He died for the depraved.

On Thursday I visited a concentration camp in Nordhausen, just over the old border with the GDR and into north Thüringen. This used to be a working camp where the V2 bomb, responsible for some of the damage during in London and also in Antwerp, was manufactured.

Looking around the place in the bright, hot sunshine, the birds singing and the flowers and grass in bloom it was really difficult to take in that in only the space of the first 7 months about 5000 prisoners lost their lives. Many of them were political prisoners arrested for their affiliation with resistance groups, though there were still quite a few Jews transported there for their skills in engineering as well as many prisoners of war.

The bombs had to be made in work chambers in the heart of one of the hills. 12 hour shifts in temperatures between 0°C and 8°C, plus the damp atmosphere; lack of warm clothing; disease and beatings; prisoners having to watch while others were hanged and left hanging sometimes for hours above their heads while they carried on working underneath the swinging bodies; lack of sleep and the almost daily occurance of waking up to find that you were sleeping on a dead body; just some of the horrible facts I was told. Only if a prisoner was of apparent use to the system by way of his qualifications would he receive marginally better treatment.

The accounts of brutality, executions, pure torture and the sheer death toll were quite emotionally overwhelming. If I was in any doubt at the utter depravity of the human heart I certainly do not doubt it now. True, we're not perhaps as bad as we ever could be, but it's a sobering thought to think that some of the officers had families themselves and were capable of providing a loving and warm home to their own wives and children, all the while either enforcing or inflicting torture upon other fellow men for the sake of a wicked, racist endeavour. Not every officer always conceded of course, though neither did they remain in service long if the Gestapo got a whiff of their 'treachery' to the Nazi regime. However, the fact that the human heart is capable of being so treacherous, so deceitful, evil and contradictory should make us all shudder.

Jeremiah 17:9 says, 'The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?'

The average person, when he hears of incidents on the news, of murders or rapings, of arson or terrorism can't quite believe how or why anyone would do such a thing. Often the only way he tries to explain it is by condemning the perpetrator as particularly evil and so as an almost completely different species to himself. Either way, he tries to distance himself from being classed as evil. He kids himself into thinking that he could never commit something so despicable, so evil.

The scary news of the Bible is that every heart is deceitful, every heart is rotten at the core and desires anything other than to do what is right. I may look on in disbelief and sheer horror at the Nazi crimes of WW2, but I can never say that I, left to my own devices, would never do such a thing. God's Word doesn't let me.

John 2:23-25 says about Jesus, 'Now when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover Feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. But Jesus in his part did not entrust himself to them, because he knew all people and needed no one to bear witness about man, for he himself knew what was in man.'

The same people who believed in his name would soon be shouting for him to be crucified. Jesus is not fooled by notions of good-will, by emotional eagerness, or outward signs of affection and love. He sees right to the core and what He sees He declares as utterly depraved. He doesn't need anyone to tell Him the thoughts and intentions of anyone's heart. He sees the evil of our nature and He condemns it as evil. So in God's sight, without His intervention, His grace, I am just as capable of committing the same despicable crimes as a Nazi officer. Shocking, but true.

But how much more wonderful then are those verses in Romans 5:

'For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
For one will scarcely die for a righteous person -though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die- but God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Since, therefore, we have now been justified by His blood, much more shall we be saved by Him from the wrath of God.
For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by His life.
More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.' (vv6-11)

Thank God that He does not leave our souls to rot in the stench of evil but that through His Son, through the Spirit working in us, He provides a way for the human heart to be saved, transformed and regenerated to His praise and to His glory.