"My name is Yves Oppert. I was born on May 25, 1909 in Paris, France. My mother died when I was seven, and I grew up in the home of my grandfather, a rabbi in Paris. I became a successful businessman and owned a chain of department stores. I was an avid mountain climber, and liked to play tennis and to race cars and motorcycles." That's the description of the man whose name appeared on the identification card that was handed to me when I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.. I was no longer Case Admiral, but for a few hours I became Yves Oppert.

"In 1934, I married Paulette Weill and together we had two daughters. I was called up by the French army in the fall of 1939 to fight against Germany. During the German invasion, I was captured, but managed to escape and return to France. I joined the underground resistance movement but was again captured in 1944. I was tortured and killed in a German concentration camp a month after my 35th birthday."

As I walked through the Holocaust exhibit carrying my identification card, I took on the personality of this real person. Inside of me, I began to feel much deeper than I thought possible the horror and pain that Yves Oppert must have suffered. As I saw videos and photos of Jews being rounded up and herded like cattle into box cars to be shipped off to concentration camps, I envisioned myself being rounded up and herded like an animal sent off to the slaughter. When I viewed scenes of Jewish men, women, and children walking around like living skeletons and being forced to work long hours at hard labor, I visualized myself as toiling with them. When I walked through a reconstructed concentration camp barracks, crowded with bunks, I pictured myself as restlessly sleeping in one of these awful, lice infested places. And when I finally came across a display of a bin of musty shoes once worn by actual Jewish victims who had been shot or gassed, I thought for a second that I saw the shoes of Yves Oppert -- my shoes -- in that big pile.

It was a grim and sobering experience to pace through the Holocaust Museum. I left depressed, defeated, and dejected. When I stepped back onto the streets of Washington, D.C., it seemed for a few moments that I had died with Yves Oppert. I felt like a walking dead man.

It wasn't until later, as I reflected more on what I had experienced that it occurred to me that once I had really been a walking dead man, along with every person in the world.

Our Life Apart from Christ

Paul's letter to the Ephesians, chapter 2, begins by describing what we once were apart from Jesus Christ. "As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you used to live." That's a walking dead person: someone outwardly alive but inwardly dead.

When sin entered our world, it didn't merely disrupt, damage or disease our relationship with God, it destroyed our relationship with Him. That's death. The best way to define death is not biologically but spiritually. Life is to know God. It is to be linked to him in a fellowship of love; it is to be connected to Jesus as a branch is connected to a vine. On the other hand, death is to be ignorant of God; it is to be alienated from him. No matter how physically strong and mentally alert we may appear to be, apart from Jesus Christ we are spiritually lifeless. We are dead. Such death is much worse than physical death.