Geoffrey Bull, recounting his experience in a Chinese communist prison camp, tells of three years he had to live without a Bible. The communists hoped to cut him off from his source of spiritual solace and strength. It was a vain hope. He had for years been storing up that Word in his heart. Then they began brainwashing him. He describes the nagging and noise, the scrutiny and spying, the tension. He tells how they would threaten him with execution – threats always baited with a promise of pardon if he would reform and acknowledge his crime against the people. The tension was aggravated by ceaseless provocation and baiting, by attacks on his integrity and self-respect, and by endless prying into his thoughts. From morning to night, day after day, month after month it went on – argument, haranguing, criticism, and struggle. Every movement he made was under intense scrutiny. Officials, wardens, fellow prisoners kept at it. For fear of their own future they dared not relent. There was no love, no peace, nothing but indoctrination and examination. The whole thing was aimed at a single end: to bring his mind into captivity to Marx.
In the end they gave him back his Bible. Geoffrey Bull describes the ecstasy with which he once again held it in his hands: “Ringing in my ears were forty months of man’s words, man’s wisdom, man’s arguments, man’s hurt. Now on the page before me ran the quiet yet pungent words of Holy Scripture: ‘Where is the wise...where is the disputer of this world?’” Long after his release he wrote, “Even today, I feel like running up and down the corridors of learning shouting out: ‘Yes, where is he?’ After the mad haranguings and fanatical ragings of the Marxists, let me ask...’Where is the wise? Hath not God made the foolish the wisdom of this world?’”
Geoffrey Bull’s tormentors had their wits sharpened by enmity. His mind was sharpened by God’s Word. He was wiser than they.
What to do:
✞Study the Word of God; it will make you wiser than your enemies.
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