Movie Review......Truth & Treason

                Helmuth Hubener was a very bright German 16 year old youth.....this back in 1941....a member of the Hitler youth.....but then everyone had to be a member. He was also a Mormon youth in a small church in Hamburg. Hitler's purging of Jews from all of German life....the brutality of it all....the Gestapo and everything of that nature combined....turned this young man into a member of the resistance....which meant that he was putting his own life on the line. He came up with an idea...to use a borrowed typewriter to write pamphlets in opposition to the Nazis and Hitler....informing the readers on what the Nazis were doing....of which he learned from a shortwave radio....and then distribute the pamphlets as secretly as he could....which turned out not to be secret enough....for he was arrested....brutalized....and tried as an adult for treason.
                 So that is the new movie in theaters right now....Truth & Treason....and my wife and I saw it this afternoon. It was very well made....and all movies like this....movies about Corrie ten Boom and Dietrich Bonhoffer come to mind....are needed....to remind us that tyranny can rear its ugly head anywhere....anywhere where the people are not vigilant.
                 This was a young man....16 for Pete's sake....very brave....and very correct on what was happening in Germany. Stop reading here if you for some reason do not want to know the ending....but this is history....and a simple Google search would tell you what happened to Helmuth Hubener.
                  His defense at his trial....he was seventeen by this time....was on the concept of truth.....and that the people needed to hear the truth....in a nation whose government would not even let them own a shortwave radio....where they would hear from outside sources what Germany was doing. Everything in the plot of the film was about....truth!
                   I can't remember the sermon title....but John MacArthur told a story in it about two wonderful older women and longtime missionaries in Africa whose vehicle went off a cliff. They were well known to his congregation by the way. Both women died. I'm sure the congregation was very moved as MacArthur told this story....but he then turned emotion into doctrinal reality.....as he said that a real tragedy is not when someone dies in a terrible auto accident like this....as horrible as that is....but that the real tragedy is when anyone dies without Christ!
                   This was pure John MacArthur! He didn't have the time or the desire to occupy the minds of his congregation with emotional stories. He wanted to teach them....to secure their eternal souls! 
                    That is part of the caveat for this film....Truth & Treason.....yes it was a terrible thing that they executed this young man.....the youngest person ever to have been executed by the Nazi's for treason....but the real tragedy was that although he died after proclaiming at his sentencing....that he did nothing wrong....for he only told the truth....truth that the people have a right to hear....the real tragedy is that he died having a more important truth....with eternal consequences....kept from him on who Jesus Christ is....and what the atonement is....and what the good news of the gospel is! That is the real tragedy....and hopefully evangelicals who watch this film will recognize the difference between something terrible....the loss of this young man's life as he simply tried to right a wrong....and the real tragedy of a young life taken....without having been told....even worse....the truth kept from him....the truth about sin and redemption!