Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
The American nation was slow to enter the war against Hitler on the side of Britain and the "Free French." Until Pearl Harbor the people weren't sure. At that time apparently nobody knew what would happen in the Holocaust. "Kristallnacht" seemed far away, almost impossible. The horror of World War II seems murky to the minds of the generations who have lived subsequent to those days. And the Memorial Day weekend is a grand holiday. Most of us have little or no sense of reality as to what this freedom and pleasure cost others in suffering and blood. Occasionally a voice is raised pleading for sobriety and adequate gratitude.
Does the world--do any of us--sense an adequate gratitude for what our present life on this planet cost the Son of God? Do we realize what it means to say that "the wages of sin is death" (Rom. 6:23)? Not that God arbitrarily inflicts death on sinners, but that sin itself is self-destructive in nature, that life as we know it would have ceased on this planet except that there was a "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8)? The "Lamb" had to be the One whose name is "Emmanuel, which being interpreted is God with us," our second or "last Adam," who truly died the real thing, the second death.
Horrible as death was for the millions who died in World War II, none truly died the second death. Let us be sober and realize at least something of what the Free World owes to those brave soldiers who suffered in World War II; but let us as Christians plead for God's mercy to enable us to realize honestly the constraint that agape imposes. It means simply that self is crucified with Christ. Being sober doesn't mean being sad or gloomy; it means being conscious, thoughtful, aware of truth.
People with extremely shallow understanding are childishly, apparently happy, but it's as thin as a coat of varnish. When self is crucified with the Redeemer, the happiness is deep, "that your joy may be full" (John 16:24), the idea being, "in depth." It's the awareness of what an eternal grave in hell could mean, from which we are redeemed. For all time there's a tear glistening in our smiles of joy.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: May 31, 2000.
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