This blog was originally published by The Friends of Israel.

Two years ago I was in Israel on Yom HaShoah (Holocaust Memorial Day). Our team of young adults, a delegation from California and Nevada taking part in the March of the Living, sat in a park amphitheater together. We each shared what we had learned about the Holocaust during our two weeks in Poland and Israel.

Not long after we began, the wail of a siren broke the calm of the still, spring morning. For two minutes, the haunting blare rang out in remembrance of the 6 million Jews and 5 million Gentiles who died as victims of the Holocaust.

Yom HaShoah is, by its very nature, relatively modern, established by an act of Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, in 1951. This means, of course, that, unlike Passover, Sukkot, Yom Kippur, and the other feasts of Israel, Yom HaShoah is not a biblical holy day. Rather, it is a solemn observance—and a very painful one at that—in which the Jewish community collectively memorializes victims of the Holocaust.

The fact that it was not instituted by God, however, does not mean that Yom HaShoah is not theological. On the contrary, questions about God, His relationship with Israel, and His character are inherent to discussions about the Holocaust. I discovered this several years ago when talking with a Holocaust survivor. He said, “If we are God’s Chosen People, why did He allow 6 million of us to perish? I find it very hard to believe in such a God.” 

Since then, I have heard similar sentiments repeated countless times by Jewish friends. We must acknowledge, however, that questions of God’s presence during the Holocaust are distinct from questioning God’s existence in light of evil in general. My Jewish friends are not necessarily questioning God’s existence; they are questioning why their God would allow such evil to befall His special people.

The Bible has the answers to such questions. Let’s address just a few.

1. GOD WAS NOT SLEEPING.
Recently I was at coffee with a Jewish friend. We were talking about God’s protection of the Jewish people throughout the ages when she said, “I guess God was asleep at the wheel during the Holocaust.”

Certainly, from a human perspective that seems plausible. After all, surely God must not have been alert to or aware of the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. God tells us, however, that He was not sleeping. Far from it, in fact.

Consider past persecutions of the Jewish people. Remember the account of Esther? Although God’s name is never once mentioned in the book of Esther, His hand behind the scenes is evident as He raises a young Jewish woman to a place of authority in the Persian king’s court. He uses Esther to save Persian Jewry from annihilation (Esther 4:14).

And who can forget the Exodus out of Egypt? Oppressed for 400 years by the Egyptians, God used Moses to lead Israel out of bondage and eventually into the land He promised them (although their sin added four decades to the journey!). 

The Lord was not distant from His people during these times—He went through the trials with them.
God was not sleeping or unaware of Israel’s suffering during these painful periods. In fact, the psalmist writes, “Behold, He who keeps Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep” (Psalm 121:4). And the prophet Isaiah declares that “[i]n all their affliction He was afflicted” (Isaiah 63:9). 

The Lord was not distant from His people during these times—He went through the trials with them.

2. GOD FORETOLD OF JEWISH PERSECUTION.
If God was not sleeping during the Holocaust, then He must have allowed the Holocaust to take place. How does that square with a just and good God?

The answer to this question is found in Deuteronomy 28, where we read that because God has a unique relationship with and love for Israel, He will chasten them when they are disobedient. Among the curses of chastening listed there, we find the following:

Then the Lᴏʀᴅ will scatter you among all peoples, from one end of the earth to the other, and there you shall serve other gods, which neither you nor your fathers have known—wood and stone. And among those nations you shall find no rest, nor shall the sole of your foot have a resting place; but there the Lᴏʀᴅ will give you a trembling heart, failing eyes, and anguish of soul. Your life shall hang in doubt before you; you shall fear day and night, and have no assurance of life. In the morning you shall say, “Oh, that it were evening!”And at evening you shall say, “Oh, that it were morning!” because of the fear which terrifies your heart, and because of the sight which your eyes see (vv. 64–67).

The parallels between this description and the experience of many during the Holocaust are unavoidable. Centuries before Hitler was born, God foretold future dispersion of the Jewish people and subsequent persecution of them on the part of the nations.

We must remember, though, the purpose of these curses. They are not merely punitive measures, taken to show God’s displeasure. These curses are acts of God’s chastening of His beloved Chosen People. Indeed, the Scripture records that “whom the Lᴏʀᴅ loves He corrects, just as a father the son in whom he delights” (Prov. 3:12).

3. RESTORATION AND JUDGMENT WILL COME.
The thing about punishment is that it is usually an end in itself, the consequence of bad behavior. Chastening, on the other hand, has as its end goal repentance and restoration, not pain. The pain of punishment is the catalyst God uses to get His people’s attention and to show them where they went wrong.

Shortly after listing the cursings that will come upon Israel for disobedience, God promises restoration, conditioned on repentance. 

Now it shall come to pass, when all these things come upon you, the blessing and the curse which I have set before you, and you call them to mind among all the nations where the Lᴏʀᴅ your God drives you, and you return to the Lᴏʀᴅ your God and obey His voice, according to all that I command you today, you and your children, with all your heart and with all your soul, that the Lᴏʀᴅ your God will bring you back from captivity, and have compassion on you, and gather you again from all the nations where the Lᴏʀᴅ your God has scattered you (Deuteronomy 30:1–3).

Interestingly, eight days after Yom HaShoah, Israel and the Jewish community worldwide celebrate Yom Ha’atzmaut, Israel Independence Day. It is a joyous celebration of the rebirth of Israel as a sovereign nation. But to the believer, it is more than that—it is a recognition of God’s faithfulness to His Chosen People, and it looks forward to the day when ultimate national repentance and restoration will take place (Zechariah 12:10; 14:9–11).

The Holocaust was an incredibly painful event, one that continues to haunt not only the dwindling number of people who experienced it firsthand, but their children and grandchildren too. The Holocaust, though, was not the end. Indeed, as the psalmist writes, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning” (Psalm 30:5). God promised that national restoration will come, and that restoration precedes the judgment of all who have sinned and not placed their trust for salvation in Israel’s Messiah, Nazis included (Revelation 20:11–15).

CONCLUSION
Sitting in that amphitheatre, the lone Gentile among a dozen or so young Jewish people, my heart hurt. Many, if not all of those sitting with me, lost a relative in the Holocaust. 

But as the siren’s scream came to a close, I found myself thanking God. Despite centuries of persecution and satanic attempts to destroy God’s Chosen People, and despite being scattered around the world, sitting with me were members of a new generation of Jewish young people, visiting the historic Jewish homeland. God has been faithful to His promises and He always will be.

This article was originally published by The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry.

During one of my trips to Israel, as I was looking around the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, I noticed a peculiar mural on one of the walls. Though dimly lit, I could just make out the ancient image of Jesus stretched out on the cross, the man who crucified him sitting by His head.

The scene itself was not unusual, considering its location. What was shocking to me was that the man with hammer and spike in hand was not a Roman soldier, as the Scriptures record, but a Jewish man.

Such a depiction in such a place serves as a stark reminder of the often subtle, yet strong animosity that has pervaded the church’s history and its theology throughout the ages, the present-day included.

When talking to those who hold to Replacement Theology, however, we are often accused of creating a strawman, a false argument set up to be defeated. We are told that Replacement Theology is not anti-Semitic and that the term Replacement Theology is a misnomer that does not accurately represent their views. Fulfillment Theology or Supersessionism are more accurate terms, we are told.

While it should be admitted that many of those who hold to Replacement Theology today are not anti-Semites, history proves that anti-Semitism was indeed a major motivation in the formation of Replacement Theology as a system of thought.

Many of the early Gentile church fathers, such as Dionysius, thought that the literal understanding of Scripture, especially concerning the Messianic Kingdom, was “too Jewish,” so they began interpreting Scripture allegorically, denying the traditional literal interpretation that Old Testament Jewish believers and the early church had held to for centuries.

For example, Cyprian, bishop of Carthage, in his Testimonies Against the Jews, wrote that he “endeavored to show that the Jews, according to what had before been foretold, had departed from God, and had lost God’s favour, which had been given them in past time, and had been promised them for the future; while the Christians had succeeded to their place, deserving well of the Lord by faith, and coming out of all nations and from the whole world” (emphasis mine).

Armed with this new way of interpreting Scripture and the deep-seated anti-Semitism many of its leaders held to, the church soon began pushing the nation of Israel off of is divinely-ordained “seat,” and started viewing itself as the “True Israel,” which took the place of “ethnic Israel” of the Old Testament, the majority of whom had rejected Jesus as their Messiah.

In his work, Dialogue of Justin, Philosopher & Martyr, with Trypho, the early church father Justin Martyr wrote “We, who have been quarried out from the bowels of Christ, are the true Israelitic race.”

While many such men contributed to the unseating of Jacob, it can be argued that personal and theological views of no single person caused so much destruction for the Jewish people as did those of Martin Luther.

​Luther originally looked upon the Jewish people kindly. In 1523, he penned That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, a tract in which he criticizes some within the Roman Catholic Church for their anti-Semitic views and for trying to force Jewish people to convert to Christianity. “If I had been a Jew,” he wrote, “and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian.”

His views devolved, however, after unsuccessful attempts to gently share the gospel with the Jewish people over a 20-year period. By 1543, his rather benevolent attitude toward Israel had turned downright anti-Semitic. In his pamphlet, The Jews and Their Lies, Luther made caustic remarks about the Chosen People of God:

“What shall we Christians do with this rejected and condemned people, the Jews?” he wrote. “First to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them.”

Luther went on to advocate the destruction of Jewish homes and of Talmuds, forbidding their rabbis to teach anymore, limiting their travel, and forcing them into hard labor.

Such scathing remarks sound eerily similar to those of another German anti-Semite of a more recent age. Indeed, Adolf Hitler frequently quoted the revered Luther’s comments on the Jewish people, paving the haunting road to Holocaust.

With the sun setting on the last remaining survivors of Hitler’s so-called “Final Solution,” and as another generation of Jewish people is facing the rising tide of anti-Semitism throughout the world, may the phrase “Never Again” be the declaration not only of opposition to another Jewish genocide, but also of the church’s resolve never again to turn on those the Messiah calls His “brethren.”

This article was originally published by The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry.

He sat across from me, his steel blue eyes examining my own. Those eyes had seen many things during their 80+ years—the forced expulsion from home, death marches, ghettos. They were witness to the Holocaust, one of the most horrific events of the 20th century, an experience that shaped his life. And here they were, looking into my own eyes, searching.

“You know,” he began in his thick Hungarian accent, “you are the first Christian I have ever met who loved Israel and the Jews. I thought Christians hated us.”

I was stunned. This man, a survivor of the Holocaust, in his nearly nine decades, had never before met a follower of Jesus who loved his people and their nation. How could this be?

Unfortunately, the words of my elderly friend are not unique, nor are they entirely misinformed. Down through the ages, the Jewish people have been persecuted, maligned, and killed in the name of “That Man,” the title many substitute for the name they dare not utter—Jesus Christ.

How is it that the church became associated with Jew-hatred? Besides the fact that all human beings have wicked hearts capable of such prejudice, I believe history proves the root of much of this animosity within the church stems from the theological scourge known as Replacement Theology, a system of thought that, in its various forms, pushes Israel from its rightful “seat” in God’s plan.

As Christians, we sometimes forget, as do many of our Jewish friends, that Christianity is not a Gentile religion. On the contrary, the Bible is a Jewish book, with Jewish themes, penned by Jewish men, all pointing to the Jewish Messiah, Jesus.

It was through the Jewish prophets that God made some very specific promises to the nation of Israel, among them a land, a nation, and the promise of both receiving blessing and being God’s conduit through which He would bless the world (Genesis 12:1–3). He also promised that the kingdom of David would be established forever (2 Samuel 7:16), a Kingdom that would be ruled by the Messiah (Isaiah 9:6–7).

​Because the early church was predominantly Jewish in its membership, its expectation was that God would literally fulfill these promises to Israel. They believed that the land of Israel was the Jewish homeland promised to Abraham and his descendants forever. They would have understood that the days would come when, although God had scattered Israel throughout the nations for their disobedience, He would restore the Jewish people to the land He gave to them one day. They also were yearning for the day when the Messiah would return to Earth to set up His promised Kingdom (Acts 1:6).
Additionally, the missions program of the early church was to take the gospel to the Jew first and then to the Gentile nations, as Jesus commanded (Acts 1:8) and as Paul later reaffirmed (Romans 1:16). As the gospel went out, however, the makeup of the church changed due to the astounding number of Gentiles coming to faith in the Messiah. The church became a beautiful, ethnically diverse body of people from all over the world. But this change in makeup eventually led to a tragic transformation in the way people viewed both the Scriptures and the “People of the Book,” now a minority in the church—a transformation that would affect both the church and the Jewish people for centuries to come.

As I looked back into the eyes of my elderly friend, I could not help seeing him as a link to an ancient story, a Jewish story. It was this man’s ancestors with whom God identified Himself. It was to them that He committed the Scriptures. It was to them that He promised the Messiah and His Kingdom. It was to them that He gave the gospel first. May the church throughout the world never forget either Jacob or the chair God has given him in His plan for history.