William Shirer, in his classic book The Rise and Fall of Third Reich writes, some 807 other pastors and leading laymen of the “Confessional Church” were arrested in 1937, and hundreds more in the next couple of years. As for the majority of Protestant pastors, they, like almost everyone else in German, submitted in the face of Nazi terror.
It would be misleading to give the impression that the persecution of Protestants and Catholics by the Nazi State tore the German people asunder or even greatly aroused the vast majority of them. It did not. A people who had so lightly given up their political, cultural and economic freedoms were not, except for relatively few, going to die or even risk imprisonment to preserve freedom of worship.
What really aroused the Germans in the thirties were the glittering successes of Hitler in providing jobs, creating prosperity, restoring German’s military might, and moving from one triumph to another in his foreign policy. Not many Germans lost much sleep over the arrests of a few thousand pastors and priests or over the quarrelling of the various Protestant sects.
And even fewer paused to reflect that under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann, and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists. As Bormann, one of the men closet to Hitler, said publicly in 1941, “National socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.
According to Dr. Lutzer, “the majority of the people, including the professing Christians, no longer believed that Christianity was worth suffering for, much less dying for. They were willing to substitute Mein Kampf for the Bible in exchange for jobs and the greater glory of Germany.”
Yet those who saved their lives lost them, and those who lost their lives saved them. What might have happened if at the church had condemned Nazism with one unified voice?
In a sermon in 1945, Pastor Martin Niemoller, and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler gave what could be the kind of epilogue on the German church struggle. He said:
There were in 1933 and in the following years here in Germany 14,000 Evangelical pastors and nearly as many parishes… if at the beginning of the Jewish persecutions we had seen that it was the Lord Jesus Christ who was being persecuted, struck down and slain “in the least of these our brethren, “if we had been loyal to Him and confessed Him, for all I know God would have stood by us, and then the whole sequence of events would have taken a different course. And if we had been ready to go with Him to death, the number of victims would have been only some ten thousand.
Helmut Thielicke’s Summary on what Really Happened
Let me read, to you, one message that came from Helmut Thielicke, German theologian and pastor, this is from Dr. Lutzer’s book Hitler’s Cross.
In April 1945, amid the ruins of a defeated Germany, Thielicke spoke movingly to his congregation in Stuttgart about the meaning of all that happened. He said that the nation got what it deserved because it had repudiated forgiveness and kicked down the cross of Jesus Christ.
In a nation that was supposedly “Christian”, he went on to say that the Cross of Jesus Christ had been neglected and thus the church was blinded to German militarism. The church had overlooked its greatest danger, namely, that in gaining the whole world it might “lose its own soul.”
Where then was the failure? This is part of he said:
- That in its temporal tasks the church should disregard the Eternal and in its faith in itself fail to see its guilt and need for forgiveness.
- That these people should proceed with fanatical energy to solve economic, social, and political problems and in solving these problems overlook or simply ignore the fact the first and foremost we need a Redeemer, who would set straight the deepest basis of our personal lives.
- That they were unaware of the dangers of which we have been shipwrecked—by being blind to the most terrible danger: namely, there is devil who can lead a man about by the nose in the midst of all his idealism, and there is a God upon whom we can wreak ourselves because “He is not mocked.”
- That we did not calculate the factor that is called “God “in our plans and therefore fell victims to megalomania.
- That we ignored that monumental call “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me” and hence landed in a giddy ecstasy of power worship that brought the whole world against us.
- That we ceased to trust ourselves to the miracle of God’s guidance and therefore we put our faith instead in miracle weapons that never came.
- That we no longer knew that God is in heaven and man is on earth and thus we lost all sense of the proportions of life and consequently were stricken with blindness in purely external political and military relationships.
Thielicke then came to the heart of the matter:
Denying God and casting down the cross is never a merely private decision that concerns only my own inner life and my personal salvation, but this denial immediately brings the most brutal consequences for the whole of historical life and especially for His own people. “God is not mocked.” The history of the world can tell us terrible tales based on that text.
In history, he says, the invisible is mightier and more creative and destructive than the visible. Anybody who still had not grasped that Germany with its program “was wreaked precisely on this dangerous rock called “God” and nothing else has no eyes to see. Because he sees only the individual catastrophes he no longer sees the basic, cardinal catastrophe behind them all.”
Finally, he reminded his listeners that “the worship of success is generally the form of idol worship the devil cultivates most assiduously… We could observe in the first years after 1933 the almost suggestive compulsion that emanates from great successes and how under the influence of these successes even Christians stopped to ask in whose name and at what price they were achieved…..Success is the greatest narcotic of all.”
Casting down the cross of Christ! Intoxicated with success! Substituting the temporary for the permanent! Thus was the church and the entire country crushed, crushed on the rock called God “who is not mocked.” Destroyed for being blinded by the pride of nationalism, instead of being humbled by its great need for repentance. The church stood with pride, but it would not bow in humility.
What is the Great Lesson for the Church Today?
E.M. Bounds once said, “Money is important, but money without prayer and intercession is powerless in the face of darkness.” This is one lesson the German Christians never learned.
If society as a whole seems to be getting darker and darker, it is not the problem of the darkness; the darkness is just acting like its nature. But the light no longer dispels the darkness, and the salt no longer preserves. It is time for the light to say, if things are darker, the problem is with us.
The Bible says, Christians are the salt of the earth (See Matthew 5:1). One of the functions of salt is to restrain corruption. Being “salt” does not abolish corruption, but it holds it in check for the duration until the Master will come again.
Our presence in the world as the disciples of Jesus Christ works like salt in the meat because salt is used as a preservative. We cannot shun all the evil in this world and you cannot change it but we can hold it in check for longer periods of time until God’s purposes of mercy, grace, and redemption are fully fulfilled.
We can’t be passive saying all this will happen. “The anti-Christ is coming and all prophecies will be fulfilled and there is nothing we can do about it.” This attitude of passivity is unscriptural. It is true that the antichrist will come just like Hitler, in fact, he will be worse than Hitler, but at this present time, there is a force that is restraining him from being revealed at this time.
For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming (2 Thessalonians 2:6-8 NKJV).
It is the personal presence of the Holy Spirit within the church that is restraining the anti-Christ system. So it is the responsibility of the church of Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to overcome the forces of darkness and to hold them in check.
I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that we what need is a mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon us as individuals, on our homes, our families, our churches, our ministers, our pastors, and on every Christian believer everywhere. If we repent and humble ourselves first, then God will answer the fervent petitions of His people to spare our lands.
Without faith, brokenness, humility, repentance, and a return to God in submission to His Laws by both the leaders and the people, it seems we are moving in the same direction as Germany, or even worse due to the spiritual condition of the Church.
Many financial analysts are worried that the dollar will be replaced as the world’s reserve currency. If that happens, then is a far greater possibility of the dollar going the same way the German mark did in the 1930s. This will completely destroy the middle class and create an opportunity for a tyrannical state.
Prices of commodities are going up every week because of the COVID-19 which means there is inflation that might eventually lead to hyperinflation. Although the mainstream media is not reporting this, we might face very tough times ahead. But as Christians we are exhorted and encouraged by the writer of Hebrews:
Let your character or moral disposition be free from love of money including greed, avarice, lust, and craving for earthly possessions and be satisfied with your present circumstances and with what you have; for He God Himself has said, I will not in any way fail you nor give you up nor leave you without support. I will not, I will not, I will not in any degree leave you helpless nor forsake nor let you down (relax My hold on you)! Assuredly not! (Josh. 1: 5.) So we take comfort and are encouraged and confidently and boldly say, The Lord is my Helper; I will not be seized with alarm I will not fear or dread or be terrified. What can man do to me? (Hebrews 13: 5–7).
In this crisis of COVID-19, it is time to weep and pray for God’s mercy and grace to prevail in our lives, homes, and nations. It is only prayer and intercession that can heal a nation.
We cannot make laws for holiness and righteousness to prevail in the hearts of men and women. It will take only the mercy and grace of Christ to save us from this invisible enemy.
Revive us Lord that Your people may rejoice in You. (Psalm 85:6)
