I know I’ve been sharing a lot from our trip to Germany, and I’m going to do that once again today before I take a break from it for a while.

Our tour guide arranged for us to make an unscheduled stop at Buchenwald concentration camp just outside of Weimar. It was a sobering experience. Not everyone in our group went inside. Even though the prisoner barracks were all destroyed, the place where they stood is still barren ground.

This camp was established in 1937. Hitler used it for anyone considered an enemy of the state, including communists or those accused of being communists. Prisoners also included Jews, the mentally ill, physically disabled, sexual deviants, political prisoners, Freemasons, and prisoners of war. All of them worked as forced labor in local factories. Insufficient food, poor conditions, and deliberate executions led to over 56,000 deaths.

On the inside of the gate of this concentration camp were the words”Jedem das Seine.” This was the German rendering of a Latin phrase that literally meant “to each his own.” However, It was something of an idiom in Germany that was understood to mean “you get what you deserve.” And it was placed where those inside the gates could see and read it.

The Nazi mindset was that they were superior to everyone else. Those who did not agree with them were looked at as being inferior and subject to whatever cruelty the Nazis wished to inflict on them. They felt justified in the brutal treatment they meted out in this and the other concentration camps.

I think we can see the injustice of people treating other people in this manner. We do not have the right or authority to pass such judgment based on our feelings or assumptions. But it continues to happen in this fallen, sinful world.

It had to have been a living hell for those incarcerated there, especially since they did not deserve it.

“Jedem das Seine.” That inscription rightly belongs inside the gates of hell. That is what we all deserve because of our sin. Separation from God in the place of eternal torment, the place of weeping and gnashing of teeth. We deserve it.

But God made it possible for us not to get what we deserve. Jesus took was our substitute. He took our place. He endured hell for us through His crucifixion and death so that we could be forgiven. And He placed His perfection on all those who put their faith in Him so that we get what we do not deserve: forgiveness and eternal life.

2 Corinthians 5:21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Thank God we do not get what we deserve.