Sometimes we must fight for love's sake

Last night I re-watched a movie I hadn't seen in a few years. The movie is entitled "Uprising" and was originally a three hour movie made for TV. Set in the Warsaw ghettos of Poland, circa 1939-1943, the movie portrays the astonishing atrocities of the Nazi regime against innocent Polish Jews. The brutality of the Nazi soldiers is a sad reminder of the wickedness that deluded men are capable of when God and God's moral values are removed from society. Based upon actual historical events, the Nazis eventually exterminate nearly 350,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw ghetto alone. While a group of rag-tag freedom fighters seek to valiantly defend their people, the German Nazi's eventually get the upper hand with only a few handfuls surviving.

If only the Allies had arrived years earlier...

For me, the movie was a reminder of the need to stand up for victims of war and injustice today. Had the allies come a few years earlier, hundreds of thousands of human beings would have been saved from their despicable fates. While Jesus advocated an individual ethic of non-violence when personally offended, in a sin-sick world, it is often the only right thing to do to liberate oppressed people through the use of redemptive force. While many of the wars fought today are waged under suspicious and sometimes confusing circumstances, when innocent humans are clearly being systematically murdered by bloodthirsty warlords, I say we defend them to the death with our own lives as an act of compassionate love.