God is Deeper

“God has now reconciled you.” Colossians 1:22

It is very difficult, sometimes impossible to forgive when we feel a deep wrong has been done against us. Many Jews were treated harshly and even murdered in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, a labor camp for women. Corrie Ten Boom and her sister Betsie were incarcerated there after they were caught helping Jews escape the Nazi Holocaust. Betsie died in the camp but Corrie was released because of a clerical error. A week later, all the women in her age group were sent to the gas chamber. 

Was Corrie filled with bitterness and hate after those terrible years in Ravensbrück? Before Betsie died, she told Corrie, “There is no pit so deep that God is not deeper still." After the war, Corrie set up centers to help concentration camp survivors, and she travelled the world speaking about God’s love and His forgiveness. 

One time, HER forgiveness was put to the test. She had just given a talk and she saw a man walk towards her. Suddenly she was brought back to the huge room in the concentration camp. She could see his blue uniform with the leather crop dangling from his belt. She remembered the shame of walking naked past this man, her sister Betsie before her, frail, her ribs jutting against her parchment skin. She remembered how cruel he had been to them, and even more to Betsie who had been so weak. 

And here he was, holding out his hand. “I have become a Christian," he said. “I know that God has forgiven me for the cruel things I did there, but I would like to hear it from your lips as well. Fräulein, will you forgive me?"

Corrie Ten Boom wrote, “I had to do it—I knew that. The message that God forgives has a prior condition: that we forgive those who have injured us. ‘If you do not forgive men their trespasses,’ Jesus says, ‘neither will your Father in heaven forgive your trespasses.’

“I knew it not only as a commandment of God, but as a daily experience. Since the end of the war I had had a home in Holland for victims of Nazi brutality. Those who were able to forgive their former enemies were able to return to the outside world and rebuild their lives, no matter what the physical scars. Those who nursed their bitterness remained invalids. It was as simple and as horrible as that.