As most of you know, Wednesday, May 5 was “Yom Ha Shoah,” the commemoration of the Holocaust of World War 2. I won’t recite over again the horrors of those days or the tragic numbers of dead which we all can recall.
My purpose in this article is to inform my readers that the Jewish battle cry, “Never Again!” will soon become a bitter memory as my people face the greater horror of the Shoah to Come.. Zechariah 13:8 foretells it:
“ “Two-thirds of the people in the land will be cut off and die,’ says the LORD. ‘But one-third will be left in the land.’”
In the land of Israel today are over 5 million Jews. If we assume that the Tribulation begins somewhere in the next 5 years or so, that number will have grown to be 6 million. Two-thirds of 6 million is 4 million! That would be a second Shoah, indeed! But there will be many more victimsamong my Jewish people.
By many estimates, there are some 11 million additional Jews living outside of Israel today; let us say 12 million in 3-5 years from now. Most scholars of end-times prophecy tell us that somewhere between half to three quarters of all inhabitants of the earth will die during the terrible judgments of the Tribulation.
A conservative figure in between those two estimates would be about two-thirds. If two-thirds of all Jews outside of Israel are struck down in the near future, that would equal some 8 million souls. Add to that the 4 million dead in Israel alone and you have a total of 12 million Jewish people perishing during the time of Jacob’s trouble
Twelve million Jewish victims is equal to exactly twice the number who fell during the Holocaust of World War 2! This, then, is what I call the Shoah to Come. My precious Jewish people will die because we remain in our sin
“…the soul that sinneth, it shall die.”
We will die because we continued to hate without a cause the One who came to rescue us, as our blessed King David prophesied in the name of the Messiah in Psalm 35:19:
“Let not them that are mine enemies wrongfully rejoice over me: neither let them wink with the eye that hate me without a cause.”
We will die because we lacked knowledge and did not seek to gain it, as our prophet Hosea warned in chapter 4, verse 6 and 7:
“My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.”
But, most tragically, the descendants of Abraham will die because we did not understand nor believe the warning of the lesser Shoah 70 years ago!
This is a painful teaching among Israel-loving Christians and a completely impermissible teaching among my own Jewish people, but I ask my readers to consider the following scriptures and decide for themselves who is really most responsible for the Holocaust?
I have heard it taught, and I believe it myself, that one of God’s main purposes in allowing the Holocaust of WW2 was to bring about the creation of the modern state of Israel in fulfillment of His own prophetic word. Praise the Lord for that!
But there was another reason as well. It was perhaps His final and most terrible warning to His prodigal people that He was willing to bring aboutdire judgments
“But if you refuse to listen to the LORD your God and do not obey all the commands and decrees I am giving you today, all these curses will come and overwhelm you… The LORD will cause you to be defeated by your enemies. You will attack your enemies from one direction, but you will scatter from them in seven! You will be an object of horror to all the kingdoms of the earth…
Above are just two verses describing the deadly curses which God spoke through Moses to warn the Jewish people about abandoning Him. But there are 48 more such verses in that same chapter and many, many more similar warnings in other books of the Torah (Old Testament). The entire chapter of Deuteronomy 28 reads exactly like an accurate record of the past 2,000 years of my people’s history, yet it was written 1,500 years before Yeshua (Jesus) by Moses our blessed teacher!
Yeshua claimed to be our Messiah, sent by our God to save us from our sins, but we would not believe him. Though it was the sins of the whole which sent him to the cross, it was the Jewish leaders, along with the Romans, who shared complicity in his crucifixion. Since our rejection of Yeshua, we have lost our Temple and, with it, our ability the Jewish people offer the blood sacrifices which God provided us for the atonement of our sins!
Since our rejection of Yeshua, we lost Jerusalem (70 A.D.) and, a few years later (135 A.D.), the whole land of Israel. Since our rejection of Yeshua, we have wandered, suffered and been persecuted as orphans all over the world. This is exactly what Moishe Rabeinu (Moses our Teacher) predicted would happen in Deut. 28:63, 64a, 37…
“Just as the LORD has found great pleasure in causing you to prosper and multiply, the LORD will find pleasure in destroying you. You will be torn from the land you are about to enter and occupy. For the LORD will scatter you among all the nations from one end of the earth to the other. And the LORD shall scatter thee among all people, You will become an object of horror, ridicule, and mockery among all the nations to which the LORD sends you.”
But we did not remember God’s words, nor did we truly believe them. Even today in the synagogues, chapter 28 of Deuteronomy is rarely read andnever are its horrors ascribed to our own failure to obey our God! So, finally, the Lord our God, jealous for his first-born son (Exodus 4:22) and determined to restore to Himself at least a remnant, was forced to inflict upon us the “Shoah” and six million had to perish!
How is it possible that my brilliant Jewish people still cannot see that for two millennia now, we have incurred all of the curses by which Moses sought to warn us!? How is it possible that my gifted Jewish nation stillfails to understand that the fulfillment of these prophetic curses proves that we must have “disobeyed” and “turned away from” our ancient God in some indescribably horrible way!?
Forty-five years ago this month, I first heard that Jesus declared himself to be our own long-lost Jewish Messiah. For 90 minutes, I was literally struck speechless with the mere consideration of that claim. Though a young man, I was given God’s help to reason that if this claim were true, it would explain the entire history of my suffering Jewish mishpochah (family) for the past 2,000 years! That day,
I prayed that my God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, would show me the truth about Yeshua’s Messianic claims. I promptly dropped out of college and spent the next 18 months seeking to prove this claim either true or false. After significant scripture study, and many miraculous signs all pointing to the cross, I bowed my heart and claimed Yeshua as my king…
“Pilate asked Jesus, ‘Are you the king of the Jews?’Jesus replied, ‘You have said it’” (Mark 15:2).
How terrible to think of all of the Jewish branches which will soon be broken off! That is why, in closing, I have a challenge for my brothers and sisters who have been grafted in to the olive tree of God’s love. Read this article one more time, prayerfully. If you believe it to be biblical and worthy, be bold as a lion and print it out and mail copies to several rabbis in your city.
If you do not want to be attacked, you may send them my e-mail for their replies. Who knows if together, we may not be used by God to add to the remnant He is saving out for himself and in so doing, to preserve a precious Jewish soul from the horrible Shoah to Come!
Asher Mandel (is53@att.net)