Ultimately, Imitation is Praise

I feel like I’m going though life on God’s horizontal escalator. You know those moving walkways at airports? That’s what it’s like. I get on and wait, and stuff happens while I do very little.

Last night the leader of my prayer group texted me to ask if I could lead the group today. That was just perfect, because I had a lot to tell everyone. Last week, I went to DC for the National Day of Prayer, a tour of the Holocaust Memorial, and a meeting with the Israeli ambassador, and the whole time, God pretty much buried me in favor. It took me quite a while to download the information to my group today, but I covered the essentials.

God always tells you more than you can tell everyone else. Frustrating. He isn’t kidding when he says your cup will run over. It happens over and over, in different areas of life.

I had a new insight today, while I was talking about the Holocaust Memorial. You may recall what I wrote about the pile of desecrated Torah scrolls I saw there. You can read about it at this link. The Holy Spirit rose up in me and made me feel his outrage and disgust, or at least that’s how it seemed.

Today I was talking about it to my friends, and I said it seemed to me that the sheepskin construction of the Torah was intended by God to show us that the Mosaic law, though priceless and vital, was external to human beings. Skin is an outer covering, and sheep represent people. The letters of the Torah are written on the outsides of sheep, and the Mosaic law was a system of commandments originating outside the person. The Holy Spirit, on the other hand, bubbles up within us and motivates and guides us so we come to share God’s nature. It is God’s law, written on our hearts, as predicted in the Old Testament. “I delight to do thy will, O my God. Yea, thy law is within my heart.”

One of my friends mentioned the lampshades and other articles the Nazis made from the skins of Jews. I remembered seeing photos of these things. Some pieces of skin were used as parchment for propaganda and crude cartoons.

I know that Satan has no new ideas. God is the creator; Satan is the imitator. I started to see how the Holocaust was a weak, clumsy, profane mimicry of things precious to God.

God wrote his law on the hides of sheep, to show that the law was to be upon his people. His use of sheep in this fashion is similar to his use of sheep and other animals at the Temple. Only a human sacrifice could take away the sins of the world, but sheep were put in their place until the real sacrifice was prepared two thousand years ago.

Similarly, when the Nazis wrote and drew on the skins of Jews, they were creating Satan’s Torah. His insult. Through these revolting articles, Satan was lampooning the sacred scrolls. I firmly believe that. It was just like the pig sacrifice Antiochus performed in the Temple. It was an extremely pure revelation of the barren and putrified state of Satan’s heart.

I believe the crematoria were mockeries of the Temple itself. The Temple was a place where animals were burned all day, to please God. In the camps, people were burned in obedience to his enemy, and their ashes rained down like manna. And how did the Nazis get people to enter the gas chambers? They convinced them they were going to be given showers. They were going to be bathed and purified. Perhaps this was Satan’s attempt to ridicule ritual immersion, which the Jewish high priests had to undergo before and after entering the Holy of Holies.

Nazi killed the Jews with gas, which is inhaled. What does “spirit” mean? It means “breath.” Look it up. God breathed into Adam to give him life. Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit onto the disciples. God gives charismatic Christians new life, from inside, by breathing the Holy Spirit into them. Hitler, on the other hand, caused Jews and other death camp victims to breathe in death.

The Temple priests ate of the sacrifices, and they lived on the gold and other things offered by the people. The Nazis mined Jewish bodies for gold and hair. Even the Sonderkommando, who were like temple officials, were unwilling participants in the twisted harvest. They lived in special rooms stocked with food and other goods taken from those murdered in the gas chambers. Improbably and inexplicably (as with so many things that have a supernatural cause), the Nazis shared the goods with them, as though mocking the commandment to refrain from muzzling the ox that treads out the grain.

Finally, the forced stripping seems to be a Satanic allusion to the requirement that priests cover themselves with appropriate attire, including linen shorts that came between their nakedness and the Temple structures beneath them. God covered the priests. Satan stripped people naked when he sent them into his version of the Temple.

Satan loves cruel sacrifices. In the days of idolatry, it was easy to get people to perform the rites willingly. They even provided their children as fodder. During the Holocaust, Satan had to deal with people who either believed in God or had no beliefs at all, so no one was willing. He still got his way.

These things seem obvious today, but a month ago, they were not apparent to me.

I could go on. The prophets talk of baldness (even baldness of the body), sackcloth, and ashes. The Nazis shaved their victims from head to toe, dressed them in coarse cloth uniforms (I saw them at the Memorial), and turned them into ashes. The prophets talk of bodies littering the ground, and this is one of the horrors that recur regularly in the photographic record of the Holocaust. I just don’t have enough time to write everything that comes to mind.

Anyway, the prayer group meeting was wonderful. And afterward, a couple of us went to a gun show. I was disturbed to see an object that appeared to be a swastika belt buckle, on a table of items for sale. I guess the murderous nuts–the embarrassing few–are trying to blend in with the sheep. Very sad. I should have complained to the show’s promoters.

My church is having a conference that starts tomorrow, and I have to help out. I may blow off pizza in the morning. People will survive without it.

That’s how it’s going today. I have to wonder what the coming week will bring.