und Fall (Creation and Fall): “God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” That is the coming new Trinity, to be implemented now. We are not here to maximize personal consumption and to glorify individual greed, the basic message of the gods of our age. As citizens of the world we must, following JOB’s message, progress from being ego-centered to becoming eco-centered.
We know what happened to JOB. The story is well-known how he received double his capital as well as his family back.
Here is another reason why the Book of JOB is so curiously contemporary. Consider the following: the most up-to-date detail in the epilogue is the mention of JOB’s daughters. In this new world where JOB Then and JOB Now merge, which is humanity’s future, these fair women are not inferior to the brothers and do not have to go to their brothers’ houses for the annual celebration. Indeed, they are given the same honour by receiving a share of JOB’s wealth as their inheritance, totally new for that age. Each is named, while the seven sons of JOB remain anonymous. The names themselves- Dove, Cinnamon and Eye-shadow- symbolize peace, abundance and a specifically female kind of grace. The story’s centre of gravity has shifted from righteousness to beauty and the focus is now the manifestation of inner peace.

Female Beauty

And something else: “And in all the world there were no women as beautiful as JOB’s daughters.” There is something enormously satisfying about the prominence of women at the end of JOB. Here they are especially included. The lesson here is that JOB, and in JOB all people, have learned to surrender not only their erroneous ideas about God but also their male compulsion to control. The daughters have almost the last word. I think that even though now women are still secondary in many cultures, especially in religious institutions, in the new world they will be more than equal.

And in the entire world there were no women as beautiful as JOB’s daughters. What JOB also tells us is that in the world to come there will be great appreciation for beauty, including female beauty.

We see more and more how organized Religion has lost the Gospel of the Earth. No wonder it has stagnated. Those who want to find this ‘gospel of the earth’ need look no further than the Book of JOB.

In short the book of JOB depicts the history of the world: first the ideal situation, then the Satan episode, spoiling the perfection, followed by hardship, questions, wrong theology, God’s answer and the final restoration with double the blessings.

The End is in the Beginning

Everything has a beginning and an end. Now, at the edge of the End-time, our world will descend to the state it was before, when everything will revert back to what existed in the time before the Beginning, the Primeval Time. Just as death is close to birth, so the down­turn is not far from the upswing. Just as all that has been neatly ordered stems from chaotic disorder, emanating from the fog of the Primeval, so the cosmos too will revert back to that same undefined state. The End?time is nothing else but the return to the Beginning before history. Not only do we ourselves need a re-birth: all of creation will be re-born, allowing us a New Beginning. It is for this newness that we live, building on Christ’s promise in Revelation 21: 5: “I am making everything new!”

Yes, The End is in the Beginning.

Bibliography
The Book of JOB, Stephen Mitchel, North Point Press
The Comforting Whirlwind, God, JOB and the scale of Creation,
Bill McKibben, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company
Deep Things out of Darkness, David Wolfers, Pharos & Eerdmans
The Lost Gospel of the Earth, Tom Hayden, Sierra Book Club

A Testament to Freedom, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harper San Francisco
The End of Science, John Horgan, Helix Books
Antwoord uit he Onweer ( A ‘Thunder’ Reply ) Dr K.H. Miscotte
JOB, Challenging a silent God, Nick Overduin, CRC Publications.
The Hidden Face of God, Richard Elliott Friedman, Harpers
Time Magazine, August 4 1997

Between Beginning and End: a Radical Kingdom Vision, J. H. Bavinck, Eerdmans (Forthcoming)

Approaching the End, Stanley Hauerwas, Eerdmans

Creation and Fall, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Fortress Press.

Next week:

The first part of a series on WHERE ARE WE?

JOB Then and JOB Now

Part 2.

The End is in the Beginning.

Why do I blog?

‘JOB Now’, meaning we and our world, is entering a ‘JOB Then’ situation, indicating cosmic disasters. Scientists these days are talking about tipping points and planetary boundaries, about human activity pushing the planet beyond its limits. In a recent study, 22 leading scientists warned that “humans likely are forcing a planetary-scale transition with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience.”

In plain language it says that our biological resources – water, trees, soil, air – which we now take for granted, will be subject to sudden and unpredictable transformations probably sooner than later.

That means we, personified in ‘JOB Now’, are in deep trouble, something the church can no longer ignore, because that trouble plays out in a world chockfull with the inequalities that flow from deeply entrenched power structures, both within individual countries and between the so-called developed and developing worlds. Stir in the ecological crises which will greatly exacerbate existing problems rooted in the unjust distribution of wealth and power, and our troubles are likely to magnify exponentially. I see it as the role of preachers and self-appointed bloggers like me to warn our society that we are in deep denial, denial that is especially anchored in the relatively privileged sectors, such as organized religion where our affluence insulates us from the immediate consequences. Bonhoeffer’s advice to the Church of Christ, in his introduction to Creation and Fall, is: “To witness to the end of all things, to live from the end, to think from the end, to act from the end, to proclaim its message for the end.” In this the church fails miserably.

Therefore  I see it as my duty to sound the unpleasantly loud alarm that we must drastically change the way we think, move, worship, especially the latter, because only as a community can we prepare ourselves for the future.

What has this to do with JOB Then?

The Book of JOB is all about personal catastrophes that represent global happenings. JOB’s friends, in their out-dated ideas, are part of that as well. JOB’s friends are the typical, judgmental know-it-all believers, be they Christians, Muslims or Jews who know exactly why JOB is in this deplorable state: it is God’s punishment. We too, in our out-dated orthodox religions, often see the law, traditions and ecclesiastical confessions as more important than love without preconditions. When JOB was rich and healthy, his friends valued his opinion (being rich always gives enhanced credibility) but not anymore. Now something has changed and it is not they. It’s JOB. His suffering has made him a different person. Now the God JOB relies on is a totally different God. Who is right? JOB honoring a mysterious, unknowable God or his companions who revere a God about whom they know everything?

Eliphaz bluntly tells JOB in Chapter 15: “JOB, you are undermining religion and crippling faith in God.” Sounds familiar to me! Buddy Bildad dooms him to hell in Chapter 18: “Brimstone will be strewn on your household.” But JOB stubbornly clings to his faith when he says in Chapter 19:25: “I know that my Redeemer is alive and that in the end He will stand upon the earth. He will plead for me in God’s court; he would stand up and vindicate my name.”
Amazing words. Unbelievable what suffering can do to people. It can totally change them. The Satan had not counted on this sort of conversion, a conversion brought about by the suffering God inflicted upon JOB. He had figured that JOB’s theology would be stagnant, a theology teaching that religion never is for nothing. I once heard a radio preacher say that the road to prosperity is simple: “start everyday with prayer, go to church, tithe, of course give to his radio or television program and read the bible.”
The Satan wanted to score a fast one with God, and prove once and for all that JOB would deny God as soon as he had become a welfare bum. But he failed in JOB, because this sort of tit for tat is the theology of the devil.
JOB’s story tells us that there are no immediate rewards to religion and by this I don’t mean that being religious does not benefit people now. It does. Religion gives people, in general, a moral focus, stability, security and a purpose in life.
Suffering can teach us wisdom. Faith can find expression in wisdom and in Chapter 28 we see the continuation of JOB’s conversion, because conversion is always a slow and never-ending process, just as acquiring wisdom is. Here JOB confesses his basic ignorance. He, who once was very rich, now confesses that being well-off can hinder the development of wisdom, something we, prosperous Westerners, forget at our peril. In his suffering JOB’s conclusion is wonderful: “Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to shun evil, that is understanding.”

What next?
After all these torrents of words, silence. “What next?” these former friends wonder. Then the Lord spoke to JOB out of a whirlwind. God Himself answers JOB personally. The Hidden One remains hidden, but not completely. God addresses Himself to the one person who has asked constantly “Why”. The other four men knew the answers, gave the pious platitudes, were comfortable, and avoided the touchy issues, reminding me of most of the sermons I have heard all my life. God did not direct himself to the four men but to JOB, who had suffered, and was puzzled by it all.
The curious thing about the Lord’s sayings is that they all come as questions. “Where were you when I founded the earth? Who determined its measurements – if you know? Do you know the seasons of the mountain-goats? Have you marked the calving of the deer? “Do you give the horse its strength” Do you cloth his neck with thunder? Do you understand the sea and can you grasp from where all these waters come and what purpose they serve? Have the portals of Death been rolled back for you?”
Now it dawns on JOB that his suffering, which he had made the central point of the universe, is nothing compared to God’s greatness, to his over-arching wisdom. While God hurls these questions at JOB, a strange peace descends on him. He starts to realize that part of the secret of salvation is that God does things just for the sake of doing things. He now starts to see that all of life is a miracle which needs neither a reason nor a cause but no other ground than God’s creative act, no other purpose than His own glorification, in which salvation is included.
JOB’s suffering has sharpened his thinking and he discovers to his amazement that in and above all other useful, moral, beautiful goals, rises the one great given that God be known, be lived, be confessed, and believed as the only Divine being. His Essence is nothing else but to live and to give life.
God’s aim for us humans is to have all living entities participate in His fullness. We, humans, are not the only focal point. We are not the totality of creation, although we often think so. John 3:16 explicitly says: God so loved the world, the cosmos that He sent His son. In the world we ask for reasons, but when ask for a reason for the world there is only one answer: the answer is that the pivot of life is God and God alone, who can only be approached through Jesus, who calls himself “The Son of Man”, humanity personified, who wants us to be nothing else but be fully human too, earthly as the earth is earth. We may think that we are powerful with our tools and brains. We are not. Says one of the greatest minds in science, John Wheeler of Princeton, in a book called The End of Science: “As the tiny island of our knowledge grows, so does the great shore of our ignorance.” We, at the height of our scientific powers, are discovering that the more we know, the more we discover we don’t know. The real Answer, the key to the Universe is now as elusive as ever and more and more scientists are admitting that. What God wants JOB to understand is that God is Infinite in His creative powers, Infinite in the beauty of creation, Infinite in the design of His work of Art. God wants ‘JOB Then’ and ‘JOB Now’ to marvel at His ingenuity. He wants both JOBs to be astounded by the revival of nature in the spring, by the multitude of flowers which adorn the landscape, by the erratic flight of the swallows, the steaming heat of the summer, the almost plaintive sounds of autumn, the stark dignity of the winter landscape. He wants JOB Then and JOB Now to affirm that their first duty in life is the enjoy God forever, and this pleasant duty starts with marveling at his creation.
When God is finished, all JOB can do is to exclaim in utter surrender in Chapter 40: “How can I reply to you? I lay my hand on my mouth. Once I have spoken, but I cannot answer; even twice, but I can no more.” His conversion is affirmed when he confesses in chapter 42:
“I know you can do all things and nothing you wish is impossible.
Who is this whose ignorant words cover my designs with darkness?
I have spoken of the unspeakable and tried to grasp the Infinite.
Listen and I will speak. I will question you: please, instruct me.
I heard of you with my ears; but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I will be quiet, comforted that I am dust.” That last word ‘dust’ means earth: earth we are and to earth we shall return.
JOB did not find a solution for his questions, but he did find deliverance from his questions. JOB never saw God but his new-found comfort was that God saw him, because JOB came to Him with questions: “Why did you do this, Lord? Why did that happen to me, Lord?”
The meaning of the book of JOB is not that JOB could solve the problem of his suffering in his life or that we can solve the pain and injustice in our lives. We, as JOB Now, are starting to realize that, for the time being, yes, till the very end of time, until the Lord returns, we are on our own. God is testing us JOB Now as he did JOB Then. We now experience what God predicted in Deut.32: 20, “I will hide my face from them and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation.”

This perversity applies to us all. The newest Climate Change report, on page 4 of March 31 Globe and Mail and front-page news in the New York Times, cites the risk of death or injury on a wide scale, probable damage to public health, displacement of people and potential mass migrations. That same New York Times issue, on the editorial page, contains a scathing report on Canada’s (read PM Harper’s) disastrous environmental record in connection with the Alberta Tar Sands. It makes me ashamed to be a Canadian citizen. We are on a treadmill to death and nothing will stop the disasters that face us, as JOB Now.

JOB’s Basic Truth

The basic truth of the book of JOB is that we must not take generally accepted truths for granted but that the most basic ideas about God and religion have to be probed and questioned without ceasing. We never arrive; we never can say: we know enough. As long as we live we have to keep up our search for Truth, and we joyfully must accept this. As long as we live we must probe for wisdom.

Fact is that we need a radical conversion. Many of us are shuttled by way of cheap gasoline from climate-controlled house, to an artificially lighted work-place, to a prepackaged supermarket, to a night in front of electronic amusement, and there is little, in all this, to shock one’s level of energy and material use out of the unconscious realm. Just as JOB Then, we need a totally new way of life, not just ‘brother are you born again?’ but consciously trying to live a God- that means Cosmos- pleasing existence.

Next week: The End is in the Beginning: Conclusion of JOB Then and JOB Now.

JOB then and JOB now.

Part One

The end is in the beginning.

We all know about JOB, that mythical figure, who is perhaps the Bible’s best known character, after Jesus. The book of JOB is a story with a purpose, which also is the definition of a myth or parable. The purpose of ‘JOB then’, written perhaps 3000 years ago, was to warn Israel about a wrong religion. The purpose of ‘JOB now’ is exactly the same: also a warning about the wrong way of worship.

We all know something about JOB. We know that he was famous for his afflictions and his supposed patience, a man fabulously rich, who suddenly lost all his wealth, his children and in a violent argument with his wife was told to curse God and die.
We also may vaguely remember how three men, come from afar, visited him in his misery, joined later by a younger visitor and how these fellows made long speeches, to which JOB replied. How finally God spoke up, vindicated JOB, rebuked the four friends, after which JOB received twice as much wealth back as well as his family.

The Satan scene

The book is famous for that strange encounter with a mysterious figure called the Satan, who, out of the blue, appears in heaven and when God asks him, “what are you doing here?” says, “Oh, I was going out for a stroll, saw the door open and decided to say hello.”

Strange business, this. Can just anybody enter heaven? To me it suggests that this entire tale is not a true story but is there to illustrate a certain truth. And what is that truth? That’s what this essay – which comes in three parts – is all about, so stay with me.

Back to the meeting of these two sworn enemies, who actually behave as if they were on a friendly footing. Listen to their casual chatter. The Lord says to the Satan almost as an afterthought: “Say, you get around. In your wanderings have you noticed JOB out there in the land of Uz? I tell you, no better person anywhere in the whole world.”
“No wonder,” replies the Satan: “look, you have given him special protection and have favoured him above everyone else. I bet you that if somebody were to ruin him financially and kill off his immediate family, he’ll curse you to the face.”

That set me thinking. Has this curious encounter between God and the Satan any significance for us today? After all, unless the Bible helps us here and now, it is merely an interesting book of great literary value. What then is the meaning of this meeting for 2014 and beyond? What does this amicable conversation, between two arch enemies – that’s how the rest of the Bible portrays God and Satan – tell us that is valuable for you and me now, at this moment, in our life-time?

So here’s how I see it. It seems to me that JOB then represented the human world in ‘the beginning’, living a ‘paradise-like’ life, where everything was just perfect. However, nothing is more dangerous than having everything.

The Satan is used by God to teach us all a lesson –because life is nothing else than one endless learning process: we never arrive, will never quit learning, not even in eternity. Part of our ‘lesson’ is that JOB was abandoned by God and left to the wiles of Satan, something that applies to us as well: at some point in history the world and we who live in it also were abandoned by God and released in the hands of the Satan. J. H. Bavinck, in his forth-coming book Between Beginning and End: a Radical Vision of the Kingdom makes this quite clear. That Satan now is in charge accounts for the wars, the cancer pandemics, the Holocaust, Capitalism, Global Warming, and the total world-wide destruction we are busy completing. Just like JOB we too need a lesson, many of us too have more than Job could ever dream.

That’s why God in his infinite wisdom says to the Satan, ”All-right. It’s a deal. He is in your power. Don’t touch his body, though.”
And so it happens. JOB loses everything and has no clue about the wager God made with the Accuser.
And JOB? He believed, with all people then and many today, that being rich in possessions was a sign of piety. The Osteen church with its Prosperity Gospel thrives on this: for them being wealthy is a sign of God’s blessings. And evidently the Satan is of that same opinion because he figures that, as soon as JOB would lose his personal and material treasures, he would deny God.
However, even though JOB is reduced to utter poverty, his faith remains steadfast, evident from his famous words: “Naked came I from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return thither. The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
Quite the statement. Just imagine that we, you, I, in one day, see our immediate family killed in a car accident, a drunken driver being the cause; then lightning strikes, our house burns up and we have forgotten to renew the insurance; next, due to a market crash, our portfolio is wiped out, our JOB disappears, and all we have left are the clothes on our body. What would our reaction be? Like JOB? Not likely. But better be prepared: today all signs point to a horrendous future, to perils for which we are totally unprepared. For JOB the sudden downturn came unannounced. We do have warnings, even though we ignore them. All crucial measures of the health of the ecosphere in which we live—groundwater depletion, topsoil loss, chemical contamination, toxicity in our own bodies, the number and size of “dead zones” in the oceans, accelerating extinction of species and reduction of biodiversity—suggest that our high-energy/high-technology society is unsustainable. Because we live in an oil-based society and are rapidly depleting the cheapest and most easily accessible oil reserves, we face a huge adjustment in the way of life on which our existence is based. We now have entered an era of “extreme energy” evident in such dangerous and destructive technologies as hydro-fracturing, deep-water drilling, mountaintop removal, tar sands extraction, all of which will hasten the coming calamities of climate change. Welcome to ‘JOB now.’

Back to ‘JOB then.’
Again a mysterious Satan visit. Again God gives him permission, this time to affect his health. So JOB becomes an AIDS sufferer, quarantined, placed in isolation, somewhere in nowhere. There his wife approaches him and angrily shouts, “Do you still cling to your pious ways? They are no use to you now. Curse God, if he exists and then die like a man!” But JOB remains unperturbed: “Shall we accept the good from associating with the God, and the evil not accept?”

It’s bad enough when our spouse accuses us. However, JOB’s real agony starts when his close friends arrive.

The Three Friends

Of course the big news about his misfortune has spread rapidly through the land (imagine Bill Gates gone broke!), and three friends from far away heard it too and made ready to pay him a visit. Weeks must have passed for this to happen. They often had been JOB’s guests at his lavish banquets where they had enjoyed vigorous but agreeable discussions ranging far afield. When they see JOB in the distance, sitting on a small hill, they stop, sit down and look at him for 7 days and 7 nights, without saying a single word.
JOB too remains quiet, even though his mind is in overdrive. Somehow their body language reveals to him their thinking before they even utter one word. And as they sit there and he sits there, he gets madder and madder, because he is utterly at a loss. JOB tries to fathom why he is suffering so much. Somehow he could bear it as long as nobody sees him. But now he has become a public spectacle. Continuously his mind revolves around the basic question: “God is doing this to me. No, God can’t do this to me. Yes, it is God. No, it isn’t.” He is going crazy. His mind, already weakened by his sickness, cannot think straight anymore.

For JOB one thing is sure: he already knows what these three are going to tell him. A long time ago – at least it seemed a long time ago – when they talked, often till deep in the night, they agreed, God’s favour is reflected in a multitude of offspring and material blessings. And, of course, the opposite is true as well: personal calamity spells sin: the greater the punishment, the more serious the crime against God.
Then he had thought like them. Not anymore. What is happening to him has not happened because he has sinned. No. No. With all his power in his weakened body he now denies this theory. And yet, he still does not know the alternative, he just can’t grasp why God is treating him this way.
As his friends sit there for what seemed like an eternity, silently and disapprovingly staring at him, it dawns on JOB that they are his friends no longer, because people who do not understand your deep-seated anguish, are friends no more.
Suddenly his mind snaps, his patience gone. Who ever said that JOB was long-suffering, had it all wrong. He burst out in a fit of total anger: anger at himself, anger at his own uncertainty, anger at his friends for their cold orthodoxy, their Calvinistic certainty, anger at God for whatever. And he burst out: “God curse the day I was born and the night that forced me from the womb”.
The entire third chapter is one long condemnation. JOB: “Why couldn’t I have died as they pulled me out of the dark. Now I would be at rest, I would be sound asleep.” Hey, no heaven talk there!

Speaker One

His outburst opens a flood. First Eliphaz. Not a word of pity. Only more hammer-blows: “These words will perhaps upset you” so he starts optimistically. “Once you brought relief to the comfortless, but now, when disaster comes to you, you rebel. Tell me, have you ever known anybody who underwent this, being innocent?”
That’s how the first friend starts: Pious words. Cruel words. Conventional words. This fellow knows exactly what God thinks or does. Today we call that ‘gnosticism’, the most prevalent Christian heresy.
But JOB does not buy his line. No longer. In Chapter 7 he challenges God and demands an impartial judgment. JOB knows that in his particular case, even though God has caused him all this misery, only God can be the true judge. So it is no wonder that JOB screams at God, “Why have you made me your target? How come that I am in this miserable condition?” Here JOB plays a dangerous game. He thinks, correctly in my opinion, that he can honour God only through fighting with God. That’s a new angle: Praise God through battling with him. Arguing with God about what has happened to us. Not just meekly say: “OK God, I take what you give me.” No, JOB is different.

Speaker Two

Enter the next speaker: Bildad, of the same stripe as Eliphaz, only more so, even less honourable. He makes a snotty remark how JOB’s kids were spoiled brats. Says he “Your children must have been evil: he punished them for their crimes.” In his further remarks he shows that he actually is afraid that whatever happened to JOB might happen to him as well. His insecurity is best portrayed by his vision of God. He tells JOB: “listen, this is what God wants, because God never betrays the innocent.” To Bildad too God is an open book, for him there’s no reserve, no real fear of the hidden God. To JOB God is a mystery. God is THE mystery. That is God’s essence. After all, a god we can understand is no god.
An essential point of the book of JOB is the relationship between God’s revelation on the one hand and God’s hiddenness on the other. The paradox Christians and agnostics alike face is how God can reveal Himself when He is Hidden, when He is the Totally Incomprehensible One, Mystery Incorporated. JOB, before his ordeal, had a clear picture of God: if he behaved properly, God would bless him. Simple. An article in TIME on the Mormons said unashamedly that “material achievement in the USA remains the earthly manifestation of virtue.” To JOB that idea has been shattered. His earlier notions about God have been found wanting. With Bildad and his companions their concepts about God have become their God. For them there are no divine secrets and no sudden surprises, no mysteries. They know exactly what God has in mind for JOB and so their awe for God has disappeared and their so-called piety has become a form of godlessness.

To be continued next week.

HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE (CONCLUSION)

Making Peace with the Planet.

March 23 2014—–Part 12.

Fifteen years ago, in St.Paul, Minn., I bought at the Luther Seminary bookstore A Testament to Freedom by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, containing the essential writings of the German pastor and theologian who joined the resistance against Hitler and was executed in 1945 a few weeks before Germany collapsed.

This 545 page paperback now looks pretty shabby, with lots of high-lightings and comments. In 1932, when Bonhoeffer was 26 years old, already having a double doctorate, already an assistant professor, he wrote an essay on Dein Reich Komme (Your Kingdom Come). On its margin I wrote: “This makes me cry,” and even now, while rereading this it chokes me up because no other writer has so clearly, so provocatively, with such youthful abandonment written about the Kingdom.

So what was it that so resonated with me? After stating that Christianity had become an out-dated replica of heaven, a cluster of sacred shrines and hallowed sanctuaries, all picturing magic escape routes from earthly turmoil, he wrote that faith should be embedded in the way each Christian becomes strong in his or her service of earth and its people, evident in everything we do, including the market place, where we buy, sell, dig, invent, move, whatever. That is a message that then and now resonates with me. Bonhoeffer, 80 years before Climate Change was wreaking havoc everywhere, wrote: “We disdain the earth… because we want to be better than the evil earth…so we are open to the religion of otherworldliness. (In other words: escape to heaven.) We have fallen into secularism, and by secularism I mean pious, Christian secularism. Not the godlessness of atheism or cultural bolshevism, but the Christian renunciation of God as the Lord of the earth. God, brother and sister, and the earth belong together.” Once, in a meeting with Karl Barth, Bonhoeffer, to Barth’s great delight, quoted Luther: “The godless man’s curse can be more pleasing to God than the hallelujah of the pious.” He also wrote: “This pious secularism also makes it possible to preach and to say nice things. (However) the function of the church is to witness to the resurrection of Christ from the dead, to the end of the law of death of this world that stands under the curse, and to the power of God in the new creation.”

Everything we believe is interconnected to everything we believe. If we believe that upon death we leave this earth to end up in heaven, then we also believe that the earth is evil, and that God is imperfect, having created an evil earth. Bonhoeffer writes: “Only they who love the earth and God as one have faith in God’s Kingdom.”

Ridderbos, Bavink, Bonhoeffer

Herman Ridderbos, a Dutch theologian, in his classic The Coming of the Kingdom, writes that “the kingdom is the new ideal form of human society and Jesus’ commandments are intended to bring about its realization.”

This means that Ridderbos, J. H. Bavinck and Bonhoeffer speak the same language. They agree that the Kingdom is God’s creation, this earth, the soil we live on, the clay that constitutes us, the “Adam”, the dust from which we originate. We can only make peace with the planet – and with God – when we see this earth as holy.

That’s why Jesus tells us to Seek first the Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well? (Matt.6: 33) The ‘righteousness’ mentioned here refers to God’s righteousness, pointing to Micah 6:8, where we are asked to: “Act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with our God.” Jesus demands the absolute sacrifice for the sake of the kingdom, which entails that our first duty is to seek the welfare of God’s creation, to see the earth as God’s holy gift to us. When we harm it, we harm everybody, every single human being, every animal and plant, nullifying the command to ‘love your neighbour as yourself.” Once Jesus’ command to ‘promote the thriving of creation’ has penetrated into our reluctant brain, and become part and parcel of our personal profile, once this primary truth that loving creation is our first and foremost duty in life, then Jesus promises that our life will find fulfillment; then he assures us that everything else in life will fall into place.

Traditional Christianity no longer relevant

Traditionally Reformed Christianity has viewed life through the spectacles of the church, and, until a few generations ago, when economic development was still within the boundaries of ecological limits, this was the way to go. Thanks to creation destroying oil, in my lifetime, the world’s population has more than tripled. We now need 10 oil calories to produce one food calorie, with the result that by our wanton, licentious, self-indulgent, hedonistic way of life, we have dug our own grave. We now are confronted with “the Limits of Growth” and are daily discovering that the way we go no longer can be sustained. Suddenly everything must be seen in a different light. The question: “How Should we then live?” is taking on a totally different meaning, and calls for a new way to live.

Can we re-create God’s Kingdom here? Should we try?

Enter Wiebo Ludwig

There was a man in Alberta, in a way a maverick, a messianic Christian preacher named Wiebo Ludwig, who died last year. Wiebo is a product of the same background as I am, with the same characteristics: a Dutch immigrant, of Christian Reformed stock, stubborn, striving for self-sufficiency, a touch of self-righteousness. He started a small Christian community in the remote north of Canada’s oil province, sabotaged at least one wellhead by pouring cement down its shaft and blew up others. The Canadian authorities, along with the oil and gas barons, demonized Ludwig as an eco-terrorist, an odd charge given that they were and still are the ones responsible for systematically destroying the environment and the planet.

Wiebo felt that our society was in a spiritual crisis, rather than an environmental or an economic crisis,” David York’s film “HYPERLINK “http://www.wieboswar.com/trailer.html”Wiebo’sHYPERLINK “http://www.wieboswar.com/trailer.html” War” is a good portrayal of Ludwig and his fight with the oil and gas industry. Wiebo felt that our addiction to fossil fuels, rampant consumerism and materialism, breakdown of family units were all symptoms of a society that has lost its root connection to God. Further, he felt that we are in a kind of end-times state, where the forces of good are in a terrible struggle with the forces of evil.

He was one of our era’s most effective figures of resistance against the oil and gas industry, and also a devout Christian, which I am as well.

Ludwig grasped the moral decadence of the consumer society, its unchecked hedonism, worship of money and deadening cult of the self. He retreated in 1985 with his small band of followers into the remoteness of northern Alberta. His community, called Trickle Creek, was equipped with its own biodiesel refinery, windmills and solar panels—which permitted it to produce its own power—a greenhouse and a mill. Its members, who grew their own food, severed themselves from the contaminants of consumer culture. However, Ludwig’s flight from evil only ensured that evil came to him: his land happened to be atop one of the largest oil and gas reserves in the world in the form of sour gas, a neurotoxin that if released from within the earth can, even in small amounts, poison livestock, water tables and people.

The oil and gas companies soon began a massive drilling effort. At first, like many other reformers and activists, Ludwig used legal and political channels to push back against the companies, which were drilling on the edge of his 160-acre farm. He spent the first five years attending hearings with civil regulators, writing letters—he even wrote to Jane Fonda—and appealing in vain to elected officials, government agencies, the press, environmentalists and first nations groups. His family—he had 11 children—posted a sign in 1990 that decried “the ruthless interruption and cessation” of privacy; “the relentless greedy grabbing of Creational resources”; “the disregard for the sanctity of the Lord’s Day”; the legislation of land and mineral ownership policy “that does violence to the God-given ‘right to property.’

His war against industry illustrated the cost of our addiction to hydrocarbons: Our materialistic way of life is based on the destruction of groundwater, the devaluing of rural property, the invasion of rural communities, the poisoning of skies with carcinogens, the fragmentation of landscapes.

How do we combat creational injustice? Do we, like Ludwig, block roads by downing trees and disable vehicles and drilling equipment?

When, after two leaks of hydrogen sulfide sour gas from nearby wells—which forced everyone on the farm to evacuate and saw numerous farm animals giving birth to deformed or stillborn offspring, as well as five human miscarriages or stillbirths within Ludwig’s community—and after the destruction of two of his water wells, he declared open war on the oil and gas industry. Was he right to blow up oil and gas facilities, because he had to fight back to “protect his children”?

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, accompanied by private security agents hired by the oil companies, spent millions to investigate and attempt to halt the sabotage. Ludwig’s farm was occupied by police five times and searched for incriminating evidence. The police and Encana Corp. infiltrated Ludwig’s tight community with an agent provocateur who, to prove he could be trusted, blew up a well owned by what was then Alberta Energy Corp., now Encana. The explosion, although orchestrated by the police and Encana, was publicly blamed on Ludwig. The oil company also brought in a “terrorism expert” from Toronto to speak at local town hall gatherings—York captures one of those talks in his film—and the expert warned residents of the rising “terrorism” of religious cults led by fanatic, charismatic leaders.

Ludwig, whose knowledge of the terrain allowed him to outfox hundreds of police officers, was never caught in an act of sabotage, but he probably had a hand in damage at hundreds of remote well sites estimated at $12 million. The federal government in Ottawa, in desperation, considered sending in the army. Ludwig was finally arrested in 2000 on five counts of property damage and possession of explosives and imprisoned for 18 months. He spent his time in prison reading and thinking.

But violence begets violence. And the more Ludwig blew up facilities the harsher became the intrusion of the state.

Ludwig’s gravest mistake was his decision or the decision of someone in his small community, to fire on two trucks carrying rowdy teenagers. The sons and daughters of oil and gas workers roared through the group’s compound at about 4 a.m. on June 20, 1999. Karman Willis, a 16-year-old girl, was fatally shot by someone on the farm, and a second teenager survived a wound.

Ludwig, before he died at age 71 after refusing chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, turned away from violence. The renunciation came a year or two after his final bombing campaign. He would read, with his family, Jacques Ellul’s 1969 book Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective. Ellul, like Ludwig’s Dutch father, had fought in the resistance against the Nazis in World War II.

Ellul wrote: “The Christian should participate in social and political efforts in order to have an influence in the work, not with the hope of making a paradise (of the earth), but simply to make it more tolerable—not to diminish the opposition between this world and the Kingdom of God, but simply to modify the opposition between the disorder of this world and the order of preservation that God wants it to have—not to bring in the Kingdom of God, but so that the Gospel might be proclaimed in order that all men might truly hear the good news.”

Initially Ludwig was more like an Old Testament Prophet, a rigid patriarch. In that he reflected the present day church, also organized along hierarchical structures, where mostly women are excluded. He, later in life, saw the error of his ways. Will the church, still organized along an Old Testament trajectory, and still heaven-bound, reform itself?

Making Peace with the Planet

In 1990 I bought a book in Toronto: Barry Commoner’s Making Peace with the Planet. Dr. Commoner was the director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queen’s College in New York City.

In many ways Making Peace with the Planet means making peace with God who created the planet. Right now we all are at war with God’s world: there’s very little peaceful about our daily activities. We all, without exception, have more or less become allies of God’s great adversary, whose sole aim is to destroy God’s precious creation, the world he loved so much. Commoner provides us with a blueprint that can be followed by all who love the earth, and by doing so express love for its maker. He formulated four laws of ecology which provide us with definite guidelines for wholesome living.

(1)        Everything is connected to everything else.

(2)        Everything has to go somewhere.

(3)        Nature knows best

(4)        There is no free lunch.

Barry Commoner wrote this book in 1975, almost 40 years ago. In Connection with “Everything is connected to everything else”, he used the example of fish. He wrote that a fish is not only a fish, but also a producer of organic waste that nourishes aquatic plants and microorganisms, all elements of an intricate network, all beautifully compatible, so that there is no waste, because “Everything has to go somewhere.” The early Christian symbol also was a ‘fish’ of which the Greek word is ICHTHUS, an acronym for Iesu Christi Theos, Uios. Sooteros, Jesus Christ, God, Son, Saviour. Fish belongs in the ocean. Because we have eliminated much of the fish there, the jellyfish the main food for fish, no longer has a predator and has mushroomed, filling the oceans everywhere. In a new book by Lisa-Ann Gershwin Stung: On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean she sees the jellyfish as an ‘angel of death’, a harbinger of planetary doom. The outlook for the sea, Gershwin writes, is essentially apocalyptic because these jellyfish are ‘marine weeds’: hardy, fast-growing, fast-breeding, adaptable and tenacious. The disappearance of FISH is just another sign of the disappearance of ICHTHUS, that age-old Christian symbol.

The vanishing of fish illustrates that collapse is in the cards. We see this also in the air we breathe, now saturated with Green House Gases. We see this also in the debt we have created, both monetary and environmentally. There too we are gambling with the very basics of our existence.

When Commoner coined “Nature knows best”, he entered the religious sphere. Making Peace with the Planet essentially means acknowledging what Psalm 19 so eloquently states:

“The law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul.

The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple.

The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart.

The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes.

The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever.

Yes, “There is no free lunch”.

The Bible tells us that the wages of sin is death. The result of our riotous living is death, because the death of the oceans, the death of pure air, the death of soil, all point to our own death through sinning against creation.

Making peace with the planet is a prerequisite for making peace with God. The apostle John says it all: “This is love for God (expressed in love for creation): to obey his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, for everyone born of God overcomes the world.” (1 John 5:3).

This concludes my series on How Should we then live?

Next week an essay on the book of Job, which, in my opinion, is the most up-to-date and inclusive book of the Bible.