This is the ninetieth lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.

See Mel Lawrenz’s book, How to Understand the Bible.

When the Bible says that mankind was created “in the image of God” we gain from that an understanding of our capabilities. We also learn about the inherent worth of human life.

What is a person worth?

Ninety-nine percent of a human body consists of six elements: oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, calcium, and phosphorus. The remaining one percent consists of minor elements and trace elements. If you purchased these chemicals on the market, you would have to spend a bit more than $100.

Most of us believe people are worth more than $100.

Yet not everyone. The Nazis considered Jews, Poles, mentally ill people, and others to be of no worth whatsoever. Of negative worth, in fact; worthy only of extermination since they were viewed as a net deficit in the human race.

I went to see Auschwitz in the south of Poland one summer day. Seeing the place in films and still photos is one thing; walking into its netherworld-like reality is another. There it all is: the underground bunker disguised as a giant group shower with holes in the ceiling where the Zyklon B was dropped in; the pallets on mechanized tracks that delivered bodies to the gaping holes of the ovens; the endless rows of barracks built alongside railroad tracks for the efficient herding of victims. Somehow what hit me as hard as the piles of eyeglasses and suitcases and hair, were the mechanisms of this death factory. Carts and tracks and ovens—and rusting spare parts on the side. Human beings did this. They built a machinery of mass desecration and with it millions perished.

The evil irony of it all is that the perpetrators were acting out of a perverse sense of superiority, a kind of exaggerated, twisted dignity. Such monsters were able to treat human beings as refuse only because they saw themselves as gods. The ultimate form of idolatry is viewing the self as sovereign. And it is not only Nazis who view life that way.

These realities of history show us how radically wrong we can get the dignity equation. The jagged road of history twists this way and that between defaming people and deifying them. This is exactly why we need to get the dignity equation right.
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Mel Lawrenz (@MelLawrenz) trains an international network of Christian leaders, ministry pioneers, and thought-leaders. He served as senior pastor of Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, for ten years and now serves as Elmbrook’s teaching pastor. He has a PhD in the history of Christian thought and is on the adjunct faculty of Trinity International University. Mel is the author of 18 books, including How to Understand the Bible—A Simple Guide and Spiritual Influence: the Hidden Power Behind Leadership (Zondervan, 2012). See more of Mel’s writing at WordWay.