Communism in Christian preaching often represents a worldly ideology opposed to biblical truth and freedom, highlighting the spiritual dangers of totalitarian regimes and atheistic philosophies (Galatians 5:1). Illustrations use images of political oppression, betrayal, and the suffering of millions to contrast the kingdom of God with earthly systems built on false promises (John 8:32).
Explores the early religious thought of Karl Marx. Born Jewish, was baptized as a Lutheran at age six, wrote religious essays in high school. Later turned away from all religion, calling it the opiate of the masses.
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Russia is not really changing under Gorbachev. Soviet system has announced reforms in the past that did not bring change. Historical review given. Gorbachev has confirmed many of the criticisms that have been made:
1. The Party does not represent the people.
2. Leadership has been irresponsible and adventurous.
3. Foreign policy has been imperial, costly and overextended.
4. Opponents have been illegally crushed.
5. Economics have been a disaster.
6. Censorship and cultural controls have devastated art.
7. Vices have not been eradicated.
8. "Glasnost" shows whole system has been operating under a lie.
#258
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Whittaker Chambers was a Communist spy for 13 years and abruptly left the Party in 1938. Through his testimony, Richard Nixon charged State Department official Alger Hiss with being a Soviet spy.
In Chambers’s autobiography, “Witness,” he describes his reasons for leaving communism. Originally, he had found in the party the two certainties “for which the mind of man tirelessly seeks: a reason to live and a reason to die.” He believed Marxism represented the last great hope on earth.
Why did that hope crumble? Chambers quotes the daughter of a German diplomat, trying to explain why her father had suddenly turned against communism: “He was immensely pro-Soviet, and then one night in Moscow he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.” Chambers read about the execution of a Soviet general he knew and realized the killings would go on and on. Lady Astor once asked Stalin, “How long are you going to keep on killing people?” “As long as it is necessary,” he replied.
Watching his daughter in a high chair, he noticed the perfection of her ear and realized such an intricate design could not happen by chance. His daughter must have a soul. Later, reading Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables,” Chambers encountered a faith that combined two seeming irreconcilables: Christianity and revolution. The revolution was not imposed from above, through a gun barrel, but from below, through service to the poor and oppressed. He read the journal of George Fox and was influenced by the Quakers.
Chambers died a sad and mistrusted man. Yet communism has been abandoned around the world. Why? First, they heard screams. Finally, the authorities themselves had to recognize the bankruptcy of a system based on humanity alone. Almost 40 years ago Chambers wrote:
“Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. ... The crisis of Communism exists to the degree in which it has failed to free the peoples it rules from God. ... Economics is not the central problem of this century. It is a relative problem which can be solved in relative ways. Faith is the central problem of this age. The Western world does not know it, but it already possesses the answer to this problem -- but only provided that its faith in God and the freedom He enjoins is as great as Communism’s faith in Man.”
Hernando de Soto is an economist who noticed poverty and wealth are not always due to injustice or imperialism. Land ownership is an important factor, because when people own something they value it and invest in it. One group of squatters put all their money into appliances because they did not have land deeds and wanted to be able to move their wealth if evicted.
#633
[see #2796 for fuller treatment]
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Leonid Il’ichev, a prominent expert on ideology and member of the Communist Party Central Committee, was quoted in the January 17, 1964 issue of Communist as saying:
“It is true that communism and religion have nothing in common. What ever the adornments of religion may be, they cannot change its nature… Never has any religion been able and will never be able to preserve man from the yoke of exploiters and lead them to the triumph of the communist regime. Marxist atheism does not confine itself to the simple refutation of religion and its teaching, it suppresses it.”
#1505
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Located in the frigid Arctic White Sea, the Solovky (Solovetsky) Islands
were one of the initial outposts of the Soviet labor camp system. A monastery
was founded on the largest Solovky island in the fifteenth century. From 1718
to 1903 the tsars had used parts of the monastery as a prison, but the
monastery itself continued to function until the October Revolution.
The origins of the Gulag archipelago--the phase Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to
describe the system of labor camps sprinkled across the Soviet map--are found
on the Solovky Archipelago. The first batch of prisoners was brought here in
the early 1920's, while Lenin was still in charge.
The horrors which lay ahead for the involuntary twentieth-century inhabitants
of the Solovky Islands were foretold two centuries earlier. According to the
story, in 1712 a monk by the name of Job, during an all-night vigil, had a
frightening visitation from Mary. "This hill from henceforth shall be called
Golgotha, and on it shall be built a church and a monastery of the
crucifixion. And it will be whitened by the sufferings of countless
millions." Thus was born the Golgotha-Crucifixion Monastery on the island of
Anzer. Piles of bearded corpses would indeed one day be stacked in the
vestibule of the church, later to be taken out and rolled down Golgotha Hill.
On a single awful night in October 1929, exactly three hundred prisoners were
executed.
However, the Solovky camps produced not just death, but also an immortal
statement of Church/State relations. [1506]
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Talk by Denton Lotz, general secretary of Baptist World Alliance, at charismatic fellowship dinner at American Baptist Convention in Charleston, WV:
In 1990 a revolution of democracy swept eastern Europe. After Czechoslovakia and East Germany succombed, the dictator Ceaucescue in Rumania hardened his line. From a balcony in Bucharest (?) at the Communist party’s hall he proclaimed, “Communism will never die.” In a few short weeks he was dead and democracy instituted. Baptists played a key role in this.
The revolt started when a Reformed pastor’s church was ransacked by authorities. As demonstrations intensified, a 20-year-old Baptist named Peter Ducheskue (?) decided to light a candle in the darkness to proclaim his faith and challenge the authorities. He lit it, placed it on the sidewalk and was shot in the legs by nearby soldiers. Nevertheless, hundreds of others were inspired by his act and the city sideways were illuminated with candles of protest. He did not regret his action even though he was wounded.
In June 1991, Baptists held a convention in the same Communist hall that the dictator used, and from his balcony they gave an invitation for people to come to Jesus Christ.
Some of the most profound conversions have been based on simple encounters with God.
One example would be a Russian Jew named Boris Kornfeld. Kornfeld was a medical doctor who lived in Russia during Stalin's rule. Although he was innocent, someone accused him of lacking loyalty to Stalin, and he was thrown in a concentration camp for political prisoners. Kornfield was not a religious Jew and he soon lost his belief in Communism.
Eventually the doctor came in contact with a born-again Christian, who explained the OT prophecies about Jesus. Since he didn't believe the Bible, this approach didn't have much effect. What really got to him as the Christian emphasis on forgiving others and repentance. Kornfield knew he was full of hate. When he operated on guards he tried to sabotage the stitches so they would later come undone. He now realized he was as evil as the guards he hated, and he began to pray for forgiveness.
He also did something else. He turned in a thief. Kornfeld found him stealing bread from a dying patient and reported it to the camp commander. The commander could hardly believe it, because stoolies usually got murdered. Dr. Kornfeld was not particularly brave, but he felt he had to finally take a stand.
This decision, which in effect was a death sentence, gave him a new freedom. He no longer ignored cruelty or stored up hatred for people. He also wanted to share his faith in Jesus with someone. His first opportunity was a young patient with cancer who was empty and miserable. Kornfeld began talking to him and described everything that had happened. All day long the patient heard about the doctor's conversion and new-found freedom.
The young patient woke up the next day to hear a commotion in the next room. During the night, while the doctor was sleeping, someone had crept in and struck him in the head 8 times with a hammer. Although his fellow doctors tried to save him, in the morning he was dead. He did not experience a miraculous deliverance.
But Kornfeld's simple testimony did not die. The young patient thought about the doctor's words and became a Christian himself. He survived the prison camp and went on to tell the world what he had learned there. The patient's name was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and through his books the still small voice of God has touched many people.
The belief in a suffering God can provide an appropriate entry point for
sharing the gospel. A few years ago, I [Dennis Ngien] was in the former
Czechoslovakia on a preaching tour. On the plane home a government official
spoke to me. He told me that he had attended the service when I had spoken
about Christ's suffering for his people, and he had left the service in rage,
cursing God for the suffering he and his family had known: 40 years of
suffering under Communist rule; the starvation and death of his parents; the
long years he had spent as a lonely child in an orphanage.
His rage continued when he arrived home. On the apartment wall hung a
crucifix, given to him by his mother with the prayer that one day he would
come to Christ. Furious, he hurled a cake topped with thick, white icing at
it. The icing covered the crucifix, dripping down the face of the crucified
figure. And in that moment, my words about Christ's suffering came alive to
him. For the first time, he said, he saw Jesus' tears. In his apartment, he
knelt in front of the cross and gave his life to Christ. And he uttered
these words: "Christ is for me, not against me."
The man told me: "I don't understand many of the things that happened
politically, but I know that Jesus did not forsake me. He was in pain when I
was in pain. He was in tears when I was in tears. He did not experience joy
when I suffered the most." Forgoing speculation as to why suffering befell
him, he was now risking himself to the loving care of the Divine Sufferer. It
sufficed this wounded governor to perceive in the Cross God's deepest pain
and his loving scars. Thus sensing God's presence in his suffering, it
enabled him to receive the gospel, and eventually to find faith.
#4058
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The fall of communism is due to its spiritual failure. It claimed that capitalism was evil and unjust, but Marxism was based on falsehood and did not reflect reality. Capitalism is more spiritual than communism - goods and services are freely exchanged, these goods increase in value, and it rewards the best efforts.
The huge Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Czechoslovakia was set up to study (and attack) capitalism. They secretly became capitalists themselves. An East German made this assessment of the "six miracles of socialism":
1. There is no unemployment, but no one works.
2. No one works, but everyone gets paid.
3. Everyone gets paid, but there is nothing to buy.
4. No one can buy anything, but everyone owns everything.
5. Everyone owns everything, but no one is satisfied.
6. No one is satisfied, but 99 percent of the people voted for the system.
Western liberalism has faults of its own. It constantly says the government is there to do what individuals can't or won't do on their own. However, government can't do anything for us without first taking from us the means to do it. Government's only tool is force, and force is usually the worst possible tool to apply in social matters.
Ideas, not armies, rule the world. False belief, not secret police or barbed wire, enslaves.
Of course, the best way to teach your children the truth of the First Commandment is to live it yourself in the home. If your kids see you putting other things ahead of God, they will become discouraged and disillusioned, like a young Jewish boy who once lived in Germany.
His father was a successful merchant, and the family practiced their Jewish faith. But then they moved to another German city, and the boy’s father announced that they would no longer attend synagogue. They were going to join the Lutheran church.
The boy was very surprised and asked his father why the family was joining the Lutheran church. His father’s answer was something like, For business reasons. There are so many Lutherans in this town that I can make good business contacts at the Lutheran church. It will be good for business.
That boy, who had a deep interest in religion, became so disillusioned with his father that something died within him. He said to himself, ‘My father has no real convictions. The incident helped to turn him against religion with a vengeance.
That young boy later moved to England and began to write. His name was Karl Marx. As the father of communism he wrote the Communist Manifesto, in which he called religion the opiate of the masses.
I wonder if world history would have been different had Karl Marx’s father heeded the admonition of the great Shema of Israel:
"Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: and you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might."
Your kids know whether you love God with all your heart. What they want to see is parents with such love and reverence for God that they bring Him into every area of their lives and put him first in everything. Kids want to see whether their parents love God enough to obey him.
Adrian Rogers, Ten Secrets For A Successful Family, Crossway Books, 1996, p.38.
In 1989 the unthinkable happened. After seventy years of communism and forty years of the Cold War, the Iron Curtain fell and the imperial power of the U.S.S.R. began to disintegrate. Russia for seven decades had been repressed by a godless tyranny and now the ring of freedom began to resound from Siberia to St. Petersburg. Freedom, the ancient cry of the human heart, would finally come to the 1000-year-old Russian civilization. Repression, you see, had not begun with Lenin but stretched far back into the Tsarist history of Russia.
Of course, freedom is a loaded opportunity — for with freedom comes the responsibility of deciding what to do with it. Without the Communist Party or a Tsar to dictate their lives, the Russian people had to choose their own path.
Here's the rub with freedom: how do you choose? What do you do with freedom? This is where morality comes crashing in, for by one's choice you demonstrate what you value, what you think has worth, in short, what you think the good life is. Such questions are at the heart of morality.
The Russian people faced an enormous disadvantage in answering these questions. Seventy years of state atheism has impaired their moral compass. And as history sadly reminds us, without the transcendent reference point of God to orient our choices, we often chose poorly.
Indeed, Russian author and Nobel laureate, Alexander Solzhenitsyn tried to remind our own nation of this truth in a lecture many years ago at Harvard University. He spoke poignantly of the sordid lifestyle Americans were entering into, and noted the sheer danger of our fascination and indulgence with pleasure. He sharply warned that such choices take us away from truth and reality, and spoke of the need to turn back to God. Reminding them of Russia's history, he asked that we commit to memory what happened to a nation when it had forgotten God. And for all the poignancy — and accuracy — with which Mr. Solzhenitsyn addressed the hazardous American attitude, the students booed him off the stage.
Truly, Solzhenitsyn was right. The land that proudly proclaims its heritage of freedom ought to be humbled by Russia's example. It should give us pause to consider what we do, what we choose, with our freedom. Whether we recognize it or not, God is attentive to our choices. Let us humbly seek His grace to live and choose His desires for our lives — for that is the ultimate end of human freedom.
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Copyright © 2003 Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM). Reprinted with permission. "A Slice of Infinity" is a radio ministry of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries.
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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #5186]
In 1931 Joseph Stalin, the absolute ruler of Communist Russia, decided to construct a building that reflected his greatness. The Palace of Soviets would be the tallest structure in the world, 25 feet taller than the Empire State Building. The bottom would be a combination White House and Congress hall and the top would hold a 6,000-ton statue of Lenin raising his arm over the city.
The prime location in downtown Moscow was already occupied by a magnificent old church but that was no problem. They blew it up. It took one year to remove all the rubble. Construction then began on the communist Palace.
As they began construction, the builders discovered a slight problem - they were building on swampland. The unstable soil could not support such massive weight and at a certain point the tall building was sure to topple over. They all knew how Stalin viewed failure....
While they frantically tried to figure out what to do, the Nazis invaded. The steel superstructure was dismantled and used for military defenses. A big hole was left and it became something of an embarrassment, so in 1958 they turned it into a swimming pool. It was the largest outdoor swimming pool in the world, of course. Eventually even that was abandoned.
In 1995 a new building was erected at the spot. Then again, you might say it was an old building. The newly-liberated Russian Orthodox Church spent hundreds of millions to rebuild the Cathedral of Christ the Savior that Stalin had dynamited. They made it exactly like the original. It just goes to show you can fight God, but you can’t win.
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Information drawn from "Church of Christ the Savior [Khram Khrista Spasitelia]," edited by Kevin Moss at Middlebury College, http://cr.middlebury.edu/public/russian/Bulgakov/public_html/xram.html
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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #1863]
Sometimes great historical change comes amid fire and blood. Sometimes it comes amid joy and singing.
The joyful kind unfolded one unforgettable night 20 years ago.
The Berlin Wall fell Nov. 9, 1989, without a shot being fired. As Germans on both sides of the wall gleefully tore it down over the ensuing days, communist rule in Eastern Europe began to crumble (see it as it happened at http://bit.ly/35cKM9). Within a few years the Soviet empire collapsed and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. Thus ended more than 70 years of tyranny that killed millions of people, oppressed hundreds of millions and regularly threatened the West with nuclear annihilation.
Today’s children grow up in the shadow of international terrorism. But they don’t have to crouch under their schoolroom desks during air-raid drills like many of us did back in the 1950s and ‘60s -- as if that would have protected us from an atomic blast. They don’t have to wonder if the world will end tomorrow in a mushroom cloud of “mutually assured destruction.”
The fall of the wall came with a suddenness that surprised even the people who expected it. Despite the pressure for change coming from all sides -- even from Soviet reformist leader Mikhail Gorbachev -- the East German state was prepared to fight a long, twilight struggle against freedom. It probably would have crushed any attempt by its people to force political change.
“We were ready for everything,” a top East German government leader admitted after the fall. “Everything except candles and prayers.”
Candles and prayers -- offered up with incredible courage in peaceful public demonstrations by East German Christians and others who joined them -- sparked the fire that eventually consumed the tyranny in their land. True, larger political, social and economic forces set the stage for change. But the believers who put their lives on the line in those last fearful days of communist rule helped turn fragile possibility into reality. Their bravery inspired others throughout Eastern Europe to do the same.
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[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #16730]
In 1945, when the Communists seized Romania, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand had to make a decision. He could bow to the intruders or resist. Wurmbrand immediately began an effective, vigorous "underground" ministry to his enslaved people and the invading Russian soldiers. He was arrested in 1948 and spent three years in solitary confinement, seeing no one but his torturers. Following this, he was transferred to a mass cell for five years where the torture continued. Then he was set free and resumed his underground work, only to be arrested again two years later. Finally, in 1964 Christians in Norway negotiated with the Communist authorities for Wurmbrand's release and exit from Romania. It takes real courage to stand toe-to-toe with an evil government and proclaim the truth of God.
What opposition are you facing today?
The Famine of 1932-33
The famine that occurred in 1932-33 was to be for the Ukrainians what the Holocaust was to the Jews and the Massacres of 1915 for the Armenians. A tragedy of unfathomable proportions, it traumatized the nation, leaving it with deep social, psychological, political, and demographic scars that it carries to this day. And it cast a dark shadow on the methods and achievements of the Soviet system.
The central fact about the famine is that it did not have to happen. Stalin himself proclaimed that "nobody can deny that the total yield of grain in 1932 was larger than in 1931." As Conquest and Crawchenko have pointed out, the harvest of 1932 was only 12% below the 1926-30 average. In other words, food was available. However, the state systematically confiscated most of it for its own use. Despite the pleas and warnings of Ukrainian Communists, Stalin raised Ukraine's grain procurement quotas in 1932 by 44%. His decision, and the regime's brutal fulfillment of his commands, condemned millions to death in what can only be called a man-made famine.
The regime's disregard for the human costs of its policies was evident in a series of measures implemented in 1932. In August, party activists received the legal right to confiscate grain from peasant households; that same month the infamous law that carried a death penalty for the theft of "socialist property" was enacted. Any man, woman, or child caught taking even a handful of grain from a government silo or a collective farm field could be, and often was, executed. Under extenuating circumstances, such "crimes against the state" were punished by ten years of hard labor.
To prevent peasants from abandoning collective farms in search of food, a system of internal passports was put into effect. In November, Moscow enacted a law stipulating that no grain from a collective farm could be given to the peasants until the government's quota had been met. In January 1933 Stalin ordered his plenipotentiary, Pavel Postyshev, to castigate the Ukrainian Communists for their "lack of Bolshevik vigilance" and to speed up the collection of grain. Under his leadership, gangs of party activists conducted brutal house-to house searches, tearing up floors and delving into wells in search of any grain that remained.
Even those already swollen from malnutrition were not allowed to keep their grain. In fact, if a person did not appear to be starving, he was suspected of hoarding food. In retrospect, a party activist has described his motivations at that time in the following manner: "We believed Stalin to be a wise leader... We were deceived because we wanted to be deceived. We believed so strongly in communism that we were ready to accept any crime if it was glossed over with the least little bit of communist phraseology."
Famine, which had been spreading throughout 1932, hit full force in early 1933. It is estimated that at the outset of the year an average peasant family of five had about eighty kilograms of grain to last it until the next harvest. In other words, each member had to survive on about 1.7 kg a month. Lacking bread, peasants ate pets, rats, bark, leaves, and the garbage from the well-provisioned kitchens of party members. There were numerous cases of cannibalism. According to a Soviet author, "The first who died were the men. Later on the children. And last of all, the women. But before they died, people often lost their senses and ceased to be human beings."
Even as whole villages died out, party activists continued confiscating grain. One of them, Victor Kravchenko, later wrote: "On the battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degree, dying hideously, without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been trapped and left to starve, each in his home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital around conference and banquet tables. There was not even the consolation of inevitability to relieve the horror... The most terrifying sights were the little children with skeleton limbs dangling from balloon-like abdomens. Starvation wiped every trace of youth from their faces, turning them into tortured gargoyles; only in their eyes still lingered the reminder of childhood."
Of course, Stalin and his associates saw things differently. In 1933, Mendel Khataevich, another of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine and the leader of the grain-procurement program, proudly stated: "A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. It's a struggle to the death. This year was a test of our strength and their endurance. It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We have won the war!"
UKRAINE, a History, by Orest Subtelny
Allan W. Dulles, former director of the CIA, reports a Moscow father was being complimented by a neighbor on his three sons: "You must be mighty proud of them," said the neighbor, "one of them a
comrade doctor, another a comrade lawyer, and the third a comrade artist."
"Yes, they are fine people's men, but the one I am really proud of is the fourth boy, who is in America. He's an American capitalist! Yes, indeed. He's unemployed, and on relief, and if it
wasn't for the dollars he sends home we'd all starve."
Ye shall be hated of all men for my name’s sake (Matthew 10:22).
The Russian newspaper published by the Young Communist League once printed a letter from Nina K., a sixteen-year-old girl, quoting her as saying, “I am a young Communist League member. I am a normal girl, but at the same time I am unusual. I’m a Baptist! Frankly, I do not consider myself a member of the Young Communist League. I have Komsomol members pass me without greeting. Let them look on me with contempt. My brothers and sisters in God treat me very well. I believe them and I believe God.” The paper captioned the letter “The One Who Has Gone Astray.”
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Tom M. Olson in Encyclopedia of 7700 Illustrations by Paul Lee Tan
Communism
There was a contest for anyone who wanted to become a member of Communist Party. Two gypsies decided to try to get there. So the first one entered the communist office and the officer showed him three pictures: Stalin, Jesus, and Lenin.
”Which one these men do you know?” asked the officer.
”I don’t recognize these two from the margins, but here is Jesus in the middle.”
”You failed! We don’t need you!” said the officer nervously.
SO the gypsy left the office and told to the other one: ”Say that you don’t know the one who is in the middle.”
When the second gypsy entered, the officer asked him the same question about the 3 pictures.
”Well,” said the gypsy thoughtfully: I don’t know the man who is in the middle, but these two robbers from his right and left side I know very well”.
Unknown author
12/05/97
Estonian Lenin left on shelf
TALLINN, Estonia (Reuters) - A statue of Lenin, consigned to an Estonian warehouse after the Soviet Union collapsed, suffered further humiliation Friday when no bidders emerged for it at a special auction.
Authorities in the southern town of Tartu wanted to sell the 8-foot bronze statue, which once stood in the city center, rather than send it for scrap. They had set a $14,000 minimum price for the Russian revolutionary leader.
Deputy Mayor Hannes Astok said the problem was not the price but the "general cooling of interest" toward Lenin in the Baltic state of Estonia, which won independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
^REUTERS@
In August, President Fidel Castro celebrated his 75th birthday. The Cuban dictator came to power in 1959, after overthrowing former dictator, Fulgencio Batista.
On the eve of his birthday, Castro made a powerful gesture. He publicly handed a Cuban flag to the head of Cuba's communist youth organization. This was more than a photo op. The flag represented a "shining torch" to light the way of communism into the future.
Lucia Newman of CNN's Havana bureau wrote, "Castro was metaphorically enacting what he calls his most powerful dream -- that Cuba's younger generations take over from him once he's gone to keep his revolution alive."
The aging Castro knows that in order to keep his regime alive, he must pass the torch of communism to the next generation. He knows that if he fails to teach Cuba's children the communist worldview, his revolution will eventually die out. So Castro has been training his country's children to pick up the torch of communism and carry it into the future.
We wince at the thought of a strong new generation of young people working to keep communism in Cuba after Castro's gone. We've seen the sad results of communism in that country and in other parts of the world. And yet we can learn something important from Castro's symbolic gesture. We can learn that torch-passing is essential for us as Christians if we are to keep Christianity and a Christian worldview alive for future generations.
The torch of Christianity shines in the world today because of our dedicated elders -- parents, grandparents, pastors, theologians, teachers, youth leaders -- who taught Christian doctrine and Christian practice to this generation. Now we must be careful to do the same, to continue the work. Author Tim Kimmel writes, "Faith is the foundation of our legacy. It enables us to give one of the most significant gifts of all to our children."
This, however, goes beyond teaching our children Bible stories and right doctrine. We must teach them to think. The world is an increasingly complex place. We face questions in bioethics -- and now terrorism -- entertainment, career, and sexuality, to name only a few, that could not have been imagined a generation ago. What will today's infants or teenagers face when they're our age? If we merely teach them what to think about today's issues, we will not effectively prepare them to creatively think about tomorrow's. They need to learn first how to think -- specifically, how to think biblically about all the questions of life.
When we teach children the Word of God and its ramifications for life, we leave them a great inheritance. And children who are nurtured in the faith usually grow up to be adults who keep the faith.
What a challenge. And it's not only a challenge for Christian parents, but for all of us as we take advantage of opportunities to carry God's Word and a biblical worldview into the future.
Fidel Castro is working hard to make sure communism is passed on to a new generation of Cubans. How much more should we make sure that Christ and a biblical worldview will be passed on to a new generation here.
Sources:
CNN.COM: "Castro marks 75th birthday, firmly in charge," CNN Havana Bureau, from Lucia Newman, August 13, 2001.
Kimmel quote is from: KIDS CAN TALK TO GOD by Denise George, Birmingham, AL: New Hope Publishers, 1999.
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Copyright © 2001 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. 'BreakPoint with Chuck Colson' is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
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John Paul II — a feeding tube in his stomach — died a natural and peaceful death just days after the deliberate starvation of Terri Schiavo, whose feeding tube was callously removed. God in His providence often uses events like this to teach the world the difference between Christianity and secularism.
The world mourns the death of John Paul. As he lay dying, his spokesman explained how suffering is redeemed, and in doing so, he gives hope to all of us. In the Vatican, we saw the culture of life on display, while in Florida, we saw the gruesome alternative: the culture of death.
We witnessed a similar teaching moment eight years ago when Mother Teresa died the same week as Princess Diana. While Diana was a much-loved celebrity — famous for being famous — Mother Teresa's death reminded us of what true greatness is: a life of service to God and suffering mankind. Just as this week, the contrast was stark.
I met with the Pope twice — once when Jim Dobson and I were invited as the first evangelicals to speak in the Synod Hall in the Vatican. I was struck by the intensity of his blue eyes and the glow he seemed to have about him. He was an extraordinary human being — and I say that as a devout Southern Baptist.
This Pope was not only the spiritual leader of one billion Roman Catholics; he was also one of the handful of world leaders most responsible for bringing down Communism.
His political journey began in the town of Nowa Huta, Poland, designed as a living monument to communist utopianism. When the people demanded a church, a Polish priest and a few workers nailed together two rugged beams as a makeshift cross, marking the site of the chapel they would build.
The communists angrily tore it down. But when the sun rose the next morning, another cross had been raised in its place.
This went on for years as the people gathered at their cross, singing and celebrating Communion. The people's faith became strong as steel. In the end, they got their church. And the man who was planting the crosses? Karol Wojtyla, later bishop of Krakow, and still later elected the first non-Italian Pope in history [actually, the first since the Middle Ages -Holwick].
When Stalin was once told that the Pope (of his day) would defy him, the communist tyrant jeeringly asked, “And how many divisions does the Pope have?” Years later, when the Soviets threatened to send troops in to quell a Polish uprising, Pope John Paul II announced he would return home to stand with his people.
The Soviet tanks never moved. Who had the most divisions?
As a Christian persecuted for his faith under the two worst totalitarian regimes of the century, Wojtyla believed passionately in the dignity of every human being. This conviction lasted throughout his life. When he became Pope in 1978 and gave his inaugural sermon, his first words were: “Be not afraid!” He never was, even unto death.
John Paul II cast the shadow of the Cross across Eastern Europe: Along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he heroically helped bring down the Soviet Empire.
As we mourn the passing of a great leader, tell your kids that being a hero isn't about success or power; it's about doing our duty faithfully and “being not afraid” — whether it's raising crosses in a Polish town or lying on a bed facing death with dignity.
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Copyright (c) 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
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One hundred million people: That’s how many died under the oppression of Communism.
Those victims have too often been ignored by much of the Western press — especially those members of the media who were sympathetic with Communist ideology. But on Tuesday, the victims were remembered — and a Washington park was dedicated to their memory.
It’s called the Victims of Communism Memorial Park. Rising above the park grounds is a statue of a woman, her arms lifting a torch aloft. It’s a replica of the Goddess of Democracy statue carried by anti-Communist demonstrators in Tiananmen Square 18 years ago.
The statue, and the park it graces, are monuments to more than just a failed and fading ideology.
Conservative scholar Lee Edwards, who along with former Ambassador Lev Dobriansky, came up with the idea for the memorial, says its purpose is not only to create the world’s first memorial to ALL of Communism’s victims, but also to honor those who resisted Communism — sometimes at the cost of their lives: people like Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Pope John Paul II, Father Jerzy Popieluszko, and Ronald Reagan.
As I write in my new book, GOD AND GOVERNMENT, Christians and Jews were particular targets of atheistic communist regimes. They were hated because they owed allegiance to the one power greater than the totalitarian Communist state.
Christianity and Communism have always clashed because they are irreconcilable in their basic premises. Each, in one sense, is a religion and each is inherently expansive and evangelistic.
Before the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Marxist Leninism functioned as a religion in the lives of the faithful. It offered a comprehensive explanation of reality and claimed to put adherents in touch with higher powers — namely, the inexorable laws of history.
Its eschatology is millennial. At the end of the class struggle against capitalism lies the classless society where exploiters are banished, the state withers away, and man’s natural goodness flows forth. The laws of history will bring justice to the oppressed and wipe away every tear.
Communist leaders recognized then, and do today in Cuba, China and elsewhere, that a renewed and purified Christianity was the only force that could move the masses as powerfully as the Marxist ideal could. So, they attacked Christianity as the enemy that it was — and still is — to communism.
Even today, not everyone recognizes communism as an evil system. That’s why, as President Bush noted at Monday’s memorial, “We have an obligation to future generations to record the crimes of the 20th century and ensure that they’re never repeated ... Evil is real and must be confronted . . .Given the chance, men commanded by harsh and hateful ideologies will commit unspeakable crimes and take the lives of millions.”
Indeed, communist oppression of Christians goes on in North Korea, China, Cuba, and elsewhere. And we are witnessing the rise of Islamo-fascist repression around the world, just as evil as communism.
You and I need to praying, both for those who still suffer under communism, and for those who languish under Islam. They are false gods, as I argue in my book.
Communism’s 100 million victims are a tragic reminder that we must stand up to tyranny in all its forms and we must never retreat.
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Copyright (c) 2007 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
It was May Day 1990 in Moscow’s Red Square. “Is it straight, Father?” one Orthodox priest asked another as he shifted a heavy, eight-foot crucifix on his shoulder. “Yes,” said the other. “It is straight.” Together the two priests, along with a group of parishioners holding ropes that steadied the beams of the huge cross, walked the parade route. It was May Day in Moscow -- the celebration of the communist takeover of the Soviet Union. In front of these priests passed the usual May Day procession of tanks, missiles, troops, and salutes to the Communist party elite. Behind the tanks surged a giant crowd of protesters, shouting up at Mikhail Gorbachev. “Bread! ... Freedom! ... Truth!”
As the throng passed directly in front of the Soviet leader standing in his place of honor, the priests hoisted their heavy burden toward the sky. The cross emerged from the crowd. As it did, the figure of Jesus Christ obscured the giant poster faces of Marx, Engels, and Lenin that provided the backdrop for Gorbachev’s reviewing stand.
“Mikhail Sergeyevich!” one of the priests shouted, “Mikhail Sergeyevich! Christ is risen!” [1]
Those humble priests wanted Gorbachev to know that dictators come and go, mighty nations come and go, atheistic philosophies come and go (they didn’t know that even the Soviet Union would come and go), but Jesus Christ is alive today, tomorrow and forever. Easter is an historical event, but it is more than that. It is an unparalleled victory over sin and death. Christ lives!
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1. Charles W. Colson, THE BODY (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1992), page 231.
HUMAN EVENTS magazine asked "a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders" to identify the ten most harmful books of the 19th and 20th centuries. The list:
1. THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO by Karl Marx
2. MEIN KAMPF by Adolf Hitler
3. QUOTATIONS FROM CHAIRMAN MAO by Mao Zedong
4. THE KINSEY REPORTS by Alfred Kinsey
5. DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION by John Dewey
6. DAS KAPITAL by Karl Marx
7. THE FEMININE MYSTIQUE by Betty Friedan
8. THE COURSE OF POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY by Auguste Compte
9. BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL by Friedrich Nietzsche
10. GENERAL THEORY OF EMPLOYMENT, INTEREST, AND MONEY by John Maynard Keynes
It's hard to argue with that list, but it seems a bit weighted toward economics. I would argue for putting THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES by Charles Darwin in the top ten, and COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA by Margaret Mead wouldn't be far behind.
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SOURCE: TEN MOST HARMFUL BOOKS OF THE 19th AND 20th CENTURIES, Human Events, May 31, 2005
The beginning of the end of communism as a global force dates not to the close of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall or the deaths of various tyrants.
Rather, it commenced in late 1962, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided during a brief political thaw to allow the publication of “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” a novel by an unknown Russian writer named Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn, 89, died Aug. 3, 2008, after half a century of doing battle with the evils of the modern world. “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” will live as long as people read books.
The novel recounts a typical day in the life of a typical zek (inmate) trying to survive a “tenner” (10-year sentence) in one of the countless Soviet slave labor camps scattered across Siberia. It’s a good day, relatively speaking, for Ivan. He doesn’t freeze or starve, doesn’t get thrown in the hole (isolation cell), he manages to work away from the lethal winter wind and sneaks some extra gruel.
Some of the other zeks aren’t so fortunate. They fall under the blows of tormenters, die of the cold, resort to eating human waste to fill their empty stomachs.
One of the most poignant characters in the novel is the Baptist prisoner Aloyshka, who’s serving 25 years for the “crime” of worshipping God. But he is content. To Ivan’s amazement, Aloyshka doesn’t even pray for extra rations or a lesser sentence.
“We shouldn’t pray for somebody to send us a parcel, or for an extra portion of (soup),” Aloyshka tells Ivan. “What people prize so highly is vile in the sight of God! We must pray for spiritual things, asking God to remove the scum of evil from our hearts.”
At the end of the novel, Solzhenitsyn sums up Ivan’s existence: “The end of an unclouded day. Almost a happy one. Just one of the three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days of his sentence, from bell to bell.
“The extra three were for leap years.”
I read the book as a student and -- like so many other clueless residents of the free world -- was shaken out of my complacency. Did human beings really treat other human beings like this? Were such crimes committed, still being committed, in the name of a phony utopia?
Ivan Denisovich changed history -- and set the historical record straight. It gave a name and a face to the nameless, faceless people -- 60 million or more of them -- who lived and died in the vast network of Soviet camps Solzhenitsyn called “The Gulag Archipelago.”
His 2,000-page masterwork of the same name, published in the West in the 1970s, destroyed the last vestiges of communism’s claim to moral credibility. After it appeared, Western elites could no longer ignore or deny the reality that communism and Nazism were two sides of the same totalitarian coin. Solzhenitsyn proved beyond reasonable doubt that the perpetrators of the Holocaust and the Gulag shared the same criminal mentality.
Written in secret and smuggled out of the Soviet Union, THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO is the greatest piece of investigative journalism of the 20th century. It vividly chronicles the savagery of communist oppression from the earliest days of the Russian Revolution through dictator Josef Stalin’s three decades of murderous rule and the later years of Soviet decline. This “history of our sewage disposal system,” as Solzhenitsyn described it, documents the wave after wave of political opponents (real or imagined), artists, intellectuals, ethnic minorities, soldiers, peasants, workers and religious believers swept away by the all-encompassing police state.
Of its many targets, communism always has been “most ruthless of all in its treatment of Christians,” Solzhenitsyn commented in 1980. “In the early years this meant wholesale executions; later the victims were left to rot in camps. But to this very day the persecution continues inexorably.”
Solzhenitsyn wrote from the personal experience of a survivor. A Red Army artillery officer in World War II, he was tossed into the abyss of the Gulag for eight years after criticizing Stalin. Sent into internal exile in the east after his prison years, he made a meager living as a teacher. He had begun to write poems and stories as a zek about what he had seen and heard, hiding them away or committing them to memory lest they be discovered.
He eventually dared to show the manuscript of Ivan Denisovich to a prominent literary editor, who took it to Khrushchev, a former Stalinist enforcer turned reform-minded premier. Honors, world fame and more novels followed. But the end of the Soviet political thaw led to Khrushchev’s downfall, and Solzhenitsyn found himself denounced once again.
Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, he stayed away from the ceremony in Sweden for fear of not being allowed to return home by Soviet authorities. But he no longer feared the all-powerful state. He spoke out with increasing boldness, despite intimidation and death threats. In 1974 he was stripped of Soviet citizenship, hustled onto a plane and deported.
He eventually took up residence in the United States, which initially welcomed him. But prophets are hard to live with. From his retreat in Vermont, the Russian exile began attacking the greed and secularism of the West. In a famous speech at Harvard, he called the United States weak, selfish, decadent. “It is time, in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations,” he warned.
Literary critic George Steiner had predicted long before that “this haunted giant of a man will come to find the West intolerable -- for its materialism, for its ironies, for blowing neither hot nor cold.”
And so he returned home in 1994 to a hero’s parade in post-Soviet Russia. He wore out his welcome there as well, however, with constant criticism of Russian government, society and the spiritual emptiness of daily life. His TV talk show, which often turned into a solo rant by Solzhenitsyn, was cancelled for lack of viewers. He was accused in his last years of hyper-nationalism, of anti-Semitism, of becoming too friendly with Russian hard-liners. Some of the attacks were fair; many were not.
None of this tarnishes his greatness. History will remember Solzhenitsyn as one of the shining lights in a dark era. He stood for freedom against tyranny. He stood for faith in a time of unbelief. He told the truth when others embraced lies. He proclaimed absolutes in an age of relativism.
And he did it with greater courage than most of us can imagine.
In memory of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the countless Ivans for whom he acted as a witness, read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Share it, too, with a young person -- perhaps someone who thinks one man or woman cannot change history.
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Erich Bridges is senior writer for the Southern Baptist International Mission Board.
“There has been a jarring phenomenon this Christian Advent season leading up to Christmas: advertisements for atheism. On the New Jersey Turnpike a billboard asks: ‘Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.’ There are signs on Washington, D.C., buses asking, ‘Why believe in God? Just be good for goodness sake.’
“It sounds wonderful until you realize it just doesn’t work. In the 20th century, countless millions lived in countries from which God had been banished by Communist revolution. These countries were incredibly cruel and repressive toward their own people, and the demoralization of their citizenry was so complete that years after the collapse of official atheism, they still haven’t recovered.
“Let’s be careful before we banish God. Society will be very cruel indeed without Him.”
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David Aikman for Townhall.com
The Christmas services were already well under way when a well-dressed woman squeezed tentatively into St. Pimen’s Church in Moscow and looked around. After a while she saw other worshipers buying candles and bought a handful herself, then followed the others to a candle stand.
Once her candles were burning, the woman sidled up to an old babushka whose nonstop devotions suggested she might be an authority, and quietly asked what, exactly, was happening.
Evidently up to her ears with such ignorance about Christmas, which was celebrated here today, the old woman barked out, “Don’t tell me you were born yesterday!” and returned to her bowing. A kindlier man nearby whispered some explanations, probably not quite accurate, but enough to give the woman at least some sense of participation.
Hers was a quest shared by millions across Moscow and Russia. For the first time in more than seven decades, Christmas had been declared a state holiday, and an entire nation seemed embarked on a search for a feast, a tradition, a heritage lost to jealous ideology.
To be sure, people had been free to practice religion for several years now, and many had celebrated Christmas before. But with no school or work, with Communism now swept away and with the white, blue and red Russian flag fluttering over the Kremlin, the search for an eroded identity seemed to become more urgent.
Not that lessons were in short supply. Starting Christmas Eve and all through the day, radio and television broadcast nonstop programs telling the Christmas story, re-enacting old Russian Christmas traditions or following church services. All across Moscow, banners greeted people with “The Birth of Christ” and tolling bells echoed from the Kremlin.
In churches as in homes, there was ample testimony to the degree to which the 74-year Communist rule had succeeded in severing traditions and memories.
The story of Christmas is a study in the tactics of the fallen Soviet Government. Until the Revolution, Christmas had been as elemental to the culture as the Western Christmas, replete with decorated Christmas trees, wandering carolers, gifts, Nativity services, Father Frost and endless stories, songs and legends. Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker Suite” and Gogol’s story “Christmas Eve” are only two of many Russian classics associated with the holiday.
Initial Communist efforts to do away with the popular holiday, in part by banning Christmas trees, failed, and it was Stalin who fixed on the idea of co-opting the secular parts of Christmas -- the decorated tree, the gifts, Father Frost -- and tacking them onto New Year’s.
Tradition is a living thread, and once severed never grows back quite the same. No whispered explanations in a crowded church can replace childhood memories.
In his Christmas message, Patriarch Aleksy II, the spiritual head of the Russian Orthodox Church, declared that the spiritual and moral rebirth of the nation was “the basis for the revival of all other aspects of our life.”
If that was so, then the fact that so many people were prepared to search so earnestly for a Christmas when their lives seemed to have so little to celebrate was in itself a promising sign.
Tao Lu never laid eyes on the Word of God until he came to the United States to study advanced computer engineering.
That’s not unusual in China where Tao grew up, even though his father taught English in a major city. The Chinese Christian movement may be growing rapidly amid periodic crackdowns, but it has yet to reach hundreds of millions of people in the vast communist nation.
“Not only did my father never mention the Bible to me, but as far as I can remember my high school and college English teachers never talked about it either,” recalls Tao, 30, now a doctoral student at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, where he lives with his wife and 2-year-old daughter.
“As a result, in the first 26 years of my life ... I never even saw a Bible.”
One of his English textbooks mentioned Christmas and Christianity as a part of “Western festivals,” but that was about it. Tao wasn’t hostile toward Christianity or any other religious faith; they just seemed irrelevant to his life.
“Marxism is the dominant philosophy of China,” he explains. “Believing in God was beyond my understanding and even considered ridiculous. I didn’t try to seek God because I didn’t realize that I was a sinner or that I needed a Savior. You tell me there’s a God? Unbelievable.”
When Tao arrived in Richmond, he sought out a Chinese Baptist church and began attending a Bible discussion group near the university -- but only to practice his English and socialize with other Chinese.
Or so he thought. The more he read the teachings of Jesus Christ, the more intrigued he became.
He was amazed by Jesus’ command to “love your enemies and do good” to them (Luke 6:35). The question Jesus asked in Luke 6:41 -- “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that in your own eye?” -- challenged him to stop judging others so harshly. He was moved deeply by Christ’s teaching not to be anxious about our needs, since God arrays the lilies of the field in grandeur and loves us much more (Matthew 6:28-32).
“These teachings are not only persuasive, they are beautiful!” Tao marvels.
But becoming a believer is not easy for a modern Chinese scholar.
“If Christianity is correct, that means the things we learned in China are wrong,” he says. “They are two totally different systems. One claims Marxism and atheism. The other claims [Jesus is Lord].”
Tao studied apologetics. He examined the lives of the disciples before and after Jesus’ resurrection. He read “From Pagan to Christian,” a book by Lin Yutang, a renowned Chinese author who embraced faith in Christ. He systematically listed the teachings of Jesus and found he agreed with all of them.
He also experienced the love of God in the lives of people who had befriended him: a pastor at the Richmond church where the Chinese fellowship meets; a Christian couple who welcome and mentor Chinese students at Virginia Commonwealth University; and a Christian lawyer, Jim Fiorelli, who volunteered time weekly to help hone his English. Their textbook: the Gospel of John.
“He was obviously a very sharp guy,” Fiorelli recalls. “He was ready to grab hold of the truth. There’s almost no substitute for giving someone the chance to read Scripture, think about it and talk through it. If you can get people into the Word, to read it for themselves, the Word will speak for itself and go deep into a person’s heart.”
The time had come for Tao to make a decision. In June 2015, he made it.
He prayed the sinner’s prayer with his pastor friend and immediately shared the news with the couple who welcomed him and with Fiorelli, who led him through a series of lessons on assurance of salvation.
“Now I realize that it was the Holy Spirit’s work that helped me finally decide to follow Jesus,” Tao reflects. “It was not based purely on my rational, logical consideration. There was also emotion. I knew that I was a sinner. I believed that Jesus is the Son of God, that He died for me and His blood cleansed my sins, and I accepted Jesus as my Savior. I was sure that I had eternal life.”
Meanwhile, his day-to-day life has changed radically. He hungers for prayer and has seen his prayers answered. He helped lead his wife to faith in Christ. Their marriage has become stronger. His studies are more fruitful. And he is discipling other young Chinese believers in Richmond.
Whether Tao returns to China or stays in America, he’s now a committed follower of Christ. There are hundreds of thousands of other international students like him on U.S. campuses, waiting for someone to tell them spiritual truth.
“So many here are open to being reached,” Fiorelli says. “There’s nothing more fulfilling than seeing people like Tao come to Christ and grow in their faith.”
In an area that once was in East Germany, the tour guide led our small group to the top of the Albrechtsburg Castle wall to look out over the incredible beauty of the Elbe River valley in southern Germany.
While we stood looking over the wall, someone in the group asked the guide, “What was it like to live under communist rule?”
Her answer surprised me because a secular worldview permeates today’s German culture to such an extent that wide swaths of history are often ignored, especially if that chapter of history had anything to do with the awakened church in the 15th and 16th centuries. Remember John Huss and Count Zinzendorf are from the Elbe River valley.
She began by saying how delighted she was to be a guide and to tell the history of her beautiful community. Then she began to share about her life living in a nation controlled by socialistic communism.
As a young adult, she attended the state university and excelled in her engineering studies. After her degree, she was offered a position with a major engineering firm. There were no private firms, so she had an engineering position with a government-run company.
As with any idealistic young adult about to embark on an occupational journey, she was thrilled about her potential. The very first day of her new job, they took her to the desk where she would work. It looked like every other desk in the large room, except her desk had nothing on top of it. She sat and oriented herself to her new environment.
Then they brought a cart with all the computer equipment she would need to do her work. After all, what is an engineer without a computer?
The supervisor placed a document in front of her to sign. She was astute enough to read it before signing. It was an agreement with the communist party to use the equipment. About halfway down the page was a statement that said, “Must renounce all forms of religion.”
She said, “I can’t sign this. I cannot renounce my faith.” When she said that, the supervisor took the document and wheeled off the cart with all the computer equipment.
For four years, she came to the office every day to an empty desk and no work assigned to her. She drew her stipend from the government like everyone else, but she was not allowed by the government to use the computer equipment to do the work she was trained to do.
Although communist countries often have a religious liberty statement in their governing documents, it is the government that decides how and when faith is to be expressed. Coercive governments often allow people of faith to worship in their church houses, but taking one’s faith into everyday life is deemed inappropriate and foolish according to those who hold the reins of power.
As I heard our guide recount her personal experience, my mind rewound to recent events in our nation where sincere people of faith face coercion by authorities to comply with the prevailing winds of political correctness.
Part of being followers of Christ, however, means we must do our duty in our political context to be courageous and compassionate. These are days for convictional leadership in our churches, the halls of legislative bodies, and in the marketplace. If we fail to lead now, if we fail to do our duty, we give our loved ones over to a near-future coercive culture that is void of reason and moral sanity.
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John Yeats is executive director of the Missouri Baptist Convention
Early one morning in newly-communist Cuba in the year 1960, Armando Valladares, who was 23 years old and still asleep in his parents’ house, was wakened by the cold barrel of a machine gun pressing his head into the pillow on his bed. There were three gunmen standing over him. A fourth kept watch on Valladares’ mother and sister in another room in the house. These men were agents of Castro’s new political police. After ordering Valladares to get dressed, they took him away.
Armando Valladares’ crime was this: Castro had been appointing communists to his new government even though he had sworn that his revolution would bring freedom to Cuba. Many people in Cuba who supported the revolution were concerned. Some were saying that Castro was a communist himself. To combat these fears, Castro had his agents print up a slogan. He had them put it on decals, bumper stickers, tin plaques, wall posters, and in the daily press. The slogan was this: “If Fidel is a communist, then put me on the list. He’s got the right idea.”
The communists of the Ministry of Communications came to the Postal Savings Bank and to the desk of Armando Valladares. They handed him a card bearing the slogan and told him to put it on his worktable. Valladares refused. Taken aback, the communists asked him if he had anything against Castro. Valladares answered that if Castro was a communist, he did.
For this crime, Armando Valladares was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Like all of Castro’s political prisoners, he was tortured and humiliated. He was made to eat other men’s excrement and forced to watch his friends die. One of Valladares’ prison friends was a youngster named Roberto Lopez Chavez. He was just a kid, and he went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses. The guards denied him water until he became delirious, twisting on the floor of his cell and begging for a drink. The guards urinated in his mouth and on his face, and he died the following day.
The political prisoners in Castro’s jails were given a choice. You could be rehabilitated and save yourself from these torments if you renounced who you were. All you had to say was “I have been wrong. All my life has been a mistake. God does not exist. I want you to give me this opportunity to join a communist society.” Of Cuba’s 80,000 political prisoners, 70,000 took this path of rehabilitation. Armando Valladares was not one of them.
“For me,” he said, “that would’ve meant spiritual suicide. All the time I was in jail, I never gave up my freedom. My freedom is not the space where you can walk around. There are lots of people in Cuba who have space to walk, and they are not free.”
Describing his incarceration, Valladares said, “For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove that I was a human being, 8,000 days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain, 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8,000 days of struggling so that I would not become like them.”
Another prisoner named Fernando Lopez del Toro came to Valladares and said in despair that what hurt him most about the torment, the beatings, the hunger was to think that all their suffering was useless. Fernando Lopez del Toro was not broken by the pain, Valladares recalled, but by the futility of the pain. Fernando eventually took his own life.
“Remember him,” Valladares said. “The only thing that keeps us firm is to know that somewhere else there is another soul that loves us, that respects us, and that is fighting for the return of the dignity that has been taken from us.”
Twenty-two years after his arrest, after an appeal from French President Francois Mitterand, Armando Valladares was able to return home a free man. He did not forget Fernando Lopez del Toro. He went on a world campaign to bring to light the terrible fate of Castro’s political prisoners. He published an account of his experiences, a book to which he gave the title “Against All Hope.” In 1987, President Reagan named him the United States Representative to the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission with the rank of Ambassador.
Ambassador Valladares persuaded the U.N. to conduct an investigation of the terrible conditions in Castro’s jails. He exposed to the whole world the inhumanity he had witnessed. To the U.N. Commission he said: “We must enter the cell of every Fernando Lopez del Toro in the world, embrace him in solidarity, and tell them to their faces, ‘Do not take your life. There are men of good will who are standing by you. Your dignity as a human being will prevail.’”
Orlando Figes’ book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia portrays the folly of trying to redefine the family to suit our ideological purposes.
According to Figes, for many Bolsheviks, the “fundamental goal” of the revolution was the creation of a “new kind of human being” who only lived for the “common good.” Of course, the “common good” was defined as “service to the [Communist] Party and its cause.”
Creating this “new human being” required “blowing up the shell of private life” that was the source of competing loyalties and obligations. This conviction put the family in the Bolsheviks crosshairs. For them, it was an “article of faith” that the traditional family — or the “bourgeois” family as they called it — was the “stronghold” of “religion, superstition, ignorance, and prejudice.”
So the Bolsheviks did everything in their power to undermine it, starting with “[removing] the influence of the Church in marriage and divorce.” They re-wrote the law to make divorce easy and gave cohabiting couples the same rights as married ones. Abortion was readily available.
The result was a “huge increase in casual marriage and the highest rate of divorce in the world.” Sexual morals were loosened and familial and communal ties were weakened. The “birth rate declined disastrously,” which left the USSR short both of laborers and soldiers. Child abandonment became a “mass phenomenon.” The Communist Party was then left trying to clean up after the mess that its war on the traditional family had created.
Well, less than twenty years after declaring war on the family, the party did an abrupt about-face. Suddenly marriage was promoted as “glamorous” and wedding rings, which had been banned as “Christian relics,” became available. Divorce laws were tightened and abortion was outlawed. The “good” Stalinist was expected to be “monogamous” and “devoted to his family.” And some comrades were expelled from the Communist Party for being bad fathers or husbands.
Obviously, the Communists weren’t acting out of a new-found respect for tradition, much less religion. Theirs was a pragmatic response to hard-learned experience. Creating good Soviet citizens, they found, required strong families.
Reading about the USSR’s reversal on the family, it’s difficult not to draw parallels with our own time. Now, let me state this up front: comparing Stalinist Russia with contemporary America and the rest of the West is ridiculous. In virtually every way that matters, they’re diametrically opposed.
But that said, today we ourselves are in the midst of a kind of social experiment involving the traditional family. And while the goals are different, the elements of that experiment resemble the one Figes described. “No-fault” divorce has given the US the highest divorce rate of any Western society. Increasingly, cohabiting couples are treated the same as married ones. While child abandonment is rare, increasing numbers of children are born out-of-wedlock, all-but-abandoned by their fathers. And of course, selective abortion due to disability or gender is common practice.
The personal and social costs of this experimentation are well-documented, but they’re also ignored or at least downplayed. Why? Ideology. In this instance, it’s an ideology whose “article of faith” teaches that personal freedom and autonomy are the highest goods. Any appeal to the common good or to the traditional family’s role in promoting the common good is regarded as an imposition and even worse, as “bigotry.”
But that won’t stop the troubles we’re creating for ourselves. We can only hope that an about-face is in our not-too-distant future. Then we can all roll up our sleeves and begin cleaning up the mess. You see this belief in the traditional family is not just a tenet of our religion. It’s reality rooted in the way God made the world.
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Copyright (c) 2013 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
Earlier this month, when celebrity chef Thomas Keller was interviewed by NPR about his new cookbook, his interviewer wasn’t all that interested in the recipes. Instead, he wanted to talk about the $850-per-plate price tag at Keller’s recently reopened San Francisco restaurant.
With so many people struggling financially due to the pandemic, asked the reporter, is it really “fair” to charge that much per plate? Or is it, to use his words, “tone deaf?”
That an interview, which was likely intended to be a puff piece, turned into a social justice diatribe is further proof that worldview affects everything.
To be clear, I cannot imagine ever spending $850 for a meal, but the reporter’s problem had nothing to do with prudence or financial stewardship. The problem with the price tag, according to the reporter, is not that some people would not have access to food, but that everyone would not have equal access to Thomas Keller’s food. In other words, his was a problem with the free market. And, of course, having a problem with the free market is all the rage these days.
Often called capitalism, a term popularized by Karl Marx and intended to be derogatory, the free market is an economic system. Unlike Communism, it is not a complete worldview. In other words, it doesn’t try to answer questions about the nature of reality, who we are, why we’re here, what’s right and wrong, what’s ultimately wrong with the world, and how it can be fixed. That’s a significant distinction.
The failures of Communism (everywhere it has been tried) are due to the fact it assumes wrongly about reality, morality, and human nature. Its failures are intrinsic. A free market, on the other hand, is premised on allowing consumers and entrepreneurs to make their own decisions. Its failures are the failures of the human beings it involves.
Economic freedom for a largely moral people leads to the explosion of wealth, innovation, and generosity. Economic freedoms outside a moral framework can lead to exploitation. Thus, instead of the totalizing control of a Communist framework, a free market leans on the state to provide legal protections and religious institutions to provide moral instruction.
Arthur Brooks, President Emeritus of The American Enterprise Institute and a professor at Harvard Business School, once said that he supports the free market because not because he cares about the rich, but because he cares about the poor. After decades of studying global poverty, he found that “four-fifths of starvation level world poverty has been eradicated since 1970.” How did that happen? It wasn’t through additional federal aid, or by throwing money at a problem that fundamentally wasn’t a money problem.
Poverty is addressed through opportunity, innovation, and people benefiting from their hard work and expertise. Thomas Keller can charge more because he sources the best produce and meat, buys the best kitchen tools, pays the best chefs, and tosses in his own innovation and skill set. I’m not saying that he should charge what he does, or that people should pay what he asks. I’m just explaining why his work and product deserves more value than a Big Mac.
Imposing absolute financial equality, on the other hand, doesn’t lift anyone to ingenuity or wealth. Rather, it lowers everyone to the lowest common denominator, economically as well as in creativity and quality.
A free market works not because wealth is valued, but because labor is.
Jesus said we can’t serve both God and money and that it’s more difficult for the wealthy to enter the kingdom of God. Jesus never said accumulating wealth itself is sinful. Exploitation of the poor is sinful. Looking to wealth for salvation and meaning is sinful. Failing to steward what we’ve been given and failing to care for those in need are sinful.
When these potential downfalls are mitigated or avoided, a free market inspires people to give more. According to data from The Philanthropy Roundtable, Americans give to charity at a rate seven times higher than continental Europeans. The top one percent of all earners in the U.S. give a full one-third of all charitable donations.
Once NPR finally asked Thomas Keller about what was in his new cookbook, the interview took an ironic turn. Keller cautioned that his recipes aren’t necessarily for home cooks. His recipes require a certain amount of previously obtained skill. Interestingly, the reporter didn’t seem to think that was unfair.
I won’t be buying Keller’s book, and I likely won’t be eating at his restaurant. Still, I respect what his labor and skill has created. All that’s ok. That’s how freedom works.
________
Resources:
“Should We Try to Erase Economic Inequality?” by Brooke McIntire, What Would You Say?, November 4, 2020
“For Chef Thomas Keller, Cooking Is Emotional,” NPR, October 28, 2020
“The Sad Decline Of The Word Capitalism’,” by Alejandro Chafuen, Forbes, May 1, 2013
“Capitalism is the greatest force for human advancement that we have,” by Arthur C. Brooks, National Post, December 23, 2019
“Who Gives Most to Charity?” Philanthropy Roundtable, 2019
________
Copyright (c) 2020 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
Some of the most profound conversions have been based on simple encounters with God.
One example would be a Russian Jew named Boris Kornfeld. Kornfeld was a medical doctor who lived in Russia during Stalin's rule. Although he was innocent, someone accused him of lacking loyalty to Stalin, and he was thrown in a concentration camp for political prisoners. Kornfield was not a religious Jew and he soon lost his belief in Communism.
Eventually the doctor came in contact with a born-again Christian, who explained the OT prophecies about Jesus. Since he didn't believe the Bible, this approach didn't have much effect. What really got to him as the Christian emphasis on forgiving others and repentance. Kornfield knew he was full of hate. When he operated on guards he tried to sabotage the stitches so they would later come undone. He now realized he was as evil as the guards he hated, and he began to pray for forgiveness.
He also did something else. He turned in a thief. Kornfeld found him stealing bread from a dying patient and reported it to the camp commander. The commander could hardly believe it, because stoolies usually got murdered. Dr. Kornfeld was not particularly brave, but he felt he had to finally take a stand.
This decision, which in effect was a death sentence, gave him a new freedom. He no longer ignored cruelty or stored up hatred for people. He also wanted to share his faith in Jesus with someone. His first opportunity was a young patient with cancer who was empty and miserable. Kornfeld began talking to him and described everything that had happened. All day long the patient heard about the doctor's conversion and new-found freedom.
The young patient woke up the next day to hear a commotion in the next room. During the night, while the doctor was sleeping, someone had crept in and struck him in the head 8 times with a hammer. Although his fellow doctors tried to save him, in the morning he was dead. He did not experience a miraculous deliverance.
But Kornfeld's simple testimony did not die. The young patient thought about the doctor's words and became a Christian himself. He survived the prison camp and went on to tell the world what he had learned there. The patient's name was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and through his books the still small voice of God has touched many people.
Persecution against church in Ethiopia described. 700 churches in one province closed. 1,800 of Word of Life churches out of 2,500 have been closed. Few Orthodox churches closed, but restrictions imposed. Government is Communist. [1985]
The Christian church is booming in China. From 700,000 believers in past to 10 million now, and they are spreading out. Says Kan Xeuqing, 67, a pastor, "People are looking for reliable and believable things, and they find that God is dependable."
Some missionaries are sneaking in as tourists. Christians are still discriminated against. Some belong to communists groups but believe in Jesus in their hearts. "Eyewitness meetings" are popular.
“There has been a jarring phenomenon this Christian Advent season leading up to Christmas: advertisements for atheism. On the New Jersey Turnpike a billboard asks: ‘Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.’ There are signs on Washington, D.C., buses asking, ‘Why believe in God? Just be good for goodness sake.’
“It sounds wonderful until you realize it just doesn’t work. In the 20th century, countless millions lived in countries from which God had been banished by Communist revolution. These countries were incredibly cruel and repressive toward their own people, and the demoralization of their citizenry was so complete that years after the collapse of official atheism, they still haven’t recovered.
“Let’s be careful before we banish God. Society will be very cruel indeed without Him.”
________
David Aikman for Townhall.com
The Christian church is booming in China. From 700,000 believers in past to 10 million now, and they are spreading out. Says Kan Xeuqing, 67, a pastor, "People are looking for reliable and believable things, and they find that God is dependable."
Some missionaries are sneaking in as tourists. Christians are still discriminated against. Some belong to communists groups but believe in Jesus in their hearts. "Eyewitness meetings" are popular.
Located in the frigid Arctic White Sea, the Solovky (Solovetsky) Islands
were one of the initial outposts of the Soviet labor camp system. A monastery
was founded on the largest Solovky island in the fifteenth century. From 1718
to 1903 the tsars had used parts of the monastery as a prison, but the
monastery itself continued to function until the October Revolution.
The origins of the Gulag archipelago--the phase Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to
describe the system of labor camps sprinkled across the Soviet map--are found
on the Solovky Archipelago. The first batch of prisoners was brought here in
the early 1920's, while Lenin was still in charge.
The horrors which lay ahead for the involuntary twentieth-century inhabitants
of the Solovky Islands were foretold two centuries earlier. According to the
story, in 1712 a monk by the name of Job, during an all-night vigil, had a
frightening visitation from Mary. "This hill from henceforth shall be called
Golgotha, and on it shall be built a church and a monastery of the
crucifixion. And it will be whitened by the sufferings of countless
millions." Thus was born the Golgotha-Crucifixion Monastery on the island of
Anzer. Piles of bearded corpses would indeed one day be stacked in the
vestibule of the church, later to be taken out and rolled down Golgotha Hill.
On a single awful night in October 1929, exactly three hundred prisoners were
executed.
However, the Solovky camps produced not just death, but also an immortal
statement of Church/State relations. [1506]
*
In the days when East Germany lived under an oppressive regime, a young man deeply involved in the life of a church community was seized by the Communist authorities, and never returned.
Sometime later, another young man, well known as a hardened leader in the Communist-organized youth movement, began attending youth meetings and worship services at the same church. The congregation's suspicions were aroused, and the pastor took the fellow aside and asked why he was coming.
The young man replied by asking, “You know the fellow from your church who was seized and taken away?”
“Of course,” responded the pastor. “I knew him well, but we have not heard from him since.”
“Well,” said the visitor, “I saw him when he was being harassed and tortured. Not only did he refuse to betray his friends, but through it all he never showed any bitterness toward his tormentors. Even in the hour of death, there was no anger towards those who were about to kill him. Instead, he spoke of Jesus Christ, forgiveness, and God's love.” The young man concluded, “And when I saw him die, I knew I must come, in spite of what it will cost me, to learn of his Christ and the love for our enemies that strengthened him in his last hours.”
________
United Methodist pastor Donald Shelby, in BOLD EXPECTATIONS of the Gospel, quoted by Joel D. Kline in WHO'S HOLDING ON TO WHOM?; tertiary source http://www.cybersaltlists.org
*
[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #29567]
Located in the frigid Arctic White Sea, the Solovky (Solovetsky) Islands
were one of the initial outposts of the Soviet labor camp system. A monastery
was founded on the largest Solovky island in the fifteenth century. From 1718
to 1903 the tsars had used parts of the monastery as a prison, but the
monastery itself continued to function until the October Revolution.
The origins of the Gulag archipelago--the phase Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to
describe the system of labor camps sprinkled across the Soviet map--are found
on the Solovky Archipelago. The first batch of prisoners was brought here in
the early 1920's, while Lenin was still in charge.
The horrors which lay ahead for the involuntary twentieth-century inhabitants
of the Solovky Islands were foretold two centuries earlier. According to the
story, in 1712 a monk by the name of Job, during an all-night vigil, had a
frightening visitation from Mary. "This hill from henceforth shall be called
Golgotha, and on it shall be built a church and a monastery of the
crucifixion. And it will be whitened by the sufferings of countless
millions." Thus was born the Golgotha-Crucifixion Monastery on the island of
Anzer. Piles of bearded corpses would indeed one day be stacked in the
vestibule of the church, later to be taken out and rolled down Golgotha Hill.
On a single awful night in October 1929, exactly three hundred prisoners were
executed.
However, the Solovky camps produced not just death, but also an immortal
statement of Church/State relations. [1506]
*
In 1945, when the Communists seized Romania, Pastor Richard Wurmbrand had to make a decision. He could bow to the intruders or resist. Wurmbrand immediately began an effective, vigorous "underground" ministry to his enslaved people and the invading Russian soldiers. He was arrested in 1948 and spent three years in solitary confinement, seeing no one but his torturers. Following this, he was transferred to a mass cell for five years where the torture continued. Then he was set free and resumed his underground work, only to be arrested again two years later. Finally, in 1964 Christians in Norway negotiated with the Communist authorities for Wurmbrand's release and exit from Romania. It takes real courage to stand toe-to-toe with an evil government and proclaim the truth of God.
What opposition are you facing today?
In the days when East Germany lived under an oppressive regime, a young man deeply involved in the life of a church community was seized by the Communist authorities, and never returned.
Sometime later, another young man, well known as a hardened leader in the Communist-organized youth movement, began attending youth meetings and worship services at the same church. The congregation's suspicions were aroused, and the pastor took the fellow aside and asked why he was coming.
The young man replied by asking, “You know the fellow from your church who was seized and taken away?”
“Of course,” responded the pastor. “I knew him well, but we have not heard from him since.”
“Well,” said the visitor, “I saw him when he was being harassed and tortured. Not only did he refuse to betray his friends, but through it all he never showed any bitterness toward his tormentors. Even in the hour of death, there was no anger towards those who were about to kill him. Instead, he spoke of Jesus Christ, forgiveness, and God's love.” The young man concluded, “And when I saw him die, I knew I must come, in spite of what it will cost me, to learn of his Christ and the love for our enemies that strengthened him in his last hours.”
________
United Methodist pastor Donald Shelby, in BOLD EXPECTATIONS of the Gospel, quoted by Joel D. Kline in WHO'S HOLDING ON TO WHOM?; tertiary source http://www.cybersaltlists.org
*
[Original illustration at this number was a duplicate of HolwickID #29567]
It was May Day 1990 in Moscow’s Red Square. “Is it straight, Father?” one Orthodox priest asked another as he shifted a heavy, eight-foot crucifix on his shoulder. “Yes,” said the other. “It is straight.” Together the two priests, along with a group of parishioners holding ropes that steadied the beams of the huge cross, walked the parade route. It was May Day in Moscow -- the celebration of the communist takeover of the Soviet Union. In front of these priests passed the usual May Day procession of tanks, missiles, troops, and salutes to the Communist party elite. Behind the tanks surged a giant crowd of protesters, shouting up at Mikhail Gorbachev. “Bread! ... Freedom! ... Truth!”
As the throng passed directly in front of the Soviet leader standing in his place of honor, the priests hoisted their heavy burden toward the sky. The cross emerged from the crowd. As it did, the figure of Jesus Christ obscured the giant poster faces of Marx, Engels, and Lenin that provided the backdrop for Gorbachev’s reviewing stand.
“Mikhail Sergeyevich!” one of the priests shouted, “Mikhail Sergeyevich! Christ is risen!” [1]
Those humble priests wanted Gorbachev to know that dictators come and go, mighty nations come and go, atheistic philosophies come and go (they didn’t know that even the Soviet Union would come and go), but Jesus Christ is alive today, tomorrow and forever. Easter is an historical event, but it is more than that. It is an unparalleled victory over sin and death. Christ lives!
________
1. Charles W. Colson, THE BODY (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1992), page 231.
Orlando Figes’ book The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia portrays the folly of trying to redefine the family to suit our ideological purposes.
According to Figes, for many Bolsheviks, the “fundamental goal” of the revolution was the creation of a “new kind of human being” who only lived for the “common good.” Of course, the “common good” was defined as “service to the [Communist] Party and its cause.”
Creating this “new human being” required “blowing up the shell of private life” that was the source of competing loyalties and obligations. This conviction put the family in the Bolsheviks crosshairs. For them, it was an “article of faith” that the traditional family — or the “bourgeois” family as they called it — was the “stronghold” of “religion, superstition, ignorance, and prejudice.”
So the Bolsheviks did everything in their power to undermine it, starting with “[removing] the influence of the Church in marriage and divorce.” They re-wrote the law to make divorce easy and gave cohabiting couples the same rights as married ones. Abortion was readily available.
The result was a “huge increase in casual marriage and the highest rate of divorce in the world.” Sexual morals were loosened and familial and communal ties were weakened. The “birth rate declined disastrously,” which left the USSR short both of laborers and soldiers. Child abandonment became a “mass phenomenon.” The Communist Party was then left trying to clean up after the mess that its war on the traditional family had created.
Well, less than twenty years after declaring war on the family, the party did an abrupt about-face. Suddenly marriage was promoted as “glamorous” and wedding rings, which had been banned as “Christian relics,” became available. Divorce laws were tightened and abortion was outlawed. The “good” Stalinist was expected to be “monogamous” and “devoted to his family.” And some comrades were expelled from the Communist Party for being bad fathers or husbands.
Obviously, the Communists weren’t acting out of a new-found respect for tradition, much less religion. Theirs was a pragmatic response to hard-learned experience. Creating good Soviet citizens, they found, required strong families.
Reading about the USSR’s reversal on the family, it’s difficult not to draw parallels with our own time. Now, let me state this up front: comparing Stalinist Russia with contemporary America and the rest of the West is ridiculous. In virtually every way that matters, they’re diametrically opposed.
But that said, today we ourselves are in the midst of a kind of social experiment involving the traditional family. And while the goals are different, the elements of that experiment resemble the one Figes described. “No-fault” divorce has given the US the highest divorce rate of any Western society. Increasingly, cohabiting couples are treated the same as married ones. While child abandonment is rare, increasing numbers of children are born out-of-wedlock, all-but-abandoned by their fathers. And of course, selective abortion due to disability or gender is common practice.
The personal and social costs of this experimentation are well-documented, but they’re also ignored or at least downplayed. Why? Ideology. In this instance, it’s an ideology whose “article of faith” teaches that personal freedom and autonomy are the highest goods. Any appeal to the common good or to the traditional family’s role in promoting the common good is regarded as an imposition and even worse, as “bigotry.”
But that won’t stop the troubles we’re creating for ourselves. We can only hope that an about-face is in our not-too-distant future. Then we can all roll up our sleeves and begin cleaning up the mess. You see this belief in the traditional family is not just a tenet of our religion. It’s reality rooted in the way God made the world.
________
Copyright (c) 2013 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
John Paul II — a feeding tube in his stomach — died a natural and peaceful death just days after the deliberate starvation of Terri Schiavo, whose feeding tube was callously removed. God in His providence often uses events like this to teach the world the difference between Christianity and secularism.
The world mourns the death of John Paul. As he lay dying, his spokesman explained how suffering is redeemed, and in doing so, he gives hope to all of us. In the Vatican, we saw the culture of life on display, while in Florida, we saw the gruesome alternative: the culture of death.
We witnessed a similar teaching moment eight years ago when Mother Teresa died the same week as Princess Diana. While Diana was a much-loved celebrity — famous for being famous — Mother Teresa's death reminded us of what true greatness is: a life of service to God and suffering mankind. Just as this week, the contrast was stark.
I met with the Pope twice — once when Jim Dobson and I were invited as the first evangelicals to speak in the Synod Hall in the Vatican. I was struck by the intensity of his blue eyes and the glow he seemed to have about him. He was an extraordinary human being — and I say that as a devout Southern Baptist.
This Pope was not only the spiritual leader of one billion Roman Catholics; he was also one of the handful of world leaders most responsible for bringing down Communism.
His political journey began in the town of Nowa Huta, Poland, designed as a living monument to communist utopianism. When the people demanded a church, a Polish priest and a few workers nailed together two rugged beams as a makeshift cross, marking the site of the chapel they would build.
The communists angrily tore it down. But when the sun rose the next morning, another cross had been raised in its place.
This went on for years as the people gathered at their cross, singing and celebrating Communion. The people's faith became strong as steel. In the end, they got their church. And the man who was planting the crosses? Karol Wojtyla, later bishop of Krakow, and still later elected the first non-Italian Pope in history [actually, the first since the Middle Ages -Holwick].
When Stalin was once told that the Pope (of his day) would defy him, the communist tyrant jeeringly asked, “And how many divisions does the Pope have?” Years later, when the Soviets threatened to send troops in to quell a Polish uprising, Pope John Paul II announced he would return home to stand with his people.
The Soviet tanks never moved. Who had the most divisions?
As a Christian persecuted for his faith under the two worst totalitarian regimes of the century, Wojtyla believed passionately in the dignity of every human being. This conviction lasted throughout his life. When he became Pope in 1978 and gave his inaugural sermon, his first words were: “Be not afraid!” He never was, even unto death.
John Paul II cast the shadow of the Cross across Eastern Europe: Along with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, he heroically helped bring down the Soviet Empire.
As we mourn the passing of a great leader, tell your kids that being a hero isn't about success or power; it's about doing our duty faithfully and “being not afraid” — whether it's raising crosses in a Polish town or lying on a bed facing death with dignity.
________
Copyright (c) 2005 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. "BreakPoint with Chuck Colson" is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.
*
It was May Day 1990 in Moscow’s Red Square. “Is it straight, Father?” one Orthodox priest asked another as he shifted a heavy, eight-foot crucifix on his shoulder. “Yes,” said the other. “It is straight.” Together the two priests, along with a group of parishioners holding ropes that steadied the beams of the huge cross, walked the parade route. It was May Day in Moscow -- the celebration of the communist takeover of the Soviet Union. In front of these priests passed the usual May Day procession of tanks, missiles, troops, and salutes to the Communist party elite. Behind the tanks surged a giant crowd of protesters, shouting up at Mikhail Gorbachev. “Bread! ... Freedom! ... Truth!”
As the throng passed directly in front of the Soviet leader standing in his place of honor, the priests hoisted their heavy burden toward the sky. The cross emerged from the crowd. As it did, the figure of Jesus Christ obscured the giant poster faces of Marx, Engels, and Lenin that provided the backdrop for Gorbachev’s reviewing stand.
“Mikhail Sergeyevich!” one of the priests shouted, “Mikhail Sergeyevich! Christ is risen!” [1]
Those humble priests wanted Gorbachev to know that dictators come and go, mighty nations come and go, atheistic philosophies come and go (they didn’t know that even the Soviet Union would come and go), but Jesus Christ is alive today, tomorrow and forever. Easter is an historical event, but it is more than that. It is an unparalleled victory over sin and death. Christ lives!
________
1. Charles W. Colson, THE BODY (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1992), page 231.
Early one morning in newly-communist Cuba in the year 1960, Armando Valladares, who was 23 years old and still asleep in his parents’ house, was wakened by the cold barrel of a machine gun pressing his head into the pillow on his bed. There were three gunmen standing over him. A fourth kept watch on Valladares’ mother and sister in another room in the house. These men were agents of Castro’s new political police. After ordering Valladares to get dressed, they took him away.
Armando Valladares’ crime was this: Castro had been appointing communists to his new government even though he had sworn that his revolution would bring freedom to Cuba. Many people in Cuba who supported the revolution were concerned. Some were saying that Castro was a communist himself. To combat these fears, Castro had his agents print up a slogan. He had them put it on decals, bumper stickers, tin plaques, wall posters, and in the daily press. The slogan was this: “If Fidel is a communist, then put me on the list. He’s got the right idea.”
The communists of the Ministry of Communications came to the Postal Savings Bank and to the desk of Armando Valladares. They handed him a card bearing the slogan and told him to put it on his worktable. Valladares refused. Taken aback, the communists asked him if he had anything against Castro. Valladares answered that if Castro was a communist, he did.
For this crime, Armando Valladares was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Like all of Castro’s political prisoners, he was tortured and humiliated. He was made to eat other men’s excrement and forced to watch his friends die. One of Valladares’ prison friends was a youngster named Roberto Lopez Chavez. He was just a kid, and he went on a hunger strike to protest the abuses. The guards denied him water until he became delirious, twisting on the floor of his cell and begging for a drink. The guards urinated in his mouth and on his face, and he died the following day.
The political prisoners in Castro’s jails were given a choice. You could be rehabilitated and save yourself from these torments if you renounced who you were. All you had to say was “I have been wrong. All my life has been a mistake. God does not exist. I want you to give me this opportunity to join a communist society.” Of Cuba’s 80,000 political prisoners, 70,000 took this path of rehabilitation. Armando Valladares was not one of them.
“For me,” he said, “that would’ve meant spiritual suicide. All the time I was in jail, I never gave up my freedom. My freedom is not the space where you can walk around. There are lots of people in Cuba who have space to walk, and they are not free.”
Describing his incarceration, Valladares said, “For me, it meant 8,000 days of hunger, of systematic beatings, of hard labor, of solitary confinement and solitude, 8,000 days of struggling to prove that I was a human being, 8,000 days of proving that my spirit could triumph over exhaustion and pain, 8,000 days of testing my religious convictions, my faith, of fighting the hate my atheist jailers were trying to instill in me with each bayonet thrust, fighting so that hate would not flourish in my heart, 8,000 days of struggling so that I would not become like them.”
Another prisoner named Fernando Lopez del Toro came to Valladares and said in despair that what hurt him most about the torment, the beatings, the hunger was to think that all their suffering was useless. Fernando Lopez del Toro was not broken by the pain, Valladares recalled, but by the futility of the pain. Fernando eventually took his own life.
“Remember him,” Valladares said. “The only thing that keeps us firm is to know that somewhere else there is another soul that loves us, that respects us, and that is fighting for the return of the dignity that has been taken from us.”
Twenty-two years after his arrest, after an appeal from French President Francois Mitterand, Armando Valladares was able to return home a free man. He did not forget Fernando Lopez del Toro. He went on a world campaign to bring to light the terrible fate of Castro’s political prisoners. He published an account of his experiences, a book to which he gave the title “Against All Hope.” In 1987, President Reagan named him the United States Representative to the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission with the rank of Ambassador.
Ambassador Valladares persuaded the U.N. to conduct an investigation of the terrible conditions in Castro’s jails. He exposed to the whole world the inhumanity he had witnessed. To the U.N. Commission he said: “We must enter the cell of every Fernando Lopez del Toro in the world, embrace him in solidarity, and tell them to their faces, ‘Do not take your life. There are men of good will who are standing by you. Your dignity as a human being will prevail.’”
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