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concentration camp, Corrie ten Boom, England, faith, forgiveness, Gestapo, Jesus, John Newton, Nazi Germany, Nazi soldiers, parliament, slave, slavery, Wilberforce
I have been crucified with Christ;
it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me;
and the life which I now live in the flesh
I live by faith in the Son of God,
who loved me and gave Himself for me.
(Galatians 2:20, NKJV)
The Elisha Code is all about dying to self and living for Christ. Christ is the second Adam—the new man who fully bears the image of God. In Eden, the tempter succeeded in marring the image of God that was so beautifully evident in Adam and Eve before the fall. Sin robs and defiles. Jesus redeems and restores.
Art by Hult –www.biblicalarchaeology.org
Two people who lived the crucified life were William Wilberforce and Corrie ten Boom. Both fought hatred and the dehumanizing forces of slavery and racism. Their most powerful weapon was relentless love. Today, those who embrace the Christ of the cross are called to do the same.
Abraham Lincoln once said that every school child should know about William Wilberforce.[i] For twenty long years from 1787 to 1807, Wilberforce persistently campaigned for the abolition of the slave trade. It was incredibly painful and often deeply discouraging work.
What kept him from giving up as he faced defeat after defeat? Wilberforce had previously lived a self-indulgent life as a very wealthy upper-class Englishman. What motivated him to stop wasting his life in drinking, gambling, and endless parties? He was a popular Member of Parliament who wowed crowds with his remarkable singing and wit. Prime Minister William Pitt said that Wilberforce had the greatest natural eloquence of all the men he had ever known.[ii] What caused him to choose the unpopular path of putting principle above politics, and conscience over ambition?
With the death of Wilberforce’s father at just age 40, William’s comfortable world was radically shaken. At the age of eight, because of his mother’s serious illness, he was shipped off to his Uncle William and Aunt Hannah in Wimbledon. Unbeknownst to his mother, he was mentored by Rev. John Newton, the former slave-ship captain and author of the song Amazing Grace. Some trace Wilberforce’s hatred of slavery back to this earliest encounter.
When Wilberforce’s wealthy grandfather got wind of his new spirituality, he threatened to disinherit him. So, Wilberforce’s mother promptly rescued him and did her best to cure him through endless parties and upper-class distractions. For a while, the cure was effective. After his grandfather’s death, Wilberforce inherited the family fortune which funded his election as an 18-year-old English member of parliament.
While spending the winter at the fashionable French and Italian Rivieras, he was suddenly called back to London in support of William Pitt’s Parliamentary Reform Bill. While crossing the Swiss Alps, Wilberforce read The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul by Philip Doddridge. Both Doddridge and John Wesley were instrumental in reintroducing the forgotten teachings of Richard Baxter about self-examination, solitude, devotions, and diligence.[iii]
In discussing Doddridge’s book with his former tutor Isaac Milner, Wilberforce’s life was radically changed. He rediscovered his childhood faith at an adult level. Wilberforce, with Milner’s assistance, began reading the Bible in the original Greek. He wanted to find out for himself what the Christian faith was truly about. He discovered that it was not about a system of gloomy prohibitions. True faith is about peace, hope, and joy. When Wilberforce fell in love with Jesus, he also fell in love with God’s creation.
Rather than drop out of politics as he was tempted to do, Wilberforce turned his new-found faith into practical action. Prime Minister Pitt wrote him, saying: “Surely the principles as well as the practice of Christianity are simple, and lead not to meditation only but to action.”
Reconnecting with his old mentor, the converted slave-ship captain, John Newton, Wilberforce realized that God could use him to end the slave trade: “God almighty has set before me two great objects: the suppression of the Slave Trade and the reformation of manners.”
Eighteenth-century England was rife with epidemic alcohol abuse, child prostitution, child labor, and animal exploitation. There were over 14,000 slaves in England alone, but hundreds of thousands more in the rich Caribbean English colonies where it was out of sight and out of mind.[iv] The future King of England George IV was famous for his immorality and gambling debts, keeping lockets of hair from all 7,000 women that he had seduced.[v] The King and his royal brothers dismissed abolitionists like Wilberforce as fanatics and hypocrites.[vi]
Because England was the foremost slave-trading nation on earth, it was initially unthinkable for them to give it up. As one merchant accurately put it, the African slave trade was “the foundation of our commerce…the life of our navigation, and first cause of our national industry and riches.”[vii]
Eighty per cent of overseas British income came from the Caribbean slave plantations.[viii] Wilberforce was naively asking England to commit commercial suicide. In Bristol, after the initial defeat of Wilberforce’s bill, bells were rung, a bonfire was lit, and a half-day holiday was awarded to sailors and workers.[ix] The passion for profit and slave-produced sugar had killed their conscience.
While fighting the slave trade, Wilberforce also invested in improving the life of England’s poor, giving one quarter of his income, representing the equivalent of $300,000 away each year. He started cancer hospitals, eye clinics and many faith-based schools for the poor.[x]
William Willberforce portrait (John Russell)
The slave trade was abolished in 1807; however, the slaves were not liberated until just before Wilberforce’s death. On July 31st, 1834, 800,000 Afro-Caribbeans were set free. While moving a motion for abolition, Wilberforce said, “Africa! Africa! Your sufferings have been the theme that has arrested and engages my heart – your sufferings no tongue can express; no language impart.”[xi]
In the 1940’s, Corrie ten Boom also learned to act on her strong faith. The Nazis conquered the Netherlands in May 1940, and during the German occupation 100,000 Dutch Jews were sent to concentration camps. Corrie prayed, “Lord Jesus, I offer myself for your people. In any way. Any place. Any time.”[xii]
By disguising themselves as Nazi soldiers, her underground team saved 100 Jewish babies from being killed in an orphanage.
A well-known architect built them a secret two-and-a-half foot-wide hiding place behind a new brick wall in Corrie’s bedroom.[xiii] Even after arresting the ten Booms, the Gestapo were never able to find the Jews hidden in this ‘angel-crib’ hiding place.[xiv]
At the time of the arrest, Corrie’s interrogator painfully slapped her in the face after every question. Corrie cried out: “Lord Jesus, protect me!”
He hissed at her, “If you mention that name again once more, I will kill you.”
But miraculously, he stopped beating her.[xv]
Corrie and her sister Betsie hid over 800 Jewish people in their Haarlem watchmaker home, before being sent to Ravensbruck Concentration Camp in eastern Germany where 96,000 women died. “The sufferings of Jesus,” said Corrie, “became very real to me at Ravensbruck.”[xvi]
She lost four family members in the concentration camps, including her beloved older sister Betsie who forgave and prayed for the guards even as they mercilessly beat her.
Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com
“Don’t hate,” Betsie pleaded to Corrie. Three days before Betsie died, she shared with Corrie the vision of opening healing homes in Holland and Germany, before going around the world sharing about Jesus’ love and forgiveness. Two weeks later, Corrie was set free through a God-ordained clerical error.[xvii] One week after this, all the other women her age at Ravensbruck were taken to be killed in the gas chamber.
Upon returning to Holland, Corrie opened a home in Holland to bring healing for people, even including the ostracized Dutch collaborators. She was knighted by the Queen of the Netherlands for her work.
Corrie told God that she was willing to go where he wanted her to go but hoped that he would never send her back to Germany. Finally, after sensing a blockage in her prayer life, she repented, saying, “Yes, Lord, I’ll go to Germany too.”[xviii]
God sent her back to Ravensbruck to lead Bible studies with former guards, now in that prison. Then, she rented and cleaned up a former concentration camp in Germany to bring temporary housing and healing to some of the nine million Germans who had been bombed or driven out of their homes.[xix]
In 1946, a former Ravensbruck guard said to Corrie in Munich, “How grateful I am for your message, Fraulein. To think, as you said, that he washes my sins away!”
Corrie later wrote, “His hand was thrust out to shake mine… Even as angry, vengeful thoughts boiled through me, I saw the sin of them. Jesus Christ had died for this man. Was I going to ask for more? Lord Jesus, I prayed, forgive me and help me to forgive him… Again, I silently prayed ‘Jesus, I cannot forgive him. Give me your forgiveness.’ As I took his hand, my heart felt an overwhelming love for this stranger.”[xx
Corrie became a penniless tramp for the Lord, travelling for three decades to sixty-two countries, and sleeping in over a thousand different beds.[xxi] Wherever she went globally, Corrie shared from her Ravensbruck experience that the light and love of Jesus Christ is deeper than the deepest darkness. She was the favorite travelling companion of the Bible-smuggler Brother Andrew as they both did missionary work behind the Iron Curtain, in Vietnam and twelve other Communist countries. In Vietnam, they gave her the honorific title of “Double-old Grandmother.”
While in the Soviet Union, she intentionally preached the gospel in her hotel room, knowing that everything she said was being listened to and recorded by communist officials.
Through her deep friendship with Rev. Billy and Ruth Graham, Corrie’s The Hiding Place book was turned into a movie reaching tens of millions. Ruth Graham said: “I didn’t know anyone who had suffered so intensely for the Lord and for his people, as Corrie had, and come through with absolutely nothing but love in her heart for her captors—she forgave them.”[xxii]
In 1967, Corrie was recognized by Israel as a righteous Gentile, with the planting of a tree in her honor.[xxiii] When people kept telling her how brave she was, Corrie transparently prayed, “What little courage I have… I was not brave. I was often like a timid, fluttering bird, looking for a hiding place… Lord, I am weak and cowardly and of little faith; do hold me close. Thou art the conqueror. May that assurance give me courage and loyalty.”[xxiv]
Because of her work blessing indigenous people, Corrie was adopted into the Hopi First Nation and given the name Beautiful Flower.[xxv] While staying at a Kansas farm, Corrie challenged her host who had recently kicked his son out, telling him to never darken his doorstep again. She said to the farmer: “If you believe in Jesus Christ and belong to Him, your sins have been cast into the depths of the sea, and that’s very deep. But then he expects also that you forgive the sins of your boy and cast them into the depths of the sea. Just imagine how you would feel if there should be another war, if your son had to go back into service and was killed in action. Don’t you think you should forgive him right now?”
After riding together in silence, the farmer invited Corrie to go with him as he asked his son to forgive him. His son replied, “But, Father. I should ask you for forgiveness.”[xxvi]
In her late sixties, Corrie was betrayed and hurt by some Christians she loved and trusted: “You would have thought that having been able to forgive the guards in Ravensbruck, forgiving Christian friends would be child’s play. It wasn’t. For weeks, I seethed inside. But at last, I asked God again to work His miracle in me… I was restored to the Father.”
She later burnt the painful letters from her friends, as a sign of letting go.[xxvii] She, like Wilberforce, lived the crucified life. Unlike Adam and Eve, Wilberforce and ten Boom did not run from God. They found their hiding place in God (Psalm 32:7). In tumultuous times, they courageously fought against forms of racism that mar and debase the image of God that we all bear.
So God created mankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27, NIV)
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[i] Lincoln on abolition in England and the United States, 1858 | Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History (accessed April 13th 2023).
[ii] Eric Metaxas, Amazing Grace (Harper Collins Publishers, New York, NY, 2007), 41.
[iii] William Hague, William Wilberforce: the Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner, (HarperCollins Publishers, London, UK, 2007), 74.
[iv] Metaxas, Amazing Grace, 94.
[v] Metaxas, 72.
[vi] Metaxas, 158.
[vii] Hague, 119.
[viii] Hague, 119.
[ix] Hague, 225.
[x] Hague, 221.
[xi] Metaxas, 151.
[xii] Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place (Chosen Books, Bantam Books, Fleming H Revell, New York, New York, 1971), 114.
[xiii] Ten Boom, The Hiding Place, 120.
[xiv] Corrie ten Boom, A Prisoner—and Yet (Christian Literature Crusade, London, UK, 1954), 12.
[xv] Ten Boom, A Prisoner—and Yet, 13.
[xvi] Ten Boom, A Prisoner—and Yet, 87.
[xvii] Ten Boom, The Hiding Place, 241
[xviii] Corrie ten Boom, Amazing Love, (Christian Literature Crusade, London, UK, 1954), p. 27.
[xix] Ten Boom, Amazing Love, 36.
[xx] Ten Boom The Hiding Place, 238.
[xxi] Corrie ten Boom & Jamie Buckingham, Tramp for the Lord (BBS Publishing Company, New York, 1975, 1995), 185.
[xxii] Corrie Ten Boom “The Lives She Touched” video Ruth Graham: “When I met Corrie, the thing that really impressed me was the twinkle in her eye. There was nothing but love and forgiveness.”
[xxiii] Ten Boom, The Hiding Place, 138.
[xxiv] Ten Boom, A Prisoner— and Yet, 129.
[xxv] Corrie ten Boom “The Lives She Touched” video.
[xxvi] Ten Boom, Amazing Love, 10.
[xxvii] Ten Boom & Buckingham, Tramp for the Lord, 310.
I love the Psalms 