Sermon Tone Analysis

Our theme for 2022 is “Begin Again”

Today and the next two Sundays I will be preaching on “Hot Topics”

I have been doing this for the last three years - giving you the opportunity to tell me what you would like to hear me preach on.

It can be a question, an issue or a passage of scripture that you have not understood.

Because of our India trip, my series in Genesis ran into July and we will be having some guest speakers again in August, but I have a few weeks in here to tackle some of your questions.

Our first question comes from a member of our congregation who asked, “Pastor Joel, What should I say to a Jewish person who doesn’t want God in her life.

She says, ‘where was God when the Nazis killed nearly six million Jews?’”

That is a very real question - and one that was probably intended to end the conversation about God.

After all, what can you say to a person who is grieving such a tragic loss.

It doesn’t matter that the loss happened eighty years ago.

African Americans are still mourning the effects of slavery in America.

American Indians are still feeling the loss of their identity and sovereignty.

My ancestors, the Anabaptist were persecuted and killed for their beliefs by other early Protestants and Catholics.

I remember hearing the stories when I was a child, even though it was several hundred years ago.

We were afraid it could happen again.

When it comes to these questions of mass atrocities we should not dismiss them - it is important that we remember!

When we remember, it is OK to ask the question, Where was God?

If you ask it honestly, you will discover that He was there; though not in the way that you might have looked for Him.

And finally, when we are ready, it is helpful to ask, “what might this event look like from God’s perspective?”

Too often we try to begin by trying to find some meaning in tragic events, but that is not possible when the pain is still fresh and so intense.

Meaning only comes later as we are looking back on them and after the healing has begun.

Today we are talking about the holocaust, but for any survivor of tragedy or trauma; you can use these same steps in your own recovery.

Remembering the holocaust.

I had the privilege of visiting Israel in 2017.

Every visitor to Israel is requested to visit Vad Yashem - the holocaust remembrance museum.

Because of the continued threat of anti-semitism, the continued existence of the state of Israel is dependent on remembering what it looks like when genocide occurs.

The Holocaust was unprecedented genocide, total and systematic, perpetrated by Nazi Germany and its collaborators, with the aim of annihilating the Jewish people.

The primary motivation was the Nazis' anti-Semitic racist ideology.

Between 1933 and 1941 Nazi Germany pursued a policy that dispossessed the Jews of their rights and their property, followed by the branding and the concentration of the Jewish population.

This policy gained broad support in Germany and much of occupied Europe.

In 1941, following the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Nazis and their collaborators launched the systematic mass murder of the Jews.

By 1945 nearly six million Jews had been murdered.

Genocide is when an entire race, religion or ethnic group is targeted for destruction.

Since the holocaust, it has been internationally recognized as a crime and is identifiable in five specific forms:

Killing members of the group.

Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.

Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.

Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

All of this happened to the Jews during the holocaust.

It was after the holocaust that the term “genocide” was first used.

And because of the holocaust, most nations no longer tolerate mass murders and ethnic cleansing.

Where these things occur, they can be prosecuted as crimes against humanity.

As you walk through Yad Vashem , the stories of thousands of Jewish victims are told through pictures, and media.

Beginning in 1939 the Jews in Eastern Europe were herded into ghettos.

They were isolated from the rest of the world, loosing their property and their rights as citizens.

Nazi propaganda blamed to Jews for societies ills and because they were perceived as a threat, they were confined.

Mass murder would not have been possible without mass deception.

The Holocaust was not a single event.

It did not happen all at once.

It was the result of circumstances and events, as well as individual decisions, played out over years.

Key political, moral, and psychological lines were crossed until the Nazi leadership eventually set in motion the unimaginable—a concrete, systematic plan to annihilate all of Europe’s Jews.

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To understand the holocaust, we need to understand what was happening at the time.

This was after World War 1 when the old monarchies were loosing power and populist movements were rising.

Hitler and the Nazis were viewed by many to be the “good guys” who could defeat the communists.

The “great depression” began in America in 1929, but it also impacted Europe.

People were scared, angry and desperate for someone to lead them and for someone to blame.

It is not clear when the decision was made to exterminate the Jews.

There is no surviving paper trail for this decision.

Among Hitler’s top commanders, the plan was code named “the final solution.”

People, including the Jews, were told that the Jews were being relocated “for their safety” and that they were being resettled in thriving communities.

Most of the population, even though they were prejudiced against the Jews would not have supported what was really happening if they only knew.

While there was some reports that got out from survivors to Jewish communities, they were drowned out by the volume of propaganda.

When the concentration camps were liberated after the war, the generals, who knew that atrocities were taking place - were still surprised and horrified by the magnitude of what they saw.

While it is difficult to remember, it is also important!

To be honest, I don’t really enjoy talking about the holocaust- I don’t think anyone does.

But it is important to remember, because if we do not remember we will not learn from what has happened.

History is know to repeat itself where people refuse to remember and to learn.

Someone might say, “shouldn’t we rather forgive what happened and the people who did these things?”

I do believe that forgiveness is absolutely necessary for our own healing.

If we allow the pain of tragedy to consume us, we may become just as irrational as those who commit such crimes.

But forgiveness is not forgetting.

It is not pushing those feelings down and refusing to acknowledge or remember them.

That is repression - and it almost guarantees that that our pain will emerge again in a way that we cannot control.

Forgiveness is only possible because of what Jesus did for us on the cross.

He took the pain of the world upon His own body and died to release it.

The cross is what makes forgiveness possible.

God Himself, suffered so that we would have a place to go with our suffering.

It is right to be angry at injustice, but only the injustice done to Jesus can balance the scales.

For the almost six million Jews who were killed in the holocaust, only Jesus blood can atone for their lives.

My long-time friend, Lonnie Lane, is a Jewish believer who has written many outstanding articles for Sid Roth’s Messianic Vision’s website on a number of Jewish issues.

One of these articles contains the following testimony from the gas chambers of the concentration camps, and is both quoted verbatim and paraphrased below, with the author’s permission.

During a time that Lonnie was writing articles for a Messianic publication, she had access to the archives of the magazine, which were kept in a vault.

Deep within the vault were copies of this magazine from the 1930-1940s.

“Shortly after WWII several articles were written by Jewish believers who had been in the death camps but were liberated before it was ‘their turn.’

Without going into detail as to how they were able to observe this phenomenon, one person reported that a man in white robes was seen on several occasions walking among and interacting with the people in the‘s showers’ just before the gas was turned on.

He would have been the only person wearing clothing,” and as such would stand out from the others as unique among them.

“It could only be Yeshua!

He came to them in their final hour.”

Lonnie reported that another article revealed that many Jews had become believers in Yeshua, and it estimated that approximately ten percent of the Jews in the camps were saved.

That means thousands, even hundreds of thousands.

Lonnie concluded, “That means God was faithful to rescue eternally those who wanted to follow Him.

Our wonderful God.

Our gracious Yeshua.

Our merciful Savior.”

I had never

read anything like this stunning testimony, and I was deeply affected by it for many weeks.

Jill Shannon, A Prophetic Calendar: The

Feasts of Israel, 2008, p. 75-76

Asking, “Where was God?”