The first installment of this series was first published in the newspaper on Jan. 10 and has continued each week. This is the article in its entirety.

With a month having lapsed since the previous column, it is probably appropriate to revisit the scripture that initiated this focus on Gods use of the word but to convey His truths and warnings. In Leviticus 26, we observe God through Moses conveying to His people Israel what He expected of them, both personally and nationally, in behavior and obedience.

In that chapter we find God using the phrase I will twenty-five times. Seven of those I wills are very good,BUTeighteen of those I wills are extremely and grievously arresting and ominously bad. And the rendition of those eighteen consequences for disobedience to God begins with the word but: BUTif you do not obey Me, and do not observe all these commandments, and if you despise My statutes, or if your soul abhors My judgments, so that you do not perform all My commandments,BUTbreak My covenant, I also will do this to you;I WILL EVEN APPOINT TERROR OVER YOU Lev. 26:14-16. Thesebutsare not only incredibly bad buts,butthey have been a constant for the last 2,900 years in Israels history.

TERROR!!! Sudden, drastic, life threatening, life ending, devastating, horrifying, paralyzing fear, searingly painful. Think: World Trade Centers, Pentagon, and eastern Pennsylvania on 9-11-01. Almost three thousand dead. None of us wants anything to do with any event that would or could be described asTERROR. BUThere is the God of Israel advising Israel, His own people and nation, of that very thing in the event of disobedience and rebellion against Him. And recall, too, that Paul in I Cor. 10:5-11 warned that theTERRORSenunciated in those passages happened to them (Israel) asEXAMPLESand they were written forOUR ADMONITIONon whom the ends of the ages have come.In other words, connect the dots.

Moses in his final State of the Union speech to Israel in Deuteronomy further warned Israel of theTERRORthat would come upon them when he said in Deut. 28: 15 et seq: But it shall come to pass, if you do not obey the Word of the Lord Your God, to observe carefully all His commandments and His statutes which I (Moses) command you today, that all these curses will come upon you and overtake you 20. The Lord will send on you cursing, confusion, and rebuke in all that you set your hand to do until you are destroyed and until you perish quickly, because of the wickedness of your doings in which you have forsaken me. 21. The Lord will make the plague cling to you until He has consumed you from the land which you are going to possess 25. The Lord will cause you to be defeated before your enemies; you shall go out one way against them and flee seven ways before them; and you shall become troublesome to all the kingdoms of the earth. 26. Your carcasses shall be food for all the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth and no one shall frighten them away 29. And you shall grope at noonday as a blind man gropes in darkness; and you shall not prosper in your ways; you shall be only oppressed and plundered continually and no one shall save you. 30. You shall betroth a wife, but another man shall lie with her; you shall build a house, but you shall not dwell in it; you shall plant a vineyard, but shall not gather its grapes. 45 Moreover all these curses shall come upon you and pursue and overtake you, until you are destroyed because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes which he commanded you. 46. And they shall be upon you for a sign and a wonder, and on your descendants forever. 47. Because you did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, for the abundance of all things. 48. Therefore you shall serve your enemies, whom the Lord will send against you, in hunger, in thirst, in nakedness, and in need of all things; and He will put a yoke of iron on your neck until he has destroyed you. 49. The Lord will bring a nation against you from afar, from the end of the Earth. As swift as the eagle flies, a nation whose language you will not understand, 50. A nation of fierce countenance, which does not respect the elderly nor show favor to the young. So lets connect just a few of the countless dots connecting these warnings and historical occurrences.

In reading Lawrence Rees international bestseller,Auschwitz, How Mankind Committed the Ultimate Infamy, 2005; I came across what was to me a heart arrester ofa passage regarding a sixteen year old Jewish boy from Slovakia that seared the meaning of the wordTERRORinto my consciousness. Deported by the Slovakian government under an agreement with the Germans, Otto Pressburger arrived on a transport at Auschwitz in March 1942. Immediately the terrorizing began as the SS guards and Kapos flushed their human cargo out of the cattle cars and proceeded to direct them to their barracks.

Pressburger recounts: From the station we had to run in groups of five. They (the SS men) shouted, Schnell laufen! Laufen, laufen, laufen! And we ran. They killed on the spot those who could not run. We felt we were less than dogs. We had been told that we were going to work, not that we were going to a concentration camp.

The next morning, after a night with no food or drink, Otto Pressburger (this sixteen year old kid), his father, and the rest of the Slovak transport of around 1,000 men were made to run from the main camp up to the building site that was Birkenau. He estimates that around seventy to eighty people were killed on the way. Birkenau, deep in mud and other filth, was an appalling place Conditions in Birkenau were considerably worse than in Auschwitz main camp, feet drop into a sticky bog at every step. There was hardly any water for washing. Prisoners existed in an environment of utter degradation, covered in dirt and their own feces

On that first day of work in Birkenau, Otto Pressburger witnessed another incident that demonstrated in an even more bestial way the desperate situation in which he now found himself:

We went to work to build roads Kapos and SS men were supervising us. There was one Jew from our town, a tall and strong man from a rich family. The Kapo spotted his gold teeth and asked him to give them to him. He answered that he could not do that, but the Kapo persisted that he must. He still said he could not give him his gold teeth. The Kapo got angry and said we must all obey his orders. He took the shovel and hit him over the head a couple of times until he fell down. The Kapo turned him upside down and put the shovel on his throat and stood on it. He broke his neck and used the shovel to get the teeth out of his mouth. Not far away stood another Jew who asked the Kapo how he could do this. The Kapo came over and said hed show him. And he killed him the same way. Then he told us never to ask questions and to mind our own business. That evening we had to carry twelve dead bodies with us back to the barracks. He killed them just for fun. All this happened on the first day at work. Pp 97-98.

Women were no better off. Murderous behavior by the Kapos had been a feature of Auschwitz from the very beginning, so the experience of these newcomers, though horrific, was nothing out of the ordinary of the camp. But the culture (if one can use such a word in the context of Auschwitz) of the place nonetheless was about to change in two major ways as a result of the arrival of the Slovakians.

The first change occurred because women were now admitted up to this point Auschwitz had been an exclusively male institution. But the arrival of women did not have the remotest civilizing effect on those in authority at the camp almost the opposite, as Silvia Vesela witnessed. She arrived at Auschwitz shortly after Otto Pressburger, on a transport containing several hundred women and one man a Jewish doctor who had been permitted by the Slovak authorities to accompany the women.

When we came to Auschwitz we were kicked out of the railway trucks, and the SS officers started to shout at our doctor, trying to find out why he was the only man on the transport. He replied in perfect German: I am a doctor, and I was assigned here by the central Jewish conference. My role is to accompany the transport and I was told I would then go back to Slovakia. Then an SS officer pulled out a gun and shot him dead. They just simply shot him dead in front of our eyes. Just because he was the only man amongst so many women. That was the first shock for me. P.99. Neither, of course, would it be her last.

Marched to their barracks, the women were ordered to strip off their clothes and hand over any valuables they had not already given up. As the Slovakian women sat, naked, having their heads shaved, an SS officer entered the room and ordered five of them to go to the doctors office. He wanted to examine Jewish women, says Silvia Vesela, and see if they were real virgins. He also wanted to know if Jewish women were clean. After they carried out the examination they were surprised but in a negative sense. They couldnt believe we were so clean. Moreover, more than 90 percent of us were virgins. These were all religious Jewish women. There was no way any of them would allow a man to touch her before the wedding. But in the course of the examinations every girl was deprived of her virginity the doctors used their fingers. They were deflowered another way to humiliate them. A friend of mine who was from a religious family told me: I wanted to keep my virginity for my (husband), and I lost it this way. P.100.

Nor did the elderly or the young receive any better or even remotely more favorable treatment from their captors. As the trains bearing these poor wretched masses from all over Europe to their deaths arrived in Auschwitz, the Germans repeatedly engaged in a selection process whereby they separated what appeared to be useful workers for their industrial facilities in Birkenau from the too young to the too old as well as what appeared to be the sick, infirm, and the feeble.

Eva Votavova arrived (in Auschwitz) with her father and mother in the spring of 1942. She recalled: We arrived at Auschwitz station and had to align in rows of five. The painful scenes began there. They were separating the young from old and children. They separated my father from my mother and myself When I saw him for the last time he looked worried, sad, and hopeless. P.100.

Commandant Rudolf Hoss emphasized in his memoirs (written in prison before his execution by the Poles in 1947) how the key to successful mass murder on this scale was to conduct the whole process in an atmosphere of great calm. But it could happen, as Hoss recorded, that if one person in the group approaching the gas chambers spoke of suffocation or murder, a sort of panic set in at once, making the killing much more difficult. In later transports a careful watch was kept over individuals who were thought likely to cause trouble for the Nazis in this way. At the first sign of any attempt to disrupt the compliant atmosphere the Nazis had created, such people were discreetly moved away, taken out of sight of the others, and shot with a small-caliber gun that was quiet enough that those nearby would not hear the noise. P.104.

The emotional torment of mothers who suspected what was about to happen to them, as they walked with their children to their deaths is almost impossible to imagine. On one occasion, Hoss records how a woman whispered to him, How can you bring yourself to kill such beautiful, darling children? Have you no heart at all?; on another occasion he saw a woman try to throw her children out of the gas chamber as the door was closing, shouting, At least let my precious children live!P.105.

Oskar Groening, a twenty-one year old SS soldier would relate late in life as to being on the Auschwitz arrival ramp as a transport of Jews arrived and debarked in September 1942. I was standing on the ramp and my task was to be part of the group supervising the luggage from the incoming transport. He watched while SS doctors first separated men from women and children, and then selected who was fit to work and who should be gassed immediately. Sick people were lifted onto lorries Red Cross lorries they always tried to create the impression that people had nothing to fear This process (of selection) proceeded in a relatively orderly fashion but when it was over it was just like a fairground. There was a load of rubbish, and next to this rubbish were ill people, unable to walk, perhaps a child that had lost its mother, or perhaps during searching the train somebody had hidden and these people were simply killed with a shot through the head. And the kind of way in which these people were treated brought me doubt and outrage. A child was simply pulled on the leg and thrown on a lorry then when it cried like a sick chicken, they chucked it against the edge of the lorry. I couldnt understand that an SS man would take a child and throw its head against the side of a lorry or kill them by shooting them and then throw them on a lorry like a sack of wheat.

When pressed for the reason why children were murdered, Groening replies: The children are not the enemy at the moment. The enemy is the blood in them. The enemy is their growing up to become a Jew who could be dangerous. And because of that the children were also affected.P.128.

TERROR, it has been an ever-present, constant, persistent, perpetual, aspect of Israels life for the last 2,900 years. It began when the united Kingdom of Israel of 120 years under Kings Saul, David, and his son Solomon of forty years each ended with the death of Solomon in 930 BC; and the division of Israel into North and South (the Northern Kingdom of Israel and the Southern Kingdom of Judah) because of bad political decisions by Rehoboam, Solomons son, regarding, of all things, taxes; and the long resultant sporadic civil war between the two kingdoms from 930 BC until 732 BC when the Assyrian Empire conquered the northern kingdom of Israel. For all those years the northern kingdom had no kings that adhered to the God of Israel, and Assyria was Gods answer to that nations rebellion. The southern Kingdom, Judah, on the other hand, did have some obedient kings interspersed with its disobedient ones which preserved its existence until 586 BC when Gods patience was even exhausted with Judah; and Babylon became Gods judgment on the southern kingdom. Driven into exile, Jerusalem and Gods Temple destroyed, Judah would be separated from all it held dear. The suffering of both these nations would be intense and severe. Allowed to return to Judah by the conqueror of the Babylonian kingdom, King Cyrus of the Medo-Persian Empire in 538 BC, elements of Judah would return, rebuild the Temple, and by 30 AD they would be confronted by their Messiah whom they would eventually hand over to the Romans for punishment of blasphemy.

The religious leaders of the Jewish people had claimed that Jesus miracles were by Beelzebub (Matt.12:24), and He had not only disputed the Scribes, Pharisees, and Sandhedrin, but declared He had performed them under the authority and power of God Himself. Hence, the blasphemy. And, ultimately, the crucifixion. Jesus said this: O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the one who kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to her! How often I wanted to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing! Behold your house is left to youdesolate: for I say to you, you shall see me no more till you say, Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!'"

And by 70 AD Jerusalem and its great Temple to the God of Israel was destroyed, and by 73 AD the remaining vestiges of the Jewish rebellion had been crushed at Massada with the suicide of the 1000 individuals occupying the fortress just before being overwhelmed by the Roman legions.

There is an axiom which most of us are familiar with: Whats good for the goose is , yep, that one. And there are two corollaries that go with this axiom when it comes to Israel. They should be a warning to all of us, based on what Moses and Paul, at Gods inspiration, have written. Here they are: Whats good for the Jew is good for the gentile, and whats good for Israel is good for the nations, including the late, great, United States; unless, of course, we learn from Israels mistakes, which the history of centuries of human behavior would seem to negate the possibility of.All this, as we wait for a TERROR response from the greatest terrorist state in the world at this time: IRAN.

More:
Connecting the dots Good buts, bad buts and terror - Harrison Daily