"Dear friends and brethren,

The Gospels record that the two thieves crucified on either side of Jesus both mocked Him. However, one of them, according to Luke's account, had a change of heart and began to rebuke his comrade: "But the other criminal protested, "Don't you fear God even when you are dying? We deserve to die for our evil deeds, but this man hasn't done anything wrong"
(Luke 23:40-41).

In record time this thief gained the promise of entering Paradise the same day.

The Bible relates different stories in order to make it easier for us to grasp refined spiritual realities within ourselves. This being so, we should try to find out why one thief obtained Paradise, the best "steal" of his career, while the other failed to enter at the same door.

Oftentimes, children watching the feats of a magician think magic is simple. They see rabbits or watches being pulled out of a hat and have no idea of the props and many hours of training it takes to make such illusions possible.

Modern civilization also engenders "sophisticated illiteracy". A first grader once stated that butter "grows" in supermarkets. Likewise, one might get the idea that all there is to electricity is knowing how to turn a switch on.

The magic flying carpet of the Arabian Nights stories remained an impossible dream in those times, while for our generation flying is easy, because many inventors and engineers have applied the complex laws of aerodynamics.

The Scriptures are often veiled and telegraphic, but our slackness in meditating on their deeper implications make us believe that we can apply all kinds of Bible promises without spiritual effort.

We must beware of becoming such "spiritual illiterates". Reading only about miracles may lead one to fancy that miracles happen without a cause and thus no more thought is given to their chain of causality.

Communist Paradise

The Communists have started revolutions in different countries by promising paradise to those oppressed. Today in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and other Communist-infiltrated countries, many simple-minded people believe such promises. However, reality is quite different once the Communists come to power. The millions killed in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Central America prove beyond doubt, for those who want to see, that the Communist paradise is actually a hell.

Tatiana Velikanova, a famous Soviet mathematician, was exiled and placed under house arrest in the cold settlement of Tauchik, in the Soviet Kazak Republic.

Here is an eyewitness report written by one of Tatiana's few visitors: "My heart ached when I saw Tanya. Her face was ashen, powdered with coal dust; she was shivering with cold- her hands and feet were frozen stiff. No one offered her shelter for the night; no one even offered her so much as a hot cup of tea. True, they gave her a cot with a mattress and two blankets and allowed her to take some coal to heat the stove. But what was the use of blankets when the walls were full of cracks and the temperature outside -22�C (7.6� F!). And if she started the fire in the stove, it would have provided mostly smoke. Tanya started the fire on the day before our arrival and succeeded in heating the place to 6�C (42.8�F)."

"Her room was one of a four-room lodging, in a stone barracks,without water, sewage disposal, or even a screened-off area for the toilet. Of all the modern conveniences of the twentieth century, it had only electricity. How can someone consider it suitable for human living?"

"When the decision was made to move Tanya into these quarters, the door from the corridor was sealed up while one of the windows was cut through to the floor creating an entry from the street. They (the authorities) added a 3 by 3 foot, box-like enclosure which juts into the room- you can guess for what. Resourceful people, to say the least."

"The room is rather big (for Soviet standards), about 55 square feet, but it serves as an entrance hall, bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, and also a toilet."

"In Tauchik the toilet is a special subject. Not that they are nonexistent in that settlement; somewhere at the edge of the village stand wooden cabins for public use, though they cannot be used (because of dirt)."
(Samizdat 133/84)

This is an example of the Communist "paradise".

RED CHINA is another example of a Communist paradise: "About 27 million Chinese died from food shortages resulting from the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s, an American analysis of new Chinese census figures concludes. Professor Ansley J. Coale, of the National Academy of Sciences at Princeton University, said the Great Leap Forward favored industrial development at the expense of agriculture, and the death rate almost doubled between 1958 and 1962."
(Los Angeles Times, 1/11/84)

The Things of Men

The mocking thief, parroting the rabble, thought that the solution to his predicament would be a patch-up job, just a return from the cross to his old way of life. Like other Jews of his day, he expected Jesus "to save" them by re-establishing an independent Jewish state.

In his dire predicament, he expected a rational, simplistic solution and thought he was in a position to advise Jesus accordingly.

When the apostle Peter tried to prevent his Master from facing crucifixion, Jesus rebuked him, saying, "Thou savorest not the things that be of God"
(Matthew 16:23).

A cause has to be related in quality to its effect. A chicken egg cannot produce a giraffe. Divine effects have to have divine causes.

How could the Saviour of the world produce only a temporary salvation?

When God appeared to Moses in the form of a burning bush, He alerted Moses to the fact that even the surrounding ground was sacred
(Exodus 3:5). How could ordinary ground have maintained a miraculous fire?

Miraculous Ground

Our seeing and hearing are also miraculous ground, the preciousness of which we are usually insensitive to, while we trample over it with our narrow, habitual thoughts.

Only the Communists, who are lying, can promise to bring paradise on earth by changing the superficial social order. Christians should beware of the mistaken belief that religion consists only of helping the poor and straightening out social wrongs.

Jesus fed the multitudes miraculously in order to speak to them, yet reproached them for following Him just to be fed. Those who think so are only looking for a mundane saviour.

From the divine one has to expect the totally different, the strangeness of the divine. The "neighbor" of the one who fell among highway robbers can be only the "strange" Samaritan, and those who meet the resurrected Jesus meet "only a stranger"
(Luke 24:18)

There is no way to produce the divine by combining our own thoughts, let alone our doubts.

The mocking thief used a logical test to find out if Jesus was the Christ. This is no way to reach Paradise. Mundane success has nothing to do with spiritual conquests.

Railing at Believers

Anatoly Vlasov, a Pentecostal from Minsk, Soviet Union, describes how he was approached in 1977 by the Soviet authorities and encouraged to apply for a passport to emigrate to Sweden at the invitation of Swedish Christians.

Unlike the United States, the Soviet Union makes obtaining a passport a tedious process that can take several years.

For months on end, Vlasov spent much time and money in order to gather all sorts of pointless documents required by the authorities as a prerequisite to obtaining the passport application.

As he went through the process several times, because he was told certain forms were not needed or had to be revised, the Swedish invitation and visa expired.

Finally, after another long wait, the family was summoned to the passport office. Instead of handing them the expected documents, a secretary, smiling sarcastically, showed them the X-marked paper they had to sign to attest that their applications for traveling abroad had been denied. Vlasov's wife exclaimed, "Is it possible you have tormented us for so long and now you turn us down? At least tell us why?"

Of course she received no answer.
(Samizdat, 133/84)

In our day and age, Christian brethren in Communist countries are harrassed, tortured, or simply ridiculed. "And others had trials of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprlsonment...of whom the world was not worthy"
(Hebrews 11:36-38).

Soviet Torturer Decorated

Unlike the free world, in Communist countries many are rewarded for evil doing.

Recently, the Soviet Union has granted its second highest award to a psychiatrist accused by the World Psychiatry Association in 1977 of abusing his profession by torturing dissidents.

The news agency Tass reported that the Order of the October Revolution was awarded to Andrei V. Snezhnevshy, director of Moscow's Institute of Forensic Psychiatry.

Critics of the Soviet psychiatric system say the institute is the main clinic for treatment of dissidents detained by the KGB.

Snezhnevsky is believed to be responsible for developing the diagnosis of "Sluggish Schizophrenia," used as justification for the forced drug treatments of Soviet dissidents.

It was also reported that Andrei Sakharov, the famous Soviet physicist, had been treated with mind-altering drugs for over six weeks.

A Mocking Attitude

The thief who continued to mock Jesus had an apparently valid reason to do so. He was simply following the example of the high priests who led the rabble jeering at Jesus' crucifixion.

By all ordinary human standards and prior experience, Jesus had failed. To this thief, what happened to Jesus was the result of His naivete, if not outright foolishness.

One usually does not feel sorry for people who suffer because of their own foolishness; one even laughs at them. This thief was a witness to "the unique event" of the universe, yet he never grasped its meaning, wasting his closeness to Jesus on a few mocking remarks. He should have been filled with awe.

Due to his superficial judgment this thief failed to be saved.

While Job suffered, the attitude of his friends was similar to this mocking thief's. They too were condemned by God.
(Job 42:7)

If a person wants to understand suffering and divine salvation, the Book of Job points out that one has to consider the universe in its entirety, from the mysterious formation of an embryo to far-distant constellations. After all was considered, Job answered in awe: "Therefore have I uttered what I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not...Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes."
(Job 42:3,6).

If our religious attitude is not awe, then we have a mocking attitude. Paradise is approached in silent awe, beyond speech, beyond superficial thought.

To what test could we submit the divine? Consider that on the eye retina alone there are over 100 million nerve cells that, for every second we SEE, perform over 10 billion calculations, even before the nerves reach the brain.

Lenin's Unpublished Letter

The Polish Canadian newspaper, Glos Polski, revealed a highly secret letter of Lenin, plotting the extermination of Christianity in Russia.

Shortly after the Communist revolution, Lenin wrote,

"Terror must be perpetrated unmercifully and in the shortest time possible, because people cannot endure continued cruelty of the regime...the trials must be conducted promptly, ending in swift sentences for the greatest number (of clergy)...the confiscation of monasteries and churches (should be carried out) with the greatest severity, without scruples and in the shortest possible time. The more priests executed during this occasion, the better."
(Samizdat, May 1984).