Why Evil Triumphs

The Nuremberg Trials

The Holocaust Remembrance Day was recently observed throughout much of the world. For many older folks--whether they're Jews or not--the Holocaust was one of the darkest periods in human history. Ten million people perished during that nightmare--six million of them Jews.

In Israel, where many Holocaust survivors eventually ended up, the day is known as Yom Hashoah V’Gevurah. And, as those survivors who are still around well understand, had Adolf Hitler not been stopped by the brutal Russian winter of 1941, there would be no Israel because the Jewish people would've likely been eliminated from the world. Completely.

However, for many younger people, the Holocaust is just ancient history that doesn't mean anything to them. They weren't around when it happened, so why should they care? It's completely irrelevant.

But it shouldn't be. Why? Because the Holocaust provides a us with a valuable lesson concerning what happens to people who completely reject God and embrace evil. They become vile and wicked. Let the apostle Paul explain it: 

"Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done.They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God's righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them." (Romans 1:28-32) 

Paul's revelation helps us understand Hitler and his Third Reich that rejected God as a myth conjured in primitive minds. Oh sure, the fuhrer often referenced God and invoked the name of Jesus Christ in his hypnotic speeches.

But that was merely for propaganda purposes. Germany was a predominantly Lutheran and Roman Catholic nation in the 1930s. The fuhrer knew that in order to gain the confidence of the German people, he had to speak their language. He pretended to be a Christian in order to gain the votes necessary to become Germany's Chancellor in 1933. And once he accomplished that, the mask came off.

And when the mask came off, Hitler revealed his true persona. He was an atheist who believed that he had a responsibility to make the world a better place by cleansing it of undesirable groups such as Jews, Slavs, Poles, the mentally and physically handicapped, and homosexuals. He would then repopulate the earth with a master race of Aryans selectively bred from the finest human stock.

Though Hitler was considered a reactionary, he was in fact a leftist who embraced evolution. He saw human life as nothing more than the end product of millions of years of random evolutionary forces. To the fuhrer, human life was cheap and meaningless. It was no more significant than ant life or plant life.

Though Hitler is frequently invoked by the left as the epitome of evil, the left's worldview is identical to the fuhrer's worldview. The left supports eugenics, population control, totalitarian government and the eradication of "undesirables" such as Christians, Jews, conservatives, the elderly and the infirm. Those were Hitler's views.

One of the left's heroes is Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood who was an arch-racist who advocated for the elimination of blacks, Jews and eastern Europeans from the world. Concerning the mentally infirm, who she despised, she said this:

We are failing to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying...the dead weight of human waste...an ever-increasing spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.

Sanger wanted to eliminate her undesirables through sterilization so they couldn't procreate. Those who managed to procreate would be "encouraged" to abort their unborn babies so they wouldn't contaminate the world. Hitler admired Sanger's ideas. But he believed that mass murder was quicker and more effective than sterilization.

I want you to look closely at the picture above. It contains many of the faces of Hitler's henchmen such as Rudolf Hess, Hermann Goring, Joachim Von Ribbentrop and Wilhelm Keitel who were charged with crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg Trials.

They weren't haters. Rather, they sold their souls to evil. They bought into Hitler's delusion that their leader was commissioned by fate to lead the world into 1,000 years of peace and prosperity. And they went to their graves believing that.

How is that relevant today? We have the same belief system operating today. There's a group of international elites who possess the same worldview that Hitler possessed. They want to resurrect the fuhrer's Third Reich, and they'll eventually accomplish that. And then the world will be as one. Under the dreaded Antichrist and his tyrannical world government. 

When God is Irrelevant

A familiar scene in many big cities

What does the world look like without the presence of God? What does the world look like without the fear of God and the knowledge of his laws and commandments? And what becomes of human beings who reject God?

The apostle Paul gave us that answer nearly 2,000 years ago in his epistle to the early church in Rome. The Roman Empire of Paul's time had many gods, but rejected any notion that there was only one true God who revealed His laws and commandments through Moses and His prophets. Absent that reality, human beings were left to determine what was right in their own eyes.

That created chaos and anarchy. When human beings become willfully ignorant of God, they descend into the deepest depths of depravity. Here's what Paul wrote: "Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them." (Romans 1:28-32)

History teaches us a clear lesson concerning those who turn away from God. From the ancient Ninevites to recent entities such as Nazi Germany, Communist China, Cambodia and the Soviet Union, atheism has always led to depravity, hopelessness, persecution, and mass murder. When people refuse to believe that they're held morally accountable by God for their behavior, they inevitably sink into depravity, violence and bloodshed.

We learned that lesson yet again recently when the Center for Medical Progress released a series of videos showing officials from Planned Parenthood discussing the sale of body parts from unborn babies with CMP employees who posed as buyers. The CMP videos are both shocking and disgusting. It's disgusting to hear adults dehumanize the unborn into commodities to be chopped up and sold, and it's shocking to hear them describe the procedures that Planned Parenthood uses to extract body parts from the unborn.

Those Planned Parenthood officials are no different than the Nazis who dehumanized the Jews and other groups they persecuted during Adolf Hitler's reign of hell in Germany during the 1930s and 40s. And America's embarrassing indifference to the videos and the barbaric procedures discussed in those videos leads us to the painful conclusion that America has turned her back on God and is about to be judged by Him.

No nation that has murdered 55 million unborn babies since abortion was legalized in 1973 is going to continue to survive and prosper. No nation that's legalized the abomination of same-sex marriage can escape God's judgment. And no nation throughout history that's persecuted Jews and Christians has survived for very long.

What does America need to do? She needs to repent by repealing Rove v. Wade and same-sex marriage. She needs to stop betraying Israel and persecuting Christians. And she needs to repent soon because time is running out.

What will happen to America if she refuses to repent? She's going to experience violent hurricanes, blizzards and tornadoes; damaging earthquakes, extensive forest fires, floods, intense heat waves and devastating droughts. Her economy will collapse; her cities will become crime-ridden sewers and she will be threatened with nuclear destruction by nations such as Russia and China.

Don't think that will happen? Then you'd better think again. It's coming.

What's the solution? It's repentance from sin and the acknowledgment of the true sovereign God of the universe who revealed Himself 2,000 years ago through His Son Jesus Christ. That acknowledgment must include the honor and respect for God's laws and commandments rather than a revival of religiosity. America needs more genuine faith in God rather than more religion.

Nearly 3,000 years ago, the Lord spoke these words to King Solomon who sought His blessing upon the ancient land of Israel: "When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command locusts to devour the land or send a plague among my people, if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land." (2 Chronicles 7:13-14)

That's how America can prevent God's wrath from coming upon the land. And that's the only way.

The Beginning of the Last Days

Charles Darwin and Karl Marx

Certainly, evil has existed since the beginning of time when the first couple, Adam and Eve defied God by eating fruit from a deadly tree that was located in the primordial Garden of Eden. 

Though the fruit didn't make them physically ill, it permanently corrupted their souls, and that corruption has been passed on to every human being who has ever lived. That corruption, that's better known as depravity, has contaminated history with multiplied murders, crime, wars and violence. Though everyone possesses that sin nature, they also possess a conscience instilled by God to make them understand the clear difference between right and wrong.

Without a conscience, human beings would be nothing more than intelligent beasts. The human conscience serves to impart God's laws and commandments to each person so they will realize that they're held accountable by God for their behavior. 

Let the apostle Paul explain it: "All who sin apart from the law will also perish apart from the law, and all who sin under the law will be judged by the law. For it is not those who hear the law who are righteous in God’s sight, but it is those who obey the law who will be declared righteous. (Indeed, when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.) This will take place on the day when God judges people’s secrets through Jesus Christ, as the gospel declares." (Romans 2:12-16)

One of the manifestations of man's depraved spiritual nature is denial. Denial of what? Denial of God and His transcendent moral laws. But what's behind that denial? Rebellion and the refusal to submit to God's authority. When people embrace sin, their consciences begin condemning them. That causes guilt feelings. While that motivates some folks to repent, others refuse and they go looking for reasons to dismiss their guilt and remain in their sin. 

Denial of God's existence isn't a modern phenomenon. It's existed for a long time. Nearly 3,000 years ago, King David wrote this: "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.' They (all human beings) are corrupt, their deeds are vile; there is no one who does good." (Psalm 14: 1) For thousands of years, people who denied God's existence were indeed considered fools. Atheism was the malady of people who were morally bankrupt and in denial.

But along came a lapsed theologian and an amateur scientist in the 19th century by the name of Charles Darwin. Darwin began to doubt God's existence after his daughter Annie died, and he sought to provide a purely natural explanation for life sans God. In 1859, he published On The Origin of Species, a purely speculative and terrible theory that dismissed God and postulated life as the product of random evolutionary forces that began in an ancient mud pond. 

The odds of intelligent life originating from chemical processes in a primordial mud pond were so remote and astronomical, they were considered impossible. The late eminent scientist and astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle placed the odds of Darwinian evolution being true at one in ten to the power of 40,000. Mathematicians will tell you that anything beyond the power of 800 is mathematically impossible.

Nevertheless, Darwin's theory became music to the ears of those who hated God and desperately sought to escape moral accountability to His laws. Though Darwin's theories were as dangerous as they were bad, they became popular with atheists who finally had a life-preserver to hang onto. Darwin's theory of evolution gradually spread across the world and began to be taught as factual science in public school and college classrooms. Millions of young people, who had grown up believing in God, were now taught a terrible theory disguised as scientific truth that life had appeared naturally without God.

One of Darwin's disciples was a German philosopher named Karl Marx who was convinced that capitalism was an evil byproduct of the Judeo-Christian worldview. He believed that capitalism created economic classes of rich and poor, with the wealthy getting wealthier by ripping off the poor. He believed that capitalism created poverty that resulted in conflict between the classes. Marx believed that taking the wealth from rich people and giving it to the poor would solve crime, poverty and end class strife.

Needless to say, Marxism doesn't work, has never worked and will never work because it denies the spiritual depravity inherent in all human beings. Taking away wealth from successful people via confiscatory taxes, ruins their incentive to succeed. Giving that wealth to those who are lazy, uneducated and unmotivated ruins their incentive to escape poverty. Why get educated and work hard when you don't have to? 

What do evolution and Marxism have to do with the last days? They arose because of an apathetic and morally weak Christian church that either couldn't or refused to counter these demonic ideologies. In part two, the rise of evil on the collapse of the modern church.

When Lives Don't Matter

A victim of an abortion

During his three-year ministry in ancient Israel, this is one of the things that Jesus Christ said: "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." (John 10:10)

Of course, Christ was referring to Satan who not only seeks to destroy human beings in the flesh, but who also seeks to murder their souls via false religions that deny the necessity of the cross in the redemption of mankind.

But make no mistake about it; Satan is all about murder and the destruction of human life. Murder is his most precious weapon because he uses it to prevent the salvation of human beings. Those who die outside of Christ are doomed eternally.

And so, even though the devil doesn't murder human beings directly, he motivates fallen human beings who are under his influence to do his bidding. While many folks in what passes for the modern civil rights movement are babbling about how black lives matter--as if no one else's life does--the lives of unborn babies and young infants apparently don't matter. At least not to a growing number of people.

Since 1973, when the United States Supreme Court (SCOTUS) legalized abortion, over 55 million babies have been murdered. And that's just in the U.S. Across the world where abortion has been flourishing in many nations much longer than it has in America, millions more unborn babies have been snuffed out by abortion executioners.

Last year (2014) the most abortions occurred in China where 7,930,000 unborn infants were terminated. Next came Russia with 2,287,300 followed by Viet Nam with 1,520,000; the U.S. (1,365,700) and the Ukraine (635,000). Though China led the way in sheer numbers, Russia actually had a higher abortion rate (68.4 abortions for every 1,000 births) compared to China (26 per 1,000 births). Russia's rate was much higher because of Russia's smaller population. 

If pre-birth abortion isn't bad enough, we now have folks who call themselves "medical ethicists" clamoring for post-birth abortions. That's right; you read that correctly. There are those who want to murder living, breathing babies because they don't believe their lives matter.

In 2012, the Journal of Medical Ethics published an article written by medical ethicists Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva who argued that newborns and infants aren't actually human beings with personalities. Thus, according to their reasoning that would've made Josef Mengele blush, these infants should be fair game for execution if their parents decide they're better off emotionally and economically without them.

Giubilini and Minerva actually said this: "Parents should be allowed to have their newborn babies killed because they are morally irrelevant, and ending their lives is no different to abortion. The moral status of an infant is equivalent to that of a fetus in the sense that both lack those properties that justify the attribution of a right to life of an individual." 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk  

Many folks will dismiss Giubilini and Minerva as kooks. They shouldn't because there are a lot of people in high places who agree with them. One of them is a radical named Peter Singer, a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. 

Singer has called for a massive reduction in the world's population in order to rescue the planet and save the environment. Like Giubilini and Minerva, Singer doesn't believe that a child achieves "full moral status" until age one or two, so their parents should be able to "abort" them legally.

Naturally, like most people who possess such a disdain for human life, Singer is an atheist. Since atheists don't believe in God, they embrace Darwinian evolution as the explanation for the existence of life. While the Bible reveals that human beings are created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26) atheists believe that human beings are merely the end product of millions of years of random evolutionary forces.

And people who believe that see no value in human life. Nearly 2,000 years ago the apostle Paul wrote this concerning people who reject the truth of God for a lie: "For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human being and birds and animals and reptiles." (Romans 1:21-23)

When people reject God, human life becomes cheap and meaningless. And when human life no longer matters, then anarchy, chaos and mass destruction follow. How far the world has plunged morally in just the past 50 years! How much farther will it continue to fall? That's a terrifying question. 

Atheism and the Shoah

Jews in a Nazi concentration camp

Why do so many Jews identify themselves as atheists? Because they lost their faith in God after six million of their ancestors died in Hitler's death camps over 70 years ago.

These Jews claim that no loving God would've ever allowed such a travesty to take place on earth. They reason that if God exists, he wouldn't have allowed such mass murderers as Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong to be born. Therefore, according to their logic, because evil exists, God can't possibly exist.

But stop and think about this: If God doesn't exist, then who's to blame for tragedies such as the Holocaust? The answer is man. And if human beings are to blame, then that contradicts Darwin's theory of evolution that claims the human race is evolving toward moral perfection. Considering the explosion of crime, violence and war over the past 100 years, only a fool would choose to believe such nonsense.

Certainly, it's extremely difficult to convince those who've been scarred by evil that God exists. And it's understandable why they doubt God's existence. The Holocaust was a nightmare beyond human comprehension. The death count was horrible enough. But when you see pictures of mutilated corpses--many of them young children--it leaves deep emotional scars on your conscience.

Nevertheless, God does exist. And yes, He allowed the Holocaust to happen. But why? How could a loving God permit such naked evil to invade His creation? Surely, He could've prevented it. But why didn't He?

The answer to that difficult question can be found in the Book of Jeremiah that was written about 2,600 years ago. Jeremiah was known as the weeping prophet because he lived during a wicked time in ancient Israel when the Jews had turned their backs on God by breaking the covenant He established with them through Moses. The Jews not only broke the covenant, they worshiped the false gods of surrounding pagan nations.

Jeremiah wasn't the first prophet that God spoke to His people through. He wasn't the first prophet who warned the ancient Jews to either repent of their sins or face the consequences. The Lord spoke through a host of prophets including Isaiah, Joel, Micah, Habakkuk, Malachi, Zechariah and Zephaniah to warn His people that they were in danger of falling under His judgment if they persisted in their rebellion against Him. Those warnings spanned several centuries, so it wasn't as though God's punishment came as a surprise. Rather, it came as a last resort.

And tragically, it came. In 586 B.C., Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar invaded Jerusalem and severely damaged that city while taking thousands of Jews captive to Babylon. The Jews remained in captivity under the Persians until 445 B.C. when Darius II finally allowed them to return home. But the Jews continued to rebel against the Lord and were taken captive once again; this time by the Romans in 70 A.D. when Titus invaded that city and destroyed Herod's Temple.

What are some of the judgments the Lord revealed against the Jews, as recorded in the Book of Jeremiah? Here's an example: "Your wealth and your treasures I will give as plunder, without charge, because of all your sins throughout your country. I will enslave you to your enemies in a land you do not know, for my anger will kindle a fire that will burn against you." (Jeremiah 15:13-14)

And then there's this: "I will make them fall by the sword before their enemies, at the hands of those who want to kill them, and I will give their carcasses as food to the birds and the wild animals. I will devastate this city (Jerusalem) and make it an object of horror and scorn; all who pass by will be appalled and will scoff because of all its wounds. I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and daughters, and they will eat one another’s flesh because their enemies will press the siege so hard against them to destroy them." (Jeremiah 19:7-9)

And here's another: "I will make them abhorrent and an offense to all the kingdoms of the earth, a reproach and a byword, a curse and an object of ridicule, wherever I banish them. I will send the sword, famine and plague against them until they are destroyed from the land I gave to them and their ancestors." (Jeremiah 24:9-10)

Certainly, the Lord's word was fulfilled. The Jews were scattered throughout the world and have been mocked, maligned, scorned and persecuted wherever they've gone. But the Lord has taken no pleasure in the destruction of His people. Sadly, they've brought that on themselves.

There are those who ask why God still punishes the Jews today for the sins of their ancestors. Why? Because they continue in the sins of those ancestors. When the Lord looks at people, he sees an unbroken chain going back to the ancient times. 

In this case, that chain is a curse that can only be broken through repentance. And that repentance can only come through faith in the Jewish Messiah Jesus Christ. It can't come through the rabbis who perpetuate the curse. They're part of the problem because they promote a religion that is rooted in the rebellion of their ancient ancestors who rejected God.

I realize that the Holocaust is a difficult topic for many people. It demonstrated what becomes of those (Nazis) who deny God, and what becomes of those who rebel against God, despite His warnings. 

But the good news is that God isn't finished with the Jews. He's bringing them back to him: "This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: 'Like these good figs, I regard as good the exiles from Judah, whom I sent away from this place to the land of the Babylonians. My eyes will watch over them for their good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up and not tear them down; I will plant them and not uproot them. I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people, and I will be their God, for they will return to me with all their heart." (Jeremiah 24:5-7)