Do you recognize the name Corrie ten Boom? She was a Dutch watchmaker in the mid-1940s. The Nazis had invaded the Netherlands and the ten Boom family hid the Jews, and for two years, they helped them escape. Eventually, an informant told the Nazi Secret Police and Corrie ten Boom and her family – eventually 30 in all – were arrested and sent to a Nazi concentration camp.

Eventually, they were sent to the Ravensbruck women’s labor camp in Germany. They held worship services there and Corrie’s sister died there at the age of 59. Corrie herself was 52. Two weeks later, through a clerical error, Corrie was set free but seven days after that, all the women in her age group were sent to the gas chambers.

Corrie ten Boom wrote a book about her experiences, titled The Hiding Place (published in 1971) that was made into a movie in 1975. There is a scene in the movie, set in the  Ravensbruck concentration camp, where Carrie and her sister, Betsie, and 10,000 other women are living in horrible, degrading, hideous conditions. In this scene, Betsie is leading a Bible study among the women. One woman, laying on a bunk bed, mocks their worship. She says, “If your God is such a good God, why does he allow this kind of suffering?”

Dramatically, the woman tears off the bandages on her hands to show the broken, mangled fingers. “I was the first violinist of the symphony orchestra. Did your God will this?”

There is silence. Then Corrie ten Boom steps to the side of her sister and says, “We can’t answer that question. All we know is that our God came to this earth, and became one of us, and he suffered with us and was crucified and died. And that he did it for love.”

Corrie ten Boom’s response was mostly perfect. I would correct one important part of her response. No, God did not “will” Adolf Hitler’s atrocities and the concentration camps and the murder and maiming of Jews and Gypsies and other minority groups. God does not “will” evil to occur. But yes, allowing man the freedom to choose, God does allow man the freedom to abuse what is good and use it for extreme evil.

But this study focuses more on the better part of ten Boom’s response. That response is very much the type of response that Job had in the middle of his suffering. Now Job lived before Jesus so he could not lean on the death, burial and resurrection of Christ for hope and assurance. But we will learn in this text that Job’s “life-line” in the midst of suffering was the word of God and Job’s response to that word.

Paul Holland