There is a very powerful old movie from 1961 that I recently watched again called, "Judgment at Nuremberg". It requires some stamina to watch the entire film, for it is over three hours long, and its subject matter is often painful and difficult to watch. It is about one of the trials of Nazi war criminals held after World War II in Nuremberg, Germany. After the Allies had defeated the Axis, war crime trials were held in Germany to hold accountable the Nazis who had led their war effort and committed atrocities. There were actually many sets of trials; the first was for the Nazi commanders, and there was another series of twelve trials for other defendants. The most famous of those twelve trials was the Doctor's Trial, where physicians were tried for human experimentation and mass murder. The movie dealt with another of those twelve trials, the Judges Trial. Accused of ordering the deaths of innocent civilians and arranging for millions to be sent to concentration camps, the Nazi judges claimed they were only following the laws as written. Those laws were primarily directed at the Jews.
Those laws crept insidiously into the German landscape, in only the span of a generation. Many of you will remember Surviving the Suffering articles from a couple of years ago (Not Quite Human) documenting the growth in German society of widespread anti-Semitism. In the late 1800's, the Jewish people in Germany were granted full citizenship, but by the turn of the century, the public at large began to turn on the Jews. There eventually was a nationwide boycott of Jewish businesses. A law was passed called, "The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service," which prevented Jews from holding any civil service jobs. The Nuremberg Laws, named for the same city in which the trials would be held decades later, stripped the Jews of their citizenship, and Jews were forbidden to marry non-Jewish Germans. A few years later, there was a night where there was widespread destruction of Jewish businesses, called Kristallnacht (Crystal Night), so named because of the broken glass that littered the streets. By the end of the war, six million Jews had been sent to their deaths in the camps.
All of this occurred in Western Civilization less than a hundred years ago; there are people alive today that lived through this, and I have met them. It is nearly impossible to believe that a country could change like that, and that there would be so much outrage directed against a particular religious group. But public opinion changed in Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, and the leaders of the nation incrementally added laws in a step-wise fashion to achieve their ends. Aided by the judges who claimed to only doing their duty, the unimaginable occurred, and it is still within living memory of many.
This last week saw our own Supreme Court judges create their own laws, essentially legislating while claiming not to do so. In the case of the Affordable Care Act, they took a law that very explicitly said one thing, and declared that it did not really mean it; this was not a constitutional question, but simply a matter of interpretation. With gay marriage, they invented a right that is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. As the writer Kevin Williamson put it, in the first case they took a law that said one thing and said it didn't, and in the second case they took a Constitution that didn't say something and said that it did. One of our Fathers, John Adams, described the ideal government as, "a government of laws, not men." Sadly, our government has become the opposite, where judges that are not accountable to the electorate create and change laws, in a step-wise fashion, to suit the purposes of the government, not the people. Who will hold these judges accountable; who judges the judges?
Our heavenly Father is the ultimate judge, and His Son Christ will render judgment when He returns. No one, not a single person, will escape judgment. If you are a sincere Christian, you are aware of how fallen you are, and how little you deserve entry into heaven. It is only because of God's mercy and your faith in Christ Jesus that you will be judged righteous and allowed to live in eternity with Him. Each of us will have to appear before Him and give account of our deeds. All earthly judges will likewise stand in the presence of our Sovereign Lord and Master, but not to try and use tortured legal reasoning to explain why they created rulings that defied Him. God has given us our Law very clearly, and there is not a case to be brought before Him to overrule his decrees.
There is also precedent for judgment in the here and now, before the return of Christ. Our country has nearly completed the process of turning its back on God and His moral instruction, just as it has turned its back on the Constitution. The former necessarily precedes the latter. As John Adams also stated, "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." When the people are no longer moral and religious, the Constitution becomes useless to them. If we discard God, we may as well throw out the Constitution, and then the judges-- men-- rule, and not the law. Society may turn against Bible-believing Christians, and we may experience ostracism and outrage as we practice our faith, and the attitudes of the country will have changed in only a few decades, in only the span of a generation. We are already seeing the boycotting of Christian-run businesses, as public opinion changes in the first half of this century.
God has and does judge nations and people. In Daniel, chapter 5, King Belshazaar of the Chaldeans held a feast, and while drinking wine a hand wrote on the wall of the palace these words: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. Daniel interpreted these words for the king. Upharsin meant that his kingdom would be given to the Medes and Persians. Mene meant that the days of the kingdom had been numbered and it would be brought to an end.
TEKEL was interpreted thus: "You have been weighed in the balances and found wanting." America is on the scales, and God is checking the balances. If we are found wanting, TEKEL, then it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10:31) and have Him pronounce MENE, MENE. I do not know what the fourth word of the sentence would be for America; I suppose there is a remote possibility it could still be UPHARSIN, the Persians, into whose hands we could be given if they obtain nuclear devices. Yet as we appear to live in the time of the judges, it is appropriate to look at the book of the same name, Judges 21:25, wherein it states, "Everyone did what was right in his own eyes." I am afraid that the sentence God will pass on America is MENE, MENE, TEKEL, YOURSELVES.
