6 million and one tombs

Today we began with a very sobering trip to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. There are many Holocaust museums throughout the world, but as you can imgine, they take it more seriously here thant anywhere else! It was unbelievably sad and a story that never gets easy to visualize (with pictures and footage). After this we went to the museum that holds the Dead Sea scrolls found in the 1940's that verified historically, the scriptures we have in our Bible. Very awesome - you know I'm a Bible/preaching geek and so this was incredible historical stuff, very cool to see actual scrolls from the 2nd century BC with my eyes. This is like seeing the Declaration of Indepence in Washington D.C. (which i have and it's cool), but times ten (2,100 plus years versus 250 years)!

The afternoon was hectic making a trip (mostly on foot) to Caiphas' house, a possible "upper room" and King David's tomb. Again, I tend to get excited about the stuff they say, "We are relatively sure" or "we know" as opposed to "this is a possible site..." Well, we ended in the Garden tomb area which is the one most of you have seen pictures of and what you think of as the real tomb of Jesus. Again, there are two of these and both of them are "maybes", but today's was amazingly touching and spiritual. We got to walk into the tomb (it is at least a first century tomb!) and then shared communion together. I reflected how 6,000,000 Jews died senselessly and brought great pain and one Jew died senselessly and brought life to the earth. How 6M Jews died because of the hatred of one man and how ONE MAN died because of the love of the ONE GOD. How 6 million Jews were viewed as worthless and therefore killed and how one Jew was worthy and therefore killed. 6 million died and lost their life. One man died and everyone lives!

This is what I'm pondering as we stay the night in a hotel on the southern end of the Dead Sea.