Did you see in the news last summer about the 93 year old Nazi who was recently convicted of complicity…

… in thousands of deaths because he was discovered to be part of the killing machine when he was 17 working at the Auschwitz concentration camp? It wasn’t until he was 94 years old that a German court sentenced 94-year-old Reinhold Hanning to five years in prison for being an accessory to the murder of 170,000 people between January 1942 and June 1944, when he served as an SS guard at the Auschwitz death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

What is the lesson pictured here? Justice and judgment come to everyone - in the Judgment of God. Christians understand this. He is the “knower of hearts.” He knows all things. Justice will be served.

In Acts 17 the apostle Paul tells us that God “has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”

In Matthew 25, in his last public statement Jesus tells us: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left.

Then Jesus goes on to welcome his beloved sheep and to invite them into the kingdom prepared for them. He celebrates the way his people have loved him, pointing out the evidence of their love to him by how they have loved “the least of these my brothers.” Can you imagine the amazement, the joy, the wonder, and the thrill in the hearts of his people?

Yet, then Jesus addresses the goats on his left. “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” And Jesus unpacks his condemnation with the indictment, not accusing them of heinous crimes, but of their sins of omission – what they did not do to him by virtue of their failure to serve “least of his brothers.” They are aghast and in denial. But the indictment is true.

This Reinhold Hanning fellow probably thought over the decades (1940s, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s…) that his evil deeds would never catch up with him. But they did.

Jesus Christ, the glorious Son of Man is a great judge, but he first came to be the Great Savior. How did he do that? He came to be cursed so that his people would not be. The apostle Paul writes in Galatians 3:13, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, ‘Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.’” What was that tree? It was the cross where Jesus bled and died, suffering God’s wrath, to make atonement for sins of both commission and omission.

Will you repent of your sins and trust his atoning work for you? Do you know him as your Savior before you meet him as the Judge?

Musing’s from Pastor John, February 28, Click to Email Pastor John