Good and Evil: What Auschwitz Reveals About the War Behind the World

I’ve been reading a book on Auschwitz this week, and it does what these books always do – it stops you cold. The photographs. The numbers. The way ordinary bureaucrats signed paperwork that sent trainloads of families to their deaths, and then went home for dinner. You close the book and you’re left holding a question that won’t let go: how do you even name what happened there? What word is big enough to hold it?

Evil. That’s the word. And once you actually use it – not as a rhetorical flourish, but as a real description of something that really happened – you’ve stepped onto ground with more underneath it than you expected. If evil is real, and not just a label we slap on things we happen to dislike, then good has to be real too. Both words only mean anything if there’s a fixed standard behind them. And that raises the next question: is this fight between good and evil confined to what we can see and measure, or is there a war going on behind the one we can photograph?

If Evil Is Real, Good Has to Be Real, Too

You can’t call Auschwitz evil without already believing in a good that it violated. Think about what the word actually requires. To say something is evil, you’re not describing a preference, like disliking cilantro. You’re claiming it violated a standard that holds regardless of what anyone prefers – a standard that says human life has worth, that cruelty is wrong even when it’s efficient, even when it’s legal, even when an entire government signs off on it. Take away that fixed standard and “evil” collapses into “things I personally find distasteful,” which is a much smaller and much less honest word than the one the survivors used.

So the moral outrage itself is evidence. Every time a person looks at those photographs and says “that was wrong” – not “that was unfortunate,” not “that was a cultural difference,” but wrong – they’re borrowing a standard that has to come from somewhere outside the event itself. Scripture says exactly where it comes from. We’re made in the image of God, and that image is what got violated at Auschwitz on an industrial scale. The good that evil desecrates isn’t an abstraction. It’s a Person, and it’s the people He made.

The Camps Weren’t Only a Human Failure – They Were a Battlefield

Scripture says the fight you’re watching play out in human history is never only human. That doesn’t excuse a single guard, officer, or bureaucrat who chose cruelty – they were moral agents, and they’ll answer for what they did. But the Bible refuses to let us stop the explanation at “people are capable of terrible things,” true as that is. It insists there’s a deeper current running under human cruelty, an intelligence behind the pattern.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. [Ephesians 6:12]

That verse isn’t an excuse for the guilty. It’s an explanation of why human cruelty so often takes on a shape that looks almost coordinated – a hatred of a particular people, sustained across centuries, dressed up in whatever ideology happens to be available at the time. Ask any honest historian why the hatred of the Jewish people specifically has outlasted every empire that tried to eliminate them, and you’re asking a question history alone can’t fully answer. Scripture says there’s a spiritual hostility behind it that history can only describe from the outside.

Good and Evil Aren’t Equal Opposites in a Cosmic Balance

The Bible never treats good and evil as two matched powers holding the universe in balance. That’s a natural place for the mind to land – if there’s a battle, surely there are two sides of roughly equal weight, locked in some cosmic stalemate. It’s a tidy picture. It’s also not what Scripture teaches, and the difference matters more than it looks like at first glance.

Why “Balance” Is the Wrong Picture

God is not one half of a pair. He’s the Creator of everything that exists, including the angel who rebelled and became who we call Satan. Evil isn’t a rival substance with its own independent power supply – it’s a corruption, a twisting of something good that God made, and a creature chose to ruin. Even Satan’s own freedom to act operates within limits God sets; read the opening of Job and you’ll see an adversary who can do nothing without permission he has to ask for. That’s not a balanced fight. That’s a rebellion being tolerated for a season, inside a kingdom that was never actually in doubt.

Why does God tolerate it at all, then, if He’s not obligated to? That’s the harder question, and honesty requires acknowledging we don’t get the full answer this side of eternity. What we do get is a promise that the toleration has an end date and a cross that already marks the turning point.

The Cross Already Decided the War

Calvary is the moment the outcome of this war stopped being in doubt. It doesn’t look that way at first. A man beaten and nailed to a beam looks like defeat, not victory – which is exactly why the powers behind that scene apparently didn’t see it coming.

He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in him. [Colossians 2:15]

Disarmed. Not merely wounded, not fought to a draw – disarmed, put on open display as defeated. That’s what happened at the cross, in the same act that looked, from ground level, like the worst thing that had ever occurred. The resurrection three days later confirmed which side actually won. For anyone who belongs to Christ, that victory isn’t a future hope only. It’s a present reality.

Little children, you are from God and have overcome them, for he who is in you is greater than he who is in the world. [1 John 4:4]

That’s not a slogan for a poster. It’s the reason the war behind human history, as real and as ancient as it is, was never actually a fair fight between equals. One side has already lost, even while it thrashes.

What This Means When You’re the One Facing Evil

You don’t have to understand every purpose behind suffering to trust the God who stands over it. I want to be careful here, because glib answers to Auschwitz are its own kind of cruelty. Nobody sitting in a comfortable chair gets to explain away what happened in those camps with a tidy verse. But Scripture does give us something sturdier than an explanation – it gives us a pattern for how God has worked with evil before, without ever being its author.

As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today. [Genesis 50:20]

Joseph’s brothers were fully guilty of what they did to him. Their evil was real, chosen, and condemned. And God, without excusing it for a moment, wove it into a larger good they couldn’t see from inside their own betrayal. That’s the pattern Paul picks up when he writes that for those who love God, all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. Not that every evil act is secretly good – it isn’t – but that no evil act, however monstrous, falls outside the reach of a God who is still working, still sovereign, still finishing something.

So the two questions from that book on Auschwitz get answered, even if not in the tidy way we’d prefer. Good and evil are both real, and both trace back past the natural world into a war that’s genuinely supernatural – a rebellion against a good Creator, not a fight between equals. And the two are intertwined, but not as partners. One serves an eternal Kingdom that was never actually threatened. The other is a defeated occupier still doing damage on its way out. That’s cold comfort standing in a place like Auschwitz. It’s still the truth, and it’s the only foundation sturdy enough to keep calling evil what it is without losing your grip on why good is worth anything at all. And, the truth is, good comes from God, not man at all … lasting for eternity.