The Fall of The Wall

by Georg Hagedorn, November 09, 2009

Dear friends,

Today is a very special day for us in Germany. Exactly 20 years ago, the Berlin wall fell. Over the last couple of weeks I've been watching numerous documentaries on the events leading up to this. It just is amazing to see how God orchestrated this event in history. It is undeniable, that this was a miraculous event. It could never have been achieved by human efforts. Christians all over the world had been praying for this to happen.

There is an important note of irony that should not be missed. November 9, (1938) is also the date the Nazis began their systematic persecution of the Jewish people, looting Jewish synagogues, shops, and personal property. All this led to God’s judgment of the German nation. God was bound by His faithful promises made to Abraham:

...And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. (Genesis 12:3)

Some of the German citizens who arrested Jews and sent them to the labor and death camps were in turn arrested by the Russians after the war and sent to labor camps in Siberia, many of them never to return. Those who had taken Jewish property had their own property taken, fleeing for their lives and leaving everything behind. Those who had put the Jewish people in ghettos were imprisoned by their own state by a wall built around them. The authorities shot everyone who attempted to flee.

This analogy could be put forth with many more details. What is most striking to me is that God's grace is greater than all of this. I have talked to numerous people that came to saving faith through their experience in the Russian labor camps and the subsequent communist regime of East Germany. But it doesn't end there. The years following the fall of the Iron Curtain led to a re-awakening of Jewish life in Germany. Hundreds of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union migrated to Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. As somebody put it, “This (happened) in a country that once had an official state agenda to eradicate the Jews. Along with this Jewish population movement back to Germany, we have seen an openness of Jewish people to the Gospel. Numerous Messianic congregations have been established in recent years.

I wonder, “how many people fail to see God's hand in all of this and the resulting freedom in Germany for Jewish people to hear and proclaim the Gospel?”

Mostly in these difficult days it seems that people just complain about the circumstances brought about by the global economic crisis. This complaining is also heard from the lips of believers in Yeshua. Let us not forget the faithfulness of God, who is not only interested in liberating people from outward earthly regimes. The Lord wants every man to experience real freedom and eternal life through the acceptance in faith of the Gospel available only through our Jewish Messiah… Yeshua HaMaschiach. I am reminded of a promise that God gave through the Prophet Jeremiah, in the midst of most difficult times:

It is because of Jehovah's loving kindnesses that we are not consumed (as a people), because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning; great is thy faithfulness. (Lamentations 3:22-23).

No other nation can lay claim to this specific promise of preservation of the Jewish people. This promise to the Jewish people is based on Jehovah’s unconditional covenants to HIS own Chosen People, the physical descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God kept His promises to Israel during the Holocaust. While other Gentile nations have disappeared in the sands of time, God’s faithfulness to Israel teaches us that we who belong to Him can always depend on His eternal principles, rooted in His unchanging eternal character.

“HIS mercies are indeed new every morning.”

Georg Hagedorn

Ariel Ministries, Representative in Germany