God gives grace for Jews to love Dachau
Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders; but thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise.
Isaiah 60.18
In 2000 the L-rd(1) called Richard and Carolyn Hyde and their family to move from America to Germany and work in a reconciliation ministry between Germans and Jews. And in 2003 he called them to make the Aliyah(2) and return to Israel where they live in Galilee, near Tiberias.Violence shall no more be heard in thy land, wasting nor destruction within thy borders; but thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise.
Isaiah 60.18
Horrifying as it was, it represents the place where God in his grace forgave our sins.
In all the religions of the world, there is one theme which unites most of them: We have done and said things which we wish we had not, called sins and we feel guilty before God. To cleans us from this sin we need to do something to wipe away this sin either do penance or offer a sacrifice.
In Christianity, God himself took upon himself the form of a man and like a sponge, took all the evil into himself. This happened when Christ himself died on the cross.
The cross became a place of grace and forgiveness. Grace means that at enormous cost to himself God let us off a debt which we could never pay. We no longer have to do penance or sacrifice, just put our trust in him, that he bore our sins.
The cross instead of being a place of horror for Jesus, has now represents a place where we can have our past forgiven, be healed in our bodies and be totally restored.
That is why we wear it as jewellery.
Like the cross, the concentration camp was an unspeakable horror. But when we look at the other side, and forgive those who did this, it can remind us not just of how evil man is(1) , but of God's grace to us, who will forgive us all our sins(2) and will help us go on to change the world for the better.
"And forgive us our sins,
as we forgive them that sin against us."
Matthew 6.12
In all the religions of the world, there is one theme which unites most of them: We have done and said things which we wish we had not, called sins and we feel guilty before God. To cleans us from this sin we need to do something to wipe away this sin either do penance or offer a sacrifice.
In Christianity, God himself took upon himself the form of a man and like a sponge, took all the evil into himself. This happened when Christ himself died on the cross.
The cross became a place of grace and forgiveness. Grace means that at enormous cost to himself God let us off a debt which we could never pay. We no longer have to do penance or sacrifice, just put our trust in him, that he bore our sins.
The cross instead of being a place of horror for Jesus, has now represents a place where we can have our past forgiven, be healed in our bodies and be totally restored.
That is why we wear it as jewellery.
Like the cross, the concentration camp was an unspeakable horror. But when we look at the other side, and forgive those who did this, it can remind us not just of how evil man is(1) , but of God's grace to us, who will forgive us all our sins(2) and will help us go on to change the world for the better.
"And forgive us our sins,
as we forgive them that sin against us."
Matthew 6.12
Why is that the cross of Jesus, an instrument of torture, worn as jewellery?
(1)
No trial provides a better basis for understanding the nature and causes of evil than do the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1949. Those who come to the trials expecting to find sadistic monsters are generally disappointed. What is shocking about Nuremberg is the ordinariness of the defendants: men who may be good fathers, kind to animals, even unassuming--yet who committed unspeakable crimes. Years later, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote of "the banality of evil." Like Eichmann, most Nuremberg defendants never aspired to be villains. Rather, they over-identified with an ideological cause and suffered from a lack of imagination or empathy: they couldn't fully appreciate the human consequences of their career-motivated decisions.
The Nuremberg Trials By Doug Linder (c) 2000
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/nuremberg.html
(2)
There is no limit to the compassion of Jesus. Two blind men were crying by the wayside, calling on the Lord to have mercy on them. And he stopped, and asked what they wanted. They answered: "Lord, that our eyes may be opened" Matt 20.33 And he healed them.
And if you want the real explanation for his saving men out of their sins and sicknesses, it is the love of his soul: that divine compassion of God and his desire to help men out of their difficulties and back to God.
Jesus' example on the cross is set forever as the very essence and the very soul of the compassion of God, through Christ. After they had pierced his hand and pierced his feet, with his last breath he prayed to his Father, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do."
When a man is able to look upon his murderers and speak such words as these, surely it shows that he speaks beyond that which the human heart is capable of giving, and is speaking only that which the soul of God can give."
John G. Lake, 1870 Ontario Canada
No trial provides a better basis for understanding the nature and causes of evil than do the Nuremberg trials from 1945 to 1949. Those who come to the trials expecting to find sadistic monsters are generally disappointed. What is shocking about Nuremberg is the ordinariness of the defendants: men who may be good fathers, kind to animals, even unassuming--yet who committed unspeakable crimes. Years later, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote of "the banality of evil." Like Eichmann, most Nuremberg defendants never aspired to be villains. Rather, they over-identified with an ideological cause and suffered from a lack of imagination or empathy: they couldn't fully appreciate the human consequences of their career-motivated decisions.
The Nuremberg Trials By Doug Linder (c) 2000
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/nuremberg/nuremberg.html
(2)
There is no limit to the compassion of Jesus. Two blind men were crying by the wayside, calling on the Lord to have mercy on them. And he stopped, and asked what they wanted. They answered: "Lord, that our eyes may be opened" Matt 20.33 And he healed them.
And if you want the real explanation for his saving men out of their sins and sicknesses, it is the love of his soul: that divine compassion of God and his desire to help men out of their difficulties and back to God.
Jesus' example on the cross is set forever as the very essence and the very soul of the compassion of God, through Christ. After they had pierced his hand and pierced his feet, with his last breath he prayed to his Father, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do."
When a man is able to look upon his murderers and speak such words as these, surely it shows that he speaks beyond that which the human heart is capable of giving, and is speaking only that which the soul of God can give."
John G. Lake, 1870 Ontario Canada
