Torch, Summer 1998

i I 11 I r I I I I 1, I! I Ii I j ,1 .. I experienced another part and piece of Jewish history not long ago. When in Washington, I visited the Holocaust Museum. It is almost beyond comprehension that Adolf Hider could get a Deportation ofJews from Banal region of Yugoslavia, 1941. Credit: Muzej Revolucije Narodnosti Jugoslavije, courtesy of USHMM Photo Archives nation to support him in murdering six million Jews. Entire walls at the museum are covered with photographs of people who died in the Holocaust. What grips me about the people involved is that they were people like we are, and they were doing the things that we do: going to school, going to work, plying their trades, working their professions, going about their normal lives and their normal days. Then, there came this dramatic intrusion into their culture. As I walked through the Holocaust Museum, these questions gripped me: Where was the German church? Where were the German believers? Where were the German Christians? Where were those who knew the Lord– not those who just used his name and called themselves Christians, but those who knew the Lord– where were they during the Holocaust? Granted, there were a few who sounded the alarm and paid a heavy price, but generally speaking, the German church was silent. Another gallery in the museum asks a similar question: Where was America? This gallery recounts the story ofAmerican isolationism of that day. Though word was filtering back about what Hider and the Nazis were doing to the Jews, Americans paid little attention. Where was America? Where was the church? Where were the believers? Where were those who knew the name of the Lord and knew about the Holocaust; where was the Christianity in America? Now, here's the frightening question. Can we ask much the same question today? I see many similarities between the Jews in I Kings 12, with what occurred in the Christian world in the middle of this century, and with what is happening in America today. In I Kings 12, the Jews had created a religious system that meant absolutely nothing when it came to carrying out the Word of God. It was ineffective in terms of fostering obedience to the living God and had no impact on their world for their God. That same thing happened to the church in Germany in the 1930s. And I fear it is what we have happening in our nation today. The text in I Kings is plain about two matters: it both gives us the origin and shows the evidences of this type of religious system. The origin is outlined in I Kings 12:26, which reads, "Jeroboam said in his heart...." This system started in the heart of a man, the heart of a leader. Verse 28 reads, "Whereupon the king took counsel.. .. " Do you know with whom he took counsel? He talked to no one other than himself. Verse 33 makes it clear he took counsel only with his own heart. "So he offered upon the altar... even in the month which he had devised of his own heart." This thing started in the heart of a man and it rapidly spread through the people because they (continued on page 10) Torch 5