WORLD WAR II AND THE HOLOCAUST

Day 7 of God Keeps Covenant: World War II and the Holocaust

In the summer of 2004, as I walked for the first time through Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, what struck me most deeply was the Jewish suffering after World War II. My heart was broken not only by the gas chambers and crematoriums (which I had known about) but also by the post-war holding camps in Cyprus and northern Europe, where conditions were not much better than at Auschwitz. I wept as I thought of the survivors of the Holocaust finally landing in Haifa, Israel, only to be sent back to the holding camps because of anti-Semitic regulations.

But I don’t intend here to dwell on the horrors. If you have seen “Schindler’s List,” “Playing for Time” or “The Pianist,” you know very well the appalling scenes from the Warsaw ghetto and the death camps.

Instead, let us zero in on a small Bible College in Wales where nightly, powerful prayer meetings were occurring during the war. Rees Howells, an intercessor God had groomed with great care, would take time by himself to wait on the Lord for the prayer strategy for a particular evening.

Once he had heard the Lord’s direction, he would join others already in prayer and together they would go into deep intercession – perhaps for hours – until they sensed they had “broken through” and the Lord had achieved what He desired. Often within days the news would report a victory the Allies had needed to press on to defeat the evil Nazi regime – exactly as they had prayed.

O yes, there were prayer gatherings everywhere as the world writhed convulsively during those awful years between 1939-1945. Finally those regimes fell, and the senseless murder ceased for those whose only crime was that they were Jewish.

Can we ever answer the question “Why?” In today’s world, innocent people, children, and babies are being murdered almost daily by terrorists. We all wrestle with why evil has to be so powerful. The answers will come when we see the Lord face to face.

Then, we will have the kind of history lesson those two disciples had on the road to Emmaus on Resurrection Day when the Lord Jesus brought His gruesome death and the prophetic Word together for them. (Luke 24) Until that day, I have to trust my Lord. In His Sovereignty, the Lord had to allow the Holocaust. The outcome was a homeland for the Jewish people – the restored nation of Israel. He used the incredible tragedy for His purposes.

To return to our opening Scripture, we see that intercessors did call on the Lord and gave themselves and Him no rest during those terrible years. Through the horrors, the Lord somehow caused His Will to be done to bring closer the Day He “establishes Jerusalem and makes her the praise of the earth.”