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About Jesus - Steve Sweetman The
Curse That Was The Holocaust One of the most horrific
events of the 20th century was the extermination of millions
of Jews by Hitler's Nazi regime. It
wasn't until close to the end of World War Two that the western allies
publically admitted that Jews, Jewish sympathizers, and other
undesirables, were being gassed, cremated, shot, and hung, in what were
commonly called prison camps. To
be precise, these were death camps, something the allies were reluctant
to publicly acknowledge, despite the knowledge of their existence.
The west's rationale for its reluctance was understandable.
The war was complicated. It
was fought on multiple fronts, and, it was impossible to rescue sick and
emaciated prisoners from camps so far behind enemy lines.
What wasn't so understandable was the west's indifference to the
matter.
Events in history don't
just spring up out of thin air. Years,
decades, and even centuries, of prior history shape the events of any
given day. This is certainly
the case with Hitler's Germany. Hitler, like all of us,
was a complex individual. He
was molded by a multitude of historic, cultural, religious, and
philosophical influences. One
of these avenues of influence stemmed from German religionists and
philosophers like Georg Hegel. (1770 to 1831)
Hegel espoused the doctrines of the supremacy of the state,
racial purity, and the inferiority of Jews.
The rise of Aryan supremacy and anti-Semitism in Germany
provided in part, and I stress in part because there's more to this than
these two issues, the basis for the social storm we call the Holocaust Ironically, as
anti-Semitism gained popularity in Hitler believed in divine
providence. He was convinced
God had appointed him to power, and in one sense of the word he was
right. An unsettling
childhood, injuries encountered in World War One, imprisonment during
and after the war, numerous assassination attempts, among other things,
proved to him that He had a Messianic mandate.
In a weird but Biblical sense, there's validity to Hitler's
twisted theology. God does
place evil men like Hitler into positions of power to accomplish His
purposes as stated in Daniel 2:21.
The tragedy of the
Holocaust is rooted in the book of Exodus.
There, Israel
entered into a covenant with God known as the Mosaic Covenant.
Israelis stood before God and vowed; "We will do everything
the Lord has said". (Exodus 19:8, 24:3)
The terms of the covenant were understood by all.
If Israel
kept the covenant it would be blessed; if not, it would be cursed.
The blessings of the covenant are listed in Deuteronomy 28:1
through 14 while the curses are listed in verses 15 to 68.
Note that the curses out number the blessings by a ratio of four
to one. One by one, each and
every curse would eventually bring Israel
down. Here are just a few of
the curses. The Lord will send Even as Israelis vowed to
keep the covenant, God said that they'd break it. "These
people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods in the land
they are entering. They will
forsake me and break the covenant". (Deuteronomy 31:16) The
curses of the broken covenant would haunt Israel
for centuries, which included the curse of Israelis eating their new
born babies. Starving Jews
actually ate their babies during the Roman invasion of Why were millions of Jews
exterminated in Nazi death camps? Every
last curse of the covenant had to inflict As Moses predicted the
destruction of Moses, and all the Old
Testament prophets, predicted The curses of the
covenant were seen in part at
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