Sermon #3

A “SAINTS” HOLOCAUST
by Dr. Rev. David R. Mains

Desired Response: Guardedly prepare for.

How To: Realize that anti-Christ-ism is an evil to be guarded against and that powerful forces want to wipe Christians off the face of the earth.

How Long: Start now developing such a mindset.

Sermon in a Sentence: Christ’s followers should guardedly prepare for a “saints” holocaust more terrifying than any previous persecutions.

Five hundred years ago, the Reformation had a profound, positive effect upon the world. Basically it was a protest movement against religious abuses. Those protesters birthed what we today know as “pro-test-ant” or Protestant churches.

Most historians would say the dominant figure back then was a German monk named Martin Luther. His nailing of the 95 Theses to the Castle Church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517, is seen as the spark that ignited the spiritual flames that blazed across Germany and the rest of Europe.

For any who are visitors, we are in a 50-Day Spiritual Adventure called The Remarkable Revelation: Sensing His Presence While Watching for His Return. This is Sunday three of eight, and by the way, it’s still not too late to purchase an Adventure Journal. You can get that, plus the small book most everyone read this past week, called The Day That Changed America at (details).

Rather than starting your journal work at Day 1, I would suggest that you pick up where the rest of the congregation is, at Day 15, or Sunday 3. That’s today. In addition, I also strongly encourage you to read the seven chapters of The Day That Changed America as soon as you are able.

Bob Fraley’s original 281-page book, Salt and Light, which served as the basis for the seven-chapter book that was crafted for this Adventure, is well worth reading also. Our church bulletin has the Web site address where it can be ordered if we run out of copies at our church book table.

Incidentally, for you who started out on Day 1 two weeks ago, if you have missed some days in your journal and feel guilty – don’t! Sometimes new practices are hard to get used to. Just do your best to stay on track this week, okay?

Spiritual Adventures are times for accelerated, measurable and lasting growth in your Christian life. It’s accelerated because you’re going to know quicker progress than normal, especially since you are not in this alone, but with many others here in the church. It’s measurable since you can see in your own handwriting in this journal how you are doing. And it’s lasting because the results of what happen in your life should extend well beyond the duration of this adventure.

It was a little more than 400 years later, in 1933, again in Germany, that another leader came into national and international prominence. His agenda was quite a contrast to Luther’s. His name was Adolf Hitler.

Apart from his military aspirations, he was passionate about his hatred of the Jews. Like a modern-day Haman from the Bible story of Esther, Hitler didn’t keep his feelings a secret. As early as 1922 he allegedly told a journalist:

Once I really am in power, my first and foremost task will be the annihilation of the Jews. … I will have gallows built in rows. … Then the Jews will be hanged indiscriminately, and they will remain hanging until they stink. … As soon as they have been untied, the next batch will be strung up … until the last Jew in Munich has been exterminated.

True to his ambition, almost immediately upon coming into power, a series of laws was passed excluding Jews from various professions. Lawyers were disbarred; judges were dragged from their chambers and beaten up by storm troopers, Hitler’s private army of hoodlums. Jewish students were not allowed to attend universities.

In 1935 German Jews had their citizenships taken away and lost all their civil rights. Think of it. One such individual was Albert Einstein, who was in America at the time, and later went to Belgium, but never returned to his native land. The orchestra conductor Bruno Walter fled after being told that the hall where the Berlin Philharmonic performed would be burned down if he went through with the concert scheduled there.

Hitler made it clear in his speech that introduced this change in the laws, that if these measures didn’t work, the problem would be handed over to the National Socialist Party for a (quote) “final solution.” That expression – “The Final Solution to the Jewish Problem” – soon became the standard way Nazis would refer to extermination.

Soon Hitler took control of the nation’s newspapers, police, industries, courts and schools. Here young children were taught to spy for the Nazis, even on their parents. The majority of Germans accepted these changes. Those who protested were forced to leave the country, imprisoned, or simply shot.

Hitler’s Jewish agenda was intensified in 1939 when his crack troops took over Poland, home to about 2 million Jewish people. It was then that Jews were restricted to ghettos where they were all put to work in the Nazi war machine. The Warsaw Ghetto was the largest, with a population of 380,000. Living conditions were horrendous, averaging 9.2 persons per room. Food was scarce and many died of starvation. There were occasional uprisings in the ghettos, but the fighters were never a match for the superior German firepower.

Special extermination camps were then established, where unsuspecting Jews would be taken on trains. German-appointed groups of Jews in the ghettos had the terrible task of deciding who should be sent off. We’re talking large numbers of deportees being sent to who-knows-where, and for who-knows-what. We know more now about the gas chambers and the emaciated bodies and the awful medical experiments, than any Jews were aware of back then. In the course of one 52-day stretch, 300,000 Jewish people from Warsaw alone were put on the dreaded trains and sent to these sinister places.

Appointed community leaders who refused to cooperate were shot in the head. One entire group chose to commit suicide rather than go along with what was happening.

In 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, there were again several million Jews who lived in the newly conquered territories. This is when accounts of the death squads come into play. Forced to lie down next to each other in large open pits, the Jews were just systematically shot by the Nazis. Immediately another group of unfortunates had to stretch out on the bloody bodies beneath them, then they too met their fate. Another layer of human beings, and another, until the giant hole was filled with bodies. Then the victims were just covered over with dirt.

I’ll stop.

But listen to me. Germany was a country with educated and cultured people. It still is. Germans are great in terms of industrial matters. They’re good bankers. Germans are fine musicians. It’s the nation of Bach and Beethoven. Germans love their meat and their beer. In many ways they’re like Americans. They dance a lot. They’re thrifty. (Okay, Americans aren’t very thrifty.)

How could it be that when Hitler came to power there were a half-million Jews in Germany, and when the war was over all but 30,000 had been killed or left the country?

I have tried to be circumspect in what I have said. I haven’t shown you any of the disturbing pictures that are available. I haven’t told you any of the heart-wrenching personal stories. I’ve not tried to make you feel like throwing up, although that’s how I felt a number of times as I researched this sermon.

I encourage you to go to Holocaust on the Internet. Just reading the Wikipedia material, which is the Web’s free encyclopedia, is worth your time. Then you can absorb this information at your own pace.

“But why even bring this up?” you ask. “And in church!”

It’s because of the series we’re in, and the conviction I have that this is what all too many believers will be going through in the days ahead, only worse!

I know I have some explaining to do. But first here’s my sermon in a sentence: Christ’s followers should guardedly prepare for a “saints” holocaust more terrifying than any previous persecutions. I’m not talking about another Jewish holocaust, but a holocaust of the saints. Again, Christ’s followers should guardedly prepare for a “saints” holocaust more terrifying than any previous persecutions.

I’m aware that the word “holocaust” is practically owned by the Jews, and I can understand their intense feelings about it. What they experienced as a people was unimaginable and close to unforgivable. So for me to borrow their term without somehow seeking permission feels a little like stealing. But I felt so strongly the need to have you hear what I’m saying, and the word “persecution” doesn’t get an emotional response from church people anymore. Talking about Nero burning Christians as torches in the night—hundreds of them—to light the Roman roads, is so far removed from the present that it doesn’t stir us like it should. It was too long ago and too far away. I needed something more current and more visceral.

I wanted you to feel the helplessness and the innocence of these people being put through such horrors for no reason other than that they were Jewish. They weren’t troublemakers. They were some of the most upstanding people in the German nation. And they weren’t even given the option of converting to another faith to escape their fate. They were just singled out for extermination because they were Jewish. I have to believe there was something demonic driving the human perpetrators of this terrible evil.

The key passage of Scripture in this sermon series is Revelation chapter 13. It’s about a superpower that will emerge at the end of this present age and align itself with that liar and mass murderer Satan to (quote) “make war against the saints and to conquer them.”

Hitler made war on the Jews. He treated them mercilessly.

The beast in Revelation 13 doesn’t make war on the Jews and conquer them. The text reads that he makes war on the saints. It doesn’t take a whole lot of smarts to figure out who this is referring to.

End of Short Preview for Sermon #3