The Man Who Saved His Enemy on the Ice

In 1569, a Dutch Anabaptist named Dirk Willems sat locked in a prison tower in Asperen, Holland, awaiting execution for the crime of being rebaptized as an adult. One winter night, he lowered himself from the tower on knotted rags and sprinted across a frozen pond toward freedom. A guard scrambled after him. Willems, thin from months of starvation, made it safely across the ice. But the heavier guard did not. The ice cracked, and the man plunged into the freezing water, crying out for help.

Willems stopped. He turned around. He reached back across the broken ice and pulled the very man pursuing him to safety.

The guard, stunned and grateful, would have released him. But the burgomaster, watching from the shore, ordered Willems seized. Weeks later, Dirk Willems was burned at the stake.

Paul writes that scarcely for a righteous person would someone dare to die — yet perhaps for a good person someone might. But God demonstrates His own love in this: while we were still sinners, still enemies, Christ died for us. Willems caught a glimpse of that upside-down love, the kind that runs toward the hostile and the undeserving. How much greater, then, is the love of the One who did not simply pull us from cold water, but bore the full weight of the cross so that His enemies might be called His children.