Where was God in the Holocaust and in war?

Suffering, Evil & Hard QuestionsIn theological review

The short answer

Christians should answer this question slowly, and without any tidy explanation: the Bible itself contains screams at God from inside catastrophe, and it does not rebuke them. Its claim is not that God was absent, but that he was present as judge of the guilty, companion of the murdered, and the one who will finally separate no one who is his from his love. No theodicy makes the Holocaust explicable, and this page offers none.

The fuller answer

Some questions should change the speed of the room. This is one. Behind it stand gas chambers, mass graves, bombed cities and children who never grew up, and any answer that arrives too quickly or too neatly has failed before it starts. So begin where the Bible begins, with the protest itself. Habakkuk looked at violence and injustice and cried to God: how long shall I cry for help and you will not hear? God canonised that cry. It is Scripture. The question is not unfaithful. It is biblical.

How long, O LORD, must I call for help but You do not hear, or cry out to You, “Violence!” but You do not save? Why do You make me see iniquity? Why do You tolerate wrongdoing? Destruction and violence are before me. Strife is ongoing, and conflict abounds. Therefore the law is paralyzed, and justice never goes forth. For the wicked hem in the righteous, so that justice is perverted.

Habakkuk 1:2-4 (BSB)

Psalm 44 was written by people who had kept covenant and still been crushed. They insist they have not forgotten God or turned to other gods, and then they say the unsayable in prayer: awake, Lord, why do you sleep, why do you hide your face and forget our misery? War's survivors have prayed that psalm in trenches, camps and ruins for three thousand years. The Bible does not answer their question with an explanation. It answers it by keeping their words and teaching the church to pray them too.

Wake up, O Lord! Why are You sleeping? Arise! Do not reject us forever.

Psalm 44:23 (BSB)

Where, then, do Christians say God was? Two answers, held humbly. He was with the victims, not the machinery: Jesus himself was arrested, tortured and executed by an empire, and Christians confess a God who knows the inside of unjust death. And he was, and is, the judge the murderers will face, which is why no Christian may call the killing fields the last word about the people murdered there. Presence is not explanation. Believers who survived the camps have testified to both, and their testimony outranks our theories.

neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 8:39 (BSB)

Paul, who was himself executed by an empire, listed the worst things he knew: trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger and sword, and said none of them can separate us from the love of God. He did not say they would not happen. He said they would not win. Until the day God wipes away every tear, the church's duties in war are lament, shelter, truth telling and refusal to bless cruelty. If you carry memories or family history from such places, God has never asked you to call them good.

Sources

Berean Standard Bible (BSB)

Review status: in-theological-review. Every Contend page passes a human theological review against the Statement of Faith before it is published as approved teaching. This section is in that queue.

Dig deeper

No answer here is a dead end. Follow the question on, test it in practice, or work the method yourself on the Dig deeper page.

Why does God allow suffering?The Bible does not give one reason for every instance, and anyone who offers you one is overselling. It does give a frame: the world is fallen and groaning, human evil does real damage, God is patient toward a world he intends to judge and remake, and in the meantime he has entered the suffering himself in Jesus Christ. The final answer is not an explanation but an ending: a day when he wipes away every tear.If God is good and all-powerful, why is there evil?Evil exists because God's good creation has been genuinely damaged, first by rebellious spiritual beings and then by human sin, and God has chosen for now to permit what he hates rather than unmake the world and everyone in it. Scripture never calls evil good or necessary. It says God will judge it, has entered its worst in the cross, and will remove it from a renewed creation.Is it OK to be angry with God?Yes, in the way the Bible itself models: bringing anger to God honestly in prayer is not rebellion, and roughly a third of the psalms do exactly that. Job accused, Jeremiah protested, and Jesus on the cross prayed the opening line of Psalm 22, a psalm of abandonment. Scripture never rebukes grief stricken honesty. What it warns against is the anger that hardens into contempt and walks away rather than speaking.Where is God when it hurts?With you, is the Bible's answer, though rarely in the way we would have scripted. God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble, says the psalm, written out of trouble, not about it. And in Christ he has not watched suffering from outside it. The God of the cross knows the inside of pain, and his invitation to the weary is rest, not explanations.Bible Character: JesusThe Son of God, born of Mary in Bethlehem, who preached the kingdom of God, was crucified for our sins according to the Scriptures, and was raised on the third day.Bible Character: PaulThe Pharisee who persecuted the church until the risen Jesus stopped him on the Damascus road, and who became his apostle to the Gentiles, travelling the Roman world and writing many of the New Testament letters.