THE MIRACLE OF FORGIVENESS

Corrie ten Boom was the means God used to challenge me to give my life to Christ when she spoke in my home church in 1956. Her story of being imprisoned in Ravensbruck concentration camp with her sister for helping Jews to escape the Nazis during World War II, and what she experienced there, captured my imagination. Her father and her sister Betsie died in the camps. She herself only escaped through a clerical error a week before all the women of her age and older were put to death. Ninety-seven thousand women died in that camp. After the war she was called to minister to victims of the camps and to go back into Germany and share the Gospel with her former enemies.

In 1947 she was in a church in Munich sharing the message that God forgives. She saw a balding, heavyset man in a gray overcoat, with a brown felt hat clutched between his hands working his way forward towards her. One moment she saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones.

“It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights; the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor; the shame of walking naked past this man. The man who was making his way forward had been a guard – one of the most cruel guards. Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out: ‘A fine message, Fraulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!’ And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course – how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women? But I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. I was face to face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze. ‘You mentioned Ravensbruck in your talk,’ he was saying. ‘I was a guard there.’ No, he did not remember me. ‘But since that time,’ he went on, ‘I have become a Christian. I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fraulein,’ – again the hand came out – ‘will you forgive me?’ And I stood there – I whose sins had again and again to be forgiven – and could not forgive. Betsie had died in that place – could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking? It could not have been many seconds that he stood there – hand held out – but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do. For I had to do it – I knew that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who had injured us. ‘If you do not forgive men their trespasses,’ Jesus says, ‘neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.’ And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion – I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart. ‘Jesus, help me!’ I prayed silently. ‘I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.’ And so, woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes. ‘I forgive you, brother!’ I cried. ‘With all my heart.’ For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then. But even so, I realized that it was not my love. I had tried, and did not have the power. It was the power of the Holy Spirit as recorded in Romans 5:5 ‘because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit which is given to us.’” (Tramp for the Lord, p.55-57)

We cannot love our enemies in our own strength. It is humanly impossible. It is only when we open ourselves to the love of God our Father that we can do the impossible. It is a matter of obedience and a realization of our own need that enables us to love our enemies. It is easy to love those who love us, to love our own kind. But this is a love that can only come from God who is Perfect Love, who loved us when we were his enemies.