…As it is written: “How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!”
Romans 10:15
A Whole Macabre Fakery
For the purpose of lulling people into the
belief that they had come to a genuine transit
camp, the commandant had ordered the construction
of a false railway station,
replete with a false clock with painted numerals, and hands that never
moved, ticket windows, timetables, and painted arrows
pointing the way to Warsaw and other cities. A camp street was built.
Things were painted in beautiful, garishly bright colors. Flowers
and evergreen shrubs were planted. There was a gas station with
flowers around it.
Wooden benches dotted the landscape “like
a luxury spa.” New fences were erected. The forest was cleared.
A zoo was installed with “any number of marvelous birds” and benches
and flowers. Glazar referred to this as “a whole macabre fakery.”
(Sereny 1974,184,166,200,219).
Glazar followed the crowd. Men were directed to the right, women and children
to the left. The women and children disappeared into a barrack and the men
were told to undress. One of the SS men told them in “a chatty sort of tune”
that they were going into a disinfection bath and would afterwards be assigned
a job. Clothes could be left in a pile on the ground where they could find them
again later on. Documents, identity cards, money, watches and jewelry were to
be kept with them. There was no time from the moment they were taken in there
to talk to anyone, or to take stock of what was happening. They had no idea at
all what the whole installation was about. (Sereny 1974, 176-177).
The Nazis, Sereny explains in her book, “recognized the capacity
of the Western Jews individually to grasp the monstrous truth and
individually to resist it, therefore ordered that great pains be
taken to mislead and calm them until, naked, in rows of five and
running under the whiplash, they had been made incapable of resistance”
(Sereny 1974,199).
Her book contains an account of a special transport of 24,000 rich
Bulgarians from Salonika who arrived with 720,000 kilograms of belongings,
who, even in April 1943, with 3 million or so dead in camps in Poland,
still did not have a clue of what awaited them, and arrived as full of
illusions as Glazar’s group of Czechs had six months earlier.
(Sereny 1974, 213-214).
“The Roots and Flowers of Evil in Baudelaire, Nietzsche, and Hitler” by Claire Ortiz Hill 2006
from the section of Beyond Good and Evil? on p.158
The Case Is Mournful
Spurgeon noted that many churches were no longer having prayer meetings.
Spiritual fervor was dwindling, congregations were thinning, and enthusiasm
for the gospel was quickly becoming extinct.
“Alas! many are returning to
the poisoned cups which drugged that declining generation. . . . Too many
ministers are toying with the deadly cobra of ‘another gospel,’ in the form of
‘modern thought.’ “
Who was chiefly to blame for the decline? Spurgeon believed it was the preachers:
“The case is mournful. Certain ministers are making infidels. Avowed atheists are
not a tenth as dangerous as those preachers who scatter doubt and stab at faith. . . .
Germany was made unbelieving by her preachers, and England is following in her tracks.”
Spurgeon made no effort to disguise his contempt for the modernists:
“These destroyers
of our churches appear to be as content with their work as monkeys with their mischief.”
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (1832-1892)
From the Spurgeon Archive
Spurgeon and the Down-Grade Controversy by John F. MacArthur, Jr.
The Church
Merely to mark time in missionary work during the war is a fatal blunder,
We must go forward.
Let the call of Christ be heard and heeded through the din of the world’s conflict,
and let the Church rise to a worthy
endeavor to accomplish speedily the work entrusted to her.
A quote from Rowland Bingham (1872-1942)
in
Christian Heroes: Then & Now
“Rowland Bingham Into Africa’s Interior” by Janet & Geoff Benge
A Beautiful Life
A life maybe very lovely and yet be insignificant in the world’s eyes.
A beautiful life is one that fulfills its mission in this world, that
is what God made it to be, and does what God made it to do. Those
with only commonplace gifts are in danger of thinking that they cannot
live a beautiful life–cannot be a blessing in this world. But the smallest
life that fills its place well is far lovelier in God’s sight than the
largest and most splendidly gifted–yet fails in its divine mission.
Mrs. Charles E. Cowman (1870-1960)
“Streams In The Desert Volume 2” by Mrs. Charles E. Cowman August 6th
The Lord Was Grieved
The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness
on the earth had become, and that every inclination
of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all
the time.
The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth,
and his heart was filled with pain.
Genesis 6:5,6
“Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it
be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating,
drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to
the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and
destroyed them all.” Luke 17:26, 27
We Will Not Fear
God is our refuge and strength,
an ever-present help in trouble.
Therefore we will not fear, though
the earth give way and the mountains
fall into the heart of the sea, though
its waters roar and foam and the
mountains quake with their surging.
Psalm 46:1-3
How awesome is the Lord Most High,
the great King over all the earth!
He subdued nations under us,
peoples under our feet.
Psalm 47: 2,3
You Mighty Man
Why do you boast of evil, you mighty man?
Why do you boast all day long, you who are
a disgrace in the eyes of God?
Your tongue plots destruction; it is like a
sharpened razor,
you who practice deceit.
You love evil rather than good, falsehood
rather than speaking the truth.
You love every harmful word, O you deceitful tongue!
Surely God will bring you down to everlasting ruin:
He will snatch you up and tear you from your tent;
he will uproot you from the land of the living.
The righteous will see and fear; they will laugh
at him, saying,
“Here now is the man who did not make God his
stronghold but trusted in his great wealth and
grew strong by destroying others!”
Psalm 52: 1-7
Their Homes Are Safe
“Is my complaint directed to man? Why should I not be impatient?
Look at me and be astonished; clap your hand over your mouth.
When I think about this, I am terrified; trembling seizes my body.
Why do the wicked live on, growing old and increasing in power?
They see their children established around them, their offspring before their
eyes. Their homes are safe and free from fear; the rod of God is not upon them.
Their bulls never fail to breed; their cows calve and do not miscarry.
They send forth their children as a flock; their little ones dance about. They sing
to the music of tambourine and harp; they make merry to the sound of the flute. They
spend their years in prosperity and go down to the grave in peace.
Yet they say to God, ‘Leave us alone! We have no desire to know your ways.
Who is the Almighty, that we should serve him?
What would we gain by praying to him?’
But their prosperity is not in their own hands, so I stand aloof from the counsel of
the wicked. “Yet how often is the lamp of the wicked snuffed out? How often does
calamity come upon them, the fate God allots in his anger?
How often are they like
straw before the wind, like chaff swept away by a gale? It is said, ‘God stores up a man’s
punishment for his sons.’ Let him repay the man himself, so that he will know it!
Let his own eyes see his destruction; let him drink of the wrath of the Almighty.
For what does he care about the family he leaves behind
when his allotted months come to an end?
Job 21: 4-21
