Pot Shot Series: Objection 1: The Holocaust – Argument 1 – New Covenant Forum - Encouraging Conversation About Jesus the Jewish Messiah

Pot Shot Series: Objection 1: The Holocaust – Argument 1

July 22nd, 2010

If you have not done so, you might want to read the Introduction to this series.

The Holocaust

Recently I was on a busy street corner in Toronto, handing out my literature, when a Jewish man came up to me and asked if I believed that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. I told him that, as I have family members who died in the camps, I believed in it of course. He then said that I should therefore be ashamed of myself and walked away. I called out to him to offer a response, but of course he didn’t want one.

This was what I call a pot-shot: an objection that is thrown into your face and, before you have a chance to respond, the objector runs away, probably thinking that they have done something clever. But they haven’t really.

There are really two different ways in which this particular objection is used. One is to use the Holocaust as a proof that God does not exist. The argument goes like this: if there were a loving and good God, he would not have allowed the Holocaust to occur. The other use of this objection is to blame Jesus and Christianity for the event and therefore denigrate both. Both of these arguments are answerable, of course.

Argument 1: There is no God

This argument forgets the nature of God’s relationship with humankind and our relationship with Him. God created man in His own image and gave us free will. We know this because Adam had the choice to obey God or not to obey God. (See Genesis 1-3)

God had the option, of course, not to give us free will, but then we have to ask ourselves the question: what is the consequence of that? If we were created so that we had to love and obey God, then what kind of love and obedience would that be? We would be more like automatons then lovers of God.

We can create a robot that is programmed to do only what we tell it to do, but can it love us? More importantly, can we love it in any meaningful way? So God, in his sovereign wisdom, determined that it was better for us to have free will than not.

The consequence of that decision is that we can and do sin (Ecclesiastes 7:20; Isaiah 53:6: Romans 3:23). All of us who are honest with ourselves would have to admit that we cannot always live up to our own standards, let alone God’s. Where there is sin, there is consequence; not only to ourselves but often to others as well. To stop it, God would have to take away our free will. To maintain our free will, God must allow the consequences of evil to take place.

Considering that we live in a world that has by and large dismissed God and has made individuals the real decider of right and wrong, is it any wonder that things like the Holocaust, or the genocides in Rwanda, or the former Yugoslav states occur.

The Holocaust is not a reason to disbelieve God, but a reason to recognize our need for God to save us from ourselves. That is where Yeshua (Jesus) comes in. Through his example we can see how to live a godly life. More importantly, through our faith in him we are enabled to live a godly life – perhaps not perfectly – but certainly more and more as we grow in him.

You can go to Argument 2, blaming Jesus and Christianity for the Holocaust.

Contributed by Daniel Muller, General Director of New Covenant Forum.

Posted in Blog, Evangelism, Jewish Objections to Jesus, Jews and Jesus, Pot-shot Objections, This, That, The Other Thing, Uncategorized