|
LOOK AT ME, MA! #4
SURRENDERING TO THE GESTAPO
Today we want to read ONE Bible verse together — and then I've got a story
that will just tear your heart out.
Here's the verse, found in First Corinthians chapter 10, verse 13:
"No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God
is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear.
But when you ARE tempted, He will also provide a way out so that you can
stand up under it."
In other words, God won't allow ANYTHING to come your
way that's simply too much to handle. The Bible tells us, He won't do
it.
Now to our story, and it's taken from one of our favorite books here at
the Voice of Prophecy: Flee the Captor, by Herbert Ford. This incredible
story details the exploits of the late John Henry Weidner, who outwitted
the Nazis during World War II with his underground escape network, Dutch-Paris.
Nearly a thousand Jews and Allied soldiers trusted in Weidner and his
fellow Christians to escape through the barbed wire to safety.
But then came the experience of young Suzy Kraay, one of his agents. A
tall, skinny, plain-faced young woman, Suzy rose quickly through the ranks
of the underground network as she assisted refugees in their escapes.
Anesthetic However, in February of 1944, her luck ran out and Suzy Kraay
was arrested by the French government, men who were collaborating with
the Nazis. After days of brutal interrogation and psychological distress,
Commandant Bissoir turned her over to the Gestapo, where things really
got ugly. They especially wanted to know if she recognized the man in
a certain picture they kept flashing in front of her. The picture was
of Weidner himself, and the Gestapo was desperate to catch the "big
fish" of Dutch-Paris. And as they kept reminding her, "We have
ways of making you talk."
Finally, when it seemed like they weren't going to get the answers they
were after, they took her down to the torture room. A number of other
prisoners were suspended several feet above the floor, handcuffed to the
concrete wall. They'd been beaten almost to death; there was blood everywhere.
Four Gestapo thugs stripped off all her clothes and gave her the dreaded
cold-water treatment where they held her repeatedly under water in a bathtub
for long periods until she would almost drown. Then they'd pull her up,
scream questions at her, and plunge her down again. Over and over, up
and down, up and down for what seemed like hours. Then they slammed her
down on the floor and took turns kicking at her unprotected body.
But these men were just getting started. They dragged her to another room
where a prisoner on a table was being whipped with belts by four men.
And the Gestapo agents shouted at her, "Unless you tell us what we
want to know, you'll be next on the table." And they added that unless
she cooperated with them, her father would die in the concentration camp.
And all at once . . . this frightened young woman collapsed. All the cold
water and the beatings and the blood and the blackmail about her dad simply
drained away her willpower. "I'll tell! I'll tell!" she cried
out. "Just don't hurt me anymore. Don't hurt my parents. I'll tell
you everything." Sure enough, she gave the Nazis the entire rundown
on Dutch-Paris: the key leaders, their addresses, how they worked, where
the escape routes were, EVERYTHING. As a result of this one confession,
150 people were arrested and thrown into prisons or concentration camps;
nearly 40 people died because of what Miss Suzy Kraay did in that French
prison.
And you know, this one wartime story almost makes me want to question
the validity of the Bible verse we just read. God promises: "It'll
never be more than you can bear; I promise it. I'll always provide a way
out." But then here's this very real experience where a young girl,
a born-again Christian, faces such trauma, such brutal physical and psychological
torture, that she can't stand up to it. She surrenders, and we who read
the story from the safety of 50+ years later and a continent removed,
wonder to ourselves: "Who could blame her? And where was heaven's
way out, the promised way of escape?"
Ironically, Weidner himself faced a similar crossroad just three months
later. The Gestapo had him too, and was prepared to give him the bathtub
treatment, made a hundred times worse by fastening electrical wires to
intimate parts of his body. The resulting pain, he knew full well, would
be virtually unbearable. The worst hour of his LIFE was just ahead of
him. But he said to the Nazis, "You can do anything you want — cut
my tongue out, put out my eyes, anything, but I will not give you those
names. I WILL NOT betray my people." And at that very moment he felt
a surge of God's power, that heaven would help him to be strong through
the torture session.
Unbelievably — and it's too long a story to tell today — God DID give
HIM a way out. He ended up NOT being tortured, and he even managed to
escape from the prison altogether. Weidner died peaceably here in Southern
California 50 years later in 1994.
But does the Bible mean it when it promises us: "No temptation will
come that's harder than you can bear"? In light of Suzy Kraay's experience,
and as we scan the horrible, tortuous 1,483 pages of The Rise and Fall
of the Third Reich, which we mentioned Monday, how do we take this Bible
promise?
Well, friend, there's not an easy answer to that question, and it would
be unfair and foolish of me to sit in this very comfortable California
radio studio in the insulated year of 1996 and say that Suzy Kraay should
not have given in. I wasn't there in that Gestapo prison at Rue des Saussaies
and neither were you. And it's not our place to determine how God will
judge her deed, as the Dutch-Paris organization's officers had to do after
World War II had ended. (They freely forgave her, by the way.) Our task
today is to take that verse, First Corinthians 10:13, and apply it to
OUR lives. That's what OUR business is.
And so this is our question for Thursday consideration. DO temptations
ever come to us that are so overwhelming, so difficult to predict or resist,
that we're ENTITLED to surrender? Or is there ALWAYS a way out? IS God
really faithful, as the Apostle Paul claims He is?
Let me say this: I have no choice but to believe in the Word of God. God
does promise a way out, and the Bible also makes it clear what that way
out is. In the experience of Jesus Himself, when He went to the wilderness
to be tempted by Satan, He was weak. He was fragile after 40 days without
food; His emotional energy was nearly gone. He was another Suzy Kraay,
so to speak. But in Luke chapter four VERSE four, and then verse eight,
and then AGAIN in verse 12, we discover the "(quote) way out"
that Christ used. The three words, "It Is Written," where Jesus
quoted from Scripture, gave Him a way to turn aside the arrows of His
enemy. Jesus didn't fight the devil or engage him in a battle of wits.
He simply told him, "The Bible answers your suggestion this way.
End of discussion."
I read a good bit of Bible commentary on this very question, and the writer
made the point that SCRIPTURE was the way out for Jesus, and JESUS HIMSELF
is the way out for US. And he quoted from John chapter one, where the
Bible tells us:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the
Word was WITH God, and the Word WAS God."
The Word, of course, being Jesus, as we're explicitly
told in verse 14. And for the millions of believers through the centuries
who have faced lions or Nazi lieutenants or an overpowering temptation
of LUST . . . whenever they HAVE resisted, it's been the name and the
presence of Jesus that helped them to do it.
On the very last page of Pastor Morris Venden's book, How to Make Christianity
Real, he describes how he finally learned the painful lesson that it was
the presence of Jesus in his life, a DAILY relationship with Jesus, that
he desperately needed. Bible study and prayer and fellowship with other
Christians. And he began to pursue that connection. And then one afternoon
in Sacramento, he was driving down the road when a temptation hit him.
It was a temptation of the flesh, he writes, an almost overpowering moment.
In spiritual terms, hell's Gestapo forces had him in their gun sights.
And then all at once, even before he could whisper an emergency prayer,
a kind of cold electric shock came over him, even though it was a hot
summer day. He could literally feel the COLD blast, as something or SomeONE
came into that car and took away that temptation. ONE MOMENT LATER, he
literally COULD NOT RECALL what the temptation was. It was gone, a kind
of heaven-sent amnesia.
He goes on to write that it doesn't always happen that way. Many other
moments and many other battles have been harder; sometimes he succeeded
and sometimes he failed. But he came to believe in the promise of First
Corinthians chapter 10, where there IS an escape in the name of Jesus,
if we'll just take it.
I'd like to stay with this same topic tomorrow, because it's so painfully
practical. What do we do with the admitted truth that a lot of times we
really don't WANT to escape? We like our prison of wickedness! And is
it all God's doing, this business of the "way of escape"? Does
a highway out of hell just appear in front of us with a pretty rainbow
over it? Or is there a part for us to do as well?
Be sure to join us again.
|
