Intro note: The content here may seem an overly intense way to encourage you to read through the Bible in Chronological Order, which Bible805 (https://wp.me/pazrJD-OO) has a variety of ways for you to do but we are living in a time when truth seems to have lost its connection with objective reality in the minds of many and a simple encouragement to read through your Bible didn’t seem like enough.
Times are tragic when now truth for many is defined by whatever social media we follow or whatever we tell ourselves is true.
Jesus succinctly summed up our situation when he said, “You are in error, because you don’t know the Scriptures.” Truth, goodness, and beauty, the truly good life, and salvation are all found in the Scriptures, in God’s Word. Truth is not humanly generated and when we forget that, when we listen to an authority other than God’s Word to guide our lives, life does not go well. The following example, inspired by the movie, Zone of Interest, though extreme, I pray will be instructive and motivating for you to consider. A PODCAST and VIDEO follow, then the text of them, and recommended resource links are at the end of this article.
Following is a podcast and video challenge and then the text.
Challenges from the movie, Zone of Interest
Haunting is the description frequently used in reviews of Zone of Interest, a film about the luxurious life of the commander of the Auschwitz concentration camp where over one million were murdered in WW2. The majority of the film takes place in the home of the commander and his wife who live in a substantial house, surrounded by lush gardens and a high wall. A short distance from the wall is the camp. The horrors of the camp are heard in the background, though never shown in the film; instead, the focus is on the banal, details of family life with children’s parties, picnics, and bedtime stories.
And the servants who quietly wash the blood off the father’s shoes before he steps inside and who bring the family items from the most recent arrivals to the camp. The commander’s son plays with his collection of gold teeth; his wife puts on a mink coat and tries the lipstick she finds in a pocket. The movie is a picture of utterly self-focused individuals who know what is going on the other side of the wall but choose not to allow it to disturb their carefully constructed, comfortable world.
Slate summed up the movie in this way “Rudolf and Hedwig Höss are just ordinary people. That doesn’t mean they’re not monsters, but that monstrosity is much closer to the norm than the exception.”
Would we be monsters in a similar situation?
The movie forces us to ask that question.
When discussing the movie recently, one person in our group commented that she considered a similar question recently while reading Bonhoeffer (a Christian pastor who resisted the Nazis in WW2 and was martyred for it). She wondered if she would have joined the resisting church. She wondered how Christians overall would act today under similar challenges.
I admit to being in the midst of a nagging bronchial infection, which I’d like to use as an excuse for my abruptness, but I blurted out that we needn’t wonder. The answer is quite clear in that we, me, all of us would act in the same way we act today.
Evil, lies, inequities, and political turmoil fill our world. Demagogues pound podiums and promise destruction and retribution; we ignore bad behavior if it comes from a political party we favor. People are starving and we fast forward through relief appeals. Though we may or may not be the head of a concentration camp or have the opportunity to take obvious, physical actions, we are responding to current challenges by our current actions.
We can’t say we don’t know.
(A blog only pause here for practical application–If you feel motivated to do something about current issues of hunger and disaster relief, two groups working tirelessly to solve them, that I have no ties to other than as a supporter and highly recommend are World Vision and World Central Kitchen. Many of you have denominational or other groups you know are worthy of support. Now is the time to forgo an extra treat and give a gift to those in desperate need.)
I don’t want to side-track into a discussion of specifics in either outrage or giving as these will be different for us all in our home countries—you know the ones confronting you, you know the resources that can alleviate them. Please don’t ignore taking action.
Regardless of specifics, how are you protecting your heart against becoming a monster?
If the sort of evil shown in these two ordinary people, who on the surface simply wanted a good life for their children, simmers just below the civil veneer of us all, what can we do to not allow the monstrosity in our hearts to bleed into our lives?
First, we must recognize we don’t suddenly become evil or good.
Hedwig Hoss did not become a living horror when she put on the mink coat of a woman who died in agony a few meters from her mirror or when she demanded that she stay in the beautiful home when her husband was transferred. Before these situations, she constructed a life view that said, “I deserve this.” Even more, she had a reservoir of conviction that told her, “I deserve this no matter what it costs others to give it to me.”
Bit by bit our values are built and we are seldom aware of the process. When extraordinary circumstances crash in people do not, as the popular saying goes, “rise to the occasion,” instead we react to the situation from the values and beliefs we’ve built when we had the leisure to choose what we would fill our minds and hearts with. If we’ve fed ourselves a diet of what “I want,” “I need,” or “I deserve it” even in situations that at the time seem to matter little—that will be our default reaction when it does matter.
If we’ve chosen the hard work of saying “no” to what we want; of choosing to fill our minds with God’s Word, His thoughts, His desires, His truth, that will not only build up spiritual strength in us, but more importantly, it will shape our minds so we will recognize when things are not right, when we hear a lie presented as truth.
The reality we forget—we don’t make ourselves
Often forgotten, because it hurts the pride inherent in us all, is that we are not self-created. We are created beings.
As such we must look outside ourselves for a guide for how to act. Even the strident affirmations today of “trust your gut,” ” listen to your heart,” and the associated affirmations that clog our consciousness and lie about how wonderful we are, forget that our hearts don’t generate moral systems. What comes out of our guts, what we listen to in our hearts is what we put into them.
Unfortunately, we don’t start with a blank slate. As the Bible affirms, we are born with a propensity to evil. You don’t need to agree with the Bible to agree with that reality—5 minutes watching a temper tantrum of a 2-year-old and the selfishness and self-centeredness of tiny lives without parental guidance is proof enough. We are born with self-centered hearts shaped by the choices, direction, and input first from parents, and then are built up and reinforced by the choices we make, regardless of circumstances.
Rudolf Hoess’ final analysis of his life testifies to the extreme influence of outside forces on the human soul and our power to choose what will shape us. What we choose to believe will result in what we will do. Beyond the movie, at the end of his life, as attested to by letters and biographies (though critics have commented that these are the words of a psychotic sociopath and cannot perhaps be trusted) he repented of his actions and returned to the faith of his youth. In his final letters to his wife and children, he writes:
[To his wife] Based on my present knowledge I can see today clearly, severely and bitterly for me, that the entire ideology about the world in which I believed so firmly and unswervingly was based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day. And so my actions in the service of this ideology were completely wrong, even though I faithfully believed the idea was correct. Now it was very logical that strong doubts grew within me, and whether my turning away from my belief in God was based on completely wrong premises. It was a hard struggle. But I have again found my faith in my God.
. . . . .
[To his son] Don’t accept everything without criticism and as absolutely true… The biggest mistake of my life was that I believed everything faithfully which came from the top, and I didn’t dare to have the least bit of doubt about the truth of that which was presented to me.
from Hughes, John Jay, A Mass Murderer Repents: The Case of Rudolf Hoess, Commandant of Auschwitz, Archbishop Gerety Lecture at Seton Hall University
Only God can judge the reality of his repentance, regardless, his clear evaluation of his mistake is instructive when he says, “The biggest mistake of my life was that I believed everything faithfully which came from the top, and I didn’t dare to have the least bit of doubt about the truth of that which was presented to me.”
His actions were the predictable outcome of what he believed. As a young man, after hearing a speech by Adolf Hitler, he turned away from the church, joined the Nazi party and a life of brutal devotion to it followed. A life, as he later admits was, “based on completely wrong premises and had to absolutely collapse one day.”
He didn’t decide one day to become a mass murderer. His life was the logical outcome of a system of lies and beliefs he chose.
We always have a choice in how we build our lives
In one of the earliest books in the Bible, God said,
“Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live! You can make this choice by loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and committing yourself firmly to him. This is the key to your life. Deut. 30:19,20
What is interesting about the context of this challenge is that it follows what many consider rather boring books of rules (Leviticus and Numbers). Specifics aside, these early books show us that God cares about every detail of life, and that worship of Him, and adherence to His Word is the way to life.
Which of course, brings us back to the reason for this discussion—that if we want to live well, to please God, and be certain of our salvation and eternal future, we need to know God’s Word. The way to life, true, eternal life is not something that bubbles up from inside us. Inside us, we want to worship ourselves, we don’t want to bow down to anyone. We need truth outside ourselves to move us from the living death of self-absorption.
That truth, that way to life is found fully in God’s Word. He speaks at first quietly to our spirits and through the inspiration of nature but that message often creates only a vague and undemanding pantheism. To truly know God and God in the flesh, Jesus our Savior, to know the fine details of what it means to live in a way that pleases Him and mold our soul into the eternal person we were created to be, we need God’s Word, the Bible.
We also need more than scattered bits and pieces of the Bible pulled out of context to satisfy our undying selfish desires and demands we make of God. We need to know how God thinks, how He acts in the broad span of history in our world, and realistically how he interacts with the people who want to join Him in the work of redeeming the earth. When you get to know the entire Book well, it may surprise you as its message is often quite different than the distorted promises and false claims often preached out of context.
The best way to correctly understand your Bible is to read it in Chronological, historical order
And all this long rant has been to encourage you to do that. All the resources you need including:
- Schedules, reading plans
- Journal pages
- Motivational and instructional Bible-content videos
- A motivational eBook
- Lesson resources for you to teach others
Are all free and available to you in links at the end of this article. In additional, all the material is available for you to freely teach and share on the Bible805 Academy.
Decide to take advantage of these tools to build God’s Word as the fountainhead of your life, the pure spring that the more you feed it by spending time daily in God’s Word, the more it will wash over and guide all you do. Not only you, but your world will benefit as God’s Word doesn’t just stay in us, it spills out into actions of love, kindness, and mercy to everyone around us. It will give you the resources to respond to challenging situations and moral dilemmas. It will enable you to be at peace no matter the challenges of life and assured of eternity when all wrongs will be righted and all made new. You will live in the dawn that will someday be full light.
Or you can decide you don’t have the time or interest to get into the Bible in a serious way; surely not to read it daily and all of it, which seems somewhat legalistic you tell yourself. You can rationalize you go to church and listen to sermons each week and that’s enough. You can fill your free time with sports programs, social media, and news channels forgetting that a steady diet of that alone will rot your soul and you’ll have nothing to draw on when the challenges of life come. I’m not saying a bit of TV or social media or news is wrong, the danger is when it progresses to hours-focused media gluttony. When there is nothing to constrain it, the monstrosity inherent in us all may break out of you. You will live in a dusk that will someday become utter darkness.
The choice is yours as to what you will build your life on, what will form your soul that will in turn create your words and actions, what will build your life and determine your eternity.
Choose to spend time daily in God’s Word.
Choose life.
The following (all FREE) are materials from Bible805 that will give you the motivation and tools to go through your Bible Chronologically in the coming year.
Below first is a brief video overview of all, followed by the links.
9 Reasons to Read or Listen to Your Bible in Chronological Order
Link to the Bible805 Academy and all the materials needed to teach it:
https://bible805academy.com/b/d5UrT
Link to the podcast, blog, notes, and any associated materials:
https://wp.me/pazrJD-er
5 Reasons Why You Probably Haven’t Read Your Bible in Chronological, Historical Order
Link to the Bible805 Academy and all the materials needed to teach it:
https://bible805academy.com/b/ERkHy
Link to the podcast, blog, notes, and any associated materials:
https://wp.me/pazrJD-ev
Why Your Bible Isn’t in Chronological Order-the history & more
Link to the Bible805 Academy and all the materials needed to teach it:
https://bible805academy.com/b/Ks7wB
Link to the podcast, blog, notes, and any associated materials:
https://wp.me/pazrJD-ex
Not Safe but Good, is a free eBook to encourage you to read through the Bible in Chronological Order
FREE downloadable eBook on Bible805.com:
https://wp.me/pazrJD-kS
Through the Bible in Chronological Order, eBook, schedules, and journal pages
FREE downloadable eBook on Bible805.com:
https://wp.me/pazrJD-Mp
Read the Bible in Chronological Order! Motivation, how to, and helps to get the most out of it!
Note: this is a motivational video for church people,a summary of the three videos above.
Link to the Bible805 Academy and all the materials needed to teach it:
https://bible805academy.com/b/pPgjz
Link to the podcast, blog, notes, and any associated materials:
https://wp.me/pazrJD-Bk
How to Fit the Bible into a Busy Life
Note: this is a motivational video I did for a business audience, a summary of the three videos above.
Link to the Bible805 Academy and all the materials needed to teach it:
https://bible805academy.com/b/pPgjz
Link to the podcast, blog, notes, and any associated materials:
https://wp.me/pazrJD-Oo
For more on this topic and updates that will inform you about additional materials to help you know, trust, apply, and teach the Bible, sign up HERE for the Bible805 Newsletter, The Lion’s Voice