Before World War I France was the most sinful nation on earth. The most evil of decadence was paraded in Pigalle, and along the rue de la Huchette, just a block from the Notre Dame. France was known as the sin capital of Europe.
The French would pay with a judgment from God. The nation suffered millions of casualties from 1914 to 1918. But following the war, in the 1920s, with horrible inflation and unemployment in the larger cities, Germany would become the most evil nation, taking the honors from France. Along one of the most popular thoroughfares, the Kurfurstendamm, young homosexual men paraded with powered faces. In the bars one could see wealthy businessmen from the financial world courting drunken sailors or attending transvestite balls. Hundreds of men costumed as women cavorted under the amused eyes of the benevolent police.
Well over two million young German widows desperate for income (and for attention), sold themselves into prostitution. In the alleys of the Haptbahnhof, they sought prey. Many presented themselves as muscular prostitutes, and mothers in their early thirties, carrying whips for deviant acts with those who could pay. Many teamed up with teenage girls to offer "Mother and daughter sex." Sex acts were openly carried out in bars and cocaine and morphine flowed like water. Many of the women were dead within a few years of diseases or even by violence.
This all happened under the short period of German democracy called the Weimar Republic. Liberty had turned to evil license (as it now is in America). In Italy, things were no better. Depravity was part of the scene of Rome and other big cities. The Gentile peoples of both Germany and Italy would suffer terribly in World War II. Germany alone would have upwards of twenty million war casualties.
One of the most horrible stories of the war, and its judgment from the Lord upon the Germans who killed the Jews, took place with the invasion of Russia. As the troops moved into Russia in 1941, coming behind the frontline soldiers were SS men called the einsatzgrupen. Their job was to round up the Jews in Russian villages and kill them on the spot. Because they got behind in this slaughter they went from 3,000 troops to 300,000 who were outright killers! This of course tied up the forward fighting soldiers, but never mind, the hatred against the Jews was so strong the German generals felt they had to do this.
But retribution was swift against the Nazis from the Lord! When the Germans were trapped in the winter at the battle of Stalingrad, the soldiers died like flies. 100,000 were wounded. They could not be fed or attended to by their comrades. They were piled up alive in cold train boxcars and given no food or medicine. They all perished! Another 90,000 were captured by the Russians and marched in the snow to Siberia. They too died horrible deaths. And in the Siberian concentration camps the captured German troops were committing cannibalism. Only 7,000 of the 90,000 returned back to Germany at the end of the war.
We cannot separate history from God’s providence. This judgment upon Europe was no fluke or "accident" that happened apart from the Lord bringing wrath upon a wayward people! By the way, several things contributed to the hatred of the German people against the Jews. (1) The amillennialism of Lutheranism, (2) with its Replacement Theology that stubbornly argued that God was through with the Jews and that they deserved any pain that fell upon them! And before World War II began, German children each morning in school sang songs to Hitler "who is our savior and lord!" The German parents of these children allowed and even agreed with such blasphemy!
But the wayward Jews of Germany would not escape the horrors of World War II. Hundreds of thousands would be killed in the death camps, as part of the total six million Jews who died who lived throughout Europe, Poland, and Russia. To understand the specific judgment that would come upon the German Jews, one has to go back to Hungarian born journalist Theodore Herzl. In 1896 he wrote a book entitle The German State. A year before he had become a Zionist who wanted to see that the Jews of Europe could immigrate to another land out of Europe. He did not care to what land—South America, Zanzibar, Africa, Canada, etc.
Herzl appealed to the German Emperor Bismarck to help but received on answer. He called for the first Zionist Conference which brought an awakening to the Jews about the plight of their people, especially those living in Eastern Europe, Poland and Russia, who were existing under terrible persecution.
But most of the Jews of Germany did not want to leave Germany. They had become "German" mentally and in their soul! They were prosperous, educated, held positions of influence, and were to a degree living a life of luxury. Herzl became an annoyance to the German Jews. They hated him and became insulting cynics. His own Jewish friends derided the idea of leaving the comfort of Germany, for Palestine or any other place in the world.
Many of the founders of the liberal Judaism (the Reformed) took Herzl to task. Both the orthodox and the Reformed Jewish leaders roundly attacked Herzl for his radical ideas of founding a homeland, especially Palestine, for the German Jews. Concerning the Old Testament prophecies of a return of Israel back to the Holy Land, one of the liberal Jewish leaders wrote: "Jerusalem is a noble memory from the past and the cradle of our religion, but it holds no hope for the future. No new life can begin there. Let us not disturb its rest."
THIS IS EXACLTY THE ATTITUDE OF CHRISTIAN COVENANT AND ALLEGORICAL scholars today about Bible prophecy. God is not going to restore Israel back to the Holy Land!
Herzl’s ideas threatened the comfort of the well-to-do German Jews. Some wealthy Jews even refused to help persecuted Russian Jews get to Palestine. One Jewish intellectual poet urged Jews to have an operation to straighten their curved Jewish noses so they would fit in better in the culture and not have to address the idea of persecution and be driven from Germany.
Herzl wanted the Jews to leave the persecution of the Gentiles in order to be happy. One Jewish philosopher responded that to be happy "the Jews’ task was to go on living among the nations as the God-sent dew, to remain with them and be fruitful for them."
Herzl wanted the first Zionist Conference to be held in Munich but the Jews of Germany were so strong against it he had to move it to Basel. When Herzl held that first Zionist Conference in Switzerland in 1897, only sixteen Jews came from Germany. When the second Conference was held the Jews coming from Germany still remained small in number. Ironically, the Conference was opened with the overture to Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser. Wagner was an adamant anti-Semitic! In all of Germany only 400 Jews registered as Zionists, that is, as those who were in favor of the Jews returning to the Holy Land from Europe!
Though the Jewish economist Franz Oppenheimer joined the Zionists he remained a loyal German Jew. He put it this way: "Jews should read 99% of what the German philosophers Kant and Goethe say, and only 1% of the Old Testament, and that should be through the filter of the atheist Spinoza and Luther’s translation of the Bible."
Ironically, by 1909 there were some younger Jews who argued against their people being assimilated into the German culture and losing their Jewish-ness. They realized that they were not any more accepted in Germany when they tried to hide their Jewish roots. A wealthy Jew, Kurt Blumenfeld, saw where it was going for his people in the future. He became a Zionist and headed up the Zionist Conferences. "He sensed the coming of a great disaster, able to smell," as he put it, "rottenness and putrefaction" while other Jews "strangely enough, only experienced well-being."
Realizing his generation’s complete lack of "Jewish" substance, Blumenfeld saw Zionism, and the desire to return to the Holy Land, as a catalyst for Jewish personal transformation. Blumenfeld had his dark side, however. He urged Zionists, those who felt the tug back to the Promised Land, to resist making the issue a religious or biblical and prophetic one. Instead, he argued, they should read the annihilation atheistic writings of Nietzsche for their inspiration.
For their rejection of what little they knew of their own Bible, and Bible prophecy, the Jews of Germany would pay a high price. They for the most part would lose everything, including even their lives. Many thousands, however, were driven to immigrate to the Holy Land and helped establish the new nation of Israel.
Both Gentile and Jew would suffer for their rejecting of God—for their immorality and for turning against the Word of God. A terrible judgment would fall on both the German nationals and the Jews who thought they were living securely in that country. The Gentiles did it their way, and the Jews likewise!
This was all predicted in Jeremiah 30 though the context there has to do with the Day of the Lord, the birth pangs, that fall upon Israel and the world. The Gentile nations will be judged: "For I will destroy completely all the nations where I have scattered you, only I will not destroy you [Israel] completely, but I will chasten you justly, and will by no means leave you unpunished" (v. 11). What happened in the past, the various judgments, were but partial; what is yet coming in the seven year tribulation, as Jeremiah 30 indicates, will be horrific!
-- Dr. Mal Couch
The French would pay with a judgment from God. The nation suffered millions of casualties from 1914 to 1918. But following the war, in the 1920s, with horrible inflation and unemployment in the larger cities, Germany would become the most evil nation, taking the honors from France. Along one of the most popular thoroughfares, the Kurfurstendamm, young homosexual men paraded with powered faces. In the bars one could see wealthy businessmen from the financial world courting drunken sailors or attending transvestite balls. Hundreds of men costumed as women cavorted under the amused eyes of the benevolent police.
Well over two million young German widows desperate for income (and for attention), sold themselves into prostitution. In the alleys of the Haptbahnhof, they sought prey. Many presented themselves as muscular prostitutes, and mothers in their early thirties, carrying whips for deviant acts with those who could pay. Many teamed up with teenage girls to offer "Mother and daughter sex." Sex acts were openly carried out in bars and cocaine and morphine flowed like water. Many of the women were dead within a few years of diseases or even by violence.
This all happened under the short period of German democracy called the Weimar Republic. Liberty had turned to evil license (as it now is in America). In Italy, things were no better. Depravity was part of the scene of Rome and other big cities. The Gentile peoples of both Germany and Italy would suffer terribly in World War II. Germany alone would have upwards of twenty million war casualties.
One of the most horrible stories of the war, and its judgment from the Lord upon the Germans who killed the Jews, took place with the invasion of Russia. As the troops moved into Russia in 1941, coming behind the frontline soldiers were SS men called the einsatzgrupen. Their job was to round up the Jews in Russian villages and kill them on the spot. Because they got behind in this slaughter they went from 3,000 troops to 300,000 who were outright killers! This of course tied up the forward fighting soldiers, but never mind, the hatred against the Jews was so strong the German generals felt they had to do this.
But retribution was swift against the Nazis from the Lord! When the Germans were trapped in the winter at the battle of Stalingrad, the soldiers died like flies. 100,000 were wounded. They could not be fed or attended to by their comrades. They were piled up alive in cold train boxcars and given no food or medicine. They all perished! Another 90,000 were captured by the Russians and marched in the snow to Siberia. They too died horrible deaths. And in the Siberian concentration camps the captured German troops were committing cannibalism. Only 7,000 of the 90,000 returned back to Germany at the end of the war.
We cannot separate history from God’s providence. This judgment upon Europe was no fluke or "accident" that happened apart from the Lord bringing wrath upon a wayward people! By the way, several things contributed to the hatred of the German people against the Jews. (1) The amillennialism of Lutheranism, (2) with its Replacement Theology that stubbornly argued that God was through with the Jews and that they deserved any pain that fell upon them! And before World War II began, German children each morning in school sang songs to Hitler "who is our savior and lord!" The German parents of these children allowed and even agreed with such blasphemy!
But the wayward Jews of Germany would not escape the horrors of World War II. Hundreds of thousands would be killed in the death camps, as part of the total six million Jews who died who lived throughout Europe, Poland, and Russia. To understand the specific judgment that would come upon the German Jews, one has to go back to Hungarian born journalist Theodore Herzl. In 1896 he wrote a book entitle The German State. A year before he had become a Zionist who wanted to see that the Jews of Europe could immigrate to another land out of Europe. He did not care to what land—South America, Zanzibar, Africa, Canada, etc.
Herzl appealed to the German Emperor Bismarck to help but received on answer. He called for the first Zionist Conference which brought an awakening to the Jews about the plight of their people, especially those living in Eastern Europe, Poland and Russia, who were existing under terrible persecution.
But most of the Jews of Germany did not want to leave Germany. They had become "German" mentally and in their soul! They were prosperous, educated, held positions of influence, and were to a degree living a life of luxury. Herzl became an annoyance to the German Jews. They hated him and became insulting cynics. His own Jewish friends derided the idea of leaving the comfort of Germany, for Palestine or any other place in the world.
Many of the founders of the liberal Judaism (the Reformed) took Herzl to task. Both the orthodox and the Reformed Jewish leaders roundly attacked Herzl for his radical ideas of founding a homeland, especially Palestine, for the German Jews. Concerning the Old Testament prophecies of a return of Israel back to the Holy Land, one of the liberal Jewish leaders wrote: "Jerusalem is a noble memory from the past and the cradle of our religion, but it holds no hope for the future. No new life can begin there. Let us not disturb its rest."
THIS IS EXACLTY THE ATTITUDE OF CHRISTIAN COVENANT AND ALLEGORICAL scholars today about Bible prophecy. God is not going to restore Israel back to the Holy Land!
Herzl’s ideas threatened the comfort of the well-to-do German Jews. Some wealthy Jews even refused to help persecuted Russian Jews get to Palestine. One Jewish intellectual poet urged Jews to have an operation to straighten their curved Jewish noses so they would fit in better in the culture and not have to address the idea of persecution and be driven from Germany.
Herzl wanted the Jews to leave the persecution of the Gentiles in order to be happy. One Jewish philosopher responded that to be happy "the Jews’ task was to go on living among the nations as the God-sent dew, to remain with them and be fruitful for them."
Herzl wanted the first Zionist Conference to be held in Munich but the Jews of Germany were so strong against it he had to move it to Basel. When Herzl held that first Zionist Conference in Switzerland in 1897, only sixteen Jews came from Germany. When the second Conference was held the Jews coming from Germany still remained small in number. Ironically, the Conference was opened with the overture to Richard Wagner’s Tannhauser. Wagner was an adamant anti-Semitic! In all of Germany only 400 Jews registered as Zionists, that is, as those who were in favor of the Jews returning to the Holy Land from Europe!
Though the Jewish economist Franz Oppenheimer joined the Zionists he remained a loyal German Jew. He put it this way: "Jews should read 99% of what the German philosophers Kant and Goethe say, and only 1% of the Old Testament, and that should be through the filter of the atheist Spinoza and Luther’s translation of the Bible."
Ironically, by 1909 there were some younger Jews who argued against their people being assimilated into the German culture and losing their Jewish-ness. They realized that they were not any more accepted in Germany when they tried to hide their Jewish roots. A wealthy Jew, Kurt Blumenfeld, saw where it was going for his people in the future. He became a Zionist and headed up the Zionist Conferences. "He sensed the coming of a great disaster, able to smell," as he put it, "rottenness and putrefaction" while other Jews "strangely enough, only experienced well-being."
Realizing his generation’s complete lack of "Jewish" substance, Blumenfeld saw Zionism, and the desire to return to the Holy Land, as a catalyst for Jewish personal transformation. Blumenfeld had his dark side, however. He urged Zionists, those who felt the tug back to the Promised Land, to resist making the issue a religious or biblical and prophetic one. Instead, he argued, they should read the annihilation atheistic writings of Nietzsche for their inspiration.
For their rejection of what little they knew of their own Bible, and Bible prophecy, the Jews of Germany would pay a high price. They for the most part would lose everything, including even their lives. Many thousands, however, were driven to immigrate to the Holy Land and helped establish the new nation of Israel.
Both Gentile and Jew would suffer for their rejecting of God—for their immorality and for turning against the Word of God. A terrible judgment would fall on both the German nationals and the Jews who thought they were living securely in that country. The Gentiles did it their way, and the Jews likewise!
This was all predicted in Jeremiah 30 though the context there has to do with the Day of the Lord, the birth pangs, that fall upon Israel and the world. The Gentile nations will be judged: "For I will destroy completely all the nations where I have scattered you, only I will not destroy you [Israel] completely, but I will chasten you justly, and will by no means leave you unpunished" (v. 11). What happened in the past, the various judgments, were but partial; what is yet coming in the seven year tribulation, as Jeremiah 30 indicates, will be horrific!
-- Dr. Mal Couch
