I can still remember the slightly musty smell of my childhood church’s cramped library. It was there I discovered World War II memoir of Corrie ten Boom, the Dutch watchmaker, The Hiding Place. In ten Boom’s memoir the reader has to wrestle with the question, “how can we forgive?”
If you know ten Boom’s story, you’ll likely remember how God brought ten Boom face-to-face with a Nazi guard years after her imprisonment. If you haven’t heard this story, it’s worth your time and ten Boom’s account is posted below.[i]
Recently I read Larry Loftis’s The Watchmaker’s Daughter, an excellent telling of ten Boom’s story. In his book, Loftis shares another story of forgiveness that contains some significant truths for us to mine.
The ten Boom family was turned into the Gestapo by a former employee, Jan Vogel. Vogel was the single most difficult person for ten Boom to forgive. He had treated her family poorly and then had entrapped them out of spite.
In The Hiding Place, Corrie shares one of her exchanges with Betsie about Vogel:
"Betsie, don't you feel anything about Jan Vogel? Doesn't it bother you?"
"Oh yes, Corrie! Terribly! I've felt for him ever since I knew - and pray for him whenever his name comes into my mind. How dreadfully he must be suffering!'
For a long time I lay silent in the huge shadowy barracks restless with the sighs, snores, and stirrings of hundreds of women. Once again I had the feeling that this sister with whom I had spent all of my life belonged somehow to another order of beings. Wasn't she telling me in her gentle way that I was as guilty as Jan Vogel? Didn't he and I stand together before an all-seeing God convicted of the same sin of murder? For I had murdered him with my heart and with my tongue.
"Lord Jesus," I whispered into the lumpy ticking of the bed, "I forgive Jan Vogel and I pray you will forgive me. I have done him great damage. Bless him now, and his family ..." That night for the first time since our betrayer had a name, I slept deep and dreamlessly until the whistle summoned us to roll call.
Loftis’s book shares that Corrie’s journey of forgiveness doesn’t end here. After the war, ten Boom continued to struggle with forgiving Vogel. Convicted that she needed to release Vogel, ten Boom took action.
On June 19, 1945, Corrie wrote to Vogel.
Dear Sir,
Today I heard that most probably, you were the one who betrayed me. I went through ten months of concentration camp. My father died after nine days of imprisonment. My sister died in prison too. The harm you planned was turned into good for me by God. I came nearer to him. A severe punishment is awaiting you. I have prayed for you that the Lord may accept you if you repent. I have forgiven you everything. God will also forgive you everything if you ask him. If it is difficult for you to pray, then ask if God will give you his Spirit who works the faith in your heart. I hope that the path that you will now take will work for your eternal salvation.
Corrie ten Boom
There are some significant lessons to learn from ten Boom’s forgiveness of Vogel.
1. Forgiveness means addressing the truth.
Note how Corrie doesn’t mince words when she addresses Vogel, “Today I heard that most probably, you were the one who betrayed me. I went through ten months of concentration camp. My father died after nine days of imprisonment. My sister died in prison too.” You can hear the pain coming through ten Boom’s pen. The forgiveness she is offering is costly. Additionally, ten Boom doesn’t sugar coat Vogel’s motives. What he intended was “harm.”
2. Forgiveness means trusting God.
Incredibly, ten Boom is able to trust that “The harm you planned was turned into good for me by God. I came nearer to him.” You might not be at the point of understanding why God would have allowed evil to befall you. Forgiveness doesn’t require that you understand God’s purposes, but it does mean that you trust God, even if you don’t understand him.
3. Forgiveness means giving the offender to God.
Ten Boom’s next sentence might be shocking to some. “A severe punishment is awaiting you.” Corrie releases Vogel to God’s just judgment and knows that if he does not repent, wrath awaits. To forgive we must release the one who owes us to God’s judgment. We can neither enact judgment on them ourselves, nor shield them from God’s judgment.
4. Our forgiveness is different than God’s forgiveness.
Finally, Corrie pleads with Vogel that he repent. Her forgiveness is not to be confused with God’s forgiveness. “I have forgiven you everything. God will also forgive you everything if you ask him. If it is difficult for you to pray, then ask if God will give you his Spirit who works the faith in your heart. I hope that the path you will now take will work for your eternal salvation.” Ten Boom urges Vogel to repent and ask God for forgiveness, knowing that God has mercy on repentant hearts. As John promises, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn 1:9).
What great hope we have in our merciful Lord who forgives us our sins and in the overflow of his mercy grants us the ability to forgive those who have sinned against us!
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[i] From The Hiding Place: It was in a church in Munich that I saw him, a balding heavyset man in a gray overcoat, a brown felt hat clutched between his hands. People were filing out of the basement room where I had just spoken, moving along the rows of wooden chairs to the door at the rear.
It was 1947 and I had come from Holland to defeated Germany with the message that God forgives.
It was the truth they needed most to hear in that bitter, bombed-out land, and I gave them my favorite mental picture. Maybe because the sea is never far from a Hollander’s mind, I liked to think that that’s where forgiven sins were thrown.
“When we confess our sins,” I said, “God casts them into the deepest ocean, gone forever.”
The solemn faces stared back at me, not quite daring to believe. There were never questions after a talk in Germany in 1947. People stood up in silence, in silence collected their wraps, in silence left the room.
And that’s when I saw him, working his way forward against the others. One moment I saw the overcoat and the brown hat; the next, a blue uniform and a visored cap with its skull and crossbones.
It came back with a rush: the huge room with its harsh overhead lights, the pathetic pile of dresses and shoes in the center of the floor, the shame of walking naked past this man. I could see my sister’s frail form ahead of me, ribs sharp beneath the parchment skin. Betsie, how thin you were!
Betsie and I had been arrested for concealing Jews in our home during the Nazi occupation of Holland; this man had been a guard at Ravensbrück concentration camp where we were sent.
Now he was in front of me, hand thrust out: “A fine message, fräulein! How good it is to know that, as you say, all our sins are at the bottom of the sea!”
And I, who had spoken so glibly of forgiveness, fumbled in my pocketbook rather than take that hand. He would not remember me, of course–how could he remember one prisoner among those thousands of women?
But I remembered him and the leather crop swinging from his belt. It was the first time since my release that I had been face to face with one of my captors and my blood seemed to freeze.
“You mentioned Ravensbrück in your talk,” he was saying. “I was a guard in there.” No, he did not remember me.
“But since that time,” he went on, “I have become a Christian. 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”–again the hand came out–“will you forgive me?”
And I stood there–I whose sins had every day to be forgiven–and could not. Betsie had died in that place–could he erase her slow terrible death simply for the asking?
It could not have been many seconds that he stood there, hand held out, but to me it seemed hours as I wrestled with the most difficult thing I had ever had to do.
For 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 also 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.
And still I stood there with the coldness clutching my heart. But forgiveness is not an emotion–I knew that too. Forgiveness is an act of the will, and the will can function regardless of the temperature of the heart.
“Jesus, help me!” I prayed silently. “I can lift my hand. I can do that much. You supply the feeling.”
And so woodenly, mechanically, I thrust my hand into the one stretched out to me. And as I did, an incredible thing took place. The current started in my shoulder, raced down my arm, sprang into our joined hands. And then this healing warmth seemed to flood my whole being, bringing tears to my eyes.
“I forgive you, brother!” I cried. “With all my heart!”
For a long moment we grasped each other’s hands, the former guard and the former prisoner. I had never known God’s love so intensely as I did then.
And having thus learned to forgive in this hardest of situations, I never again had difficulty in forgiving: I wish I could say it! I wish I could say that merciful and charitable thoughts just naturally flowed from me from then on. But they didn’t.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned at 80 years of age, it’s that I can’t store up good feelings and behavior–but only draw them fresh from God each day.
Maybe I’m glad it’s that way. For every time I go to Him, He teaches me something else. I recall the time, some 15 years ago, when some Christian friends whom I loved and trusted did something which hurt me.
You would have thought that, having forgiven the Nazi guard, this would have been child’s play. It wasn’t. For weeks I seethed inside. But at last I asked God again to work His miracle in me. And again it happened: first the cold-blooded decision, then the flood of joy and peace.
I had forgiven my friends; I was restored to my Father.
Then, why was I suddenly awake in the middle of the night, hashing over the whole affair again? My friends! I thought. People I loved! If it had been strangers, I wouldn’t have minded so.
I sat up and switched on the light. “Father, I though it was all forgiven! Please help me do it!”
But the next night I woke up again. They’d talked so sweetly too! Never a hint of what they were planning. “Father!” I cried in alarm. “Help me!”
His help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks.
“Up in that church tower,” he said, nodding out the window, “is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops.
“I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive someone, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.”
And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversation. But the force–which was my willingness in the matter–had gone out of them. They came less and less often and at last stopped altogether.
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