I find his name almost daily on the front page of my newspaper and I hear from him, or about him, in practically every television news bulletin. At least that is still the case at the time I am writing this blog. Chances are that this will remain the situation for some time to come. I am talking about Volodymir Oleksandrovych Zelenskyy, the 46-year-old president of Ukraine. He once was a popular comedian and an actor who played the role of president in a TV series. His country suffered from chaos and corruption, so he decided to run as a candidate in his country’s national elections. Zelensky won those elections with an overwhelming majority and was installed on May 20, 2019, as the sixth president of Europe’s second largest country that has a population of over 44 million people. Now, two years later, he is widely admired for his courage and has become a national and international hero.

Examples of courage
Being “courageous” is a synonym for being brave and daring, especially at times of crisis when the stakes are high. It is a matter of taking action when many do not have the nerves to do so. Heroes are men and women we admire for what they have the guts to do, often under very difficult circumstances. This hero may be a fictional or mythical figure, a woman or man from the distant or more recent past, or a contemporary. We distinguish several categories of heroes. Vice-Admiral Horatio Nelson (1758-1805), killed at the moment of his greatest victory in the Battle of Trafalgar, is remembered by the British as the greatest naval hero in their history. Michael Johnson, Muhammed Ali, Magic Johnson and Serena Williams are among the famous American sports heroes, who are also widely known in other parts of the world. Sean Connery, Roger Moore and other performers of the 007-role, as well as female stars such as Jane Fonda, Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep have in the eyes of many moviegoers become movie heroes. The Netherlands longest running musical Soldier of Orange is based on the true story of Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, a World War II resistance hero.
The eleventh chapter from the biblical book of Hebrews has become known as the gallery of heroes of faith! Reading and re-reading this section of Scripture is a most inspiring—yet rather baffling— experience. It recounts the brave deeds of men and women who put their own lives on the line in the service of their God. We learn about an elderly man who was told by God to migrate, together with his family, to an unknown destination. About someone who killed a lion with his bare hands. And about men and women who “faced jeers and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment” and cruel forms of death.

We admire the heroes of the past and the present. Often that admiration is accompanied by the realization that we ourselves are not so courageous. We are not sure whether we would be capable of similar heroism at the critical moment. When I hear of someone who went into a burning house to save a child, I wonder if I could muster that kind of courage in such a situation. Just as a large number of other Adventists I watched with excitement and immense admiration the movie Hacksaw Ridge—the story of the non-combatant medic Desmond Doss, who put his life on the line during the battle for the Japanese island of Okinawa, and succeeded in saving 75 men. And I am fascinated by the story of another Adventist who became famous because of his heroic role in the Dutch-Paris Escape Line. During World War II this resistance organization saved the lives of about one thousand Jews and other people who had to flee from the German Gestapo. Jean Weidner (1912-1994) risked his own life in providing leadership to a group of other courageous people who defied the ever present danger of being captured, tortured and sent to their death in a concentration camp, when they assisted people to reach the French-Swiss border and cross into freedom over the Salève mountain range, behind the Adventist College of Collonges. No, I don’t think I could have been part of that courageous group.

Courage and faith
Desmond Doss and Jean Weidner were heroes. They were also men of faith, but should we therefore consider them heroes of faith? Or were they rather war heroes after all? There are many non-believer-heroes in addition to such (Adventist) believers as Doss and Weidner, and it is difficult to precisely map the relationship between courage and faith. But, even if there undeniably are non-believing heroes, many Christians will tell us that their faith has often been a source of courage for them. In Psalm 23—one of the best-known spiritual hymns—David confesses his trust in God: “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff they comfort me.” We hear an echo of these words God spoke through the prophet Isaiah: “Fear not, for I am with you, be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.” (Isaiah 41:10, RSV).
How does this happen? How does God give us courage, and how can we ever be capable of heroic deeds? We should not expect to match the courage of people like President Zelensky, Desmond Doss or Jean Weidner overnight, or even in the long run. But what we may expect is that God will give us the courage to be sincere and honest in our everyday lives—even when that may not always seem expedient—and to confidently bear witness to our faith. It may sometimes take courage to pray in a busy restaurant before our meal, to tell others about our faith, or to ask colleagues not to swear in our presence. But God can and will give us that kind of courage if we ask Him for it.

Could I become a hero?
Whether we have the courage to perform a truly heroic act we will only know when we are in an exceptional situation. Do I have the courage to jump into a canal to save a child from drowning before my very eyes? Frankly, I don’t know. As I think about it at this moment, sitting at my desk, I wonder if it would be wise to do so. Am I a good enough swimmer? Wouldn’t there be a good chance that such a possibly heroic act on my part would fail, only resulting in an additional casualty? Perhaps I should not worry, but simply can pray God and ask Him if He will continually guide me and make it clear at critical moments what I should do. Who knows if I could become a hero in such circumstances?

I recently read a fascinating, but also very sobering, book by the Japanese author Shusaku Endo. It is about Sebastian Rodrigo, a young Portuguese priest who travelled in 1638 to Japan at a time when the Japanese authorities had turned against the Catholic missionaries and tortured and killed many of them. If ever I read about a hero of faith, it was this heroic Sebastian Rodrigo. Would I have been able to persist with my missionary task in the face of such deadly opposition? Or would I have looked for the first ship to take me back to Portugal?
In the Middle Ages and in the Reformation era, millions of Christians (Protestants of various persuasions and Roman Catholics) paid for their faith with their lives. Had I lived in those times, would I have been able to climb the stake, singing a Psalm, as many did? And suppose one day there were to be a persecution of Seventh-day Adventists in my part of the world (as the traditional Adventist end-time scenario predicts), how courageous would I be? Would I be able to remain steadfast in my faith even if it required a high price? There is only one answer to questions like that. God expects that we pray to Him each day for the strength needed to face the challenges of that particular day. And then leave everything else to him.

Perhaps we think we can never become a hero. After all, we cannot stand in the shadow of the brave men and women we encounter in our history books, or on the eleventh chapter of the book of Hebrews. But remember: many of the heroes we learned about in our history books were not perfect people. The same is true of the heroes in the Bible. Noah had a drinking problem. Jacob cheated on his disabled father. David had sex with someone else’s wife…

And let’s not think that heroes were never afraid before they became a hero. Anne van der Bijl (1928-2022), the famous smuggler of Bibles into communist countries in the Cold War era, emphasized that a hero is not someone who is never afraid, but someone who perseveres in spite of his fear! So, join me in praying daily for courage for all the small (and possibly big) challenges we face in our life. We do not know whether we will ever be called upon to become a hero, but we do know that God can give us the right amount of courage we need at the right time. Therefore, “be strong and take heart, all you who hope in the Lord” (Psalm 31:24).

“God created the world, but the Dutch made Holland.” Find a map of the Netherlands in the Middle Ages and compare it with a map that reflects the current situation, and you will understand why these words became a popular maxim. Many areas which used to be water have been reclaimed. They became fertile agricultural grounds and have provided space for numerous smaller and larger towns. Until the early decades of the twentieth century there was a large body of water in the center of the country. It covered some 5,000 square kilometers (almost 2,000 square miles). It was salty, for it was in open connection with the North Sea. Today only about half of this Zuiderzee (that was the old name) is left and has been renamed IJsselmeer. It is presently a lake of sweet water, cut off from the salty water in the North by a heavy dam of 32 km in length, which is not only a safety barrier—to keep the salt water at bay—but also accommodates a four-lane highway.

The Afsluitdijk (literally: the “closing off dike”) was built in a little more than four years and was ready in 1932. It was the first major project to be completed after the Dutch government in 1918 passed a law that would serve as the blueprint for the reclamation of a major part of the IJsselmeer and for creating a new province in the heart of the country. A first section of the water that was cordoned off by a dike and pumped dry was the Noordoostpolder–today still a thriving agricultural district. Work on the new land, with a completely new infrastructure, continued during the second World War. After the war ten villages and towns were built, with a present population of just over 50.000.
Subsequently, a larger part of the IJsselmeer also became a polder. The work was split into two phases, the eastern polder (East Flevoland, 1957) and the southern polder (South Flevoland, 1968). Several major towns have been built in this part of our new province. Almere, with its more than 225.000 inhabitants, is now the seventh largest city in the country.

Four meters below the sea level
Since 2008 my wife and I live in an apartment in Zeewolde, a town in South Flevoland with 24,000 in habitants. Our town is currently celebrating that it now exists 40 years! We are quite happy to live here. It is very centrally located in the country, the town has a lot of green, and a lot of space—and parking is free. Sometimes people ask whether it is not scary to live in a polder, for suppose the dike will break. It is true that, if the dikes would break, or if the Russians would decide to destroy it, we would be in the midst of a lake of about four meters deep. I sometimes joke that we are not really worried, since our apartment is on the second floor, and our feet would therefore remain dry. Seriously, the dangers of living in a polder like ours are probably smaller than the risks of living in a big city. We hope we can live here peacefully, and in good health, for many years to come.

History: land – water – land
The other day, I wondered how it would be for Elder Ted Wilson to live in a place like ours. He would hear about the history of this new part of the Netherlands and would have to find some modus to fit the history of this part of the country into his beliefs about the “recent” origin of the earth and an even more “recent” global flood. Let me explain.
Before this huge project of creating areas of dry land, the body of water which was once referred to as the Zuiderzee did not always exist. In earlier times, before several major floods devastated the area, it was swampy land, with here and there some inhabited areas. Archeologists have discovered that in some places in our polder hunter-gatherers were already eking out their existence some 7,000 years ago. Near the village of Swifterbant, in eastern Flevoland, remains of old houses were found during the reclamation of Flevoland, eventually some fourteen in all. Archaeologists also found a skeleton in fairly good condition, the so-called “head man of Swifterbant.” More recently, it has been discovered that people were already working small fields at this time. This culture—which extended to the German states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, and is related to other finds in the east of the Netherlands and in Denmark, with its specific kind of ceramics, is now usually referred to as the Swifterbant Culture.
For traditional, conservative Seventh-day Adventists (as Wilson) there is an obvious problem with the discoveries of the archeologist, for the experts date these remains as going back to around 5,000 BC, that is: seven thousand years ago. How can this fit with the conviction that the creation of our earth is “recent”, as number six of the Fundamental Beliefs insist. Admittedly, not all conservative Adventists will follow the chronology of bishop Usher and date the creation at 4004 BC. Many will allow for a somewhat longer period and stretch the meaning of “recent” to (at most) some ten thousand years.
Assuming that the archeologists who have studied the Swifterbant Culture know what they are talking about, this allowance for 10,000 years by young earth geologists does not really solve the problem. Even if life on earth started some ten thousand years ago with Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, somewhere in present-day Iraq, it is quite a step to accept the idea that after a relatively short time their quite primitive descendants had reached what is now as the Flevopolder in the Netherlands. The more so, since we must also reckon with the global flood which, according to a literal interpretation of the Genesis story, covered the entire earth. Even if we do not accept Usher’s date of the Flood in 2350 BC as realistic, a literal reading of the Old Testament account demands, according to traditional Adventism, that a global flood destroyed everything, possibly four or five thousand years before Christ. Such a flood would not only have destroyed the people who lived near Noe, and saw him entering the ark, but must also have killed the people who were hunting and gathering food and experimented with growing food on small fields in Flevoland. And such a global flood of a magnitude that it covered even the highest mountains, would have left no trace of the Swifterbant Culture!

And what about the dinosaurs and the ice ages?
How would Wilson and other conservative Adventists respond to my questions about the original inhabitants of the area where I now live? They are actually very simple questions compared to the many problems with regard to the origin of the universe and our solar systems. And they are quite simple compared to, for instance, the many riddles that still surround the dinosaurs. As I write these lines, I have just seen a news items from Australia. A researcher by the name of Adele Pentland identified, with her team from Curtin University, a new species, after the discovery of the 100 hundred million years old fossilized remains of a new species of Pterosaur. This powerful flying predator had a wingspan of perhaps as much as 12 meters How do we account for such fossilized remains within the scheme of a “recent” creation?
But, staying closer to home, more complicated issues than the dating of the Swifterbant culture provide major challenges for the theory of a “recent” creation. Huge boulders of various kinds of rocks are found in several places in the northern part of the Netherlands. How did they get there, in an environment without any mountains or rocks? They were transported there by the thick crust of ice that covered parts of northern Europe in ages past. Geologists tell us that, in the past three million years, between twenty and thirty ice ages have occurred. Several of these reached parts of the Netherlands and played an important role in de the formation of the Dutch landscape.
Just this week ago an exhibition has opened that provides a panorama of what our province was like some 100,000 years ago—long before the Swifterbant people lived here. There were ice ages in the past, but there was also a period with a subtropical climate. From bones that have been found it is clear that there once were forest elephants, rhino’s, giant deers and mammoths. Besides animal remains, tools of Neanderthals have also been found, such as flint tools, worked antlers and bone remains.
I am certainly no expert on these things, but I have long ago stopped believing that we must find ways of fitting all of these discoveries in a scheme based on a “recent” creation and a global flood, just a few thousand years ago.
I believe that God is the Creator. Everything that exists has its origin in God’s creative activities. I have, however, no idea when and by what process God created. The biblical creation account is theology, not science. Numerous flood stories around the world suggest, together with the Genesis story, that there was, at one time in the distant past, a large flood with devastating effects. But we must depend on the scientific world for learning more about the details.

Thinking about Neanderthalers, ice ages, the Swifterbant culture, etcetera, I just wonder: Is it not time, also for conservative Seventh-day Adventists in 2024, to accept the consensus of the scientists who have studied these things, rather than clinging obstinately to theories that must accord with a literalist “plain” reading of the Bible? Too many people have already left Adventism because of the anti-intellectual attitude of influential persons and currents in our church.

Focus
My salvation does not depend on the dating of an earlier civilization in the area where I currently live, nor on the question whether and when Neanderthals may have lived there. My faith is built on the “recent” reality of the One whom we know lived and died on this earth just over 2,000 years ago. In the distant past He created life, and He guarantees future eternal life. It’s time the focus of all Adventist Christians is on what belongs to the core of the Christian faith—and not on elements that are at best at the fringe of our faith experience.