God’s Ancient People

Pray for the peace of Jerusalem: they shall prosper that love thee. PSALM 122:6

The ten Booms did not decide to hide Jews in 1942. In a sense they had decided it long before, over a century of family prayers. When the persecution came, what they did was not a sudden heroism but the natural outworking of something they had believed all their lives: that the Jewish people were beloved of God, and that a Christian who loved God could not stand by while they were hunted. This chapter is about that conviction, where it came from, and what it asks of the church.

A household that prayed for Jerusalem

Casper ten Boom read the Bible aloud to his family every day, and he read it as a book about Israel as well as about the church. God had chosen Abraham and his seed. He had given them the covenants, the law and the prophets. Through them the Messiah had come. And God, as Paul insisted, had not cast them off.

Who are Israelites; to whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came. ROMANS 9:4–5

The Ochorus biography records that the family prayed regularly for the peace of Jerusalem, and that in the Amsterdam years of his marriage Casper had Jewish neighbours and friends whom he honoured. His phrase for the Jewish people, which his daughter remembered all her life, was God’s ancient people. It is not a sentimental phrase. It is a theological one. It says that the Jews are not a distant religious category or a problem to be managed, but the people to whom God first bound Himself, and to whom He remains bound.

I say then, Hath God cast away his people? God forbid. ROMANS 11:1

The star he meant to wear

When the German authorities ordered every Jew in the Netherlands to wear a yellow star in 1942, Casper, then in his eighties, intended to collect one and wear it himself. His family talked him out of it; the gesture would have achieved nothing but his own arrest. But the instinct tells us who he was. The suffering of his Jewish neighbours was not their problem. It was his.

He paid for that conviction with his life. Friends warned him that if he went on sheltering so many Jews he would end up in prison, and in his frail state would not survive it. He answered, as Corrie recorded in her earliest account, that he would count it an honour to give his life for God’s ancient people. Ten days after the raid on the Beje he was dead.

A child tucked into bed

Corrie’s own turning point, as she described it in 1945, was undramatic. She was visiting a Jewish doctor one evening when his small child called down to remind him that he had not come up to say goodnight. She heard the father playing with his children upstairs, and as she waited she realised what could happen to that family on any night. Out of that ordinary moment came a resolve to help the Jews wherever she could.

There is something important in the smallness of it. Most of the great refusals in history begin not with a vision but with a face. Corrie did not first form a policy on the persecution of the Jews and then act on it. She saw a father and his children and could not look away.

If thou forbear to deliver them that are drawn unto death, and those that are ready to be slain; if thou sayest, Behold, we knew it not; doth not he that pondereth the heart consider it? PROVERBS 24:11–12

Such a time as this

It must be said honestly that most Dutch Christians did not do what the ten Booms did. The churches did protest against the deportations, and thousands of ordinary Dutch people hid Jews at mortal risk. But the great majority kept their heads down and hoped the storm would pass. That was understandable. The penalties were severe and the occupation long. Most of us, if we are honest, would probably have done the same.

That is exactly why the ten Booms matter. They were not powerful. They were an old watchmaker and two middle-aged daughters with no weapons, no influence and very little money. What set them apart was a settled conviction that the lives of their Jewish neighbours were their responsibility before God. The words of Mordecai to Esther could have been written for them.

For if thou altogether holdest thy peace at this time, then shall there enlargement and deliverance arise to the Jews from another place; but thou and thy father’s house shall be destroyed: and who knoweth whether thou art come to the kingdom for such a time as this? ESTHER 4:14

God did not need the ten Booms in order to preserve His people. But He had placed them in Haarlem, in that house, at that moment, with that century of prayer behind them, and they would answer for what they did with the position He had given them. So will we.

A Christian love, and an unconditional one

The ten Booms’ love for the Jewish people was a Christian love, and it should be described honestly. Corrie’s brother Willem worked for a Dutch society that combined care for Jewish people with Christian mission among them, and the family longed for Jews to know Jesus as their Messiah. Paul’s longing was theirs.

Brethren, my heart’s desire and prayer to God for Israel is, that they might be saved. ROMANS 10:1

Some modern readers find that combination uncomfortable. But what is striking is that in the years that mattered most, the ten Booms’ love did not wait for anyone to agree with them. They sheltered Jews as Jews, because they were people in mortal danger and because they were God’s ancient people. They asked nothing in return. A love that makes its help conditional on a hearing for the gospel is not the love of Christ. The ten Booms kept the two things in their right order: first the life, and then, where it was welcome, the witness.

What the church owes

Corrie drew from all this a lesson for the church that she pressed on audiences for the rest of her life, though never in the form of a political programme. God’s promise to Abraham still stands.

And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed. GENESIS 12:3

That verse should be handled with care. It is not a charter for any particular state policy, and those who use it to settle modern political questions should remember that the ten Booms applied it to a frightened family at the back door. But its core is plain. The church that despises the Jewish people despises the people from whom its Saviour came, and cuts at the root that bears it. The long history of Christian contempt for the Jews, which made the murders of the twentieth century thinkable, is a sin for which the church must repent, not an embarrassment it can forget.

For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance. ROMANS 11:29

In 1967 Yad Vashem recognised Corrie as one of the Righteous Among the Nations; forty years later it honoured her father and Betsie too. A tree was planted for her in Jerusalem. The family that had prayed for the peace of that city for a hundred years was remembered there. It is the kind of answer to prayer she loved.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read Romans chapters nine to eleven at one sitting, and note what Paul says about God’s faithfulness to Israel.

2. Examine your own speech and your church’s habits for any contempt, however casual, toward the Jewish people. Confess it and put it away.

3. Pray this week for the peace of Jerusalem, and for Jewish neighbours and communities near you by name.

4. Ask yourself which group of people in your own society is most vulnerable today. What would it mean to see one face among them, as Corrie saw the doctor’s child?

5. Learn the story of one rescuer or one family of Jews from your own country during the war, and tell it to someone younger than you.

A PRAYER

God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, You have not cast away Your people, and Your gifts and calling are without repentance.

Forgive Your church for every contempt it has shown to the people of whom, as concerning the flesh, Christ came.

Give me a love that does not wait until it is safe, and that sees the face in front of me rather than the danger behind it.

I pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and for all who are drawn unto death in my own day. Show me what You would have me do. Amen.