APRIL 6 2019
THE FOOLS
Who are the fools? We are! All of us. No exceptions.
I love the Psalms. Every morning – before breakfast – except on Sundays – now in our 66th year, we have read a Psalm or a portion thereof. I continued a custom started by my parents who probably inherited the act from their parents.
I imagine that I have gone through the Psalter more than 50 times during our marriage. Psalm 119 – that really long one – has 22 separate sections of about 10 verses each, so reading that takes almost 4 weeks. Psalm 117, which is just one verse, makes for a quick turn to start breakfast.
I have read somewhere that monks in the early Middle Ages were required to know all the Psalms by heart. I went to a Christian Elementary School, and each weekend I had to memorize a rhymed version of a Psalm – which I did with the help of my mother – and my entire class – in turn – had to recite it.
So Psalms were drilled into me like no other portion of the Bible.
The Psalms contain a lot of wisdom. Take Psalm 14 with as heading, THE FOOLS. It starts as follows, “The fool has said in his heart: “There is no God above.” Their deeds are corrupt, depraved; not a good man is left.”
Psalm 53 has exactly the same title, THE FOOLS, and continues with exactly the same words: “All have left the right path… they never pray to the Lord, so they tremble with fear without cause for fear: for God is with the just”
We are these fools.
It’s not that we are stupid. It’s not that we are atheists, because is those days, some 2500 years ago, everybody believed in Gods. Just read Homer in the Odyssey or Iliad: gods then were everywhere. Remember the apostle Paul on the Areopagus how he remarked that the place crawled with gods.
We are the fools, people who have our values all wrong: we are convinced that God will never take action.
Well, “the chickens are coming home to roost”, as the saying goes. God IS taking action.
The acts of us, fools, the works of all of us who have left the right path, are now becoming evident. Socrates started it all: he preached an ‘after-life’, away from the earth. He was the one who refused to see THE EARTH as HOLY, and the church has declared his Greek interpretation as holy. So, by adopting his Heaven Heresy, we have treated God’s creation as disposable, as evil even.
Now we all have a touch of GNOSTICISM, the real teaching of THE AMERICAN RELIGION, which confesses that the earth is the product of the Demi-Urge, an evil force. USA politics is dominated by this heresy, hence their evil policies.
Enter Jesus.
Jesus’ message can be captured in 5 words: “Seek First The Kingdom of God.” You know what that means? It means, SEEK THE WELFARE OF CREATION! It means to listen carefully to Creation; it means to examine it minutely; it means to reflect consciously on our interactions with our natural surroundings, with nature if you like. It means to be tuned to the Spirit of the Universe.
Creation is our full partner in life, our most meaningful companion throughout our entire existence: to negate its wishes, to thwart its desires, to override its inclination, is the same as to curse God, because, like no other entity, nature, creation, God’s handiwork, call it what you like, is God expressing himself to us in a purely miraculous way. That’s why I call it God’s PRIMARY OR DIRECT WORD.
To disregard God’s wonderful WORD is to ignore God, is to believe that God will tolerate everything, that he is some sort of good old, slightly senile man, whom we can treat as a person of no consequence, whom we don’t have to acknowledge as GOD, the creator of heaven and earth.
We are approaching the END, and before that happens, God asserts himself, shows the entire world his authority, now vested in his son Jesus Christ.
Already the signs are everywhere, as ubiquitous as plastic, the true symbol of our age. Oh, how I hate plastic. I hate it with a perfect hatred.
Plastic-pollution takes its toll on the soil and air and water, but it also affects our human mind. No wonder, because everything is connected to everything else. We don’t live in a vacuum.
What is making the young killing themselves by guns and drugs? There are definite signs that pollution is affecting people’s mental sanity. Reports are appearing that pollution causes “subjective stress, depressive disorders, health-related quality of life and suicide.”
Our sins against Creation do not go unpunished, as evident in THE WEATHER.
Here’s what ARCTIC NEWS reports:
“On March 30, 2019, Arctic sea ice extent was 13.42 million km², a record low for the time of year.
With Arctic sea ice at a low, it won’t be able to act as a buffer to absorb heat for long, with the danger that an influx of warm, salty water will reach the seafloor and trigger methane eruptions.
As warmer water keeps flowing into the Arctic Ocean and as air temperatures in the Arctic are now starting to rise on the back of a strengthening El Niño, fears for a Blue Ocean Event in 2019 are rising, which would further accelerate the temperature rise as less sunlight gets reflected back into space.
In a rapid warming scenario:
(1) A stronger-than-expected El Niño would contribute to
(2). early demise of the Arctic sea ice, i.e. latent heat tipping point.
(3) associated loss of sea ice albedo,
(4) destabilization of seafloor methane hydrates, causing eruption of vast amounts of methane that further speed up Arctic warming and cause.
(5) terrestrial permafrost to melt as well, resulting in even more emissions,
(6) while the Jet Stream gets even more deformed, resulting in more extreme weather events
(7) causing forest fires, at first in Siberia and Canada and
(8) eventually also in the peat fields and tropical rain forests of the Amazon, in Africa and South-east Asia, resulting in
(9) rapid melting on the Himalayas, temporarily causing huge flooding,
(10) followed by drought, famine, heat waves and mass starvation, and
(11) collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
We are not only fools: we are out of our minds. We are not only inane: we truly are insane, mad, deranged, idiots. How else can we explain our total failure to prevent Global Heating, our so disastrous excursion into Climate Change. We are so bewitched by our technical tricks, by our miraculous machines, by our prowess to overpower nature, that we have lost all sense of proportion, all traces of wisdom.
We are the dumbest, the most infantile, the most stupid generation the world has ever experienced. We have lost our bearings in politics, in the economy, in religion, in everything, everywhere, especially in Creation.
We no longer know what is right and what is wrong: we are rudderless, have no longer any idea what is normal.
Climate change is already worrying enough — now a report from the U.S. central bank cautions that rising temperatures and extreme storms could eventually trigger a financial collapse.
A Federal Reserve researcher warned in a report last week that “climate-based risk could threaten the stability of the financial system as a whole, along with an aging population and rapid advances in technology.“
Climate change could soon hit the banking system “by storms, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme events” making it harder for businesses to repay loans.
Already one million waterlogged acres in the farm belts of Nebraska and North Dakota, signal rising food inflation. Already the insurance industry is saying that climate change could soon make insurance unaffordable for most people, because of growing evidence that climate change poses an existential threat to the world.
TURMOIL
I like that word TURMOIL. It sounds like what it portrays.
On TURMOIL, here’s what my muse made me do:
Our world today, by using oil,
Has done away with human toil,
But poisoned our so precious soil,
So will it end in great turmoil?
The ocean waves already boil
The forests burn and tempers roil
Our rulers lie and truth despoil
Yes, it will end in great turmoil.
Soon there’s nothing left to spoil
Then all of nature will recoil |
Who do we think we can still foil
Before it ends in great turmoil?
When there’s nothing left to moil
When ev’ry thing’s beyond recall
Then Jesus comes to fix it all.
Forever end the great turmoil.
(Yes there is a tune to sing this.)
Turmoil is the trend: wherever I look matters are in motion, often violently.
We have been warned.
Jonathan Wiener, in 1990, wrote, “THE NEXT ONE HUNDRED YEARS, Shaping the Fate of Our Living Earth”. He relates how already in 1896, a Swedish chemist, Svante Arrhenius, wrote, “We are evaporating our coal mines into the air. …Eventually this change might very well heat the planet to heights outside all human experience.”
Wiener relates how Charles David Keeling, 60 years later, in 1956, when 26 and with a fresh Ph.D. in chemistry made it his life’s goal to measure CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide is the gas that our cars exhale through their tail pipes, causing Green House Gases.
In spite of solemn pledges at the scores of the United Nation’s Climate Change meetings to reduce CO2, it is still increasing. And the dangers are increasing exponentially as the Arctic melts.
1 John 5: 19, an obscure text in a seldom read Bible book, confirms what Jesus already said in John 17, that, “The whole world is under the control of The Evil One.”
Yes, now, with Satan in charge, ALL THINGS are about to change, in the air, in the soil and in the seas, in politics, in people’s minds, including all that is not visible such as the airwaves, the rays that are bounced to and from the satellites, the TV streams that we receive via the dishes sporting on our roofs, the thoughts that penetrate our minds: all these invisible things shape our minds more than the sermon on Sundays: everything is about to change; nothing is stable anymore: TURMOIL is the new state.
A Chinese curse is with us: may you live in interesting times.
As we well know, all is not well, and it is going to get worse.
As a prelude to THE END, the Bible Book REVELATION mentions EARTH QUAKES, especially in Chapter 16: 18: “No earthquake like it has ever occurred since man has been on earth.”
You can imagine how the seismographs in the capitals shake wildly in record numbers beyond any ever registered. You can visualize how the houses tumble, the palaces are flattened. No human technological expertise is any help. Nothing can withstand this force of nature: no nuclear bomb has this devastating power. Now an endless series of ever more frightening events roll over the world.
The catastrophes mentioned here extend to the entire cosmos. They affect people everywhere. In the disastrous happenings preceding the last things, two types of distress can be detected. There are calamities that originate in nature and there are those that are the result of human action. Here only the first type is mentioned. It is as if the tamed earth, given by God as a gift to humanity as his own domain, is now rebelling, is now rising up against her tormentor. It is as if nature that, for so long, for so many centuries, has faithfully furnished humanity with all its needs, has now become recalcitrant, and full of revenge has thrown itself upon humanity.
And this humanity, this so superior human race, with her nuclear energy, her mighty medical system, her military might, and her entertainment establishment all of which made her feel so immensely important and strong, these same men and women are now in a totally humiliating fashion confronted with the fact that in the final analysis they amount to nothing, that they are a mere rag that is thrown out as useless.
THE FOOLS: Who are these fools? We are!