"Did you do it?"

Right after World War II, when the German people were just waking up to what had happened in the Holocaust and a lot of people were pointing fingers at one another, a man named Guenter Rutenborn wrote a play called The Sign of Jonah.

In it people start talking to one another, asking, “Did you do it? Did you know? Why did you do it?” Of course, in the play, just as in real life, when people were pointed to and asked, “Did you do it? Why did you do it?” they immediately said, “It wasn’t me. I was just following orders. It was the person above me.” Then they went up to that person. “Oh no, no, no. It wasn’t my fault. It was the person above me.” You go up there and you say … “Oh, no, no, no,” they say. “It was not me. It was the person above me.”

In the play, at a certain point it begins to dawn on everybody. “Wait a minute. It’s the guy all the way at the top. It’s not our fault. It’s God. It’s God’s fault. The evil and injustice of the world is God’s fault.” At the end, there’s a trial. They put God on trial, and they find him guilty, and this is what they say in the play. They sentenced God to “become a human being, a wanderer on the earth, deprived of his rights, homeless, hungry, thirsty. He himself shall die. And lose a son, and suffer the agonies of fatherhood. And when at last he dies, he shall be disgraced and ridiculed.”

   “Wait a minute. They’re looking at the injustice of life and they say, ‘God has to die’?… But God, the God of the gospel, in his perfect righteousness, has done even more than the blasphemy of our cursing dares to demand.” In other words, the philosophers were right, but in the wrong way. The injustice of the world means God must die, but he comes in the gospel and does it voluntarily.

An illustration Tim Keller (The Final Hour) borrowed from Ed Clowney