All right. So I'm, I'm uh reading quotes from and there was light. Um, and these two quotes don't really go together except they're on opposite pages. But for the sake of time, I'm just gonna handle them together. Um, so paraphrasing this one situation is he was being admitted into the concentration
camp. They asked him what his official job was and the person who was clerking was actually a fellow prisoner. And I guess he wasn't being watched too closely because the Jacques said I'm a student and he said, never ever reveal that to anyone while you're here. Because if you do, you won't last a week
, I believe he says, and there, ok, never say that again. Once they know you're an intellectual, they will kill you. Name a trade. Never mind what it is. And then he says, oh, ok. Well, I'm an interpreter of French German and Russian. It's interesting because he didn't even know Russian at, at that time
and he was able to learn it somehow um, before it mattered. But he reflects that, um, that saved his life, that he would have been killed if he hadn't. If that the, the fellow prisoner hadn't clued him in that you don't want to be an intellectual in a Nazi prison camp because you won't last long because
obviously they, they kill everyone who's a threat. Um, so what I wanted to bring up about that is that unforeseen consequences can be enormously large and it usually it takes someone who knows something we don't to help us see those and this isn't something that's just gonna happen in a concentration
camp. It happens every dang day. There is immense reluctance to accept the, the possibility that there might be someone in your circle who knows something about something that you don't know. And I find this as sad as I do find it funny because my entire life I have presumed to be a moron and uh I was
often correct, but in my willingness to be a fool, God made me wise. And there are plenty of people who take offense when I get on the soap box. And I say things like I dot dot dot m dot dot dot Wise. So if I, if I, if I make that impression in any way that I believe myself to be wise, they lose their
minds. Here's the thing I didn't come at it that way. The only reason I feel that way about anything is because God has beaten it into me with great suffering. And I have come to realize through that tutelage that when you do not know that you are strong, you don't bother trying to lift heavy weights
. And if you don't lift heavy weights, you can't help people who can't lift heavy weights yet. And this is an amazing thing about the idea of improvement because the entire purpose of creation is to facilitate improvement for all who will receive it. But improvement is a thing that is received even though
there is a lot you have to do your doing. It only comes after the offer of doing it, which comes from someone else who comes from God. However, that looks so the funny thing about a willingness to be better is that there, there are angels of light and angels of darkness and we're enticed by one or the
other in everything that we do. The good news about the angels of light is that they cannot make a case for being better than you without giving you the keys to becoming that same way yourself. They always cour it's impossible for them to not cour. So there is never a reason to not be immensely grateful
for any of that. The angels of darkness. Um the angels of darkness. On the other hand, they obtain power by keeping those keys away from you. They, they, they, they um their modus operandi is to enslave you and to lead you towards misery. And so it's a very different thing and those are the ones that
you ought to be extremely careful about. But you can't be careful about them without recognizing that they too have more power than you do. So, improvement is quite important. Luckily, this, this gentleman Jacques, when he arrived at the concentration camp, he didn't tell off this clerk and say, how
dare you? I worked very hard for my degree. How dare you tell me what I should say and not say, who do you think you are? So, in that, I guess he was very different than most intellectuals as he was self styled to be having known many. They, they don't take kindly to be being shown something better than
what they already think or what they already are. Uh Next quote. Um This is very important. He says he's talking about the first day or two in the camp and how, how extremely cold it was and how poorly dressed they were and how there wasn't any food. He says I must be frank, the hardest thing was not
the cold. Not even that I'm just gonna pause there. How cold have you ever been? So, just yesterday I was snow blowing and I decided to just keep going. Once I got our stuff done, I just keep, kept going. It's kind of like a mini blizzard out there by, by Montana standards anyway, it was only like a
foot of snow. But I was like, you know, I've got a snowblower. Other people might not, I'm just gonna keep going and I did the next one. And then I was just like, well, I can do one more. So, as I was doing this though, um, it was really cold outside. It was minus something. I don't know what. And I
thought I was dressed warmly enough but I didn't dress based on being out there for many times more than I had to be. Um, so I end up getting just a little frost nip on my face. No big deal. But, you know, being cold it hurts, it really hurts until it doesn't anymore. And then you're in really big trouble
. Uh But this guy, he was wearing open clogs and he had holes in a single layer of clothes. So no socks and, um, uh, out of 2000 people, he says about 200 died uh very quickly from the cold or being scared or not having enough food. Um, anyway, so he says the hardest thing was not the cold, not even
that. So what do you think it was? He says it was the men themselves, our comrades and other prisoners. All the ones sharing our miseries. It wasn't the cold, it wasn't the starvation. Um It wasn't even the fear and it wasn't even the guards. What was the worst part about all this was their fellow prisoners
? And, um, he says, suffering had turned some into beasts. So, uh, and then he says worse than the beasts were the possessed. Hundreds of men at Buchenwald were Bewitched. Uh the harm done them was so great that it had entered into them body and soul and now it possessed them. They were no longer victims
, they were doing injury in their turn and doing it methodically. I think of all the surprises I have faced in God teaching me about people. The greatest surprise is just how evil people are not even can be but are and it takes experiences to reveal this. Um the greatest maybe of all the experiences
isn't so much being tossed into a life or death situation, although repeatedly and without fail, this reveals that a surprising number of people are surprisingly worse than you ever would have imagined possible. I think the most um If you want to see the depths of evil revealed, it requires you to love
at the heights of love. So you will see it revealed and equal and opposite if you go that route and it's only then that you'll see the true limits of human evil. And um again, the greatest example of this is Jesus and coming and doing what he did and, and being treated the way he did. But this is not
echoing a theme from another video. This is not something that you should read about. Uh meaning jesus' experience and say, well, thank goodness, I never have to go through any like anything like that. The more like Jesus you are, the more you will experience something like he experienced. It. And don't
think that just because you're not living in the Middle East in, you know, 2000 years ago, you're safe from what he went through. Don't think that you need to be physically nailed to a cross to know something about what he went through. There is a time when those sorts of things only happened to those
who had uncommon faith for lack of a better way of phrasing it. One thing that distinguishes the end times in which we live from all other times is the general circumstances of the people will approach this. And I can say it better than that. Um the threshold of righteousness that someone has to hold
in order to walk to be exposed to such experiences will drop as the end times proceed that it will drop. And people with very little faith are going to end up in situations that require massive faith to overcome. Mark my words because if you're alive today, um Well, I'll put it this way, generations