Peace On Earth?

A few months ago my uncle gave me a pretty neat little snap shot he had of my grandpa and I back when we were a little younger.

My grandfather has actually past away since then, as well as my grandma and my aunt, and so to keep my family’s history remembered, as well as to honor my grandpa’s request – my uncle passed on to me my grandfather’s WWII military uniform.

I think my grandfather and I had about the same height because the uniform actually fits pretty well, and especially his old satchel I use all the time. He used it to carry around his books and maps, and maybe a few emergency items to help his patients with; and I use it to carry around my Bible and my laptop... it’s kind of like the different tools we each use, albeit completely different centuries, to help us change the world.

Most masculine man purse ever.

I know that that’s a pretty big statement to the degree that some may say it's pretty presumptive, but I say it nonetheless because I really believe it's true - I really believe the message in the Bible can change the world.

And so yeah - anyways, the other thing that my uncle gave me as an important tool to remember history with was a compilation of pictures and documents that my grandfather saved from the war. All his pictures are in black and white, and I remember one summer day when I was like 12 that he sat me down on a purple couch in his living room so he could show me all those pictures.


In the picture to the left we're both sitting in the same living room that we sat at when he showed me the pictures, it's just that we're each about 10 years younger because there's no way that I could have possibly even started to understand those pictures at the age of 2.


They are really horrific pictures, more horrible than anything I have ever seen, but they are real, and that’s the point - that’s the reason for why my grandpa showed them to me. He showed them to me so that I wouldn't be someone who would ever deny reality, and specifically, he showed them to me so that I wouldn't ever be someone who would deny the reality of what happened in World War II.

Above: Bodies piled near crematorium upon my grandpa's arrival at Dachau May 1945. To the left: One of my Grandpa's patients with amputated leg (15 years old).  


I think my grandpa wanted me to be sensitive to injustice and to see an example, embodied in himself, of someone who stood up for the ruthless and terrible evils of the Holocaust. I think he wanted me to be conscious of and concerned for the helpless and the oppressed, and I think he wanted to show me that he was courageous, as I imagine he hoped that one day I would be, in helping victimized people if ever that day demanded it from me.

Maj. Jack Killins and Lucazewski by their jeep in Bacarat, France March 1945.

My grandfather* as well as many other men and women sacrificed a whole lot of themselves (and in some cases their very lives!), so that you and I could enjoy the freedoms that we have today. They did it because they saw a tremendous injustice and were not willing to let that injustice slide by as if it wasn't their problem.

Above: My grandfather with other members from Team Europe (In both pictures he's the tallest one standing) To the left: Maj. Killins and Ralph Demrau at Camp Twenty Grand.

I respect that, I admire it, and I'm grateful for it.

But taking this theme a little deeper though, why is it that injustice happens? How could the Nazis so unabashedly slaughter so many Jews just because they were Jews? How could they starve them and torture them and do experiments on them and incinerate them or suffocate them in gas chambers? How could German soldiers implement such terrible atrocities to a whole race simply because they were ordered to do so?



Prisoners to the left and bodies of deceased prisoners to the right shortly after the arrival of allied troops to Dachau.   

Even more than that, how could God allow it?

Where in the world was God when all these crazy monstrosities were going down?

Where in the world is God today when the big time hurricanes hit, when the Connecticut school shootings go down, when various North African nations endure months of famine on end, or when the North Indian slums never improve? Where is He when dictators rise, when genocides strike, when loved ones die, when relationships break, or when any number of other devastating things occur?

Why does God forsake us like that?

...To be honest, I don't know that I can fully give the complete answer to that question, but I know that the primary solution to it comes from another Jew who was born into this world about 2013 years ago. A Jew who saw a ruthless and terrible evil but was not willing to let that reality slide by as if it wasn't His problem.

While many Jews living in Europe during the mid 40's suffered tremendously under Hitler's Nazi Regime, there was another Jew around 33 A.D. that suffered even more tremendously under Herod's rule of the jurisdiction of Nazareth...

The intriguing thing though is that it wasn't even Jesus' excruciating crucifixion that was what made Christ's death so devastating. The worst suffering Jesus had to endure didn't come from any mortal man. The worst suffering that Christ had to endure came from God Himself... In a very real sense it was God that killed His Son (Isaiah 53:4,10).

...The only reason why pain and suffering exists in this world is because sin exists, yet that doesn't mean that God is not loving because the truth is that He has provided a remedy for it. God isn't aloof or oblivious to sin and suffering - it breaks His heart so much that He stared it straight in its face and dealt with it in the most radical way possible.

God dealt with sin by sending His own Son to be tortured and to die on the cross to free us from it (John 3:16). Jesus is no stranger to suffering, in fact that is what He is most known for (Isaiah 53:3-5,7).

I said earlier that I didn't think I could give a completely adequate answer as to why any number of devastating things occur in this world or as to why so much pain and sorrow exists, and I asked why God at times seems to so heartlessly forsake us in the midst of them - but actually I can't really ask that question because the truth is that He doesn't.

See, that was the whole point of why Jesus had to die. He had to be forsaken so that we could be forgiven; and we have been forgiven so that we would never be forsaken.

Jesus was the only one that could ever cry out "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" (Psalm 22:1, Matthew 27:46, Mark 15:34), because He was the only one that was truly forsaken by Him... Notice though how Jesus in the midst of this total abandonment by His Father, still refers to Him as "My God", therefore implying that at the very epicenter of God's total abandonment of Him, He still believed in Him...

In Hebrews 13:5 God promises that He will never leave us or forsake us - and remember how in my last entry I was like making a really big deal about how we shouldn't think that we can ever help God?

Well the reason for that is because He's actually the one helping us, not the other way around. The very next verse in Hebrews 13 affirms that, because God will never leave us nor forsake us, "we can say with confidence, 'The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?'" (v. 6).

I know that this might be starting to get a little crazy for some of you, but if you've stuck with me for this long, let me just make one last analogy about these things that I've been saying in relation to a couple more songs that I've thought about recently.

There's this really curious line that Jon Foreman says at the end of "Gone" from Switchfoot's Beautiful Letdown album where he makes reference to a question that Bono supposedly asked at some point, and the lyrics go like this:

Every moment that we borrow

Brings us closer to the God

 Whose not short of cash

Hey Bono I'm glad you asked

Life is still worth living

...According to this Hebrews 13 passage that I've been mentioning - right before the author of Hebrews quotes the passage where God says, "Never will I leave you and never will I forsake you," the admonition that goes beforehand reads, "Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have."

So that fits in pretty nicely for what I just quoted from "Gone," but anyway... as for what Jon Foreman is referring to when he says,"Hey Bono I'm glad you asked" - I'm not entirely sure - but maybe what he's referring to has to do with the questions that Bono asks at the end of his song "Peace on Earth" from U2's album All that You Can't Leave Behind when he brings up all these really difficult issues of pain and sorrow and then asks this:

Jesus can you take the time

To throw a drowning man a line?

Peace on Earth

To tell the ones who hear no sound

Whose sons are living in the ground

Peace on Earth

I hear it every Christmas time

But hope and history won't rhyme

So what's it worth?

This peace on Earth?

...Basically I think that what Jon Foreman is saying is like, "Hey Bono, I'm glad you asked those questions. And yeah He can. And it's worth a lot. And life is still worth living."

...But then again that's really just what I think he's responding to. I'm just guessing because honestly I can't know for sure...

All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people's sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ's ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ's behalf: Be reconciled to God.

God made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

2 Corinthians 5:18-21  

* Although it's really tough to admit it; from an instance that I remember my dad talking to my grandpa about it a few years before he died, my grandfather had the same question that I've been talking about of "if God is so loving, how could he permit such tremendous suffering in this world?" ...And unfortunately to my knowledge, my grandfather never found that answer in Christ.