APRIL FOOL’S MONTH (3)
THE END IS IN THE BEGINNING
This is how the Bible starts: “In the beginning…. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.”
Will the END have similar features?
J.H. Bavinck calls the beginning the URZEIT, the primeval period, the primordial time that preceded humanity’s appearance. He writes, “The URZEIT was when all things were put into place. What happened, then, became the measure for everything that would happen afterwards. In that era the basis was laid on which all subsequent events rest.”
Will the END see the same features?
A bit later in his Between the Beginning and the End: A Radical Kingdom Vision, he continues, “It is truly remarkable that this same primitive thinking that is always engaged with the happenings in the URZEIT is at the same time interested in what will happen in the end-time……..Soon, at the arrival of the end-time our world will descend to the state it was before, and everything will revert back to what existed in the URZEIT, just as death is close to birth…………The end-time is nothing else but the return to the URZEIT”.
So there you have the Bavinck prediction, written as long as 70 years ago in the shadows of two world-wars and the dirty Thirties’ depression.
Put it another way: human history is a tiny island between the two immense oceans of URZEIT and End-time. We, you and I and the entire human race ever born, live and die between these two enormous entities, between a pollution-free and ideal conditions in the Garden, and Judgement in the End, followed by The Eternal New Earth.
Earth we are.
Genesis, the first Bible book makes it abundantly clear that we, with every atom and molecule in our bodies, are part of this earth: God formed us from the earth. That’s why we humans are adam, and belong to adamah, the life-bearing earth. That’s why our destiny is intimately intertwined with the fate of the earth. Genesis 3: 19 plainly tells us that “earth we are and to earth we shall return.” We and the earth are on identical paths: the state of the earth reflects our physical and mental state.
The VIRUS
The appearance of the VIRUS is no accident, is the result of us abusing creation. Now there are two destructive elements at work: (1) the COVID – 19 VIRUS destroying human health, and (2) we, humanity, destroying nature: We are the VIRUS and The VIRUS is us. Both bode ill for the future, and both lead to the sort of CHAOS that ruled IN THE BEGINNING.
To the world’s economy the Viruses are like the proverbial straw that breaks the camel’s back. Don’t think for a moment that we can go back where we left off last year. The world’s economy is strained by at least three tremendous burdens: one is the increasing costs of production of mineral resources (don’t be fooled by the current low prices of oil: prices are one thing, costs are another). Another is pollution, and the third is accelerating Climate Change, the heat melting poles, already weighing on the economy. These three factors define the condition called “overshoot,” occurring when an economic system is consuming more resources than nature can replace.
Sooner or later, an economy in overshoot has to come to terms with reality. It means that it can’t continue to grow: it must decline. The VIRUS is that last straw.
An accelerating crisis.
It all started very early in human history. Something happened in Paradise, in the Garden of Eden, that caused its initial idyllic situation to stop: the Bible story centers on the taking of a fruit which God had singled out as a no/no. Whatever.
The result was our world, of which Cain became the prime mover. Jacques Ellul in his The Meaning of the City, writes that “Cain built a city, the city as opposed to Eden. The city is the direct consequence of Cain’s murderous act and of his refusal to accept God’s protection…….. The city is called Enoch, which means a new beginning….Creation is seen as nothing, and now a new start is made and it is no longer God’s creation, but a human concoction. Cain –we – takes possession of this world and uses it as he wishes, and the result is the CITY which represents the ultimate rejection of God. Today even the most remote places in the world are part of the City: the entire earth has become The City”.
Yet, Ellul sees The City of God as our final destination.
Extraordinary times.
Today these viruses are threatening the entire world. There is no antidote and the carnage goes on because WE will not change. On the contrary, even though ‘the lust for money is the root of all evil’, we pour money into the economy at a torrid pace never seen before. Last week I discovered that the Government of Canada had put $580 in my bank account, without ascertaining whether I needed it or not.
April is April Fool’s month.
We fool ourselves when we think that we can pick up where the Pandemic started in 2020. There’s never a going back. The previous decade was the final ‘normal’ one, in which we thought we could have the cake and eat it too. Now the cake is eating us. Our exploitive actions are backfiring. We are forced to retreat, and retreat leads to defeat. Creation is mightier than we; the universe is uniting against us. The Poles, both North and South, band together to choke us by dispatching deadly methane and melting glaciers and ferocious winds our way.
We are mere mortals. “Who can endure the Day of His Coming?” laments Malachi, as the End ends in chaos, and the End is like the Beginning: an earth devoid of life, an earth depleted of essence, robbed of all sanity, deprived of LIFE.
Trump is tricking and treating his know-nothings “Christians”, his unaware ignoramuses, his overfed and undernourished followers, who now have become ready prey for the lurking Virus.
Yes, disaster is on the doorstep, with so far this year the hottest ever in the world, with the real heat yet to come, with only 13% of the oceans basically intact, and, with all the arable land, 40% of the earth’s surface, kept artificially productive, eroding the soil, poisoning the end product, famine looms: CHAOS is in the cards.
In the great scheme of Creation, God has given us, humans, a great degree of authority, subject however, to acting in harmony with the only wise will of God: as God loves his creation, our entire lives must mirror that devotion. Not doing this, not acknowledging God’s ultimate decrees, has disturbed the creation order and is leading to universal dissolution, from decay to total collapse.
The history of the world is determined by our never-ending attempt to establish a human empire, totally apart from God: simply another attempt to build a new Tower of Babel, and, just as the old one forever remained unfinished and led to complete confusion, so today it leads to CHAOS.
The real miracle is that straight through all these strivings to arrive at a human-dominated empire, God re-establishes his eternal and unequaled Kingdom.
Yes: THE END IS IN THE BEGINNING, THE BEGINNING IS IN THE END.