Past Persecutions

Last month Bill went with our friend, Pasha to a conference at the largest Baptist Church in Kiev. The purpose of the conference was to honor the men and women from Soviet times who had been publicly faithful to their beliefs and did not retreat when faced with intimidation. At that time the Soviet solution for this “problem” was imprisonment.

At the conference a number of stories were told about life under enforced atheism. One elderly woman explained how during her imprisonment she used the bags from her small portion of daily rations to write children’s Bible stories. Someone was able to copy and distribute them to families whose Bibles had been confiscated and destroyed.

Another older German spoke of how his business frequently brought him from Germany to the Soviet Union on trips. When his wife, a believer, asked him to take Bibles with him to distribute, he quickly replied “No.” But, on a subsequent trip she placed a few in his valise anyway, along with the name and number of a contact. When he got to Moscow and found them he was angry, but nevertheless made the contact. After witnessing the recipients’ tears of joy in receiving them, some actually kissing their new possession, he himself believed. Through the rest of his business career, he made it a priority to bring Bibles to places where they were illegal. When the Ukrainian pastor asked him if he was ever afraid, he replied “Da.”

One of our friends, Oleg, is the Director of the Bible College here in Kiev. He is in his 30’s and tells of being a 10 year old boy growing up in a typical Ukrainian village. He was different because he was a Christian. When his teacher discovered this, she made it a point to single him out. He was moved to the front of the class, called a “fool” and repeatedly ridiculed.

God has given the people of Ukraine a window of freedom but who knows what the future holds for this country and the believers here?

“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us?

He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?

Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us.

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: ‘For Your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.’

Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us.

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8: 31-39