Remembering The Holocaust
All throughout God’s Word, God asks us to remember. In Luke 22: 19, Yeshua tells His disciples when doing the Passover Seder, and they get to the part of the Afikomen, to remember Him. “And when He had taken some bread and given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is My body, which is being given for you; do this in remembrance of Me.”
Remember Him for what? Remember His death. So we want to remember the Holocaust. We want to remember their death. Why is it important to remember the Holocaust? Probably for the same reason we remember 9/11 or Pearl Harbor. Atrocities done to humanity should never be forgotten. We have an obligation to remember, and to learn from it, so that it may never happen again. What happens to one, happens to all of us, because we are all part of humanity. We all share this planet and we must all coexist on it in a civilized manner.
John 13:34-35 tells us this, “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this all people will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.”
This does not say only to love one another but Yeshua says that we are to love, as He has loved us. And how has Yeshua loved us? By laying down His life for us
John 15:13 continues to say, “Greater love has no one than this, that a person will lay down his life for his friends.”
If we are to love like our Messiah loved then we are to lay down our lives for one another. Now, this does not sound like we should be annihilating one another. Today we have so many activists protesting about one thing or another, but we do not see anyone protesting against countries or people who are mistreating or persecuting or systematically eliminating a whole culture or religion or nationality of people. We need not go any further than those who rule with their ideologies. We have done a thirteen part series on “The Sins of our Forefathers.” In this series we discuss the attitude that many theologians had toward the Jewish people. But Paul reminds us in Romans 3:2, that the Jewish people were entrusted with the Word of God. Romans 9:4-5 says this,
“Who are the Israelites, to whom belongs the adoption as sons and daughters, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, (Ten commandments) the temple service,(worship) and the promises; whose are the fathers, (the Patriarchs) and from whom is the Messiah according to the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen”
Romans 11:17-18 tells us, “But if some of the branches were broken off, and you, being a wild olive, were grafted in among them and became partaker with them of the rich root of the olive tree, do not be arrogant toward the branches; but if you are arrogant, remember that it is not you who supports the root, but the root supports you.”
Again we are told to remember. We seem to forget that Yeshua was Jewish. Our roots are Jewish roots. We must look and act like our Messiah, that is the true definition of a disciple. He told us to love one another.
The Jewish Deicide is a notion that the Jews collectively were responsible for killing the Messiah. The notion arose in early Christianity; the charge was made by Justin Martyr and Melito of Sardis as early as the 2nd century. The accusation that the Jews were Christ-killers fed Christian anti-Semitism and spurred on acts of violence against Jews such as pogroms, massacres of Jews during the Crusades, expulsions of the Jews from England, France, Spain, Portugal and other places, and torture during the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions.
The text of Matthew 27:24-25 has been the Scripture that they hung their hat on. “Now when Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but rather that a riot was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd, saying, “I am innocent of this Man’s blood; you yourselves shall see.” And all the people replied, “His blood shall be on us and on our children!” This was an organized mob that the elite Jews formed for this very purpose. Remember thousands of people would come and gather to hear the Messiah speak. It was not them who condemned Him to death. John Chrysostom (c. 347 – 407) was an important Early Church Father who served as Archbishop of Constantinople and is known for his fanatical anti-Semitism, collected in his homilies, such as Adversus Judaeos. The charge of Jewish Deicide was the cornerstone of his theology, and he was the first to use the term deicide and the first Christian preacher to apply the word deicide to Jews collectively. He held that for this putative ‘deicide’, there was no expiation, pardon or indulgence possible. This idea that the Jews killed the Messiah went on through the centuries. But in the catechism which was produced by the Council of Trent in the mid-16th Century, the Catholic Church taught the belief that the collectivity of sinful humanity was responsible for the death of Jesus, not only the Jews. Even though this proclamation was made there were still people who did not believe it to be true and held the Jews totally responsible. Nero and the other Caesars did not know such teaching, but Hitler should have known. We are going to take a closer look at Adolph Hitler and his view of Christianity and the Jewish people to help understand what took place, and why and to see how people come to conclusions that are extreme because of teachings that are not true. According to Wikipedia and other historic writings, “Hitler was born to a practicing Catholic mother, Klara Hitler, and was baptized in the Roman Catholic Church; his father, Alois Hitler, was a free-thinker and skeptical of the Catholic Church. In 1904, he was confirmed at the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Linz, Austria, where the family lived. According to John Willard Toland, witnesses indicate that Hitler’s confirmation sponsor had to “drag the words out of him … almost as though the whole confirmation was repugnant to him”. Hitler biographer John Toland offers the opinion that Hitler “carried within him its teaching that the Jew was the killer of God. Their extermination, therefore, could be done without a twinge of conscience since he was merely acting as the avenging hand of God …” Later Hitler called himself a German Christian. The German Christians were a Protestant group that supported Nazi Ideology. Hitler and the Nazi party also promoted “nondenominational” positive Christianity, a movement which rejected most traditional Christian doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus, as well as Jewish elements such as the Old Testament. Eventually Hitler no longer believed in anything Christian. He believed that there was one god, and that was Germany. According to Table Talk, Hitler believed that Jesus’ true Christian teachings had been corrupted by the apostle Paul, who had transformed them into a kind of Jewish Bolshevism, which Hitler believed preached “the equality of all men amongst themselves, and their obedience to an only God and this is what caused the death of the Roman Empire.”
Hitler had admired the pomp of Catholic ritual and the hierarchical organization of the clergy. Later he drew on these elements, organizing his party along hierarchical lines and including liturgical forms into events or using phraseology taken from hymns. Because of these liturgical elements, Hitler had a messiah-like status and the ideology’s totalitarian nature, the Nazi movement, like other fascist movements and communism, is sometimes termed a “political religion” that is anti-ecclesiastical and anti-religious. Throughout Hitler’s life he went back and forth on his ideas of Christianity, but true Christianity was never in his heart. Hitler believed in science over Christianity. Germany was his god and he was going to create a new world order. National Socialist ideology developed a racial hierarchy which placed minority groups – most especially the Jews as subhuman. The categorization was based on the Nazi conception of race, and not on religion, thus Slavs and Poles (who were overwhelmingly Christian) were also grouped as inferior to the so-called “Aryan” peoples. Hitler espoused a ruthless policy of “negative eugenic selection”, believing that world history consisted of a struggle for survival between races, in which the Jews plotted to undermine the Germans, and inferior groups like Slavs and defective individuals in the German gene pool, threatened the Aryan “master race”. Writing for the public in Mein Kampf, Hitler described the Jews as enemies of all civilization and as materialistic, unspiritual beings: “His life is only of this world, and his spirit is inwardly as alien to true Christianity as his nature two thousand years previous was to the great founder of the new doctrine.” In the work, he also described a supposedly divine mandate for his anti-Semitism: “Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.”
But Hitler had no regard for the Catholic Church either. Hitler promulgated the sterilization law, and began work to dissolve the Catholic Youth League. Clergy, nuns and lay leaders began to be targeted, leading to thousands of arrests over the ensuing years, often on trumped up charges of currency smuggling or “immorality”. Catholic publications were shut down. The Gestapo began to violate the sanctity of the confessional. On Protestantism, Hitler proposed to unite Germany’s 28 Protestant churches into one Reich Church, which was the German Evangelical Church. Hitler stated to Albert Speer, “Through me the Protestant Church could become the established church, as in England.” Steigmann-Gall wrote that Hitler demonstrated a preference for Protestantism over Catholicism, as Protestantism was more liable to reinterpretation and non-traditional readings, more receptive to “positive Christianity”, and because some of its liberal branches had held similar views. Hitler’s interest was opportunistic: “From Hitler’s point of view, a national church was of interest purely from a point of view of control and manipulation”, wrote Kershaw He installed his friend Ludwig Müller as leader of the movement and sought to establish a pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic unified Reich Church. We have seen that nothing good can come from those who only want power and control. They don’t care whose lives they ruin or eliminate. It is important that we teach the Word of God in the true light. The church has taken many Scriptures and incorrectly interpreted them to align with their doctrine. This is sad but true, and it cost 6 million Jewish people to lose their lives and it ruined the lives of millions of others. The Jews did not kill the Messiah, it was our sins. Isaiah 53:4-5 says, “Surely He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed.”
Yeshua tells us this in John 10:17-18, “For this reason the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life so that I may take it back. No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it back. This commandment I received from My Father.” Yeshua was a Jew and He did not hate the Pharisees or anyone else. He came to correctly teach the Word of God, not to eliminate it. He did not eliminate the Hebrew Scriptures, which we call old and not necessary. And He did not in any way, shape or form, tell us that the Jewish people were no good or enemies of God. We have been grafted into Israel and they support us and not the other way around. The Hebrew Scriptures are the foundation to all other Scriptures, because God’s Word is eternal. Yeshua quoted them regularly. Today as believers we must remember and ask forgiveness for our forefathers who caused the death of so many people throughout history. Yes, we must repent, because we are part of humanity. Today, anti-Semitism is on the rise and history will repeat itself. We must stand with the Jewish people, because they are the root that supports us. Revelation 12:17, speaking of the Antichrist says, “So the dragon was enraged with the woman,(Israel) and went off to make war with the rest of her children, who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus (Yeshua).”
The evil forces are not only going after the Jewish people, but those who also believe in Messiah Yeshua, Christians. Let’s stand with Israel, and the Jewish people in whom we have been grafted into. Their plight is our plight, their persecution is our persecution, their God is our God, so we must stand together, because history is repeating itself.
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