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Dear Hal,
Thank you for writing The Refiner's Fire! Please check out our article, "Hell is a Real Place".)
You have addressed a truly emotional issue; one for which there is no simple answer! And the bottom line is: Nobody knows for sure that Jews "will go to hell" just because they don't "believe in Yeshua". However, Yeshua warned us in John 14:6: Yeshua answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me."
Note that Yeshua did NOT say, "No one except for the Jews comes to the Father except through me." He said, nobody! The thing is, Yahweh knows our hearts, and since only HE can decide who will or won't end up in heaven, who's to say that good, Torah observant Jews won't end up in heaven? Who's to say that the Christians who have taken God's Word and twisted it into something unrecognizable and decided that Torah was "nailed to the cross" and have changed Yeshua's Name and turned Him into a blond, blue-eyed Gentile adonis will end up in heaven? It is sheer arrogance for any mere human to tell another they're going to hell.
To answer your question: based on the teaching of the Tanach, Yeshua was the FINAL Sin Sacrifice who died for ALL of mankind. So, if that particular Nazi somehow "saw the light" and repented for what he had done and ended up a true, Torah observant God-fearer, then God would most likely have forgiven him and accepted him as righteous. Only Yahweh Himself knew the heart of that Nazi; He knows when someone is for real and He knows when we're "faking it"...and He has the right to accept or reject us. We must also remember that the tragic suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust did not automatically transform them into godly people who were immediately after their deaths sent to heaven, as some probably lost their faith during that time, while others became overly hostile toward God during this horrible ordeal. But only Yahweh knew each one on a case-by-case basis and no one has the right to say who went to heaven or not....(Please read Ezekiel 33:11-16)
Yahweh is a gracious God. If a Jew dies who has who has NEVER heard of Yeshua or has, for whatever reason, never had the opportunity to recognize that Yeshua really IS Messiah and God Incarnate, according to the Bible, that person will be granted God's grace, because he simply didn't know any better. (See 1 Tim 1:13) Although I have no way of backing this Scripturally, I truly believe that our Creator would not send to hell anyone who has never heard of Him, because as He says in the Bible, He wants no one to perish. If, however, a Jew (or anyone else) has heard about Yeshua, yet chooses to ignore what the Bible says about Him, then that person will be judged accordingly. (Romans 2 explains in detail the impartiality of God.) I have a theory that, because the Bible says that "a day is like a thousand years" and vice versa - meaning that God views "time" differently from us humans - who is to say that He doesn't give us one, final chance in the seconds before we die? The Bible isn't specific about this, and that is why it is imperative to "get right" with God BEFORE we die. This means that anyone - Jews and the Gentiles who are "grafted in to the Olive Tree" - must become Torah observant believers in Yeshua, as this is what the Bible is all about.
Yahweh has kept His promises to Israel, even though sometimes it seems He may have turned His back on us! We are told in Genesis 15:18: On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram He said, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the Euphrates..." That covenant, despite what "the world" thinks, was NEVER reversed, as proven by the events immediately following the Holocaust! God used the Holocaust to make a couple of His "end times" prophecies come to pass, and they happened in one day, exactly as Isaiah prophesied! Not only that, but Israel and the Jews have survived attack after attack (including the Six Day War in 1967 when several much larger countries attempted to seize Israel - and Israel won!) and the Land to this day remains the property of the Jews. NOBODY is going to take it away from them, including the Muslim Arabs who have been doing their level best to annihilate Israel.
Hal, we pray you decide to give Yeshua a chance! He IS real; He was the Messiah sent by Yahweh (an ASPECT of Yahweh Himself) to teach us about Yahweh and His commands, and to show us how to live with each other according to Yahweh, and then to offer Himself as a DIVINE Sin Sacrifice. For those who insist God never demanded human sacrifices, we would remind them that Yeshua was a DIVINE sacrifice - while His fleshly body perished, His divine nature and His nephesh did not! Furthermore, what's the difference between what Yeshua did and YHWH's other prophets who suffered and were martyred at the hands of those who fought against the Malchut Elohim?
YHWH surely can do whatever He wants since HE is in charge of the entire universe. He has revealed Himself through a burning bush to Moshe, through pillars of cloud and fire in the desert, through "three men" to Abraham at the Oaks of Mamre, and He even spoke through a donkey - so why are traditional Jews insisting that He couldn't possibly reveal Himself through a human form as THE Messiah who actually had a NAME (Yeshua) and who Yahweh said would be called EMANUEL (God with us)? Yeshua was foresahdowed in Isaiah 53 and in various other Tanach Scriptures. Please take some time to read the articles on our Netzarim page.
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