The motto of the Jewish Defense League is “Never Again!” referring to the Holocaust of WWII at the hands of Nazi war criminals.
The other night I happened upon an interesting-sounding documentary on PBS that I stuck with and then was sorry I did (kind of). It was called Elusive Justice. Part of the summary says,
“In the absence of a sustained international manhunt and centralized prosecution, the task of bringing Nazi war criminals to justice was undertaken by a handful of individuals — acting without official status or government support. These so-called Nazi hunters collectively identified and brought to justice thousands of Nazi war criminals.”
I enjoy justice and legal books and documentaries, so I watched the film.
And then my watching turned into horror. Oh, of course I knew that the holocaust was the worst genocide on earth in all of history. I knew that Hitler was the worst personification of evil ever to inhabit a body, and will remain so until the antichrist comes and supercedes his evil by a factor of a million. I knew that the piles of bodies discovered at the camps and in graves stunned the liberators so much that many of them were not able to function normally ever again. But I never watched the video or deliberately looked at visual images of the carnage.
Until the Elusive Justice movie.
Those terrible images of piles of bodies. Of walking skeletons liberated from death camps. The tortures, and the callousness of the deaths. Shallow graves. Terrible, terrible ways they invented to kill mass quantities of people. Of human beings.
Watching a Holocaust documentary with a biblical perspective means my brain processes the information differently than it did when I saw photos and videos of the Holocaust with a blinded mind as a lost person. In a sanctified mind, we wash through each image and each fact through a brain that is daily becoming more occupied with Christ. It is daily growing more light and less dark. Rather than the information we’ve obtained floating around in a loose morass of relativistic morality, our brain compares everything it absorbs with the bible’s facts and laws and uses His word as the benchmark to everything else.
In the heart-department, it means now I have a heart-burden for the lost world which does not know what is coming…or who is coming. My mind faints at the thought of what Revelation reveals for Israel…for the Jews…for the Christians…and for the lost.
For example, Revelation 6:8 says that when the Fourth Seal is opened, the pale horse of death is released.
“And I looked, and behold, a pale horse! And its rider’s name was Death, and Hades followed him. And they were given authority over a fourth of the earth, to kill with sword and with famine and with pestilence and by wild beasts of the earth.”
If we interpret that to mean that a fourth of the earth’s people will die, then it is mind-blowing. And remember, the entire Tribulation will take place within precisely 7 years, and the Great Tribulation will have the entirety of its events take place within 3.5 years.
In Revelation 9, the Sixth Trumpet judgment releases death angels. “So the four angels, who had been prepared for the hour, the day, the month, and the year, were released to kill a third of mankind.”
So let’s break down the Tribulation’s death numbers and compare them to the German Holocaust of WWII.
In the Elusive Justice documentary it was stated that the Nazis/SS killed 2/3 Europe’s Jews in 10 years. “The SS was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP). It began at the end of 1920 as a small permanent guard unit. … Under Himmler’s leadership (1929-1945), it grew from a small paramilitary formation to one of the largest and most powerful organizations in the Third Reich. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Himmler’s command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II (1939–1945).” (Wikipedia)
The standard number of overall Jews killed is 6 million in WWII’s 6 years. Breaking it down, that is a death rate of 1M Jews per year.
The German Nazis killed Jews in death camps not just in Germany, but they died in Croatia, Bulgaria, Poland. In all of Europe. I was astounded at how quickly the organization within the Nazi Party coalesced to become an efficient killing machine within just a few short years. Amazing rapidity.
Right now there are 6.93 Billion people on the earth. Round that up to 7 Billion.
Of the seven billion people on earth now, if 1/4 are killed by Revelation’s Sixth seal, that means 1.75 billion people die soon into the Tribulation. So people are already dying in great numbers before the Sixth Trumpet is blown, when another third dies. That is another 1.75 billion.
Did you catch that number? By the time the 7-year Tribulation is half over, half the world’s population is dead, 3.5 billion people. 3.5B in 3.5 years.
In the Nazi Holocaust, 1 million Jews were killed per year. In the first half of the Tribulation 1 Billion die per year.In half the time!
And then the Great Tribulation begins. In the second half of the Time of Jacob’s Trouble AKA The Great Tribulation, the devil is thrown down to earth. This makes him very angry. He begins his pursuit of the Jews and the Christians with total evil purpose and intent. ALL the universe’s evil is funneled through one man, the antichrist, who becomes indwelled by satan, who in turn single-mindedly pursues God’s chosen. (Revelation 12: 13-17; Revelation 13:7, Daniel 7:21)
I want us to imagine three things.
1. The carnage. This below
and this also (Bergen-Belsen, 1945),
Is NOTHING compared to the death rate of the Tribulation. The documentary said that in some cases the Nazis killed hundreds of thousands a day. If you remember the terrible feeling you had at seeing tens of thousands killed the Banda Aceh Christmas Day quake and tsunami in 2004, or the feelings of horror as you watched the Japan quake and tsunami wash away tens of thousands in March 2011, increase that order of magnitude to millions a day killed in successive events that occur one upon another, and are bigger and worse than both those events, and you have a glimmer of the Tribulation carnage.
As an aside, if you do not believe the Church will be removed in the rapture prior to all this wrath and death, and you think you can handle it, YOU ARE WRONG. I see too many people casually take the doctrine of the rapture as a kind of an ‘oh, well, it’ll all pan out in the end’ potentiality and in their false humility (really pride) they fold their hands across their stomach and complacently say, “Well I have a strong faith, I would hope that I could remain faithful during that time.” Jesus Himself said it will be the worst time the world has ever known, which means worse than the Flood when man was completely evil all the time! (Genesis 6:5) He said if he didn’t cut it short Himself, no one would survive. (Matthew 24:21-22). The mind will not be able to handle life then, either having gone crazy at seeing the things that are coming upon the earth and having a heart attack on the spot, (Luke 21:26) or simply by living with people whose minds are totally deluded and drenched with sin. (Romans 1:28-31). All that tells me is that they have not studied Revelation or that they have an inflated sense of self.
2. Next: think of the easy evil of man. The men in 1928 who later did these Nazi war crimes were normal men, but by 1929 had joined the Nazi party and later the SS. They became genocidal criminals very quickly. It is what Paul means when He says there is none good, no not one. (Romans 3:10).
There was this little Polish town called Jedwabne. John MacArthur mentioned it in a sermon recently. He said,
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“I’ve been reading, in fact I’ve finished reading a little book called Neighbors. It’s a secular book written by a man named Jan Gross and it looks at a very strange anomaly for sociologists to deal with and anthropologists to deal with in the world in which we live. The explanation of the contemporary sociologists and anthropologists is that man is basically good and that when man does something really bad it’s because he gets brainwashed, and the only explanation for the Holocaust in German, the only explanation for good German people massacring six million Jews is that they were under a relentless onslaught of Nazi propaganda that literally overpowered their thinking so that eventually they were so severely brainwashed that they just went out and massacred the Jews. That has been the standard response by the evolutionary sociologists and anthropologists who believes that man is on the ascendancy getting better and getting better and has to explain the incredible Holocaust of Germany to say nothing of the 50 million, perhaps, that were killed by Stalin, and the explanation has always been, well, they were under this brainwashing for a long time and they were so brainwashed they couldn’t think the normal way. They were terribly victimized by this brainwashing. And then they found this town in Poland called Jedwabne.”
“Now in ’39 when Hitler started his movement to take over the world for the Third Reich he didn’t want to have to fight a war on the eastern border so he made a truce with Russia and in order to kind of keep a buffer zone, Germany is here, Russia is here, in the middle is Poland. And so he split Poland down the middle and annexed the eastern part of Poland to Russia and took the western part to Germany so there would be a buffer there. So Jedwabne was in eastern Poland and was never occupied by any Nazi’s, it was never occupied by any Germans, it was occupied by Russians. Russians weren’t trying to conquer the world as such, they weren’t interested in racial propaganda, and so there was not propagandizing at all of the 3,000 people that lived in Jedwabne, 3,000 people, 1,600 of them were Jews. The Jews had lived in the town for 300 years. They farmed together with the folks, the Gentile people who were there, they went to school with them, they worked with them, they occasionally married them, they bought their groceries in the same place, they worked the fields together, they carried on the same social events in the town, and they had for 300 years. There was essentially no racial attitudes there. Everybody got along fine.”
“Well in, it June 22, 1941 and Hitler didn’t want that truce anymore because he wanted to defeat Russia so he swept through Poland and the truce was broken and he took that town Jedwabne along with Poland all the way to the Russian border. That was on June 22, 1941. On July 10, that’s a little over two weeks later, the Gentile townspeople massacred all 1,600 Jews in one day, slaughtered them all. The ones they couldn’t stab with a pitchfork or behead with an axe because they were running out of time that day, they herded into a barn, poured gasoline all over the barn and incinerated them all.”
“This nagging event couldn’t be explained by the sociologists. Absolutely could not be explained by the sociologists because that town was never under any Nazi propaganda. They’d never been there.”
“This history records indicate not one of those people was killed by a German. Not one of them was killed by a Nazi soldier. Every single one of those Jews was killed by one of his neighbors, hence the title of the book. And the question the sociologist asks in the book, and he can’t really answer, is how in the world can people in a two week period massacre their neighbors in a blood bath? How can they do that?”
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This is the spirit of antichrist, (1 John 2:18) which is the same spirit of evil we find in the emergent church, a la tolerance and interfaith. Those two positions – Nazi death camps and emergent church- seem like extremes but they are not. Since they are both godless, they are exactly the same flavor: evil, and totally opposed to God. It is how and why all the world’s false religious doctrines will blend into one muddy amorphous blob of evil in the last days when men kill for fun (Mark 13:12) and shake their fist at God (Rev 9:20-21; Rev 16:9, 11, 21)
They could do these genocidal war crimes because we are evil. And they will do it again in the Tribulation, except more efficiently. because an order of tenfold more of humankind will die at the hands of evil man, simply because evil man wants them to die.
3. Third, think of the holiness and glory of God who saves. In his book, The Existence and Attributes of God, Stephen Charnock noted God’s holiness “is the crown of all His attributes, the life of all His decrees, the brightness of all His actions. Nothing is decreed by Him, nothing is acted by Him, but what is worthy of the dignity, and becoming the honour, of this attribute”.
And yet He saves men who build concentration camp gas chambers- if they repent. He would have saved Hitler if he had repented. He saved you. Me.
In Charles Hodge’s Systematic Theology, Hodge said of God’s holiness,
“This is a general term for the moral excellence of God…. Holiness, on the one hand, implies entire freedom from moral evil and, on the other, absolute moral perfection. Freedom from impurity is the primary idea of the word.” (Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, 150-151).”
God is on His throne and He is holy. When He saved you, He declared you holy. This is the universe’s 2nd most amazing act, that after Jesus died and was resurrected, (the universe’s greatest act) through Him we have eternal holy life.
Oh, and by the way, Israel National news reports that German Neo-Nazi Party Appeals to Court for Legitimization.
Never again? Sadly, yes again. And soon, by the looks of things.
