NOVEMBER 23 2019
THE GOSPEL FOR DUMMIES.
First thing to know is that ‘the father of lies’ is in charge of this world: the Bible is correct, (and today’s evidence overwhelming) when it states in 1 John 5: 19 that “The Evil One rules this world”. It’s still God’s world, of course, but today Satan calls the shots and Jesus knew this when in John 17 he prayed to his Father: (verse 15) “You protect my followers from the Evil One…(because) they are not of his world,” a world belonging to Satan.
And that is true: the followers of Christ don’t belong to a world dominated by evil, by fraud: they belong to “the world to come”, where righteousness is the norm.
However.
The second thing to know is that the heaven adherents have misinterpreted this to mean that they don’t belong to the earth: that their destination is with God in heaven, even though the Bible explicitly states that “God lives in inapproachable light: nobody can see or has seen God”, (1Timothy 6:16), or that John 3: 13 plainly tells us that nobody ever went there, and that “we are soil and to soil we shall return (Genesis 3: 19).
The heaven fable reminds me of Mark Twain, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
The heaven heresy is so ingrained that it has totally distorted the MESSAGE: it is so anchored in the church that when I once suggested in a church periodical that going to heaven is a hoax, a letter to the editor called me a heretic.
The problem is that the Heaven dogma is so human: it allows us to have the cake and eat it too. We can fly anywhere, burn fuel in abundance, after all heaven is our destiny. The heaven adherents find polluting even helpful, because it will bring on Armageddon, the final battle, Rapture, the fetching up to heaven, preceded by the conversion of Israel. No wonder the US Secretary of State, the American Foreign Minister, approves of Israel expanding its territory into Arabian-held lands. After all, so they say, the Bible tells us so.
FRAUD, persistent fraud, is everywhere.
The biblical truth, the gospel for dummies, is that, “The salvation of creation – nature – and personal salvation are two sides of the same coin: you can’t have one without the other.”
To exclude creation from redemption, from being bought by the blood on the cross has led to a fraudulent interpretation that has done immeasurable damage to God’s world. Today it so deeply influences American policy, that it promotes pollution and war, promotes cosmic destruction, fully endorsed by Pompeo and Pence, both claiming to be Christians.
I dare say that any church that preaches heaven at the expense of the earth is a fraud. Bonhoeffer is correct when it calls this ‘pious secularism’.
I dare say that polluting is defrauding God, because we defile what God, when he made it, called ‘good’ seven times.
Fraud everywhere.
Fraud is everywhere today, reaching especially into the boardrooms of the cream of the crop in the corporate world and in government circles. Volkswagen comes to mind with its diesel deception and Boeing with its 737 Max flying machine.
A higher loyalty.
This week I am reading James Comey’s, A HIGHER LOYALTY, Truth, Lies, and Leadership. Comey’s customary 10 year appointment as Director of the FBI to ensure total political neutrality, was abruptly terminated when he refused to pledge loyalty to Trump.
We too have a higher loyalty, not to economic growth, but to honoring God in his creation. That is another facet of “The Gospel for dummies”.
The Bible repeatedly states that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom”. The church is great in befuddling this concept. It simply means that we must be in awe of God’s creation. From the rising of the sun to its setting, we must deeply love the natural world around us: that is the fear of the Lord: that is the gospel for dummies. That’s why John 3: 16 – God so loved the cosmos – is today the most important text in the Bible: loving creation ensures eternal life. We must follow God’s love by loving creation with all powers within us: our eternal destiny depends on it. That’s the new gospel for dummies! It’s as simple as that! Once we conduct life with this basic principle in mind we have the beginning of wisdom, have secure footing to build LIFE.
But……
That’s why this 19th Century hymn is more current than ever:
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide;
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.
Swift to its close ebbs out life’s little day;
Earth’s joys grow dim, its glories pass away;
Change and decay in all around I see—
O Thou who changest not, abide with me.
Don’t despair.
I sincerely believe that in these last days – and we are rushing head over heels into global disaster – remedies too will emerge: we will discover how to live properly: there will be a remnant, a tiny trickle of humanity that will see the dangers ahead and pursue policies that reflect permanence.
So, what are the dangers ahead, dangers enhanced by FRAUD?
I know the world is becoming aware of the looming perils, except, apparently the USA, the world’s largest polluter. But have measures taken so far, reduced Climate Change?
No.
CO2 emissions for all countries, in total, have been spiraling upward, year after year. Population growth and increased world prosperity have caused CO2 to outpace GDP. That’s understandable. Of course people in Africa and Asia want to copy us.
While population in the US+EU+Japan Group grew by 11% between 1997 and 2018, in that same period population growth in the Remainder Group grew by 35% thanks to improved sanitation and basic medical care. These people too want homes with indoor plumbing and electricity, and love cars.
And then there is Deforestation, a continuing global problem.
High Income Countries keep pushing deforestation to the poorer, heavily indebted, parts of the world. This is causing a Carbon Bomb. A new report shows that deforestation released a shocking 626 percent more CO2 between 2000 and 2013 than previously thought. This new research shows that we should be taking much better care of our last great intact forests because doing so has remarkable climate benefits. If we are going to stay on top of the runaway growth in CO2 levels in the atmosphere, this needs to change.
Will we change? That is the cardinal question today.
The key insight of the study indicates that our unaffected, still intact forests, are packing ever more carbon into the living matter, deadwood and soils on each acre of land. Taking all large forest areas into account, and to a lesser extent some other still pristine ecosystems like grasslands, this so-called “sink” removes fully a quarter of all humanity’s carbon emissions each year, free of charge. It’s simply mandatory that this remains the case.
If we stop this sink from doing its job, most of that quarter will remain in the atmosphere (with a little of it dissolving in the sea), increasing the rate at which CO2 levels rise each year by a third at a time when we need to be pulling every lever at our disposal to lower carbon dioxide. It would be like yanking out the plug whilst trying to fill the bath.
The study also revealed the fallacy of forest fragmentation. You don’t have to clear a forest to reduce its ability to act as a sink; you just have to damage it. By looking at the millions of acres across the tropics that were damaged during 2000–2013, the study tallied up the extent to which pressures like fires, logging, and drought along new forest edges reduced the carbon stored and absorbed long-term by previously intact forests. These figures were six times worse than conventional estimates that only look at outright forest clearance.
Climate impacts aside, many other environmental services are also put at risk by this damage, including biodiversity, watershed protection, rainfall patterns and the survival of some of the world’s most imperiled cultures.
An article in THE NEW YORKER of November 11 had some distressing news. Entitled BLOOD GOLD, it relates how in Brazil – which now has a Climate Change denying president – indigenous people and illegal miners are engaged in a fight that could well decide our future.
In the Amazon region the threats are set to worsen. Losses had accelerated by 2016 and will continue to grow in the future, with 25 million kilometers of new road expected to be built by 2050, much in intact areas, and increasing global demand for timber, minerals and food.
The tropics are not the only places to suffer, as few intact forests survive in the temperate belt. Even in the northern boreal zone they are in rapid retreat.
What is to be done? Ultimately the damaging processes need to be reined in. We must plan new infrastructure so as to avoid the most critical areas, the fragmentation by farms and fires must be curtailed, and the overhunting of ecologically critical animal species must be brought under control. But with greed always at work, and Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new president, deeply influenced by a powerful lobby there, called the three B’s: Bible, Bullets and Beef, the Amazon and the tribes there, faces the greatest threat ever. That threat is truly global, enhanced, if not founded on the wrong interpretation of ‘dominion’, mentioned in Genesis 2.
Christ –and by implication we – came to serve everything created. That is another aspect of the gospel for dummies.
The world’s intact forests, though embattled, are still vast, and at 2.5 billion acres (one billion hectares) represent one the greatest treasures nature has given us. If we are to have any hope of stabilizing our ailing climate, action at every level from international treaty to local community is needed to keep that treasure safe from harm.
ARCTIC NEWS.
You do well to pull up ARCTIC NEWS. Up there, in the far North, in the shallow Arctic Ocean, in the Siberian tundra and Canada’s North vast regions, trillions of tons of METHANE are buried in the no longer permafrost.
Arctic News warns us that another El Nino is on the way, a special weather phenomenon that enhances global temperatures, especially in the more northerly regions. Should this happen then this may prove disastrous, releasing megatons of methane, a far more a potent greenhouse gas than CO2.
That sudden release could accelerate Global Heating within a few years, killing all life on earth, including us, of course.
That this will happen is a Biblical given. That LIFE on earth will cease ( and cease suddenly) is foretold in many bible passages, including 2 Peter 3. Here it is:
The Day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar, the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and its works will be laid bare.
Since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to conduct yourselves in holiness and godliness as you anticipate and hasten the coming of the day of God, when the heavens will be destroyed by fire and the elements will melt in the heat. But in keeping with God’s promise, we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells.
To conduct ourselves in holiness and godliness means more than praying and bible reading and attending church. It means to taste the holiness of creation, to live to see all living matter as God-given and thus sacred: that is the essence of the new gospel for dummies.
Arctic News may have the dates wrong, but it serves as a warning, because as Jesus – see Matthew 24 – has repeatedly told us, “The Day of Lord comes unannounced, totally out of the blue.” Ultra-clear signs are out there: the unalloyed fear of the Lord is the integral part of the gospel for dummies.