As our Jewish brethren remembers Yom HaShoah (the day of the Holocaust or Catastrophe), which commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, today,  I think about a movie which I've watched several times,  God on Trial.  Towards the end of the movie, one of the actors, all of whom are inmates at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, contends that God is not good, but merely "on our side."  In other words, the only reason a Jew might say that God is good is because he has made them his covenant people and is therefore "for" them.  If God wasn't on their side, then perhaps he would not be good.

    If this is true, are those who do not believe in God simply doomed to be born and die, eternally separated from their creator?  What is the point of their lives?

    On the other hand, if there is no God, if there is really just you and me in a vast and insouciant universe, how can we assert that anything is good or, for that matter, bad?  How can we know?  In an accidental and indifferent (to use Albert Camus's words) universe, we have no way to determine such things.  We can insist that certain things are good, but we do so in a moral vacuum:  there's no reason why we cannot just as easily say that these things are bad.  It's an exercise in epistemological futility.

    Yet if God is there, even if we cannot physically, apart from the person of Jesus, see him, weaving moral fabric and order in the cosmos, then, and only then, can we know what is genuinely good.
    

     It is perhaps in the Holocaust that we see this most clearly.  If God wasn't there, if God wasn't there upholding the fact of purpose and point amidst the horrors of its suffering, then why do we even claim to know its evil?

    Pray that all of us will grasp the necessity of a covenantal God.