Gone But Not Forgotten

Her name was...but that was the problem. She no longer had a name. She was now simply a number. And that was deliberate because she and all of those with her no longer had names, only numbers. And this was a part of a conscious effort to dehumanize them. They were no longer viewed as human beings, only numbers.

And as part of this process, she had been stripped of everything that she owned—her identity, her family had been taken away from her, along with every item of clothing, her dress, her shoes, her socks, photos of her family, her little ring, her little necklace— every possession that she owned had been taken away from her. And then another act of humiliation and efficiency—even the hair from her head—had been shaved. The better to prevent lice, sickness, and disease from spreading among them and reducing the efficiency of the prisoners.

She had turned 15 years old just a few months before, and that had temporarily spared her life, because those younger than 15 were considered too young to provide useful work. So they were sorted out and taken away to be killed. She was a very intelligent young woman, quite a gifted writer, but that didn't matter now. She now had only one purpose in life, and that was to be part of the machine—a machine built for the twin purposes of power and death—a machine that was very efficient at both.

She was one part of hundreds of thousands of parts—a part that was to be worked and worked until it succumbed to sickness or disease, or was simply worn out and could work no more. And then that part would be discarded, and another part put into her place so the machine could continue with its deadly and efficient effort in the war. Her crime was to have been born Jewish, and in the summer of 1944 in Europe, that amounted to a death sentence.

Her given name was Annalise Marie. She would later become famous to history by a shorter version of her name, Anne. Anne Frank. Ironically, Anne Frank was German by birth. Her father had even served as a German infantry officer in the First World War. But none of that mattered now because they were part of an inferior race and had to be eliminated. Anne's father, Otto Frank, could see the danger brewing long before others could.

And after the Nazi Party came to power in 1933 in Germany, he moved his family from Germany to Amsterdam and Holland. And his conditions grew from bad to worse. He twice applied for visas for his family to immigrate to the United States.

But the United States was filled with its own share of anti-Semites at that time, and twice his visa application was rejected, like thousands of other Jewish families at that time. And then in 1940, when Germany overran Holland, Anne Frank's family was trapped there with no way out. They headed better than most, and with the help of friends and some of Mr. Frank's business partners, they went into hiding in what they called the secret annex.

It was a secret hideout of rooms that had been prepared earlier in the back of a warehouse at Mr. Frank's business. And to help cover their tracks, they told others that they were fleeing to Switzerland, so hopefully the authorities would not come looking for them. And eventually they could find a way to escape and make a clean getaway. And while they hid out in their secret rooms at the back of the warehouse, around them the world descended into madness.

Anne Frank was 13 years old when her family went into hiding, and like many teenagers, she had dreams. A great dream. She hoped to become a famous writer, and in line with those dreams, she began to pass her time in their secret self-imposed prison by writing a diary. A diary in which she poured out her hopes, her dreams, her fears, her transition from childhood into becoming a young woman.

And in her diary she chronicles the strain as her family takes in another family of Jews and later another elderly man. She takes them, they take them into their hiding place to spare them from the Holocaust that is happening outside. In her diary she talks about the disagreements with her family in this indescribably stressful time, and talks about her struggles with growing up and trying to forge her own identity in such incredibly stressful times. She describes the tightening noose as conditions grow worse and worse, as the food that they have carefully stored away for months begins to run out.

And it gets harder and harder to find food on the black market. Their clothing wears out, develops holes, becomes rags essentially, but they can't replace it. There's nothing to replace it with. She talks in her diary about her fears of someone in their secret hideout getting sick, because getting sick could become a death sentence. There's no way to bring in medicine from the outside. There's no way to get a doctor.

So just the slightest sickness could become a death sentence. She describes her fears and nightmares as friends are taken away, never to be seen again. Anne Frank wrote her diary only 10 years before I was born. Some of you were alive during that time. Some of you weren't. And for our younger people, that time of horror might seem unimaginably far away, like its ancient history. But again, it's not that long ago, only 10 years before I was born. The famous 17th century British philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote, The life of man is nasty, brutish, and short.

The life of man is nasty, brutish, and short. And today our lifespans are longer, but for most of human history, that has been the story of mankind. Man's life has been nasty, brutish, and short. To remind us of what a world without God is capable of, I'd like to read some excerpts from Anne Frank's diary. It's titled, Diary of a Young Girl.

Much of it is intensely personal, and I won't go into that. But what I would like to read is her thoughts as she witnesses the most advanced civilization on Earth at that time going insane. January 13, 1943, she describes conditions deteriorating around them. She writes, terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor, helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They're allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they're robbed of these possessions on the way.

Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed. Their family is gone. Everyone is scared. The children in this neighborhood run around in thin skirts, thin shirts, and wooden shoes. They have no coats, no caps, no stockings, and no one to help them.

Gnawing on a carrot to steal their hunger pangs, they walk from their cold houses through cold streets. Things have gotten so bad and hauling that hordes of children stop passers-by in the streets to beg for a piece of bread. I could spend hours telling you about the suffering the war has brought, but I'd only make myself more miserable. All we can do is wait as calmly as possible for it to end.

Jews and Christians alike are waiting. The whole world is waiting. And many are waiting for death. On October 29, 1943, she talks about the depressing atmosphere and their hiding place and the constant fear they have of being discovered. She writes, Let me out where there's fresh air and laughter.

A voice within me cries. I don't even bother to reply anymore, but lie down. Sleep makes the silence and the terrible fear go by more quickly. A month later, November 17, 1943, she talks about a nightmare in which she dreamed of a friend whom she assumes has been captured and sent to the concentration camps. She writes, Last night, just as I was falling asleep, Hannah Lee suddenly appeared before me.

I saw her there, dressed in rags, her face thin and worn. She looked at me with such sadness and reproach in her enormous eyes that I could read the message in then. Oh, Anne, why have you deserted me? Help me! Help me! Rescue me from this hell! And I can't help her. I can only stand by and watch while other people suffer and die. Why have I been chosen to live while she's probably going to die? And then she writes to herself, I've got to stop dwelling on this. It won't get me anywhere. I keep seeing her enormous eyes, and they haunt me.

The following spring, May 3, 1944, she reflects on war with remarkable clarity for a girl who was only 14 years old at the time. She writes, what's the point of war? Why can't people live together peacefully?

Why all this destruction? There's a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder, and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown, will be cut down and destroyed, only to start over again.

Again, that's remarkable insight for a 14-year-old girl who didn't understand the truth. But she did understand, as she wrote here, and as we've heard about during this feast, that unless and until there is a metamorphosis, as she put it, a transformation, a change in human nature, this cycle of war and suffering and death is going to continue.

In the following months, she and her family heard, on BBC Radio out of London, the news of the Allied landings at Normandy in France, June 6, 1944, and that got her hopes up. And she writes of their hope that maybe the long nightmare they've been living in will soon be over.

So she writes in her diary, is this really the beginning of the long-awaited liberation, the liberation we've all talked about so much, which still seems too good, too much of a fairy tale, ever to come true? Will this year bring us victory?

We don't know yet. But where there's hope, there's life. It fills us with fresh courage and makes us strong again. We'll need to be brave to endure the many fears and hardships and suffering yet to come. So she's hopeful now. They begin to see some light at the end of the tunnel that perhaps the nightmare they're living in will soon come to an end.

A month later, July 15, 1944, she describes her hope that things will get better and that she as a teenage girl will finally be able to realize her dreams. She writes, it's difficult in times like these. Ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals. They seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.

She continues, it's utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation of chaos, suffering, and death. I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness. I hear the approaching thunder that one day will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up into the sky, I feel that some everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more. In the meantime, I must hold on to my ideals. Perhaps the day will come when I'll be able to realize them.

Anne Frank's diary contains two more entries and then ends on August 1, 1944. Three days after that, in the morning of August 4, a car pulled up outside the building housing their secret rooms, outstepped a German SS sergeant accompanied by three Dutch secret police. Someone had tipped them off. The Jews were hiding at the back of the building, and they arrested the eight people hiding there.

Anne Frank's family, plus the other family they had taken in, and the elderly Jewish men were hiding there as well. They shipped all eight off by train to Auschwitz in Poland. What was life like for Anne and her sister in Auschwitz? We really don't know. We don't have anything that Anne wrote. Her diary was left there, abandoned in the secret rooms, when they were taken captive. But as I researched this subject, I came across this photo of a young girl who had lived through the horror of the concentration camps.

This photo was taken in a Polish orphanage shortly after the war. Children were asked to draw a picture of their home, and most of the children in the orphanage drew the typical child's picture of the crooked house, of the crooked chimney, and crooked doors, and windows. This little girl, her name was Teresa, drew terror, because that was what her home had been in her short lifetime. And you can see in her eyes the terror that came out on the chalkboard. Of the eight people who had been in hiding with the Frank family, only the father, Otto Frank, survived the war. The others died of disease, of exhaustion, of starvation, or they were gassed, or they were simply worked to death.

Anne Frank and her sister, Margo, was her name, survived longer than most. They were healthy enough to be transferred from Auschwitz to another camp called Bergen-Belsen. But in the winter of 1944 and 1945, a terrible typhus epidemic swept through the camp, brought on by the horrible hygienic conditions there, and it killed thousands of prisoners, including Anne, sister Margo first, and then a few days later, Anne herself. Their bodies were dumped in mass graves, along with thousands of others.

The camp was liberated six weeks later. And three weeks after that, Germany surrendered, and the war in Europe ended. You've probably heard that Europe is far less religious than the United States, and it's true if you travel there, you see huge cathedrals, huge churches, that seem empty most of the time, or have been transformed into restaurants, entertainment centers, discos, all kinds of things. Europe is much religious than the rest of the world, simply because they went through two world wars in the last century, and they saw suffering that most of us cannot begin to imagine.

Two generations of young European men, British, French, Italian, German, were slaughtered during those two world wars. About 20 million people died in the first world war, and a generation later, about 70 million people died in the second world war. The Europeans witnessed all of this firsthand. They felt the war. They lived the war. They saw the horrors firsthand. They saw the genocide, and they wondered, if there is a God, how could He allow this kind of suffering, and millions of Europeans abandoned religion entirely and became atheists?

And even today, one of the major arguments that atheists use is, if there is a God, how could He allow things like this to take place? And it's a good question. It's a good question, and much of the answer lies in the fact that the world does not understand the meaning of this day, this day that we are celebrating today. You see, God has not forgotten all of those people, the 20 million who died in World War I, the 70 million who died in World War II, the 6 million Jews like Anne Frank and her family who perished in the death camps.

He's never forgotten the billions, billions of other human beings who have lived and loved and hoped and died without ever knowing what life was all about, without ever knowing the purpose for our existence, without ever knowing the wonderful and precious truths that we have heard about this week that has been revealed to all of us. Most of mankind has indeed lived life, as Thomas Hobbes said, lives that were nasty, brutish, and short. Nasty, brutish, and short. If you ever visit a cemetery, my dad made tombstones when I was a child, so many of my childhood years spending hours in cemeteries, later apprenticing with him.

And if you walk through a country cemetery or any cemetery these days, you walk among the tombstones, you'll see this phrase, on probably more than any other phrase, on the tombstones, Gone, but not forgotten. And that's the title for today's sermon, Gone, but not forgotten. It's a nice sentiment. It's a good sentiment. It's a well-meaning sentiment. It's a loving sentiment. But unfortunately, it's one that's not very accurate, because most people die and they are quickly forgotten.

Their children remember them, their grandchildren, maybe even their great-grandchildren, but beyond that, memory of people disappears. People go to the grave and they're quickly forgotten. There's only one who truly remembers them, and that is God. And he has never forgotten all those who have come before, all of those who have lived and died and saw their hopes and their dreams go to the grave with them. What does this day mean to those people? What does it mean to them?

In short, it means the fulfillment of their hopes and dreams. Everything that mankind has ever wanted, ever wished for, ever hoped for, ever dreamed about, but could never find, those dreams come to reality. But all of that is found in the meaning of this day that we're celebrating here today that could never reach those dreams in a world that is blinded by Satan the Devil and cut off from God and prison in a world of darkness and spiritual blindness. And this day is all about their hopes, their dreams, everything that mankind has ever wanted but could never find in Satan's world. But how will that become a reality?

How will God make it possible for man to finally find and attain everything that he has longed for, hoped for, dreamed about? One of the most truly haunting and unforgettable things I've ever seen is the Children's Memorial at the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. I've visited it several times. And it's hard to describe because it's unlike anything you'll ever see anywhere else. One minute you're out in the bright sunshine of Jerusalem, and the next minute you walk through a doorway into a hillside, into a chamber.

And there as you enter the darkness of the chamber, you see photos before you imprinted on glass, black and white photos of children, boys and girls of all ages. You walk past those slowly, they're in the darkness, and you enter a dark, curving hallway. And it narrows down so that only one person can go through at a time. And within a few steps the outside light is gone, and you're standing there in complete darkness. And the pathway is narrow, so you have to walk single file.

And that's by design because you were intended to walk alone in the dark and to experience this by yourself alone. And then as your eyes begin to adjust to the darkness, you see tiny lights that seem to be floating in the air everywhere around you. Some of them seem close enough that you could almost reach out and touch them, some a few yards away, some so faint, so far away that it's like they're disappearing from sight. And thousands of these lights float in the air all around you, everywhere you look.

It's still as you are walking through a universe of stars as you slowly shuffle along there in the dark. And they change positions as you move, some appear and disappear. Again, some so close you feel like you could touch them and others far away. And no one is saying a word. And then you notice the voice, the unforgettable voice in the background. It's a woman's voice, very deliberate, slowly reading from a list. Rachel Weisman, 13 years old, Austria. David Berger, 8 years old, Netherlands. Esther Korman, 2 years old, Hungary.

Isaac Levy, 15 years old, Germany. Mariam Gribbitts, 3 years old, Poland. Benjamin Fisher, 7 years old, France. Dahlia Rbikovich, 10 years old, Russia. And the voice keeps repeating, going on, name after name, reading off the names. The ages, the countries, of some of the million and a half Jewish children who were murdered in the Holocaust.

I didn't realize it at the time, but the thousands of flickering lights there in the children's memorial were created by actually only five candles burning. But they are reflected thousands of times by mirrors that are carefully placed throughout this memorial. So you see reflections of reflections of reflections from these five candles in this darkened hall of mirrors. And the candles are kept perpetually burning there as a memorial to the Jewish children murdered in the Holocaust. And the Jewish architect of this designed it this way so that those thousands of tiny points of life reflected, as he put it, the souls of the children whose lives were cut short far too soon. And although this is a truly haunting place, and if any of you have ever been there, you know what I'm talking about. If you ever go to Jerusalem, you should by all means see this. It's haunting, but at the same time, it's a hopeful place. The first time I went there after the feast in Israel years ago, with the lessons of the feast and the meaning of this eighth day, still fresh on my mind as I slowly shuffled along in the dark, entranced by these lights everywhere, and hearing those names. And the symbolism I was seeing represented something else that was very hopeful. A scripture came to mind. Ecclesiastes 12 and verse 7. This came to mind as I stared at these, this universe of lights floating all around me in this memorial to the murdered innocence of the Holocaust. The context of Ecclesiastes 12 and verse 7 is Solomon talking about the inevitability of death. He says that we will all grow old. We will die because that's the way we were designed. We were designed to live 60, 70, 80 years. We weren't designed in these physical bodies to live forever. So he says in Ecclesiastes 12 and verse 7, then the dust, and the dust he's referring to is these bodies. The dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it. The bodies of many of those Jewish children commemorated in the children's memorial didn't get a decent burial. Anne Frank and her sister Margo and her family had their bodies dumped in the mass graves of Bergen-Belsen. Millions of others had their bodies burned to ash, and their ashes dumped in swamps or used for landfill. Their bodies returned to the dust of the earth, as Solomon wrote here. But the body is not what is important to God. He designed our bodies to be temporary to last six, seven, eight decades, and then to wear out and break down. Dust we are, and to dust we will return. What is important to God is the spirit. Our bodies die, and that spirit that God has placed within us goes back to the God who made it, who gave it, to await the resurrection. And that's what all of these tiny flickering lights there in the children's memorial represented to be. I thought of those millions of lives snuffed out at such a young age that I've returned to God to await the fulfillment of this day. This day that we are here celebrating, as time has marched on, mankind has forgotten those millions. But God has not forgotten them, and He never will. Every day brings us one day closer to the fulfillment of this day when those spirits will be reunited with a physical body to live again, to hear something they've never heard before. Which is God's truth, to learn things they've never heard before. Which is the wonderful truth that we've been hearing about here for this Feast of Tabernacles. They will learn and have their opportunity for salvation.

Ezekiel 37, the famous chapter that we traditionally read here on this day, gives us a marvelous description of how this will take place. Let's read about this when this prophecy, this marvelous prophecy, will become a reality. We can't really talk about this day without discussing this chapter. Ezekiel 37, in verse 1, he writes, The hand of the Lord came upon me and brought me out in the spirit of the Lord, so he's describing this vision that he sees here, and sent me down in the midst of the valley, and it was full of bones. Then he calls me to pass by them all around, and behold, there were very many thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of bones in this valley, and they are very old, they are very dry. These people have been dead a long time, is what this means. And he said to me, Son of man, can these bones live? So he answered, O Lord God, you know. Again he said to me, prophesy to these bones. And say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones, Surely I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live. I will put sinews on you and bring flesh upon you, cover you with skin and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord. So God promises to resurrect these old, dry bones, and give them bodies and life again, huge numbers of them. And sometimes we wonder, I wondered, how will this happen? How will God resurrect all of these bodies and bones and sort everything out again and give them life again? How do we put all of that back together? After all, once we die, what happens? Our bodies decay, it decays into atoms and molecules, and they go all the way to the place. They become part of the soil, part of the ground we walk on. They wash into the streams and rivers and into the oceans. They're blown around by the wind. So how's God going to sort all this out? How is this going to happen? But really, assembling billions of new physical bodies is no problem for God. What are our bodies? I studied physiology years ago, and our bodies are basically a bag of chemicals, a bag of molecules walking around on two legs. We're mostly water and carbon, various other elements, calcium and other elements thrown in. And the resurrection, God doesn't need to resurrect the exact same body. He just needs the raw materials. The raw materials, the carbon atoms, the oxygen atoms, the hydrogen atoms, the calcium atoms, and nitrogen atoms, and there's a whole universe full of those atoms. He doesn't need to resurrect the same body. He just needs the raw materials. He's got a universe full of them. He just needs the raw materials. Every human being who has ever lived has his or her unique DNA. And DNA is fascinating. If you study it, if you've been keeping up with the discoveries in recent decades about DNA, scientists just continually bewildered the more they find out about DNA. What is DNA? DNA is a blueprint, an exact blueprint for building a living being, a human body. In other words, every one of us. And scientists have been able to extract DNA from creatures that have died thousands of years ago. Do you think God cannot do the same thing with human bodies?

Does God have that DNA stored somewhere? I don't know.

I think this is one way he can do it, if he chooses to do it that way. We don't know how God is going to do it. We just know he is going to do it, as we just read there from Ezekiel. God has a perfect memory, unlike the rest of us. Maybe he'll recreate all the billions who've ever lived just based on his perfect memory. We don't know. He doesn't tell us how he's going to do it, just that he is going to do it.

He may have any number of methods to accomplish this. And anyone who can build a universe with trillions of planets and stars and billions of galaxies can surely create 20 or 30 or 70 or 80 billion human bodies. What's harder for God to create? A human body or a universe or a galaxy? Creating billions of bodies, recreating billions of human bodies is nothing to God. Anybody who can speak and a galaxy can spring into being can surely create billions of human bodies. It's nothing to God. I don't think human bodies will be a problem for God to rebuild in the resurrection. Let's continue in Ezekiel's prophecy, verse 7. So I prophesied as I was commanded, and as I prophesied there was a noise, and suddenly a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to bone. Indeed, as I looked, the sinews and the flesh came upon them, and the skin covered them over, but there was no breath in them. So now Ezekiel is looking out over this vast valley of human bodies, thousands of bodies, millions of bodies, maybe. He doesn't say, but there is no breath. They're standing there, but they're not breathing. Also he said to me, prophesy to the breath, prophesy, son of man, and say to the breath, Thus says the Lord God, Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe on the slain, that they may live. So I prophesied as he commanded me, and breath came into them, and they lived and stood upon their feet, an exceedingly great army.

What an incredible sight! What an amazing sight! Can you imagine what is going on in Ezekiel's mind as he's seeing all these bones come together, and sinews, and muscle, and flesh, and skin, and eyes, and hair, and suddenly, some of these huge numbers of people are standing there, and they begin to breathe in front of him. Then he said to me, verse 11, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. And this throws some people off thinking this is only referring to Israel. It's actually in the context God is describing what he's going to do for Israel as a model for all other nations. So that's really what he's talking about. It doesn't mean this resurrection is limited strictly and only to Israel. It's a type of what God is doing for all mankind. They indeed say our bones are dry, our hope is lost, and we ourselves are cut off. That's what the people who are resurrected say. In other words, they have died in a state of hopelessness cut off from God. Their dreams, their goals, their hopes are lost in the dust of the grave. But God has never forgotten those dreams, those hopes.

Think about this statement for a minute. Then you shall know that I am the Lord.

Let's think about that phrase. What does that mean? Think about the context. One of today's great debates and culture in society is whether or not God exists. Many people just don't know. They don't know. Many don't accept that miracles happen. These are the people who are being talked about here, though, are going to be different. They will know that God exists in a way that none of us sitting here today will know in this life. What do I mean by that? Well, think about it. In context, every single one of these people who are resurrected will know God exists in a way that we don't because they will have been raised to life again. You talk about proof that God exists.

When you're raised from the dead, you'll have all the proof you need that God exists, that a miracle has happened here. You talk about a receptive audience. Are these people going to be willing to listen? You bet they will because they've been raised from the dead.

I don't know. Have you ever watched somebody die?

I was there at my father's bedside when he died, and he knew he was dying. The last words out of his mouth, the family was gathered around his bed, and we were talking normally, and suddenly he said, I'm dying, and his eyes rolled back in his head, and he was gone. People who are dying know they are dying. And think about all these people, these billions that are resurrected here. Their last conscious thought will have been to know that they were dying. Many will have suffered from diseases for a long time that sapped the life out of them. Many of them will have died in epidemics of disease where they knew they were dying. Many will have died in wars or in battle where they were wounded and lying on the ground watching their blood and their life ooze out of them. And they knew they were dying. And the next moment they are raised to life again. They are raised to life again. Will that be a receptive audience to God? You bet they will.

You bet they will. In this resurrection, people won't be wondering whether God exists. Each of them will be living proof that God exists because each of them is a living, walking miracle, given life again by God.

God won't have to do a lot of convincing that He exists. He will have their attention. Continuing in verse 14, God says, I will put my spirit in you, and you shall live, and I will place you in your own land. Then you shall know that I, the Lord, have spoken it and performed it, says the Lord. Now they will have their opportunity for salvation. For the first time ever, they will come to know and to understand the true God. They will have the opportunity to repent and to receive God's Spirit. As it says here in verse 14, I will put my spirit in you. They will receive God's Spirit. They will have the opportunity to repent and receive God's Spirit freely offered. As it says in this verse, for the first time ever, and they will have their opportunity for their dreams, their hopes to finally become a reality.

Jesus Christ explains who will be in this resurrection over in Matthew 12, verses 41 and 42. And the context here is that Jesus had performed many great miracles in His day, but people still refuse to believe, particularly the scribes and the Pharisees. And they come to Jesus wanting to see a miracle, but Jesus had already given them miracles and they still refuse to believe. And then He warns them about the consequences of their refusal to believe. And He says something remarkable. He says, The men of Nineveh will rise up in the judgment with this generation, and condemn it because they repented at the preaching of Jonah, and indeed a greater one than Jonah is here. The queen of the south will rise up in the judgment with this generation and condemn it, for she came from the ends of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon, and indeed a greater one than Solomon is here. Now, traditional Christianity doesn't have a clue what to do with this passage, because you simply cannot fit it into the traditional view of Heaven and Hell and the immortal soul. The men of Nineveh that Jesus is referring to lived and died about eight centuries earlier, 800 years earlier. But Jesus says they will rise up in the judgment with those who were hearing Him in the first century. And He says the queen of the south here is referring to the queen of Sheba, who lived and died about a thousand years earlier. So you have people who lived and died 800 years ago, a thousand years ago, brought up in a time of judgment with the people that Christ is talking to at that time, and they're resurrected together in a period of judgment. How do you fit that into the traditional idea of Heaven and Hell? You can't. You can't. According to traditional Christian teachings, all of these people died years ago, and they were judged then, and either went to Heaven or Hell. So what's the point in bringing them all up together to be judged again? It makes no sense. No sense at all. So none of this makes any sense without understanding this day that we are here celebrating today. And this day shows that God is far greater and far more loving, far more awesome than most people imagine. And it shows that all people will have the wonderful opportunity for eternal life in their time, regardless of when they lived in human history. And according to God's timetable, God will give every human being his own opportunity to learn and to choose, to choose either God's way of life or to choose their own way and death. And so far, only very few have been given that opportunity. Most have lived in a world of Satan's deception, imprisoned by that deception. But God has a plan to remedy that, as revealed through the meaning of this day.

What does this day teach us about God Himself, about the God we worship?

Junior was a young man who grew up in West Texas, out near Lubbock, Texas. He was called Junior because he was named after his father. And out there in that West Texas farmland and ranch land, he just didn't have much use for church. He wasn't a bad person, just like most young 25-year-old men. He simply didn't care for church. There were a lot more interesting things to do.

World War II came along, and like many other young American boys, he was drafted. He was sent to the Pacific Theater to be part of the island-hopping campaign, as the United States and its allies recaptured the islands that Japan had captured, conquered earlier in the war.

The telegram arrived at Junior's parents' house there in West Texas, like it arrived at so many other homes during the war. In the Philippines, in the last year of the war, his time ran out.

A piece of shrapnel from a Japanese artillery shell killed him, and his body was shipped home to be buried in the small family cemetery there in the small hometown in Texas.

And what happened to this young 25-year-old man was tragic. But what was perhaps even more tragic was what happened to his mother.

Junior, you see, 25 years old, never interested in church, had never been saved.

And his mother had been a sincere churchgoer. She believed, as her religion taught, that those who weren't saved were going to hell at death. And there they would be tormented in the flames of hell for all eternity.

And for Junior's mother, that's where she thought her son was. Her firstborn son, 25 years old, had never been saved, and now was condemned to an eternity of being tormented in hell.

And she couldn't deal with it. She couldn't deal with it. She had what was called at the time a nervous breakdown. We would call it a mental breakdown today. So severe, she had to be hospitalized.

She never fully got over it. She eventually learned to cope, but she never really got over it. She simply could not process the thought that her 25-year-old firstborn son was burning forever in hell because he had not been saved.

Junior's mother was my wife's grandmother. My wife never knew Junior. He was killed in the war about a decade before she was born. But Connie and her grandmother were quite close, and my wife used to visit her there in West Texas whenever she could. And Connie's grandmother knew that we had somewhat unconventional beliefs regarding life after death. And on more than one occasion, she would say to my wife, Connie, explain to me again about that second chance. I want to know more about that second chance. Please help me understand that second chance. And second chance is what she called our belief in the second resurrection. And Connie would patiently explain, and did so on a number of occasions, explain our beliefs. And her grandmother would listen intently, and then she would almost inevitably say, I sure hope that's true. I sure hope that's true.

And my wife's grandmother never really fully understood it, but to the end of her days, this kind, dear, sweet woman, still wanted some hope, something to hold onto, that her firstborn son wasn't burning in the flames of hell. And to me, this is one of the most horrific and atrocious teachings ever, because it makes God into a monster. It makes God into a monstrous, sadistic being who would torture people for eternity, for whatever sins they committed in this life. In the case of Junior, 25 short years of life on earth, and he's tormenting in hell for all eternity. It's a damnable teaching. But it's what? Close to a billion people on earth believe in that in some form or another, that God is allowing people to be tortured in the flames of hell forever. This is not the God of the Bible. This is not the God that we worship. This scripture has been read earlier during the feast here, 2 Peter 3, verse 9. The Lord is not slack concerning His promises. Some count slackness. But is long suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance. That all should come to repentance. That everyone, every human being who's ever lived, should have the same opportunity for salvation and learning and knowing about God that we are so blessed to have. For all to have their hopes and dreams of meaning in life and life everlasting to become a reality.

What is your picture of God? We just talked about the picture that millions, a billion people, have of God as a being who would allow billions of people to be tormented in hell for all eternity. But what is your picture of God? We've learned a lot about God here. Wonderful messages, this feast. But we find a fascinating insight into God's nature and character over in Psalm 56 and verse 8. And to understand what's being said here, we need to understand the context of it. Because in this psalm, David is describing many of the trials he's going through, how he's persecuted, how he's fleeing for his life, how his enemies are surrounding him, pursuing him, trying to kill him. And yet he has hope because he knows the nature and the character of the God he worships. He knows he worships a God who loves him dearly and will not let him down. And then he writes a somewhat puzzling passage, verse, just this one phrase is all I'll read from this psalm, but he says, he says here, put my tears into your bottle. Are they not in your book? And this sounds puzzling to us because we have no clue what he's referring to here. It's a specific cultural reference to a practice of biblical times. And I have here what is called a tear bottle. I'm showing it larger here on screen so you can see it. It's about three inches high, half inch or so in diameter. And archaeologists have found a lot of these in tombs in the land of Israel. In David's time, they seemed to have been made of clay or even leather, possibly, and very few have survived from that time. Later in the first century, the time of Christ, they were made generally of Roman glass. And this is a reproduction here. And what happened is that when a person died, the mourners would gather and they would shed their tears and collect their tears into tiny bottles like that. It's called a tear bottle, a tear bottle. And that bottle with the tears of the mourners would be placed in the tomb with the deceased person as a reminder of how much the deceased person was loved.

And it was to remind God of how much the person was loved as evidenced by the bottles of tears shed at the person's passing. And apparently David, although he's writing approximately a thousand years earlier, is referring to this custom or something like it, and the custom continued down to the first century.

But he's saying essentially that God figuratively collects our tears in his bottle and that he remembers all of the suffering and the sadness and the tears that we go through in this life, that God remembers the tears we shed in sorrow, and he saves them in his bottle and he records them in his book so that he will never forget. And that's astonishing if you think about it, but that seems to be what David is describing here, that he's saying essentially that God sees the tears we shed in this life, that he remembers them, that he doesn't forget all the pain and the sorrow that we experience in this life, and that although God, that although mankind will forget and will forget those who shed those tears, that God will never forget.

God remembers them, and he promises in his plan to ultimately make all suffering and all tears go away, and this day helps us understand how that will ultimately come about. I look forward to the day when Anne Frank will rise in the resurrection to the greatest freedom that mankind has ever known.

Anne Frank lived in the prison of her family's secret hiding place, where they were in constant terror of the thought of being discovered. She lived in the prison of the concentration camps where she and most of her family suffered greatly and ultimately died. But she also lived, as every human being has since the dawn of time, in a prison of a world that is enslaved in the spiritual darkness of the God of this age, Satan the Devil.

What does this day picture? It pictures the freeing of those prisoners, the proclaiming of liberty to those held in that captivity, the recovery of sight of the blind, the healing of the brokenhearted, the fulfillment of the hopes and the dreams of all of those who have ever lived. And yes, Jesus Christ quoted that prophecy that I just paraphrased here, and we know that it will apply to His Second Coming and to the millennium, which we've celebrated here this last week.

But if you think about it, it actually applies on a far greater scale to what is pictured by this day, when the billions who have ever lived and died will be freed from that prison of Satan's blindness, and the brokenhearted will be healed, and all of their hopes, all of their dreams, all of their goals will at last become a reality. And all of the scriptures that we've heard about here during this feast, about conditions during the millennium, will also apply to the billions who live during the fulfillment of this day.

But there will be a big difference. Most of those who lived during the millennium will have only known a perfect world, but those in the Second Resurrection who come up in the meaning of this day, the fulfillment of this day, will have lived in what Paul Wright says, this present evil age, the age of the God of this world, and they will have known firsthand where man's ways lead.

They will have lived and died knowing that. But they will be brought to life in a world where the ills of this age no longer exist. Those who've lived in a world of war will be brought up to live in a world of peace. Those who've lived in a world of sickness and disease will live in a world of health and happiness. Those who've lived in a world of crime and fear will live in a world of love and respect for fellow human beings.

Those who've lived in a world of famine and starvation and want will live in a world of plenty. And those who've lived in a world of spiritual blindness could offer them the knowledge of the true God, who will live in a world where the knowledge of God and His ways cover the earth as the waters cover the seas. Those raised to life in the fulfillment of this day will have known and lived that contrast between two ways of life, between man's way and God's way, and in the second resurrection they will live under the righteous reign of Jesus Christ and His saints.

And they will know which way leads to life and which way leads to death. What choice will they make? I think billions will choose life, eternal life in the family of God, and the hopes and the dreams of all of those who have ever lived, those who mankind has forgotten, will at last come true. And what a wonderful truth we have in the meaning of this day, and what an incredibly wonderful God we worship.