Totured For Christ

[hogndog]

WND Exclusive FAITH UNDER FIRE
Tortured for Christ
The extraordinary story of 1 man's victory over Communism
Posted: July 16, 2005
1:00 am Eastern

By Ron Strom
© 2008 WorldNetDaily.com



He was an outspoken anti-communist with the scars to prove it, a man raised Jewish who embraced Christianity with uncommon devotion, and a visionary whose life was dedicated to helping believers who suffer for their faith.

He was Richard Wurmbrand, founder of leading Christian-persecution organization The Voice of the Martyrs.

As WorldNetDaily reported, Wurmbrand began Voice of the Martyrs in 1967 after enduring years of imprisonment and torture at the hands of Communists in his native Romania.

As a young married man in 1937, Wurmbrand and his wife, then Jewish, traveled to a small village in Romania where Christian Wolfkes, an old carpenter who had been praying that he migth share the Gospel with a Jew, gave them a copy of the New Testament. Wurmbrand and wife Sabina eventually converted to Christianity.


Richard Wurmbrand

As a pastor in Romania during World War II, Wurmbrand sought to reach out to occupying soldiers with the Gospel. He and Sabina, however, suffered repeated beatings and arrest by the Nazis. Jewish family members perished in Germany's
concentration camps.

A decision in 1945 would shape the rest of Wurmbrand's life. A bio on the Voice of the Martyrs' website states:

1945: Richard and Sabina Wurmbrand attend the "Congress of Cults" arranged by the Romanian Communist government. As many religious leaders come forward to swear loyalty to the new regime, Sabina Wurmbrand tells her husband to "wipe the shame from the face of Jesus." Richard, knowing the outcome of such an act, steps forward. The delegates believe he too will praise the new leadership, but, to their surprise, Richard tells the 4,000 delegates that their duty as a Christian is to glorify God and Christ alone.

That act of obedience to his God caused Wurmbrand's eventual designation as "Prisoner No. 1" by the Romanian government. He was arrested by police in 1948 on his way to church on a Sunday morning. Three years were spent in solitary confinement.

In 1950, the communists arrested Sabina for helping with the underground church she and Richard had begun and forced her to work on the Danube Canal. Her 9-year-old son, Mihai, was left behind and forced to live on the streets.

After three years, Sabina was released and told her husband had died in prison. In 1956, however, after serving eight and a half years in prison, Richard was released, having withstood horrific torture. Despite warnings not to do so, Richard again began working in the underground church in Romania.

After being turned in by an associate, Wurmbrand, in 1959, again was arrested. He served in prison for another five years.

In his book "In God's Underground," Wurmbrand describes the various horrors he suffered in prison: sleep deprivation; starvation diet; forced to race around his tiny cell for hours until he collapsed; beatings with truncheons and boots; water funneled down his throat until it filled his stomach, which was then violently kicked; the soles of his feet flogged Inquisition-style; guards urinating and spitting into his open mouth; drugged into delirium; and terrorized by dogs kept inches from his throat.

In 1965, the Wurmbrands were "ransomed" out of Romania for $10,000. They traveled to Scandinavia, England and eventually to the U.S. The pastor's captors warned him upon leaving Romania that he was not to speak against communism, a warning he did not heed.

The next year, just one month after arriving in the U.S., Wurmbrand testified before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, where he stripped to the waist to reveal 18 wounds on his neck, back and chest – evidence of the torture he had suffered at the hands of the Communists.

Talking about his time in solitary confinement, Wurmbrand told the senators: "For years I … never [saw] sun, moon, flowers, snow, stars, no man except the interrogator who beat [me], but I can say I have seen heaven open, I have seen Jesus Christ, I have seen the angels and we were very happy there."

Speaking requests poured into Wurmbrand after his Senate appearance, and he became committed to sharing about the atrocities Christians were subject to in Communist countries. Wurmbrand became known as "The Voice of the Underground Church" and "The Iron Curtain St. Paul." At the same time the Romanian secret police was plotting to kill the pastor.

In 1967, the Wurmbrands began Jesus to the Communist World, which later became The Voice of the Martyrs. The ministry's first monthly newsletter was published later that year. Richard also released "Tortured for Christ," the story of his persecution by his Communist captors.

In the ensuing years, Wurmbrand expanded his work of helping persecuted Christians and educating the West about abuses, with activity eventually in 80 nations.

In 1989, Wurmbrand's home country, Romania, gained its freedom after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the ousting of the oppressive regime of Elena and Nicolae Ceausescu.

After 25 years of exile, in 1990 Richard and Sabina returned to Romania and helped set up a Christian printing facility. In fact, the city of Bucharest offered one of the very cells Wurmbrand had been held to store Christian books.

In the early '90s, Wurmbrand worked to get the Gospel and Christian literature to former Communist countries, including Albania, Romania, Moldavia, Russia, Ukraine and Bulgaria. At the same time, Wurmbrand led new efforts to help Christians in Asia and Africa.

Sabina died in 2000, and less than a year later, Richard succumbed, at the age of 91.

Besides "Tortured for Christ," Wurmbrand wrote several other books, including "From Suffering to Triumph," "If Prison Walls Could Speak, "Marx and Satan" and "The Church in Chains."

Wurmbrand's Voice of the Martyrs ministry was a way to help suffering Christians as he had been helped in his time of need. When asked how he survived as an illegal pastor in Romania, Wurmbrand told the Senate panel:

"The Christians sustained me everywhere. I had no salary. I had no regular salary, but the Christians everywhere sustained me. In Romania the first question asked of a pastor or a priest of any denomination is: Has he been in prison? If he has been in prison he is all right. All the Christians sustain him."

Get the book "Tortured for Christ"

hogndog

 

[prodromos]

Glory to God!
What a wonderful testimony.

 

[hogndog]

You really should get the book if you have a bookstore nearby.
I read it in or around 1972 and yes it is a very powerful testimony.

hogndog

 

[LamorakDesGalis]

I remember reading the book, even though it was a long time ago. Its quite a testimony.


LDG

 

[hogndog]

http://www.pittsburghstandard.com/MarchFiles/E1March.html

Review of Tortured for Christ by Richard Wurmbrand

Matthew Bell

Copy Editor

This month’s book review article will be an encore submission as we prepare our hearts for the Good Friday/Easter season.

Just prior to the September 11 bombings, a group of Christian missionaries and international aid workers were imprisoned by the government of Afghanistan, along with several innocent Afghanis. The ‘crime‘? They exercised the Christian faith, including the command to evangelize. With the occurrence of the bombings, their case was rapidly forgotten, replaced by fears for our own safety here at home. Seeing as their fight in the current war is, if anything, actually more important for the long term peace of the world than military action, this month’s book is selected in their honor. That book, written in just a few days in the middle of the 20th century by an exiled Lutheran pastor, is Tortured for Christ, the testimony of the late Richard Wurmbrand.

The case of Tortured for Christ is a provocative one; Pastor Wurmbrand, one of those who suffered under the bloody regime of the Ceausescus’ in Romania, does not use normative human rights rhetoric. To explain, many say, when confronted by religious or political persecution, that the crime of the offending countries is one of harming others merely for having different ideas. Persecution offends the western sensibility, not because of virtue in the persecuted, but because persecution is intolerant. Pastor Wurmbrand hates persecution, but his stance against it is fueled not by this western sensibility. For him, persecution represents an evil even greater than intolerance, and those who are persecuted represent a greater good than that of mere dissent.

When he tells the somber tale of Christian martyrdom in the 20th century, he paints for us the portraits of men, women, and children who suffer because they are doing something far too significant to have the adjective mere applied to it. They are resisting the zeitgeist, the spirit of their age, which in Wurmbrand’s time was dialectal materialism taken to its logical conclusion. They do this by promoting the Christian Gospel, which upon close examination is really the very radical idea that people are not clumps of chemicals, meaningless automata driven by hunger and sex, but creatures designed to be images of the Divine. This image was shattered and fragmented by the willful choice to sin, to pursue mere hunger, lust, power — all partial goods — instead of the perfect good, the Glory of God, with which we were designed to fellowship. God, displeased by this broken fellowship has bent down to pour out not simply kindness, but Himself upon humanity in the form of His Son Jesus. Those who come to Jesus become not mere men, but “partakers of the divine nature”. For Wurmbrand, Communists persecuted this view not because they were intolerant, but because this Truth, and those who believe it, are not mere anythings. God has come among us. His message directly threatens our self-centered universe.

These are words only when they come from me, a westerner who has never suffered for this Truth. “The Pastor“, as his people called him, however saw first hand the power of Christ at work in those who resisted the toxic ideology of the Stalinists in Romania. He witnessed as he himself and his fellow prisoners resisted physical, psychological, and sexual tortures by the power of Christ, as He imparted His Spirit and Word to them. His words tell it more honestly than I can:

We had to sit for seventeen hours a day — for weeks, months and years — hearing:

Communism is good!

Communism is good!

Communism is good!

Christianity is stupid!

Christianity is stupid!

Christianity is stupid!

Give up!

Give up!

Give up!

Several Christians have asked me how we could resist brainwashing. There is only one method of resistance to brainwashing: it is “hard washing.” If the heart is cleansed by the love of Jesus Christ, and if the heart loves Him, one can resist all tortures. What would a loving bride not do for a loving bridegroom? What would a loving mother not do for her child? If you love Christ as Mary did, who had Christ as a baby in her arms, if you love Jesus as a bride loves her bridegroom, than you can resist such tortures.

Or consider this passage, even more representative of his ideology, and an even more lucid explanation of what it means to be spiritual:

In the prison of Gherla, a Christian named Grecu was sentenced to be beaten to death. The process lasted a few weeks, during which he was beaten very slowly...He was beaten on the testicles.

Then a doctor gave him an injection. He recovered...and then he was beaten again until he died under this slow, repeated beating. One who led this torture was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, whose name was Reck.

During the beatings, Reck said something to Grecu that the Communists often said to Christians, “You know, I am God. I have the power of life and death over you. The one who is in heaven cannot decide to keep you in life. Everything depends upon me. If I wish, you live. If I wish, you are killed. I am God!” So he mocked the Christian.

Brother Grecu, in this horrible situation, gave Reck a very interesting answer, which I afterward heard from Reck himself. He said, “You don’t know what a deep thing you have said. Every caterpillar is in reality a butterfly, if it develops rightly. You have not been created to be a torturer, a man who kills. You have been created to become like God, with the life of the Godhead in your heart. Many who have been persecutors like you, have come to realize — like the apostle Paul — that it is shameful for a man to commit atrocities, that they can do much better things. So they have become partakers of the divine nature. Jesus said to the Jews of His time, ‘Ye are gods.’ Believe me, Mr. Reck, your real calling is to be Godlike — to have the character of God, not a torturer.”

One great lesson arose from all the beatings, tortures, and butchery of the Communists: that the spirit is master of the body. We felt the torture, but it often seemed as something distant and far removed from the spirit which was lost in the glory of Christ and His presence with us.

Once in a class a professor told us something that disturbed me. He told us that with electrodes applied to the correct places in the brain, he could make you not simply hungry, or increase your libido, but that he could make us eat, or make us have sex. He denied the will. One day in class we were told that thought was random firing of neurons, and nothing more. I did not believe him, but had no evidence to counter. It didn’t occur to me that he, psychologists though he was, really didn’t have supreme evidence for his claim either.

Those who suffer for the right have experiential evidence that there is more to human existence and dignity than random electrochemistry. They have found that the spiritual world is more than a fable told us to provide catharsis. The persecuted, such as those heroes and heroines who suffered under the Ceausescus’ or under Stalin — or suffer under the Taliban — as such, are also soldiers. They fight for the same cause as did their Lord: to save the soul, which they love more than life, from those who would enslave it to the ends of mere culture, tradition, empty political philosophies, and the tyranny of all that the Scriptures call sin. Above all, they are winning, for the Lord is in them to work and will His good pleasure.

They are winning in a decisive sense. There is only so much that military and police action, as important as these are, can accomplish. If we strike down Osama bin Ladin, several more will take his place. The situation, in that sense, is analogous to the danger faced in the Cold War. A direct assault of the Iron Curtain would have brought about nuclear apocalypse.

The missing link in the new war, and the unsung heroes and heroines of the old Cold War, are those who suffer for the crime of opposing the toxic ideology of their own countries. Those who fought oppression from within the old Soviet Union were, as such, unrecognized allies of the western democracies. Likewise the martyrs suffering in nations such as Afghanistan are the allies of democracy. By telling others of the Peace of Christ, endangering their own lives, they combat the underlying cause of the new terrorism. Osama bin Ladin and his network know this. The Taliban knows this. That is why they arrested the Christian relief workers and the Afghani Christians. That is why so-called jihad groups in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sudan slaughter thousands of people. It is this fact which makes Tortured for Christ, with its celebration of Christian martyrs and lucid, evidential attack against stripping humanity of its God and soul, so timely. Richard Wurmbrand calls upon us to rethink the nature of faith, to reevaluate its role in the battle against tyranny.

Matt is a graduate student in the Intelligent Systems and Computer Science programs at the University of Pittsburgh. He also is an active member of East End Assembly of God in Bloomfield and the Chi Alpha chapter on the Pitt campus. Lastly, he loves books, and loves even more to talk about them.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7957160113259127737