What a tragically beautiful story Pastor Swindoll shares.
Reminding us of the powerful truth of God's faithfulness!
I think we sometimes focus on all of our shortcomings when we could be swimming in all of His attributes and the fact that He delights in us. (just because that's the way He is) What a concept!
July 10, 2012
God's Faithfulness amidst Our Confusion
by Charles R. Swindoll
Elie Wiesel gives readers a tragic perspective on the horror of the holocaust. Wiesel's book,
Night,
will grab you and not let you go. In terse, tightly packed sentences,
he describes those scenes and his own confusion as he witnessed (in his
teenage years) a chapter of life we would prefer to erase.
This young Jew saw it all. Fellow Jews from his village were stripped
of their possessions and loaded into cattle cars, where a third of them
died before they reached their destination. He saw babies pitchforked,
little children hanged, weak and emaciated men killed by fellow
prisoners for a single piece of molded bread. He even saw his mother,
his lovely little sister, and all his family disappear into an oven
fueled with human flesh.
Wiesel's God was murdered at Birkenbau. Something dear and precious within his soul also died as all his dreams turned to dust.
Francois Mauriac, the Nobel-prizewinning French author, in writing
the foreword to Wiesel's book, describes the time he first met Wiesel:
It was then that I understood what had first drawn me to
the young Israeli: that look, as of a Lazarus risen from the dead, yet
still a prisoner within the grim confines where he had strayed,
stumbling among the shameful corpses. For him, Nietzsche's cry expressed
an almost physical reality: God is dead, the God of love, of
gentleness, of comfort, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, has
vanished forevermore, beneath the gaze of this child, in the smoke of a
human holocaust exacted by Race, the most voracious of all idols. And
how many pious Jews have experienced this death. On that day, horrible
even among those days of horror, when the child watched the hanging
(yes) of another child, who, he tells us, had the face of a sad angel,
he heard someone behind him groan: "Where is God? Where is He? Where can
He be now?"¹
Confusion. Tragic, horrible confusion. Experiences like those we've just read will do that to you.
But the vast difference between Elie Wiesel and those like Corrie ten
Boom cannot be ignored. Servants like Corrie ten Boom, who endure hard
consequences victoriously, testify of God's precious faithfulness, even
during days of confusion.
1. Elie Wiesel, Night (New York: Avon Books, 1969), 9.
Adapted from Charles R. Swindoll, Improving Your Serve: The Art of Unselfish Living
(Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1981), 186--87. Copyright © 1981 by Charles
R. Swindoll, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Used by permission.
