In light of the Easter season being upon us, this week's featured post is "Christ Entered Our Death Camp" written by Lilianne Lopez, a regular contributor to the blog Sabbath School Net. Also since many of you may be more inclined to view religious movies during this period, be sure to check out the recent post on Christians in relation to Bible-themed movies "Whose Side Are We On".
If it had not happened, could we imagine a world in which God became a
Man and lived among us? Although He could have come as a powerful and
wealthy King, He chose to come as a newborn powerless and poor Baby. He
lived like those around Him. He obeyed His parents and His government.
He even allowed them to put Him to death.
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| Image © Lars Justinen from GoodSalt.com |
We don’t know much about Jesus’ growing-up years … probably because
it was much like everybody else’s who grew up at the same time. There
was nothing that would make His childhood look different from the other
children in Nazareth. He was a Jewish boy, from a Jewish family, in a
Jewish village.
Then something startling happened. When He was twelve, in Jerusalem
for His first Passover, He realized who He was. Think for a minute about
how that moment of revelation must felt for Jesus. Can you imagine
being twelve and finding out that you were the Creator of the planet
that you were standing on and everything on it?
Even more mind-boggling though, is that after coming to that
realization, Jesus went home with His earthly parents and continued to
live, work beside, and obey them for the next 18 years. Our sinful,
earthly minds rebel at the thought of being subject to anyone,
especially someone we perceive as being somehow less important than we
are. Yet Jesus knew He was God, and still obeyed His parents and lived
as their Son.
From the time when Jesus and God the Father made the plan to redeem
humanity, Jesus had been obedient to the laws that governed Him. Some
people like to paint Jesus as a rebel, but if we look closely at His
life, we realize that He never broke a rule He didn’t have to. In every
way He lived the life of a devout Jewish baby, child, and man. His
parents had Him circumcised just like every other Jewish boy. He didn’t
eat any unclean meat. He kept all the Jewish feasts that pointed to Him
as the Redeemer. He kept the Sabbath that pointed to Him as the Creator.
He kept the Ten Commandments that He had written with His own finger.
In the stories of the mythological gods, all of them tried to “fly
under the radar.” Most of them didn’t even attempt to live by the same
rules that humans were expected to follow. Most of the mythological gods
were immoral, jealous, and unprincipled beings, according to the
stories written about them. They used whatever power they had to draw
attention to themselves and to get what they wanted, no matter what it
cost anyone else.
Jesus was different. He allowed Himself to be beaten and killed to
save each one of us, even though He could have destroyed those who were
mistreating Him.
Do you think you would be able to do what Jesus did, even on a smaller
scale? Here’s the story of someone who did. His name was Witold Pilecki,
a captain in the Polish army and a committed Christian. In September
1940, Pilecki did the unthinkable – he sneaked
into Auschwitz!
Why would anybody sneak in to a Nazi death camp? Well, Pilecki was
sure that very bad things were happening in that place and he wanted to
get proof of what was going on. He could only get that information from
the inside. So Pilecki came up with the plan. His superiors approved it
and made sure he had a false ID card with a Jewish name. Then Pilecki
went out and got himself arrested by the Nazis. He was sent to Auschwitz
and tattooed as inmate number 4859.
Now, it wasn’t like Pilecki had nothing to lose, he had a wife and
two kids. He said, “I bade farewell to everything I had known on this
earth.”
Once inside the death camp, he didn’t go around telling people that he wasn’t Jewish and that he should be treated differently.
He “became just like any other prisoner—despised, beaten,
and threatened with death. From inside the camp he wrote, ‘The game I
was now playing at Auschwitz was dangerous…. In fact, I had gone far
beyond what people in the real world would consider dangerous.’
“But beginning in 1941, prisoner number 4859 started working on his
dangerous mission. He organized the inmates into resistance units,
boosting morale and documenting the war crimes. Pilecki used couriers to
smuggle out detailed reports on the atrocities. By 1942, he had also
helped organize a secret radio station using scrap parts. The
information he supplied from inside the camp provided Western allies
with key intelligence information about Auschwitz.
“In the spring of 1943, Pilecki joined the camp bakery where he was
able to overpower a guard and escape. Once free, he finished his report,
estimating that around 2 million souls had been killed at Auschwitz.
When the reports reached London, officials thought he was exaggerating.
Of course today we know he was right.
“Here’s how a contemporary Jewish journal summarized Pilecki’s life:
‘Once he set his mind to the good, he never wavered, never stopped. He
crossed the great human divide that separates knowing the right thing
from doing the right thing.’ In his report Pilecki said, ‘There is
always a difference between saying you will do something and actually
doing it. A long time before, many years before, I had worked on myself
in order to be able to fuse the two.’ The current Polish Ambassador to
the U.S. described Pilecki as a ‘diamond among Poland’s heroes.’”
Mr. Pilecki was not Jewish and didn’t need to worry about what was
going on in those camps. As far as he and his colleagues knew they were
work camps. But Pilecki wasn’t satisfied to stand by and watch. He had
spent his life working for freedom and eventually gave his life because
he refused to give up the names of the people with whom he worked.
Jesus was not human and He didn’t need to worry about anything here
on earth. We blew it – he could have just created another world and
forgotten about us. But Jesus couldn’t stand by and watch, either. He
and His Father made a plan and snuck Him into our sinful existence. And
just like Pilecki, Jesus risked all. He risked failure and eternal loss.
“In stooping to take upon Himself humanity, Christ
revealed a character the opposite of the character of Satan. But He
stepped still lower in the path of humiliation. ‘Being found in fashion
as a man, He humbled Himself, and became obedient unto death, even the
death of the cross.’ Philippians 2:8.
As the high priest laid aside his gorgeous pontifical robes, and
officiated in the white linen dress of the common priest, so Christ took
the form of a servant, and offered sacrifice, Himself the priest,
Himself the victim. ‘He was wounded for our transgressions, He was
bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon Him.’
Isaiah 53:5.
“Christ was treated as we deserve, that we might be
treated as He deserves. He was condemned for our sins, in which He had
no share, that we might be justified by His righteousness, in which we
had no share. He suffered the death which was ours, that we might
receive the life which was His. ‘With His stripes we are healed.’”(E.G. White, Desire of Ages, p. 25)
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