IN THE YEAR 1938 thirteen young army officers were sent to the national penitentiary at Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, for their misdeeds. These leaders had been sentenced by court-martial: six of them to death before a firing squad, five of them to hard labor for life, and two to ten years hard labor.
Three of these young men had been brought up under the blessings of Christianity. But never having sought the Lord, though all were well educated, they had instead lived in sin and drunkenness.
However, God began to work mightily in their hearts. Faced with death, these three truly and sincerely turned to God and trusted Christ as their Saviour. At the court-martial, one of them testified that should God let him live, he would preach the gospel. This produced some laughter as he was one that was due to face the firing squad.
Another of the condemned group had been brought up very religiously. At seventeen he had felt a strong conviction of sin and being a sincere fellow he became a very active member of the church. He threw himself wholeheartedly into these activities, but he found no peace or pardon for sin. He was unable to continue with what he felt was a mockery. Not hang found reality for his own soul’s need, he renounced all religion as mere hypocrisy, gave up God Himself, and became an atheist.
Several years later, his wife lay dying. Then he broke his resolve of infidelity and cried to God saying, “Give me my wife and I will serve Thee.” That prayer was answered. God raised up his wife and in an effort to fulfill his promise he went back to the church again and found no reality. Then he went into politics and being involved in a rebellion, he was thrown into prison. There in his solitary cell he read through a book of sermons and found verses from Isaiah, the Psalms and Job, which were as life to his tortured soul. Two days later, this book was taken from him, but he had memorized many of the verses.
Released from solitary confinement, he was able to obtain a Bible which he read constantly from the first to the last. He began to practice extreme piety, but it seemed that a blank wall stood between him and God. His heart longed for peace but he found none. As he continued to study the Bible, he found passage after passage that revealed and condemned the errors in his faith. One day, his soul in an agony of conviction, he meditated on the Song of Solomon. He heard his brother officer singing, “Thy Yoke is Easy,” and he longed to be able to sing with him, but he hadn’t found Christ. At last, in reading the Song of Solomon, the Spirit of God broke through the darkness of his soul and he understood the “Beloved” to be the Lord Jesus, and that to know God is to know and love the Saviour. He passed a restless night and in the morning for the first time he accepted the invitation of the Christian boys to join them in their devotional service. As they sang again, “Thy Yoke is Easy,” the light of God flooded his soul and he found peace and pardon in Christ. Henceforth, he could say, “I am my Beloved’s, and my Beloved is mine.” Song of Sol. 6:33I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies. (Song of Solomon 6:3).
In a moment, all of the old bitterness and darkness was swept away in the joy of eternal life by faith in Him who had died as his surety under the judgment of God.
The hand of God was seen in that prison, and the death penalties were commuted to life sentences. The prison became a Bible school and a mission field. Ten of those thirteen former officers were gloriously saved, and a large number of other prisoners of all classes of society came to know the’ Lord Jesus as their Saviour. Sometime later, through the mercy of God, those men were pardoned and set free. Most of the converted officers, wonderfully saved from death, consecrated their lives to preach the Word in Haiti.
The testimony of those men shook the upper cultured class in Haiti, a class which too had scarcely been touched by the gospel. Even the military judge who condemned them was saved. One of those whom he had condemned had the joy of leading him into the knowledge of the Lord.
ML-05/08/1966