The Watchmaker's Daughter Who Could Not Stop Testifying

For thirty-three years after her release from Ravensbruck concentration camp, Corrie ten Boom traveled the world telling one story: God had done something that defied all explanation. She had watched her sister Betsie die on a filthy barracks floor in 1944, yet heard Betsie whisper with her final strength, "We must tell people what we have learned here — that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still."

Corrie carried that testimony to sixty-four countries. Audiences in Nairobi, Tokyo, Havana, and countless small churches heard her declare what she had witnessed with her own eyes — a God who walked into the darkest pit of human cruelty and proved Himself sovereign there. Reporters sometimes pressed her: Wasn't she simply lucky? Hadn't circumstances just worked out? Corrie would shake her head. "I do not tell you a theory," she would say. "I tell you what I have seen."

This is precisely what Moses demanded Israel consider in Deuteronomy 4. "Ask now about the former days," he urged. Has any god ever walked into an empire and pulled an entire nation out of slavery with signs and wonders and an outstretched arm? Search history from one end of the heavens to the other. You will find nothing like it. The Lord alone is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath. Like Corrie, Moses was not offering theology in the abstract. He was testifying: I was there. I saw the fire. There is no other.