The Bible in the Barracks

Unless thy law had been my delights, I should then have perished in mine affliction. PSALM 119:92

If you had asked Corrie ten Boom what kept her alive in Ravensbrück, she would not have said courage, or luck, or even her sister, though she loved Betsie more than anyone. She would have said the Word of God. A small Bible, carried against every rule into one of the worst places in Europe, sits at the centre of her story, and the lesson she drew from it runs through all her later teaching. When everything else is taken away, what you have hidden in your heart remains.

One page each

In the recorded address Tribulation, now in the Ochorus library, Corrie tells of the days after the arrest in February 1944. Members of the family had each managed to keep a single page of Scripture hidden somewhere about them. She asked one what she had, and heard that it was the first chapter of Ephesians; another had the eighth chapter of Romans. For a time that was all they had. It sounds a small thing. To a prisoner it was an inheritance.

She tells too of her months in solitary confinement at Scheveningen. Every morning she sang a hymn aloud, and heard it taken up from a cell further along the corridor. Every text she knew by heart she said aloud so that others could hear. There was one thing, she said, that no one could take from her, and that was what she had learned by heart.

Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee. PSALM 119:11

That is the first and most practical point of this chapter. Corrie urged every audience she addressed to write down the promises of Scripture and learn them by heart while they still had Bibles, against the day when they might not. It sounded alarmist in comfortable Western churches. It did not sound alarmist to believers behind the Iron Curtain, or to her.

Past the search

When the sisters were processed at Ravensbrück in September 1944, everything the prisoners carried was taken from them. Corrie had a small Bible, printed for the underground, and she was determined to keep it. By her account she hid it with a little warm underwear, put them on again beneath her thin prison dress, and walked through a line of guards who were searching every woman. The woman in front of her was searched. The woman behind her was searched. She was not.

She believed all her life that God had hidden her, and in her addresses she says she had prayed for His angels to surround her. Her earliest account of the camps, written in 1945, already speaks of angels at the processing building; the story is not a late embellishment. Readers will judge it according to what they believe about God’s dealings with His people.

Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation? HEBREWS 1:14

One does not have to share every detail of her interpretation to be moved by the result. Two middle-aged Dutch women entered Ravensbrück carrying a Bible, and it would be read aloud, day after day, to hundreds of women.

Readings in Barracks 28

The barracks in which the sisters lived had been built for a few hundred prisoners and held, by the end, well over a thousand. It was filthy, crowded and crawling with vermin. There, with their hidden Bible, they held readings every day, sometimes twice. Corrie read and preached; Betsie prayed and comforted. As the Ochorus biography records from her earliest account, the women listening were Dutch and Belgian, French, Polish and Russian, Protestant and Catholic together. Where they had no language in common, the sisters would say the name of Jesus, and faces would change. Corrie reflected that there would be no separate Protestant and Catholic quarters in heaven, so there was no reason for them in Ravensbrück.

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom; teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. COLOSSIANS 3:16

It is worth pausing on what this meant. In a place designed to reduce women to numbers, the reading of Scripture restored them to persons addressed by God. The camp said they were nothing. The Book said they were loved, bought with a price and awaited in their Father’s house. Many of the women who heard those readings died in the camp. Corrie said afterwards that many of them died with the name of Jesus on their lips, and that this alone made the sisters’ imprisonment worthwhile.

Wherein I suffer trouble, as an evil doer, even unto bonds; but the word of God is not bound. 2 TIMOTHY 2:9

A red suitcase in Moscow

The Bible in the barracks became, in her travelling years, a Bible in the suitcase. Corrie took Scripture into Communist countries wherever she could. In Power in Prayer and in The Greatest of These Is Love she tells of arriving in Moscow with a suitcase full of Russian Bibles and watching a customs officer ransack every bag in the line. She prayed, with her hand on a verse in Jeremiah, that God would watch over His word. She says she saw, for the only time in her life, bright figures around her case. When the officer reached her, he waved her through and carried the heavy suitcase to her car himself.

Then said the LORD unto me, Thou hast well seen: for I will hasten my word to perform it. JEREMIAH 1:12

She was candid, and rather funny, about the use she had made of the verse. She knew perfectly well that Jeremiah was not speaking about Bibles in luggage, and she said so to her audiences: God does not first ask for a sound exegesis before He hears a frightened woman’s prayer. That is true, and it is also a caution. Praying a promise is one thing; building doctrine on a verse torn from its setting is another. Corrie did the first freely and seldom the second. Her readers should keep the distinction she kept.

A famine of the Word

Behind all this lay a conviction she took from others as well as from her own experience. In Tribulation she recalls a missionary bishop who had worked for many years in China and who told her, after his expulsion, what he most regretted. He had not taught ordinary believers to study and teach the Bible for themselves, and he had not taught them how to be strong in persecution. When the missionaries and the clergy were gone, the church had only what its members carried inside them.

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD. AMOS 8:11

Most readers of this book own several Bibles and read none of them as often as they read the news. Corrie’s witness is a rebuke to that. The Word she was willing to risk her life to carry is lying unopened on our shelves.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth: but the word of our God shall stand for ever. ISAIAH 40:8

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Choose one chapter of Scripture — Romans 8, Ephesians 1 or Psalm 91 are good places to start — and begin to learn it by heart this month.

2. If you were allowed to keep only one page of the Bible, which would it be? Read it again today, slowly.

3. Keep a notebook of promises for hard times, as Corrie urged, adding one each week.

4. Pray for believers today who have no Bible, or who risk their freedom to own one, and consider supporting those who supply them.

5. Examine how much time you give to Scripture compared with the news and your phone. Make one specific change this week.

A PRAYER

Lord, Your word is not bound. It went into the prison and the barracks when nothing else could, and it did not return to You empty.

Forgive me for leaving it unopened while I have it freely. Give me an appetite for it, as for bread.

Help me to hide it in my heart now, so that no one can take it from me later.

And strengthen all who carry Your word into dangerous places, and all who wait for it in the dark. Amen.