Lots of Berliners talked of Ronald Reagan’s speech, delivered in Berlin, almost two years earlier, when he demanded:”Mr. Gorbachev, Tear Down this Wall!” Was President Reagan’s dramatic call about to happen? Some Berliners worried the soldiers would take charge. No one knew.
Ironically, the worst source of information was the media, perhaps because in 1987 so many had underestimated the importance of Reagan’s speech. The New York Times declared that Reagan had “lost the air of authority” and suggested that Reagan’s Berlin Wall speech was “surreal” and indicated that the “presidency had ceased to function.” The Washington Post, and U.S. News & World Report has also been highly critical.
But, in November 1989, Berliners remembered the power of a U.S. president calling for the hateful wall to be torn down. Each person to whom I spoke, seemed to know someone, a family member or friend, who had been trapped on the other side of the wall. Hope was alive, powerful and focused on tearing down the Wall. -"I Helped Tear Down the Wall"
(Tim) Grant Olson, the producer of the video at the bottom of this post, was an elder at our church some years back. Since then, he's gone on to serve in Campus Crusade's work in Eastern Europe. Although I'm in strong disagreement with Crusade's relegation of the Church to the sideline of evangelism and discipleship, since the fall of communism twenty years ago, it's been a great joy to see how Crusade has poured men into Eastern Europe where they've boldly proclaimed Jesus Christ.
There was some glamor in the early years, but that glamor has long since departed. The callouses Marxism left on men's hearts are real. Also, the systemic poverty and corruption that is Communism's legacy remains intractable in many of the Eastern European countries. The glory days of the first opening of Eastern Europe are long gone and what's left for those giving themselves to the people of countries such as Albania, Hungary, and Romania is very tough slogging.
So God bless Campus Crusade and her men and women who have loved Eastern Europeans with the Gospel of Jesus Christ!
All this on the occasion of our arrival, today, at the Twentieth Anniversary of the act of God pulling down the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Men of towering courage and strength like Lech Walesa, John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn were putty in God's hands to bring down the bloodiest ideology and greatest oppression man had known up until that time. (It's since been dwarfed by feminism's victims, one billion and counting.)
In my office is a picture Dad had been given by the artist who drew it. He had the drawing on the wall of his study and loved it...
It's a triptych of one of my heroes, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, shown as a youth, middle aged man, and old man. The drawing was done by a dear friend from Colombia Bible College days, Bonnie Supplee. When people under thirty come in my office, they often ask "Who's that?" I answer by asking them if they've ever heard of Alexander Solzhenitsyn? So far, they've all said "no."
Sadly, Christian children have learned about the heroism of the men on the Titanic who gave the first seats on lifeboats to women, but they know nothing of the great courage and work of Walesa, John Paul II, or Solzhenitsyn. It's time to teach our children the history of the Cold War; of the bloodthirsty nature of utopian ideology, centralized political power, the idolatry of the state, and the obscene slaughter of a hundred million men, woman, and children on the altar of these gods.
Then, our sons and daughters will be better able to understand the extreme wickedness of feminism whose victims currently stand at over 1,000,000,000, and continue to fall at the rate of about 50,000,000 per year--here in our own "In God we trust," just down the street from our library and courthouse, kitty-corner to our Wendys and Kroger, three miles up the street from our church-house where we worship the God of justice and truth each Lord's Day morning.
So show this video to the young boys and girls, the college men and women of your church. Show it to your own children and grandchildren. We must not forget the work of God twenty years ago, nor the evil He there condemned.
