Archive: “Even If You Wish It, We Won’t Kill You!”

This Romanian preacher tells of bringing Christ to his people while under the Stalin regime

By Josef Tson

It was Stalin’s time—the peak of the communist terror. Romania succumbed to communist rule in 1948. The program was to convert the country to atheism. Communists purged the libraries of Christian books, and printing Christian literature was forbidden. One could read only what the Communists permitted. In that atmosphere of terror, persecution and restriction I became a Christian.

A few months later I went to a university to study literature, linguistics and languages. My main passion was books, but it was nearly impossible to find any Christian literature. When I finally found a man who had some Christian books he told me it would be too dangerous for me to borrow them. (If the communists learned that he had given them to me, he would be thrown in jail.) So he allowed me to come to his house to read them.

In a couple of months I had read all the books that he had. So I asked him, “Brother, I want to grow as a Christian. What can I do?” He told me there were two English libraries in Bucharest left by former American missionaries. He could arrange for me to get access to them if I knew English.

I immediately enrolled in an English course. Only four students in the whole university dared take that course, and everyone looked at us dubiously because we wanted to learn the language of the capitalists. In six months I was able to read English.

I got in touch with that man, and one of the first English books he gave me was The Christ On The Mount, a working philosophy of life by E. Stanley Jones. It talked about discussing Christianity with the intellectuals of India; it was a great revelation to me. Communist teachers had been telling me that only ignorant people believed in God, that science had proven that there is no God and that educated people did not believe in Him. I learned from reading Dr. Jones’ books, though, that it is possible to think about Christianity in an intellectual way.

When I finished at the university in 1955, I felt called to Christian ministry, so I went to the Baptist seminary in Bucharest. Two years later somebody gave me another book written by a Methodist. That book condemned all Christian faith in the Atonement. I wasn’t prepared for this encounter with liberal theology, and through this experience and a few other encounters with liberal theology I lost my faith.

I left the seminary and went through a spiritual darkness for a few years. But the Lord took care of me. As I read more, another author helped me understand the biblical concepts of atonement, substitution and redemption through Jesus Christ.

One day the Lord opened a way for me to escape from Romania and go to England. There I received a scholarship to study at Oxford University, where I earned my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theology. During my three years at Oxford I discovered that I was able to defend my evangelical position with the highest academic documentation available. I learned that I didn’t have to commit intellectual suicide in order to be a biblical theologian, thinker and preacher.

Something else happened in Oxford; I was called to go back to my own country.

I met with the leaders of the evangelical groups at Oxford, and they wanted to know exactly why I wanted to go back to Romania. I explained that in communist countries the people were disappointed with communism and were searching for alternatives. They were ready for the Gospel. I wanted to give it to them, and I hoped to train a new generation of preachers. A skeptical student asked, “Josef, it all sounds marvelous, but what chances of success do you have?”

I smiled to myself and thought, “Here is a typical western way of thinking—chances of success.” In Romania you don’t come to Christ to have success. You come to Christ to go the narrow way with few other people. You are despised, harassed and discriminated against. You lose everything and learn to live victoriously with Christ in poverty. That’s the call of the Gospel there. And this man was asking about success!

I didn’t know what to do with that question, so, as usual, I prayed. “Lord,” I asked, “what if I ask You that question? What chances of success do You give me when I go to Romania?” My Lord was quick. He said, “Josef, my answer is in Matthew 10:16, ‘I send you out as [a] sheep in the midst of wolves.’” I immediately saw a kind of vision. I saw a circle of wolves and a sheep in the center of the circle. And the Lord said, “Josef, do you see that image? That’s the most hopeless situation you can conceive. Tell me what chance that sheep has of staying alive for five minutes, let alone of converting the wolves. That’s how I send you, Josef. Totally hopeless. No chance of success. Totally vulnerable. Josef, if you will go to Romania as I send you, with no guarantees of success, go.”

I considered this the most crucial experience in my intellectual and theological pilgrimage. I went immediately to the Bible to ask the question, “Why does God send me so hopelessly out there?” The answer came quickly. Jesus said, “As my father sent Me, so send I you. My father sent Me to be the Lamb of God. I send you as a lamb to wolves.”

To put it in other words, I already knew what the cross of Christ had achieved. But Christ said to me, “You pick up your cross, Josef, and do the same.” I came to see that when the wolves would jump on me to tear me to pieces I could say, “I love you, and if you kill me, I’ll actually die for you. Because if you kill me you will see the love of Christ in action.” And at least some of those wolves would begin to shudder and change, and they would become lambs. The only way those wolves could understand what a lamb is would be by killing it. For two thousand years this has been God’s way of conquering the world. So with that I went back to Romania.

I had decided to put my life on the altar, and I came to understand that martyrdom was part of my job. As I told my dear wife, “I want to see in this land a generation of people who don’t hide their faith. I hate the notion of underground Christianity. I want people who will stand up and pay for what they believe. As Christ said, ‘If you won’t give witness of Me before this wicked generation, I can’t bring witness of you before My Father.’ You cannot be a secret Christian knowing this.”

But how could I make others stand up if I wouldn’t do it? So I returned to Romania and courageously preached the Gospel. If the communists had killed me, it would have been the supreme example I could have given. Only then would others have stood up in the same way. I even wrote in one of the papers about the sin of survival: “If you want to survive, you have to compromise. There are times when Christ doesn’t expect you to survive. He wants you to be a martyr. He wants you to preach the Gospel, pay for it with your life and conquer by your dying.”

On the fourth of October 1974, the government had had enough of me. (I had been preaching for two years.) On that day seven policemen came to my door. They searched my house for eight hours, confiscated all of my library, placed me under house arrest for the next six months and forced me to go to police headquarters for interrogation almost every day.

I was the pastor of a church at that time, and I still had to preach on Friday nights and Sundays. Fortunately the police had left two books with me. (They were too torn to bother with.) One of them was written by a German author who had dared to stand up against Hitler and consequently had gone through harsh interrogations and treatments. The other book was Abundant Living by E. Stanley Jones, which I just left in my study. But I read the other one every night at bedtime to give me courage for the next day’s interrogation.

The purpose of the interrogations was to break me physically, mentally and spiritually. Sometimes there were 10 hours of interrogation in a day, and I would come home almost broken physically. I was scared all of the time. I never knew how they would treat me or when I would answer with something that would aggravate my situation. After about six weeks of interrogations, I began to break down. I was tired, and I no longer knew why I was going through these things. I only knew that I was desperate and that I wanted to get out of there.

Late one afternoon as I returned from interrogation I went into my study, fell flat on my face and started to cry. In my desperation I heard a voice saying, “Stand up, take that book and read!” The book by Dr. Jones was the only one there, so I couldn’t have made a mistake. I opened it to a page on which E. Stanley Jones discussed Christ and His cross. He said that at the time Jesus came to earth the cross was considered an instrument of torture; it was a symbol of the cruelest death. But Jesus didn’t just bear His cross stoically. He transformed it into an instrument of salvation. “You too,” said Dr. Jones, “you have to do the same with your cross! Don’t just bear it, for your cross can impinge on somebody else’s life. Instead look around at what bearing your cross can do for others. Transform your suffering into something meaningful for other people.” I felt that God was speaking directly to me.

Every Sunday people came with tape recorders to record the messages of a man who was, all week, in interrogations, and whatever I preached went all across the country. One of the greatest sermons I preached at the time was on joy. (“The joy of the Lord is your strength” Nehemiah 8:10.) At the end of that day, somebody said, “Josef, it’s incredible. I came this morning expecting to see a wreck, and there you were beaming with joy. I said to myself, ‘If Josef can preach about joy, it’s real!'” So I came to see how my cross was becoming something very important for others.

That book by E. Stanley Jones had redirected my thinking at a crucial moment in my life. I immediately decided to translate it into Romanian. Every morning I would get up much earlier than necessary and would translate a page in Romanian. After the day’s interrogation I would translate another one. On the weekend I would translate another page. By the end of my six months of house arrest and interrogations I had translated the entire book.

Christian books cannot be printed in Romania, so I made six carbon copies by hand. Somebody who had binding equipment bound them for me. I gave the copies to a few friends, and they paid professional typists to retype the book. It spread like fire.

Toward the end of the six months of interrogations, one of the police officers got fed up with me and threatened to kill me. I told him this: “Sir, your supreme weapon is killing. My supreme weapon is dying. You know that my sermons are on tapes all over the country. When you kill me, you will sprinkle those sermons with my blood. Everybody who has these tapes will say, ‘I’d better listen because that preacher really meant it. He paid with his life for it.’ Sir, my preaching will speak 10 times louder if you kill me. I will actually win the victory in this land if you choose to kill me.”

The officer sent me home.

One of his colleagues told one of my friends, “We know that Mr. Tson would love to be a martyr, but we are not foolish enough to fulfill his wish.” When I learned that even if I wished it they wouldn’t kill me, I began to think of the implications. For so many years I was afraid of dying, and because of that I had kept quiet about my faith. And I wasted my life in inactivity. But when I realized the value of dying and said, “Lord, that would be the supreme honor—the crowning glory of my ministry—so, Lord, here I am,” the officers said, “Even if you wish it, we won’t kill you.” Now I could go across the country and preach whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, wherever I wanted, because they wouldn’t kill me even if I begged them to.

As long as I had wanted to save my life, I was losing it. When I put it on the altar, I discovered I was completely free to witness in my country. The Lord started a revival through this. A new generation of young people was ready to stand up for the Lord with new courage. They were ready to die for what they preached.

God’s strategy is to conquer the world through people who put their lives completely on the altar. This world would be conquered in no time if every Christian would say, “I am sold out. Lord, send me wherever You want. And I know that the supreme way that You would conquer through me would be to illustrate Your love by my literally dying for You.”

That is what it takes.

Dr. Josef Tson is president of the Wheaton, Illinois-based Romanian Missionary Society. He has received an honorary doctorate from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary.