Two Separate Levels

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? . . . . . No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.” —Romans 8:35,37

One of my all-time favorite books is The Hiding Place, by Corrie ten Boom. It’s a classic. . . the true story of courage in the face of suffering. The ten Boom family hid Jews in a special “hiding place” in their home in Haarlem, Holland, during World War II. The book follows what happened to this Christian family after their activities were “discovered” and they were put into concentration camps in Germany. After Corrie was miraculously released, she went on to care for others and tell her story of God’s faithfulness to generations of those who had only read of the atrocities that she had survived.

Earlier this year we posted a devotional on Excellent or Praiseworthy which reminded me of a section in The Hiding Place. “Some Things Don’t Change”, posted on August 4th, uses Hebrews 4:12 as its’ introductory verse: “For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart.” One of the things that “living and active” means to me is that the Bible speaks to me in the midst of my circumstances. Years later I might read the same verse, but in a different season of my life. I will understand God’s truth in perhaps a deeper way in my new situation—-and for that I am grateful.

Let me share with you the section of The Hiding Place, and see if you don’t agree that it tells us of the power of the word of God in all situations. Corrie and her sister, Betsie, are in a concentration camp named Ravensbruck, living under the most horrific of conditions. She writes:

“It grew harder and harder. Even within these four walls there was too much misery, too much seemingly pointless suffering. Every day something else failed to make sense, something else grew too heavy. ‘Will You carry this too, Lord Jesus?’

“But as the rest of the world grew stranger, one thing became increasingly clear. And that was the reason the two of us were here. Why others should suffer we were not shown. As for us, from morning until lights-out, whenever we were not in ranks for roll call, our Bible was the center of an ever-widening circle of help and hope. Like waifs clustered around a blazing fire, we gathered about it, holding out our hearts to its warmth and light. The blacker the night around us grew, the brighter and truer and more beautiful burned the word of God. ‘Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us.’

“I would look about us as Betsie read, watching the light leap from face to face. More than conquerors. . . It was not a wish. It was a fact. We knew it, we experienced it minute by minute—poor, hated, hungry. We are more than conquerors. Not ‘we shall be.’ We are! Life in Ravensbruck took place on two separate levels, mutually impossible. One, the observable, external life, grew every day more horrible. The other, the life we lived with God, grew daily better, truth upon truth, glory upon glory.’

“Sometimes I would slip the Bible from its little sack with hands that shook, so mysterious had it become to me. It was new; it had just been written. I marveled sometimes that the ink was dry. I had believed the Bible always, but reading it now had nothing to do with belief. It was simply a description of the way things were—of hell and heaven, of how men act and how God acts. I had read a thousand times the story of Jesus’ arrest—how soldiers had slapped Him, laughed at Him, flogged Him. Now such happenings had faces and voices.” (p. 206-207)

The ten Boom family knew the Bible, read the Bible, studied the Bible. And in those dark days in Ravensbruck, the word of God spoke to Corrie and Betsie and the ladies who joined them in studying the living, active, voice of a loving God who speaks to us through the Holy Spirit and tells us “truth upon truth, glory upon glory.”

The Excellent or Praiseworthy devotional “Some Things Don’t Change” told of the word of God as it ministered to soldiers in the Civil War. It also told us of how Rapid Deployment Kits (containing Bibles, tracts, and devotionals) are being sent from Military Ministry, as we speak, to soldiers deployed around the world serving in the Global War on Terror. I understand what Corrie ten Boom wants us to grasp — that whatever the circumstances (even wartime deployment), we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us!” As the song says, “Jesus loves me, this I know. . . .for the Bible tells me so!”

Ten Boom, Corrie, The Hiding Place (Grand Rapids: Chosen Books, 1971, reprinted in 2007), p. 206-207.

Questions to share:

1. Can you think of a time that you read a verse from your Bible. . . . and then years later you read the same verse with a new perspective? What did that verse mean to you in both situations?

2. What does Corrie ten Boom mean when she writes about the two levels of life in Ravensbruck? Are there two levels of life where you are living now with deployment, and how can your life with God “grow daily better”?