Psalm 42:5--Why are you downcast, O my soul? And why are you in turmoil within me?
This was a great verse to read as I finished my book Escape from Sobibor, an emotionally suffocating book on how a few people escaped from one of the worst genocides in human history (the Holocaust). It is hard to read the book with any sort of hope. Sure a few dozen people ultimately survived, but what about the unimaginable loss. At Sobibor, 250,000 men, women, and children were murdered. Certain stories stick in me like thorns (Warning: Explicit!):
*Some of the survivors were forced to cut the hair of the teenage girls before they were sent into the chambers.
*Children and babies were often swung and smashed against walls, which may have been merciful compared to clinging to their mothers' skirts in the chambers. One survivor remembered one particular child's voice coming from the chambers, crying "Mama! Mama!"
*The story that gets me most of all was of one mother who tried to leave her baby on the train, hoping he would survive. The Nazis saw the baby, and made one of the eventual survivors grab him. He picked up the baby, who noticed and smiled at him. That smiling baby was taken to the chamber.
Those who initially escaped Sobibor had watched their parents, siblings, spouses, and children walk into the chambers and never return, only to disappear into smoke and ash. When they did escape, they were hunted, not only by Nazis, but my the underground Polish forces who hated them as well, as well as normal folks who would kill them and/or turn them in for a reward of flour and sugar. There was nowhere to safe to go. One couple--perhaps the only couple to survive together--conceived while in hiding, and after the war ended, while they were on their way to Holland, their baby drank bad milk and died. They had to bury him at sea. When all of this was over, the several million Jews of Poland were reduced to a several thousand. There were few survivors; even fewer tears.
In the face of such unimaginable, inhuman pain and suffering, most of these Jews lost their belief in God. Like Elie Wiesel, they saw God hanging upon the gallows, in the place of the little boy who actually hung from the rope. Likewise, some Christian theologians, on the horns of a perceived dilemma between God's omnipotence and His goodness--denied one or the other (usually His omnipotence). Hence the rise of open-theism, which denied God's omnipotence, omniscience, and immutability (unchangingness) in order to make God a fellow-sufferer with mankind.
But the Holocaust should not be used to put God on trial (like Wiesel does in his Trial of God). Men love to point the finger at God and make matters of suffering into a matter of theodicy (the justification of God in light of evil). But what of man? Why do we not put man on trial and engage in anthropodicy (the justification of man in light of evil)? The chambers belong to man! The cross belongs to God!
It is man who brought sin and suffering into this world. Man, who made the mentally handicapped an object of experimentation and little babes into objects of destruction. As self-perceived victims, we cry out against God. As transgressors, we find the blood upon our own hands. There is only one man who God specifically appointed to suffer, and that was Jesus Christ, who did so for those who bore His blood upon their own hands. Jesus died that they might also bear it upon their souls and as salve for their wounds.
No, horrific suffering must never be used to indict God. It condemns mankind and drives us to the God-man who became our sin, so we might be the righteousness of God.
