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Will God Use an ungodly man to fulfil his purposes?
Habakkuk 1:5-11
'Behold ye among the heathen, and regard, and wonder marvellously: for [I] will work a work in your days, "[which] ye will not believe, though it be told [you]."
Oskar Schindler was not a Godly man. He an adulterer, he was a womanizer. He drank heavily, he is greedy and opportunistic. But God used him anyway,
The relocation of Polish Jews from surrounding areas to Krakow began in late 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II, when the German Army defeated the Polish Army in three weeks. Oskar Schindler, a successful businessman, arrives from
Czechoslovakia in hopes of using the abundant cheap labour force of Jews to manufacture enamelware for the German military. Schindler, an opportunistic member of the Nazi party, lavishes bribes upon the army and SS officials in charge of procurement. Sponsored by the military, Schindler acquires a factory for the production of army mess kits and cooking paraphernalia. Not knowing much about how to properly run such an enterprise, he gains a contact in Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), a functionary in the local Judenrat (Jewish Council)
who has contacts with the now-underground Jewish business community in the ghetto. They loan him the money for the factory in return for a small share of products produced (for trade on the black market).
Opening the factory, Schindler pleases the Nazis and enjoys his new-found wealth and status as "Herr Direktor," while Stern handles all administration. Stern suggests Schindler hire Jews instead of Poles because they cost less (the Jews themselves get nothing; the wages are paid to the Reich). Workers in Schindler's factory are allowed outside the ghetto, and Stern falsifies documents to ensure that as many people as possible are deemed "essential" by the Nazi bureaucracy, which saves them from being transported to concentration camps, or even being killed.
Schnindler witnessed evil personified in the German Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler. The reality of what was being perpetrated on the Jewish populations in Europe
disgusted him, angered him and horrified him. He set out through bribes, false documents and any other means available to him, to save as many of his Jewiah workers and other concentration camp Jews as he could. He spent what estimated to be $800,000 over the 5 years he was in Poland and sat the end of the war had saved over 1,100 Jewish people from certain extermination in the death camps at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. The Allied victory revealed a man who was now victorious in his quest to save as many as he could but penniless and destitute.
Oskar Schindler is a reminder to us all, that we can be useful to God and that he will in fact use us, regardless of our character flaws for His Glory.
