The introduction of Darwinism weakened the strong influence of Christian education in America and Britain. The early 1900s was the first era in which Darwin and his ideas had infiltrated the educational system in the West.

Who was Charles Darwin (1809–1882)? He was a British scientist whose theories about evolution and natural selection became the foundation of our modern biology.

The idea of evolution wasn’t new with Darwin. It was first conceived by Aristotle (384–322 BC). In modern days it was Erasmus Darwin, Charles’ grandfather, who first propounded it in the 1790s. But it was Charles Darwin who presented evolution in a more convincing way through a process he termed “natural selection.”

He wrote a book in 1859 entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. In this book, he wrote about the evolution of animals, and later in 1871, he applied his same ideas to humans in his book, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex.

He believed that when animals compete in this life and struggle for food, the strongest survive and the weak are eliminated, which has been termed as “survival of the fittest.”

According to his theory, the natural breeding process works by selecting the best and letting others die out, resulting in a slow but steady evolution. Darwin’s ideas had huge consequences for intelligent design.

His theory of evolution assumed that various living creatures developed over millions of years, but the Bible says that “God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good (suitable, pleasant) and He approved it completely. And there was evening and there was morning, a sixth day” (Genesis 1:31 AMP).

So Darwin’s theory of natural selection disregards God’s creative order according to the Holy Scriptures.

Racial Heritage

All of Darwin’s followers in the early twentieth century believed that the greatest achievement of the evolutionary process was the white race. They believed that intelligence could be measured on a sliding scale or an innate ability rather a set of abilities a child develops under supervision and training.

For example, Lothrop Stoddard believed that millions of years of evolution were at stake and that the work of evolution could be lost if the racial heritage of the intelligent people was lost.

By their understanding of the process, if whites were the best, then it was acceptable to ignore the welfare of non-whites, or even hasten their extinction. By measuring intelligence, it puts everyone on a sliding scale of measurable value and makes it tempting to encourage those with I.Qs while setting aside—and even phasing out—those with lower I.Qs.

Darwin’s theories encouraged racism, and which contributed to slavery. They allowed scientists and biologists to ignore intelligent design and to apply absolutely no value to other human beings they deemed undesirables.

This led to a theory decried by most, but sticking in the back of people’s minds, that black people are inherently inferior, intellectually, with white people. I.Q. tests, so the theory goes, indicates that blacks simply don’t have the necessary brain power with which to compete with other races.

We are all made in God’s image and there is no hint, in the Bible, that God created one race to be inferior to another. We see tens of thousands of very intelligent, very productive black people. Countless number of them have risen from very humble beginnings to tremendous success.

Black people are exactly like white or any other group of people in the area of natural intelligence—some very bright, some of ordinary good intelligence, some slightly or below average. Besides your real intelligence or I.Q, regardless of your race, is not studied; it is discerned.

When man lost his relationship with God, he became a victim of education. He began to look to books and the affirmation of others-what he can see, hear, taste, feel and touch to gain knowledge. When satan destroyed our relationship with God, he capped our real intelligence and life potential, we then looked outside ourselves to find knowledge.

That’s why the Darwinists believe that only the fittest survive. Regardless of whether their philosophy is mainstream or not, the genetic implication of Darwinism is that there must be a master race, and thus inferior ones.

The Famous Scopes Trial

For example, the racism associated with evolution was exposed during the famous 1925 Scopes Trial: The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes. It is perhaps better known by its other name, “the monkey trial.”

It was about a teacher who broke the state’s law against teaching the theory of evolution in a public school. The main debate about the trial was the relationship between faith and science in the United States.

The book that John Scopes was using to teach the theory of evolution was A Civic Biology written by George William Hunter. In that book, he talked about the evolution of man and how there once lived races of men who were much lower in their mental organization than the present inhabitants.

Excerpts from the book give the author’s views about white supremacy, eugenics, contempt for people with disabilities, and impatience with charity.

Improvement of Man. ~If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection…. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment.

Eugenics. ~When people marry there are certain things that the individual, as well as the race, should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring…. The science of being well born is called eugenics.

Parasitism and its Cost to Society. ~ Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe…. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them, the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

The Remedy. ~ If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country.

In regards to the races of men, the trial spoke of five races: “At present there exist upon the earth five races of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure.

These are the Ethiopian or Negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the Caucasians represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.”

George William Hunter, therefore, concluded that the Caucasians are the “highest type of all.” Every individual’s thought process was changed and virtually all people believed that we all came from natural selection, this simply means the survival of those most suited to their environment.

Nazi Racial Ideology

Darwin’s theories encouraged racism, slavery, and Nazism which eventually gave us the bloodiest war in the history of mankind. In his book, When A Nation Forgets God, Dr. Erwin Lutzer says,

When we think of Nazi Germany, we immediately think of the Holocaust, the brutal murder of millions of Jews and other “undesirables….But we need to realize that there were circumstances and widely accepted ideas that enabled the population to become part of an evil that was greater than any individual.

Viktor Frankl a Holocaust survivor said:

The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment—or as the Nazis liked to say, “of blood and soil.” I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some ministry or other of Berlin, but rather at the desks and in the lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers.

Similarly, Social Darwinism was used as a justification for American imperialism in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines following the Spanish-American War, as many adherents of imperialism argued that it was the duty of white Americans to bring civilization to “backward” peoples.

It is said that after God dies in the nineteenth century, man died in the twentieth. For when God is dead, man becomes an untamed beast. Indeed as Richard Wurmbrand once said,

If you believe you were created by God, you will try to become Godlike. If you believe you sprang from apes, you are in danger of turning into a beast.

Two Opposing Accounts

Many well-meaning people have unconditionally accepted that the theory of evolution as taught in schools and colleges must be scientifically true. If it is true, then the Bible’s account of creation as recorded in the book of Genesis must be false and nothing more than a myth. These opposing accounts cannot co-exist together. Either creation or the theory of evolution is correct—not both.

Millions of Christians in our generation who believe that evolution has been proven scientifically to be true have tremendously weakened their faith in Christ, whether or not they talk about that logical contradiction or even think about it.

Many Westerners are unaware of the fact that Darwinism can easily be incorporated into the education system and you would not blame the average Christian parent for misunderstanding what is happening today.

Most of us believe in evolution is because we’ve been taught it from our childhood, and we’ve never taken the time to study and discern the real situation, and few pastors or prophets are sounding the alarm.

At some point, Christians place their faith and trust for their salvation and eternity in the truthfulness of the teachings, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as recorded in the New Testament.

But if they have been taught that the Bible’s statements about God’s creation in Genesis are false, then how can they logically and confidently place their faith and trust for salvation and eternity in heaven upon the authority of Christ’s promises of salvation as recorded in the Holy Scriptures?

Few Westerners, when they see news reports of the poverty, suffering in Asia and Africa, take time to stop and ask why the East or Africa is bound into an endless cycle of suffering while the Western nations are (or were) so blessed.

Secular humanists, evolutionists, and Darwinists are quick to reel out many historic and scientific reasons for the disparity, because they are unwilling to face the truth.

But the real reason is simple: The Christian heritage of Europe and America had brought the favor of God, because Christians believe we are all created in God’s image, and therefore we all have value; while false Eastern religions which includes Darwinism believe in the “survival of the fittest” and this is what has been taught in public schools.

We don’t expect that history will repeat itself, but unfortunately, the same values that destroyed Germany are being taught in many of our centers of learning today.

In our time, we have seen the tide shifting for Africa and Asia. The ground is never too hardened. Africa did not yield a harvest for almost two centuries, although the finest of God’s servants sowed the seed of God’s Word on the Continent.

So if the Lord can have mercy on Africa and other nations, then there is hope for Europe because where sin abounded, grace abounded much more, so that as sin reigned in death, even so, grace might reign through righteousness to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord (Romans 5:20-21).

The mark of the beast is a prophetic event that has brought much fear and confusion to the body of Christ and it is probably far more subtle than we’ve been led to believe. Many of us are right now inundated with very confusing explanations about the meaning of the mark of the beast.

It is true the Bible speaks very clearly of a time coming when no one will be able to buy or sell if they don’t bear the mark but no one can get that mark without worshipping the beast.

What a horrible time that’s going to be. Without this mark, there will be no way to obtain food or transportation or even make a living. It will be humanly impossible to survive. Regardless of the form in which the mark comes (or has come), those who have partaken of the nature of the beast-the spirit and the love of this world (see 1 John 2:15-17), will not be able to resist the mark or anything else the beast has to offer.

The technology is already in place to implement such a ‘marking’ system.  But at this point, I will refrain from all speculation about the beast’s marking system and leave it to those the Lord has revealed its technology.

My belief is that the overcoming Church of Jesus Christ will be with the Lord when this marking takes place. God’s people have already been marked on their foreheads. Ezekiel spoke of a people that sigh and cry for all the abominations that are done:

And the Lord said to him, Go through the midst of the city, through the midst of Jerusalem, and set a mark upon the foreheads of the men who sigh and groan over all the abominations that are committed in the midst of it (Ezekiel 9:4).

Remember no one will be able to get the mark without worshiping the beast. So whether or not this is the mark of the beast doesn’t matter to those who know and have placed their faith and trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. What matters is; do you know Jesus intimately? Are you blood-bought, stamped with the seal of the Holy Spirit and preserved for glory? The overcoming church of Jesus Christ will not be on this planet when this marking takes place.

God’s people have already been marked on their foreheads. We are already sealed, marked, branded and stamped with the seal of the long-promised Holy Spirit as God’s own secured for the day of redemption through Christ from evil and the consequences of sin (see Ephesians 1:13).

In the Book of Revelation, we hear the Lord telling the destroying angels, Harm neither the earth nor the sea nor the trees until we have sealed the bondservants of our God upon their foreheads (Revelation 7:3).

In Revelation 9:4 the demon powers unleashed in the last days are told not to injure the herbage of the earth nor any green thing nor any tree, but only to attack such human beings as do not have the seal (mark) of God on their foreheads.

Again in Revelation 22:4, the Lord promises us that, “No longer will there be a curse upon anything. For the throne of God and of the Lamb will be there, and his servants will worship him. And they will see his face, and his name will be written on their foreheads.”

We, His children, are already marked in our foreheads! We are blood-purchased, sealed, marked and preserved for glory. Who dares to try to convince us that he who sealed us in our foreheads would allow Satan to replace the Lord’s mark with his own?

If you are a child of God, your forehead has already been claimed, and your forearm has been plunged beneath the blood of God’s lamb.

The Greatest Danger-Deception

Many people have striven to understand the manner in which this beast would attempt to place his mark on them, so they would know what to refuse and would be free from the wrath foretold. Tragically, those who are frantically trying to avoid the mark of the beast are actually partaking of the spirit of the beast every day.

Our only deliverance from the wrath of God is to be found in Christ. Taking the mark is not the real sin, although this might sound a bit contradictory, the sin is found in worshipping the beast. The mark is merely evidence of such worship.  John further explains:

Here is room for discernment a call for the wisdom of interpretation. Let anyone who has intelligence (penetration and insight enough) calculate the number of the beast, for it is a human number the number of a certain man; his number is 666 (Revelation 13:18). 

If we are trusting in our knowledge of good and evil to discern the beast, we will easily be deceived. The nature of the beast is rooted just as much in the ‘good’ that is in man as it is in the evil.

Satan comes an ‘angel of light’ or messenger of truth, because good has always been more deceptive than evil. It was not the evil nature of the Tree of Knowledge that deceived Eve; it was the good. The ‘good’ of the Tree of Knowledge kills just as certainly as the evil.

The evil nature of man is manifested in these last days with increasing intensity, but so is the ‘good’ of man which is rooted in the same tree. Just as evil is becoming more blatant, the good is becoming more subtle and deceptive.

It’s the reason Jesus begins His analysis of the closing phase of this age with a warning against deception, which is repeated twice in the course of the discourse as recorded by Matthew 24:4-5.

Deception will be and is one greatest single danger that threatens us as Christians greater than persecution or war.  For example, what would be the popularity of a leader today if he promised safe streets, a healthy economy and the restoration of national dignity and military strength-and delivered on all these promises?

As we’ve covered here and here, Adolf Hitler promised all these things to a Germany crippled by depression and war. Dr. Erwin W. Lutzer says of this time:

We should not be quick to condemn those who gave Hitler a chance, given the economic chaos that spread throughout Germany after World War I. He could never have come to power if the German economy would have remained strong after World War I.

He rode to victory simply because he promised to rebuild the collapsing German mark and put the nation back to work. He cleverly exploited the economic crisis that post-war Germany was experiencing. Yes, it was the economy that gave rise to National Socialism.

The nation was starving and on the verge of anarchy, with a currency that was utterly worthless. In just four years, he not only balanced the budget but also paid off a national debt that was higher percentage of their gross national product (GDP) than America’s was before the Covid-19.

He took one of the most economically and militarily weak nations on the earth at that time and made it among the most powerful nations both economically and militarily. In only four years, he took a nation struggling with more than 50% unemployment to 100% employment.

Not only did Hitler dramatically improve the German economy and military, but he also removed corruption, pornography, and perversion from the streets and instilled such a resolve and vision in the nation that even some church leaders began to wonder if it were the beginning of the Millennium.

Such a dramatic transformation of a nation has never been witnessed before or since. It was so remarkable that Winston Churchill said that if Hitler had died in 1939 he would have been considered the greatest leader in world history.

In the face of such ‘miracles,’ one can understand the deception of the masses and their adulation of this man. Yet few church leaders have been willing to acknowledge the tragic deception that came upon most of the church in Germany.

Milton Mayer, in his book They, Thought They Were Free, observed,

Fascism came as an ‘angel of light ’and German Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, welcomed Hitler as a gift from God. Nazism was seen as redemptive of a decadent society and came almost as Puritanism to a majority sick of perversions and licence parading as liberty.’

Hitler used the church in Germany as a springboard to power. The dean of Magdeburg Cathedral exulted in the Nazi flags displayed in his church, declaring, “whoever reviles this symbol of ours is reviling our Germany.”

Hitler became a god for millions of people in Germany. It seems much of the nation had come under a spell of a man who was hailed as the long-awaited savior of a people who had become weary of poverty and humiliation.

It is been noted that at one of the Nuremberg rallies, a giant photo of Hitler was captioned with the words:

“In the beginning was the word.” The Lord’s prayer was changed by some to read, “Our father Adolf who art in Nuremberg, hallowed be thy name, the Third Reich come….”If you did not say, “Heil Hitler!” when you entered a restaurant or a business establishment, you would not be served.

Although dictators are usually hated by most, this one was for the most part adored, obeyed, and worshipped

‘The swastika flags around the altar radiate hope-hope that the day is at last about to dawn.’ Pastor Siegfried Leffler stated,

In the pitch-black night of the church history Hitler became, as it were, the wonderful transparency for our time, and the window of our age, through which light fell on the history of Christianity. Through him, we were able to see the Saviour in the history of the Germans.

Pastor Julius Leutheuser actually taught that ‘Christ has come to us through Adolf Hitler.’

The entire German Church did not reach this level of deception, but much of it did. This profound delusion was challenged by the extraordinary stand for truth made by some German Christians, such as Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Those who will stand against the most powerful political and military machines in history with nothing but spiritual power will ultimately prevail. Bonheoffer’s life continues to challenge Christians to rise up and boldly stand against the darkness of their times.

It now seems clear that the German church’s superficial understanding of redemption opened the door to this terrible deception. The good that is in man will never redeem him from the evil that is in him.

It is still from the same tree, and its poison will always result in death. The system whose coming appeared so good to the German Christians shocked the civilized world with its evil deeds, but its nature had actually not changed. The good of man is just the other face of evil in man.

Satan is capable of using either good or evil as a tool to bring about his purposes. They were only a handful of German Christians that discerned the deception from the beginning. The same satanic mask is being promulgated today. Our discernment must be more than distinguishing good from evil; we must know the Lord’s voice and follow Him.

Milton Mayer added a significant insight into the events in Germany preceding the war:

I felt and still feel that it was not just a German man that I met, but MAN. He happened to be in Germany under certain conditions. He might be here under certain conditions. He might, under certain conditions, be I.

The truth is that the same beast is within us all. It is the Adamic nature that continually beckons us to eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

There is no good in accumulating an entire storehouse of prophetic knowledge, preaching and teaching, if you drift away from intimacy with Christ. It would be easy to know everything possible about all these prophetic subjects, and yet still fall into the jaws of lust, lose your faith and die in utter apathy.

The only trustworthy preparations are those for the heart, not the body. If you love the Lord, this is where all preparations must begin. If your heart is not right with the Lord, all your preparations to protect your body will be in vain.

Those who are right now setting their hearts to seek God with all their being-saturating their hearts and minds with His Word, and cleaving to Christ more and more-are better prepared for the coming storm than anyone.

The key to understanding everything God is doing on the earth, and everything He is doing in our individual lives, is to understand that it is all for the purpose of bringing us, and the whole creation into union with His Son. The ultimate purpose of God is that all things will be summed up in His Son Jesus Christ (see Colossians 1:13-19).

So our goal is not to just see the book of Revelation as either history or future events, but to see it in the light of the unfolding purpose of God to reveal His Son. The apostle John testified that:

This is the revelation of Jesus Christ His unveiling of the divine mysteries. God gave it to Him to disclose and make known to His bond-servants certain things which must shortly and speedily come to pass in their entirety. And He sent and communicated it through His angel (messenger) to His bond-servant John (Revelation 1:1).

Events did immediately begin to take place, and continue to occur, which perfectly fulfills this prophecy. In John’s vision, there is a great deal about the anti-Christ or the man of sin.

Revelation 13:16-17 teaches that the beast has a mark which he attempts to place upon us in chapter 14, verses 9-10, we see that terrible wrath comes upon all who take the mark.

Therefore the mark of the beast has nothing to do with the true believer. The Lord will sustain us in the midst of depression and disaster. If He can empower the Hebrew children through the fiery furnace and Daniel to endure the lions’ den, then he can empower us all to resist anything the devil throws at us.

We’re His bride-and His love will deliver us! I believe God is going to remove His bride before He pours out His final vials of wrath upon the earth.

William Shirer, in his classic book The Rise and Fall of Third Reich writes, some 807 other pastors and leading laymen of the “Confessional Church” were arrested in 1937, and hundreds more in the next couple of years. As for the majority of Protestant pastors, they, like almost everyone else in German, submitted in the face of Nazi terror.

It would be misleading to give the impression that the persecution of Protestants and Catholics by the Nazi State tore the German people asunder or even greatly aroused the vast majority of them. It did not. A people who had so lightly given up their political, cultural and economic freedoms were not, except for relatively few, going to die or even risk imprisonment to preserve freedom of worship.

What really aroused the Germans in the thirties were the glittering successes of Hitler in providing jobs, creating prosperity, restoring German’s military might, and moving from one triumph to another in his foreign policy. Not many Germans lost much sleep over the arrests of a few thousand pastors and priests or over the quarrelling of the various Protestant sects.

And even fewer paused to reflect that under the leadership of Rosenberg, Bormann, and Himmler, who were backed by Hitler, the Nazi regime intended eventually to destroy Christianity in Germany, if it could, and substitute the old paganism of the early tribal Germanic gods and the new paganism of the Nazi extremists. As Bormann, one of the men closet to Hitler, said publicly in 1941, “National socialism and Christianity are irreconcilable.

According to Dr. Lutzer, “the majority of the people, including the professing Christians, no longer believed that Christianity was worth suffering for, much less dying for. They were willing to substitute Mein Kampf for the Bible in exchange for jobs and the greater glory of Germany.”

Yet those who saved their lives lost them, and those who lost their lives saved them. What might have happened if at the church had condemned Nazism with one unified voice?

In a sermon in 1945, Pastor Martin Niemoller, and initially a supporter of Adolf Hitler gave what could be the kind of epilogue on the German church struggle. He said:

There were in 1933 and in the following years here in Germany 14,000 Evangelical pastors and nearly as many parishes… if at the beginning of the Jewish persecutions we had seen that it was the Lord Jesus Christ who was being persecuted, struck down and slain “in the least of these our brethren, “if we had been loyal to Him and confessed Him, for all I know God would have stood by us, and then the whole sequence of events would have taken a different course. And if we had been ready to go with Him to death, the number of victims would have been only some ten thousand.

Helmut Thielicke’s Summary on what Really Happened

Let me read, to you, one message that came from Helmut Thielicke, German theologian and pastor, this is from Dr. Lutzer’s book Hitler’s Cross.

In April 1945, amid the ruins of a defeated Germany, Thielicke spoke movingly to his congregation in Stuttgart about the meaning of all that happened. He said that the nation got what it deserved because it had repudiated forgiveness and kicked down the cross of Jesus Christ.

In a nation that was supposedly “Christian”, he went on to say that the Cross of Jesus Christ had been neglected and thus the church was blinded to German militarism. The church had overlooked its greatest danger, namely, that in gaining the whole world it might “lose its own soul.”

Where then was the failure? This is part of he said:

• That in its temporal tasks the church should disregard the Eternal and in its faith in itself fail to see its guilt and need for forgiveness.
• That these people should proceed with fanatical energy to solve economic, social, and political problems and in solving these problems overlook or simply ignore the fact the first and foremost we need a Redeemer, who would set straight the deepest basis of our personal lives.
• That they were unaware of the dangers of which we have been shipwrecked—by being blind to the most terrible danger: namely, there is devil who can lead a man about by the nose in the midst of all his idealism, and there is a God upon whom we can wreak ourselves because “He is not mocked.”
• That we did not calculate the factor that is called “God “in our plans and therefore fell victims to megalomania.
• That we ignored that monumental call “I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me” and hence landed in a giddy ecstasy of power worship that brought the whole world against us.
• That we ceased to trust ourselves to the miracle of God’s guidance and therefore we put our faith instead in miracle weapons that never came.
• That we no longer knew that God is in heaven and man is on earth and thus we lost all sense of the proportions of life and consequently were stricken with blindness in purely external political and military relationships.

Thielicke then came to the heart of the matter:

Denying God and casting down the cross is never a merely private decision that concerns only my own inner life and my personal salvation, but this denial immediately brings the most brutal consequences for the whole of historical life and especially for His own people. “God is not mocked.” The history of the world can tell us terrible tales based on that text.

In history, he says, the invisible is mightier and more creative and destructive than the visible. Anybody who still had not grasped that Germany with its program “was wreaked precisely on this dangerous rock called “God” and nothing else has no eyes to see. Because he sees only the individual catastrophes he no longer sees the basic, cardinal catastrophe behind them all.”

Finally, he reminded his listeners that “the worship of success is generally the form of idol worship the devil cultivates most assiduously… We could observe in the first years after 1933 the almost suggestive compulsion that emanates from great successes and how under the influence of these successes even Christians stopped to ask in whose name and at what price they were achieved…..Success is the greatest narcotic of all.”

Casting down the cross of Christ! Intoxicated with success! Substituting the temporary for the permanent! Thus was the church and the entire country crushed, crushed on the rock called God “who is not mocked.” Destroyed for being blinded by the pride of nationalism, instead of being humbled by its great need for repentance. The church stood with pride, but it would not bow in humility.

What is the Great Lesson for the Church Today?

E.M. Bounds once said, “Money is important, but money without prayer and intercession is powerless in the face of darkness.” This is one lesson the German Christians never learned.

If society as a whole seems to be getting darker and darker, it is not the problem of the darkness; the darkness is just acting like its nature. But the light no longer dispels the darkness, and the salt no longer preserves. It is time for the light to say, if things are darker, the problem is with us.

The Bible says, Christians are the salt of the earth (See Matthew 5:1). One of the functions of salt is to restrain corruption. Being “salt” does not abolish corruption, but it holds it in check for the duration until the Master will come again.

Our presence in the world as the disciples of Jesus Christ works like salt in the meat because salt is used as a preservative. We cannot shun all the evil in this world and you cannot change it but we can hold it in check for longer periods of time until God’s purposes of mercy, grace, and redemption are fully fulfilled.

We can’t be passive saying all this will happen. “The anti-Christ is coming and all prophecies will be fulfilled and there is nothing we can do about it.” This attitude of passivity is unscriptural. It is true that the antichrist will come just like Hitler, in fact, he will be worse than Hitler, but at this present time, there is a force that is restraining him from being revealed at this time.

For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only He who now restrains will do so until He is taken out of the way. And then the lawless one will be revealed, whom the Lord will consume with the breath of His mouth and destroy with the brightness of His coming (2 Thessalonians 2:6-8 NKJV).

It is the personal presence of the Holy Spirit within the church that is restraining the anti-Christ system. So it is the responsibility of the church of Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to overcome the forces of darkness and to hold them in check.

I am convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that we what need is a mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon us as individuals, on our homes, our families, our churches, our ministers, our pastors, and on every Christian believer everywhere. If we repent and humble ourselves first, then God will answer the fervent petitions of His people to spare our lands.

Without faith, brokenness, humility, repentance, and a return to God in submission to His Laws by both the leaders and the people, it seems we are moving in the same direction as Germany, or even worse due to the spiritual condition of the Church.

Many financial analysts are worried that the dollar will be replaced as the world’s reserve currency. If that happens, then is a far greater possibility of the dollar going the same way the German mark did in the 1930s. This will completely destroy the middle class and create an opportunity for a tyrannical state.

Prices of commodities are going up every week because of the COVID-19 which means there is inflation that might eventually lead to hyperinflation. Although the mainstream media is not reporting this, we might face very tough times ahead. But as Christians we are exhorted and encouraged by the writer of Hebrews:

Let your character or moral disposition be free from love of money including greed, avarice, lust, and craving for earthly possessions and be satisfied with your present circumstances and with what you have; for He God Himself has said, I will not in any way fail you nor give you up nor leave you without support. I will not, I will not, I will not in any degree leave you helpless nor forsake nor let you down (relax My hold on you)! Assuredly not! (Josh. 1: 5.) So we take comfort and are encouraged and confidently and boldly say, The Lord is my Helper; I will not be seized with alarm I will not fear or dread or be terrified. What can man do to me? (Hebrews 13: 5–7).

In this crisis of COVID-19, it is time to weep and pray for God’s mercy and grace to prevail in our lives, homes, and nations. It is only prayer and intercession that can heal a nation.

We cannot make laws for holiness and righteousness to prevail in the hearts of men and women. It will take only the mercy and grace of Christ to save us from this invisible enemy.

Revive us Lord that Your people may rejoice in You. (Psalm 85:6)

Piles of new bank notes awaiting distribution at the Reichsbank during the hyperinflation. Source

History tells us that before World War I Germany was a prosperous country, had a prosperous economy, and a world leader in chemical, optics, and machinery. It was also the most populated country with the Jews in any country in Western Europe when Hitler came to power.

In fact, a small part of them were architects of its Constitution, a fact that Hitler exploited. The German republic had just come from a severe economic hardship it experienced after World War 1.

German’s inflation was triggered by a huge increase in the money supply because of the heavy reparations assigned to Germany after losing World War I. The German government chose to pay its debts with cheap marks, printing as many as needed to stem the crisis. When the initial injections of newly printed money failed to work, the government’s response was the same: print more unbacked paper money.

By late 1923, 300 paper mills and 2000 printing presses worked around the clock printing German marks. This created massive inflation and depression in 1929 which worsened Germany’s problems. On average prices doubled every three days. In a single month, prices exploded more than 32,000% higher enough to drive prices up by a factor of 320 in a single, 30–day period.

German sank into the most severe hyperinflationary period in recorded history after printing 1.3 trillion marks. This translates to about 4 trillion in today’s dollars. According to one expert, that is almost exactly the same amount of money the United States government has printed since 2008.

An article from Wikipedia about the Weimar Republic describes how this hyperinflation happened very quickly:

When the German people realized that their money was rapidly losing value, they tried to spend it quickly. This increase in monetary velocity caused still more rapid increase in prices which created a vicious cycle. This placed the government and banks between two unacceptable alternatives: if they stopped the inflation this would cause immediate bankruptcies, unemployment, strikes, hunger, violence, collapse of civil order, insurrection, and revolution. If they continued the inflation they would default on their foreign debt. The attempts to avoid both unemployment and insolvency ultimately failed when Germany had both.

There is a story of a student at Freiburg University that ordered a cup of coffee for 5,000 marks. He decided to order a second cup. When his bill was 14,000 marks, he protested but was told, “If you want to save money and you want two cups of coffee, you should order both of them at the same time.” One’s grandparents sold their restaurant in order to retire. However, by the time formalities were completed, all they received was enough to buy a loaf of bread.

There is another story, though perhaps not a true story, of a woman who filled her wheelbarrow with German marks and left them outside the store, confident that no one would bother stealing the money. When the time came to pay for her groceries, she walked outside only to discover that the bundles of money were left on the ground but the wheelbarrow was gone!

In 1995 and 2010, Dr. Erwin Lutzer published two frightening books titled: Hitler’s Cross and When a Nation Forgets God. In Hitler’s Cross, Lutzer wondered why the Church was seduced by false promises of a greater and glorious Germany.  He said, “the eyes of the angry people wanted a savior from their economic problems. This is when Hitler arrived.” Lutzer then illustrates his point by saying:

We should not be quick to condemn those who gave Hitler a chance, given the economic chaos that spread throughout Germany after World War I. He could never have come to power if the German economy would have remained strong after World War I. He rode to victory simply because he promised to rebuild the collapsing German mark and put the nation back to work. He cleverly exploited the economic crisis that postwar Germany was experiencing. Yes, it was the economy that gave rise to National Socialism.

Hitler’s success in the first few years rested not only on his foreign policy, which brought so many bloodless conquests but on German’s economic recovery, which brought admiration from even among economists abroad.

Unemployment was reduced by putting the unemployed back to work by means of greatly improved public works and giving stimulus packages to private corporations. Government credit was furnished by the creation of special unemployment bills, and tax reliefs were given to firms which raised their capital expenditures and increased employment.

He made Germans feel important and made sure they were well cared for by the state. He gave them huge tax breaks and introduced social benefits and made sure that even in the last days of the war not a single German went hungry.

During his 12 years of constant warfare, he never once raised taxes for working-class people. The German soldiers were also offered more than double the salaries and benefits to what the Americans and British received.

The economy seemed to be working at least for the first few years. He definitely never let the financial crisis go to waste. Unfortunately, those who welcomed Hitler’s regime because they expected to practice unhampered free enterprise were disappointed, and the Church was no exception.

Church, State, and the Economy

So what does this have to do with the Church today? Everything! A strong section of the church also believed that Nazi regime was the answer to all their prayers. It was all about the economy. In examining the lessons that may be learned from studying the German church, Dr. Lutzer writes,

Nothing else seemed to matter, under no circumstances were the Christians allowed to sit down and reflect how all this could be handled. The church did not heed the lone voices crying in the wilderness. The churches were nationalized under Hitler. The government said the churches needed repairs, so a “church tax” was created. Pastors were put on government salary, and therefore they were subject to state authority.

This led to the silencing of pastors because they feared they would lose their funding if they spoke out. The church in Germany appeared to be too preoccupied with the problems of the nation and the economy to see what was happening before its eyes. The religion of blood and soil had replaced the religion of humility and prayer.

Though burdened with unemployment and the physical hardship of its dejected people, the church, for the most part, still refused to repent and turn wholly to God….The church mistook the temporal benefits of the swastika for the spiritual benefits of the cross of Christ.

Whoever Has the Gold Has the Rule

The marriage of church and state according to Lutzer is “always detrimental to the mission of the church. Either the church will change its message to accommodate the state’s political agenda, or the political rulers will use the church to their own ends. Regardless, the purity of the church is compromised. This unholy unity contributed to the paralysis of the church during the Hitler era.”

At the moment when the Church should have been condemning the politics of the day with one unified voice, the church found its existence dependent upon the goodwill of the state……The economy often trumps matters of liberty and principle because money is so integral to who we are and, of course, we need money to live. Unfortunately, sometimes it also trumps those values that are eternally important, such as one’s honor and witness for the Gospel.

The so-called golden rule applies: Whoever has the gold has the rule. Given our penchant for wanting to live and not suffer deprivation, we are prone to do exactly what the German people did, and that is to overlook eternal ideals for the sake of temporal survival.

Hitler became a god for millions of people in Germany. It seems much of the nation had come under a spell of a man who was hailed as the long-awaited savior of a people who had become weary of poverty and humiliation. It is been noted that at one of the Nuremberg rallies, a giant photo of Hitler was captioned with the words:

In the beginning, was the word.” The Lord’s prayer was changed by some to read, “Our father Adolf who art in Nuremberg, hallowed be thy name, the Third Reich come….”If you did not say, “Heil Hitler!” when you entered a restaurant or a business establishment, you would not be served. Although dictators are usually hated by most, this one was, for the most part, adored, obeyed, and worshipped.

Those who have studied Albert Einstein’s writings have come to a concluding idea that Albert Einstein was religious in a conventional sense, but his concept of God was not that of a personal God which is what most believers have–a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

When the German professor William Hermanns asked Albert Einstein whether “it isn’t only human to move along the line of least resistance” during the dark period of the Holocaust, Einstein responded:

Yes. It is indeed human, as proved by Cardinal Pacelli, who was behind the Concordant with Hitler. Since when can one make a pact with Christ and Satan at the same time? And he is now the Pope! The moment I hear the word “religion”, my hair stands on end. The Church has always sold itself to those in power, and agreed to any bargain in return for immunity. It would have been fine if the spirit of religion had guided the Church; instead, the Church determined the spirit of religion. Churchmen through the ages have fought political and institutional corruption very little, so long as their own sanctity and church property were preserved.

Today it is the same thing, the institutional church in Europe (Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelicals) is supported through taxes. In some parts of Africa, it’s even worse. As far as the Bible is concerned, church and state should be separate and independent, and each was meant to perform their God-ordained duties.

This independence gives an elder of a church, an opportunity of showing that he does not preach with a view to personal financial gain, but solely in the service of the Church of Jesus Christ.

This was desperately needed in the Church in Germany because some who had joined the state church pointed out that joining the Confessing Church would jeopardize one’s funding.  The Confessing Church was slow to recognize how perverted the political order had become as we shall finally examine in Part 3

It has been said that what we learn from history is that we don’t learn anything at all from history. I believe that a little bit of history will help us understand the current global economic crisis. German’s inflation was triggered by a huge increase in the money supply because of the heavy reparations assigned to Germany after losing World War I.

Before World War I Germany was a prosperous country, a prosperous economy, and a world leader in chemical, optics, and machinery. In 1914 the German mark, the British shilling (which was a former monetary unit in Great Britain), the French franc, and the Italian lira all had equal value, and were all exchanged four or five to the dollar.

By 1923, however, the exchange rate between the dollar and the mark was one trillion marks to one dollar. The German government chose to pay its debts with cheap marks, printing as many as needed to stem the crisis. When the initial injections of newly printed money failed to work, the government’s response was the same: print more money.

The prices of goods rose every day as tax revenues collapsed and the government-financed all its activities through the printing of money. With all this quantitative easing, the economy seemed to be working very well and unemployment was low. But remember that printing money is similar to an addiction to drugs. Once you start printing, it is very hard to ever stop. German currency was relatively stable at about sixty marks per the United States dollar during the first half of 1921.

The rise in prices hit the middle class and those on fixed incomes hard. People who had fixed incomes were wiped out and many who had saved money found that their savings were worthless and all retirement funds were reduced to nothing. At the retail level, it was only barter trade that had become the main means of exchange when currencies had collapsed completely as a result of hyperinflation.

In such desperate times when money is useless, whatever could be bartered was used in exchange for food or clothes. By late 1922 inflation was out of control. There was widespread corruption; prostitution, riots, political assassinations, and crime— social upheavals became common.

The only ones who benefited were those with foreign bank accounts, farmers, landowners, and those with big mortgages. They were glad when the purchasing power of the mark fell so that they could repay their loans with worthless pieces of paper. As a matter of fact, big corporations urged the government into deliberately letting the mark fall in order to free the government of its public commitments and help businesses that needed to cancel their large debts.

For example, great German industrial corporations like Krupp, Thyssen, Farben, and Stinnes reasoned they would make German goods cheap and easy to export, and they needed the export earnings to buy raw materials abroad.

Inflation kept everyone working. Next, the masses who depended on fixed incomes, pensions, and savings greatly suffered. The professionals-engineers, lawyers, architects, surveyors, scientists, and others could not find any demand for their services.

The currency lost meaning and the people lost faith in the financial system. When the thousand billion mark note was printed, few bothered to collect the change when they spent it. American writer Pearl Buck was living in Germany in 1923. She later wrote:

The cities were still there, the houses not yet bombed and in ruins, but the victims were millions of people. They had lost their fortunes, their savings; they were dazed and inflation-shocked and did not understand how it had happened to them and who the foe was who had defeated them. Yet they had lost their self-assurance, their feeling that they themselves could be the masters of their own lives if only they worked hard enough; and lost, too, were the old values of morals, of ethics, of decency.

Due to the economic crisis in Germany, there was no gold available to back the currency. Therefore, the Rentenmark was introduced which brought an end to hyperinflation. Adam Fergusson describes what happened next:

The post-hyperinflationary credit crunch was, not surprisingly followed by a credit boom: starved of money and basic necessities for so long (do not forget the hyperinflation had come directly after defeat in the Great War), many funded lavish lifestyles through borrowing during the second half of the 1920s. We know how that ended, of course: in The Great Depression, which eventually saw the end of the Weimar Republic and the beginning of the National Socialist era.

The companies in Germany went bankrupt and workers were laid off. By the end of 1930 unemployment affected most German families just six years after the last hyperinflation had hit the Weimar Republic. By the end of 1932, over 30 percent of all German workers were unemployed.

Most of those who were unemployed were family men who could not provide for their families. Deprived of jobs and decent living, the Germans were willing to do anything to survive.

Those who saw no end to their troubles turned to the more extreme political parties in Germany— the Nazi and Communist parties. Hitler’s Rise to Power.  We all know the term “never let any crisis go to waste” because in such an economic crisis a leader who wants to capture a nation will be waiting to take advantage of the situation.

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was sworn in as chancellor. He had waited for this opportunity after his attempted coup had failed in 1923. But thanks to democracy, the Nazi party legally won thirty-two seats in the next elections and the National Democratic Party won 106. Within one month after the elections, Hitler was on his way to become a dictator, and the rest is history.

Politicians know that many people would be willing to sell their souls if they could be assured of jobs. Dr. Lutzer has said,

Given a choice, many of us would prefer economic equality along with tyranny rather than economic opportunity with freedom, most will choose bread and sausage above individual liberties.

Historian David A. Rausch describes how Hitler’s brand of socialism had many advantages for the German people:

Hitler had lowered wages; state governments and economies were consolidated under the totalitarian regime; and Germany began to rearm. The economy began to recover and men were put back to work but at the high price of personal freedom. Virtually every area of German life was under the control of the Nazi regime, yet more citizens did not seem to care. Fed a steady dosage of propaganda by the press and entertained with massive rallies, parades, and “gifts” from “The Führer,” the German people swelled with pride at their nation’s apparent comeback.

According to Dr. Lutzer, one of the most important lessons to learn from this part of history is that:

Some politicians often use an economic and political crisis to make their subjects more government dependent, and with that dependency comes more control…. With expanded government control comes loss of religious liberty and loss of the work ethic. This was most clearly seen in communist countries where wages were set by the government and doled out by the government. For the politicians to control the state coffers is of great benefit to them, because the more people are dependent on the government for their existence, the more willing they are to bow to whatever the government demands.

The goal of those in power has always been to level everyone and make us all equally poor. Why? Because power and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Another example that has been widely circulated on the Internet was given by an elderly woman named Kitty Werthmann. She told audiences what life was like in Austria during the late 1930s:

In 1938, Austria was in deep Depression. Nearly one-third of our workforce was unemployed. We had 25 percent inflation and 25 percent bank loan interest rates…. Farmers and business people were declaring bankruptcy daily. Young people were going from house to house begging for food. Not that they didn’t want to work; there simply weren’t any jobs…. The Austrian people were really hurting and they were desperate for answers. When Hitler came to them with “solutions,” they were ready to embrace him with open arms….

We looked to our neighbor on the north, Germany, where Hitler had been in power since 1933. We had been told that they didn’t have unemployment or crime, and they had a high standard of living. Nothing was ever said about persecution of any group— Jewish or otherwise. We were led to believe that everyone in Germany was happy.

We wanted the same way of life in Austria. We were promised that a vote for Hitler would mean the end of unemployment and help for the family. Hitler also said that businesses would be assisted, and farmers would get their farms back. Ninety-eight percent of the population voted to annex Austria to Germany and have Hitler for our ruler. We were overjoyed and for three days we danced in the streets and had candlelight parades. The new government opened up big field kitchens and everyone was fed.

Prices Controlled By the Führer

Economist Ludwig von Mises’s analysis of the situation in both Germany and England at that time was that both countries experienced inflation. Prices went up, and the two governments imposed price controls. Starting with a few prices, with only milk and eggs, they had to go up further and further.

The longer the war went on, the more inflation was generated. After three years of war, the Germans elaborated on a great plan. They called it the Hindenburg Plan, which meant that the government would control the whole German economic system: prices, wages, profit— everything.

And the bureaucracy immediately began to put this into effect. But before they finished, the debacle came: the German Empire broke down, the entire bureaucratic apparatus disappeared, the revolution brought its bloody results, and things came to an end.

In England, they started in the same way, but after a time, in the spring of 1917, the United States entered the war and supplied the British with sufficient quantities of everything they needed. Therefore the road to socialism and serfdom was interrupted.

Before Hitler came to power, Chancellor Bruning again introduced price control in Germany for the usual reasons. And Hitler enforced it even before the war started. For in Hitler’s Germany there was no private enterprise or private initiative; there was only a system of socialism which differed from the Russian system only to the extent that the terminology and labels of the free economic system were still retained.

There still existed “private enterprises,” as they were called. But the owner was no longer an entrepreneur; rather, the owner was called a “a shop manager.” The whole of Germany was organized in a hierarchy of führers— there was the Highest Führer, Hitler of course, and then there were führers down to the many hierarchies of smaller führers. And the head of an enterprise was the betriebsfuhrer— the workers of the enterprise were named by a word that, in the Middle Ages, had signified the retinue of a feudal lord: the gefolgschaft.

And all of these people had to obey the orders issued by an institution which had a terribly long name, Reichfuhrerwirtschaftsministerium, at the head of which was the well-known fat man named Goering, adorned with jewelry and medals. And from this body of ministers came all the orders to every enterprise: what to produce, in what quantity, where to get the raw materials, and what to pay for them, to whom to sell the products and at what prices to sell them.

The workers got the order to work in a definite factory, and they received wages that were decreed by the government. The whole economic system was now regulated in every detail by the government. The betriebsfuhrer did not have the right to take the profits for himself; he received only what amounted to a salary. If he wanted to get more he would say, for example, “I am very sick, I need an operation immediately, and the operation will cost five hundred marks.”

Then he had to ask the führer of the district (the gaufuhrer or gauleiter) whether he had the right to take out more than the salary given to him. The prices were no longer prices and the wages were no longer wages— they were all quantitative terms in a system of socialism.

The system of the German Nazis retained the labels and terms of the capitalistic free market economy. But they meant something very different: there were now only government decrees. The question is, How did the church respond?  This will be covered in Part 2 and 3.

Part of this letter appears in the book, When Jesus Returns by respected British international writer and Bible teacher David Pawson. It was written by Ms. Corrie Ten Boom, a Nazi Concentration Camp survivor, and lifelong missionary, in 1974.

The world is deathly ill. It is dying. The Great Physician has already signed the death certificate. Yet there is still a great work for Christians to do. They are to be streams of living water, channels of mercy to those who are still in the world. It is possible for them to do this because they are overcomers.

Christians are ambassadors for Christ. They are representatives from Heaven to this dying world. And because of our presence here, things will change.

My sister, Betsy, and I were in the Nazi concentration camp at Ravensbruck because we committed the crime of loving Jews. Seven hundred of us from Holland, France, Russia, Poland and Belgium were herded into a room built for two hundred. As far as I knew, Betsy and I were the only two representatives of Heaven in that room.

We may have been the Lord’s only representatives in that place of hatred, yet because of our presence there, things changed. Jesus said, “In the world you shall have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.” We too, are to be overcomers bringing the light of Jesus into a world filled with darkness and hate.

Sometimes I get frightened as I read the Bible, and as I look in this world and see all of the tribulation and persecution promised by the Bible coming true. Now I can tell you, though, if you too are afraid, that I have just read the last pages.

I can now come to shouting “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!” for I have found where it is written that Jesus said, “He that overcometh shall inherit all things: and I will be His God, and he shall be My son.” This is the future and hope of this world. Not that the world will survive, but that we shall be overcomers in the midst of a dying world.

Betsy and I, in the concentration camp, prayed that God would heal Betsy who was so weak and sick. “Yes, the Lord will heal me,”, Betsy said with confidence. She died the next day and I could not understand it. They laid her thin body on the concrete floor along with all the other corpses of the women who died that day.

It was hard for me to understand, to believe that God had a purpose for all that. Yet because of Betsy’s death, today I am traveling all over the world telling people about Jesus.

There are some among us teaching there will be no tribulation, that the Christians will be able to escape all this. These are the false teachers that Jesus was warning us to expect in the latter days. Most of them have little knowledge of what is already going on across the world. I have been in countries where the saints are already suffering terrible persecution.

In China, the Christians were told,”Don’t worry, before the tribulation comes you will be translated or raptured.” Then came a terrible persecution. Millions of Christians were tortured to death.

Later I heard a Bishop from China say, sadly, “We have failed. We should have made the people strong for persecution rather than telling them Jesus would come first. Tell the people how to be strong in times of persecution, how to stand when the tribulation comes to stand and not faint.”

I feel I have a divine mandate to go and tell the people of this world that it is possible to be strong in the Lord Jesus Christ. We are in training for the tribulation, but more than sixty percent of the Body of Christ across the world has already entered into the tribulation. There is no way to escape it. We are next.

Since I have already gone through prison for Jesus’ sake, and since I met the Bishop in China, now every time I read a good Bible text I think, “Hey, I can use that in the time of tribulation.” Then I write it down and learn it by heart.

When I was in the concentration camp, a camp where only twenty percent of the women came out alive, we tried to cheer each other up by saying, “Nothing could be any worse than today.” But we would find the next day was even worse.

During this time a Bible verse that I had committed to memory gave me great hope and joy. “If ye be reproached for the name of Christ, happy are ye; for the spirit of glory and of God resteth upon you; on their part evil is spoken of, but on your part He is glorified.” (I Peter 3:14)

I found myself saying, “Hallelujah! Because I am suffering, Jesus is glorified!”

In America, the churches sing, “Let the congregation escape tribulation”, but in China and Africa the tribulation has already arrived. This last year alone more than two hundred thousand Christians were martyred in Africa.

Now things like that never get into the newspapers because they cause bad political relations. But I know. I have been there. We need to think about that when we sit down in our nice houses with our nice clothes to eat our steak dinners.

Many, many members of the Body of Christ are being tortured to death at this very moment, yet we continue right on as though we are all going to escape the tribulation.

Several years ago I was in Africa in a nation where a new government had come into power. The first night I was there some of the Christians were commanded to come to the police station to register.

When they arrived they were arrested and that same night they were executed. The next day the same thing happened with other Christians. The third day it was the same. All the Christians in the district were being systematically murdered.

The fourth day I was to speak in a little church. The people came, but they were filled with fear and tension. All during the service they were looking at each other, their eyes asking,

“Will this one I am sitting beside be the next one killed? Will I be the next one?”

The room was hot and stuffy with insects that came through the screenless windows and swirled around the naked bulbs over the bare wooden benches. I told them a story out of my childhood.

“When I was a little girl, ” I said, “I went to my father and said,

“Daddy, I am afraid that I will never be strong enough to be a martyr for Jesus Christ.”

“Tell me,” said Father, “When you take a train trip to Amsterdam, when do I give you the money for the ticket? Three weeks before?”

“No, Daddy, you give me the money for the ticket just before we get on the train.”

“That is right,” my father said, “and so it is with God’s strength.

Our Father in Heaven knows when you will need the strength to be a martyr for Jesus Christ. He will supply all you need just in time”

My African friends were nodding and smiling. Suddenly a spirit of joy descended upon that church and the people began singing, ” In the sweet, by and by, we shall meet on that beautiful shore.” Later that week, half the congregation of that church was executed. I heard later that the other half was killed some months ago.

But I must tell you something. I was so happy that the Lord used me to encourage these people, for unlike many of their leaders, I had the word of God. I had been to the Bible and discovered that Jesus said He had not only overcome the world, but to all those who remained faithful to the end, He would give a crown of life.

How can we get ready for the persecution? First we need to feed on the word of God, digest it, make it a part of our being. This will mean disciplined Bible study each day as we not only memorize long passages of scripture, but put the principles to work in our lives.

Next we need to develop a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. Not just the Jesus of yesterday, the Jesus of History, but the life-changing Jesus of today who is still alive and sitting at the right hand of God.

We must be filled with the Holy Spirit. This is no optional command of the Bible, it is absolutely necessary. Those earthly disciples could never have stood up under the persecution of the Jews and Romans had they not waited for Pentecost.

Each of us needs our own personal Pentecost, the Baptism of the Holy Spirit. We will never be able to stand in the tribulation without it.

In the coming persecution we must be ready to help each other and encourage each other. But we must not wait until the tribulation comes before starting. The fruit of the Spirit should be the dominant force of every Christian’s life.

Many are fearful of the coming tribulation, they want to run. I, too, and a little bit afraid when I think that after all my eighty years, including the horrible Nazi concentration camp, that I might have to go through the tribulation also. But then I read the Bible and I am glad.

When I am weak, then I shall be strong, the Bible says. Betsy and I were prisoners for the Lord, we were so weak, but we got power because the Holy Spirit was on us. That mighty inner strengthening of the Holy Spirit helped us through. No, you will not be strong in yourself when the tribulation comes. Rather, you will be strong in the power of Him who will not forsake you.

For seventy-six years I have known the Lord Jesus and not once has He ever left me, or let me down. Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him, for I know that to all who overcome, He shall give the crown of life. Hallelujah!

Corrie Ten Boom-1974

This Letter first appeared Here