Admin says: Soldiers or freedom fighters are not necessarily terrorists. They become terrorists if they persecute, torture or execute captured combatants or non-combatants, who are most commonly civilians.

Ivan Rudolph about doomed farmer in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

There are always wild stories floating around during times of conflict, and the Rhodesian Bush War was no exception to this, but the account that follows has credible confirmation because Agnes Keates, one of Prime Minister Ian Smith’s secretaries, told it to us.

Agnes had read a strange report that had been sent to Prime Minister Ian Smith. It had only been compiled after a careful investigation of the circumstances by the military. Of course, the information was supposedly not for general dissemination, but Agnes knew we would be very interested and so told us anyway.

Before summarising what was in the report, I must tell you that Agnes was against the form of practical Christianity in which we believed and was uncomfortable with our commitment to it.

The report she saw dealt with an isolated farmer. A popular man with his labour force, one of them surreptitiously let him know he would be attacked by terrorists that very night. He used a telephone link to give the alarm, but his isolated position and the fact that night was closing in meant that rescue from outside would not be attempted before the following morning. He locked the farmhouse and barricaded himself in an inner room, knowing that his attempts were puny and not likely to hold up the attack for many minutes. His extreme danger drove him to his knees and he spent the whole night in an agony of prayer.

No attack came.

The following morning, the security forces arrived, holding in the back of one of their vehicles a terrorist captured that very morning. This man showed them where he and his comrades the night before had gathered in preparation for the attack.

The terrorist explained that when they had risen up to attack, they had seen a row of white figures between them and the farmhouse, and they had been terrified by these figures and had run away in panic, scattering into the bush.

When the security forces captured this terrorist, he had been unarmed because he had abandoned his own weapon at the farmhouse.

The soldiers then collected a number of abandoned AK47 automatic rifles and mortars, which validated this strange story and which were listed in the report.

          This testimony shows that:

1. God may intervene personally during warfare, for example using lines of angels, to save a few people, but does so only rarely. Nevertheless, there have been similar examples of angels in a number of conflicts – in the Congo conflict protecting fleeing nuns, in the Boxer uprising in China enabling threatened missionaries to walk out unmolested, at Mons in the First World War saving soldiers etc.

2. God’s concern during warfare is neither exclusively for one side nor the other, His concern appears to be for praying individuals on either side rather than political winners and losers. When Joshua wanted to know what the outcome of the upcoming battle against Jericho would be, he asked an angel of the Lord “Are you for us or against us?” (Joshua 5:13,14) to which the angel replied “No”.

3. God can give forgiveness and a future to the most desperate of people during times of conflict, whether their lives have been lived morally or not. “Good” or “bad” lives do not appear to be the criterion. An example? Rahab the prostitute and her whole family were preserved during the destruction of Jericho. Rahab became highly regarded in Israel and was one of Jesus’ ancestors. God is hugely more interested in restoration of individual lives than in wartime winners and losers.

Ivan Rudolph and Psalm 91 during the Rhodesian Bush War

During one bush stint with the Police Reserve, I tried to talk to a young man who was my platoon commander about Christ. I loaned him one of my favourite books titled “The Cross and the Switchblade”. He read it, but commented when asked, “You know me. It didn’t have enough blood and snot for me.” That was the kind of aggressive youngster he was. The flipside was that he displayed intelligence and courage on patrol in the bush, which were qualities you valued highly in a leader in dangerous circumstances.

Towards the end of this stint, I began to feel uneasy. Was it just the deteriorating situation on the ground, or was there more behind my unease? As I read scripture, Psalm 91 captured my attention and I read it several times. It “spoke” to me and I sensed God was emphasising it as appropriate to my situation.

Then I received a letter from my wonderful, prayerful wife Brenda. She said that the Lord had drawn her attention to Psalm 91 and she believed it was significant for me and that I should read it!

Basically, Psalm 91was a general encouragement that the Lord was protecting me in dangerous circumstances and that “no harm will befall you”. This had to be a promise specifically for me under those particular circumstances because it certainly was not a general promise for all Christians during the war, many of whom were killed.

During this stint, I could relate certain incidents to the wording in Psalm 91. Here are two examples:

• That God’s “faithfulness will be your shield and rampart. You will not fear the terror of night nor the arrow that flies by day” appeared to be fulfilled when we were trapped in a gulley with terrorists in a commanding position above us firing mortars and automatic fire down into our midst. It was a precarious position. If our commanding officer had not acted immediately and courageously, we might well have suffered heavy losses. “Forward,” he yelled out and led a charge up the hill at the terrorist position. Fortunately for us, they panicked and fled.
• The second example occurred at the end of our time there. As we tidied up, it was decided by our platoon commander that a certain grenade that had begun to rust might be unreliable and that we should destroy it. I wore it on my belt as we went on a patrol during which it would be dealt with.

Our platoon leader looked for a suitably protected situation where flying shrapnel from the grenade would not be a concern. Shortly before midday, he chose an old abandoned mud hut not far from the dirt road. He asked whether I might like to throw it instead of him. I hesitated briefly, then said probably not as I had no experience with grenades.

Telling us to wait at the vehicle for him, he took the grenade from my belt and walked to the hut. We watched him as he pulled the pin and tossed it into the hut. He dropped flat onto the ground. Nothing happened,

After a few minutes he stood up and stared thoughtfully into the hut. The grenade had indeed been faulty as suspected, but it was too dangerous simply to leave it there unexploded as anyone else going in there, perhaps a child, might touch it and it might explode.

“Leave it there!” I remember someone behind me calling out to him. I glanced at the time. It was now within a few minutes of noon.

After what seemed an age while he considered possibilities, but was probably just a few minutes. we saw him enter the hut. The grenade exploded. The hut walls sent up a spray of powdery orange dust.

Rory Kilalea, a teaching colleague, was the first to react and ran towards the hut. I was close behind. We found the dead body lying in a pitiful condition amongst the blown-apart hut, looking like a twisted abused doll. Rory knew more first aid than I did and took charge in trying unsuccessfully to revive him while I assisted. Amongst other injuries, he had lost his right hand and part of the arm, suggesting he might have picked up the grenade to throw it again, at which point it most likely exploded.

Psalm 91 had said to me not to fear “the plague that destroys at midday”, and midday was the time the grenade exploded.

I mentioned at a later Harvest Youth Meeting how Psalm 91 had applied to my bush war experiences. A teenage girl challenged me afterwards.

“But why did God save you and not your platoon commander?” she asked. “You would have gone to be with God while he may not.”

“I don’t know why,” I responded lamely.

On reflection, I still don’t know.

             Ivan’s testimony shows that:

1. God makes decisions about life and death that do not accord with our logic. Once again, we are challenged that His ways are not our ways nor His thoughts our thoughts, but we have confidence that His thoughts are far higher than ours are. (Isaiah 55:8-9)

2. God can make a scripture “alive” to us, in which case we need to read it often so that it becomes an important part of our experiences with This is relational, not logical.

3. God gives us logic so that we can live our lives on a practical level while on ‘playpen earth’. In the vital eternal qualities of faith, hope and love (1Cor13:13), logic is inadequate and often hopelessly off. It is a massive error to suppose that all spiritual experiences will succumb to our logic.

4. God communicates through scripture and so we need to keep reading the Bible, or nowadays listening to someone else reading it.

Please email me your own Topic 6 testimony below:

Medical doctor comments on his observations during Zimbabwe bush war.

I can think of 4 instances in particular where God intervened.

1) The last we saw of Simon L was when he filmed our wedding.  While we were on honeymoon, he was shot.  He was in ICU for a month and died a day after we returned home.  For a long time I could never understand why God allowed this to happen to a strong Christian young man who was on the verge of getting engaged, but years later I heard that the nurses looking after him came to know Christ and an agnostic surgeon (who wasn’t even attending to Simon but saw him in the ICU) noticed what a calm uncomplaining attitude he had to his serious injuries.  The surgeon who was looking after Simon apparently was tearful when Simon passed away.  (Ivan comments – I am very grateful for this information about Simon. It is very helpful for me because I have mourned Simon’s death and circumstances over the years, and can still see burnt into my memory aspects of his funeral. Simon, of course, lost nothing going to the Lord and those who came to the Lord through his dying witness will have benefitted eternally.)

2) I heard of at least 2 cases where the attackers suddenly stopped their firing and ran away since they saw giants dressed in white protecting their targets. (Ivan gives details of one of these incidents in the first testimony in this topic).

3) A soldier was shot through the kidney but carried on returning fire, totally unaware of his injuries.

4) A 7year old boy was attacked by a terrorist welding a machete.  The child was brought in from the rural areas hours later with his left kidney and spleen hanging out, his stomach bloated, and having lost a lot of blood.  He asked me whether he was going to die.  I lied and said “Of course not”.  he was taken to the operating theatre and 1 week later he was running around the ward as though nothing had happened.  Through prayer, God turned my lie into the truth!

These incidents illustrate the following about who God is during war.

1. God does not stop war but can help individuals who pray during that war.

2. God occasionally sends supernatural helpers to rescue the desperate.

3. God can use Christian testimony of the dying to challenge the living.

4. God has made life on ‘playpen earth’ to include a wide variety of experiences from which we must learn the basics of Faith, Hope and Love (1Cor13:13). War provides accelerated life opportunities to develop who we are in these eternal dimensions of character.

5. God’s timings in life and in death are precise (psalm 139 – vs 16 in particular). We often cannot see the purposes of prolonged life or death, but God has His purposes for either or both.

Roland Pletts, schoolfriend at Umtali Boys High School and now a Christian minister and author living in England.

 Roland comments: ‘this testimony is from a missionary in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the bush war of the 1970s. Joan Cordell was there as an Elim missionary, a number of whom were brutally and famously massacred up in the Vumba mountains.

Joan’s mission station was in the Inyanga Mountains. Her mission station was regularly visited by communist-trained combatants wanting to indoctrinate the believers with their communist agenda.

Several times, heart beating loudly, she had hidden from them, under the bed and in other places, but the pressure had told on her and she had left the mission and come into town (Umtali) for treatment for high blood pressure. On a visit to our little church she wrote of receiving this “miracle of Divine Comfort” from the Lord. Her letter follows:

“When a Spirit filled believer speaks in ‘other tongues’ ‘is it a known language?’ is a question often asked these days.

As on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:4-17) when the Holy Spirit gave the languages of the visitors to Jerusalem, so in these days God does the same thing for a specific purpose.

On Sunday the 18^th July I was in the AOG church Umtali having been brought, two days previously, from a mission station on the Eastern Border suffering from hypertension and exhaustion. During the time of open worship brother Pletts (Roland) sang the tune ‘Crimond’ to which the words ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ are usually sung. I realized that he was singing in the Spirit (i.e. in “Tongues”) in the Shona language, the language of the local African people!

Fascinated, I listened intently as he sang the tune a second time with the words, “Ishe wenyu akakund…” – In English; “Your Lord has conquered, you need not be defeated. Because your Lord has conquered, you will conquer too.”

The message came to my heart with tremendous comfort and as I considered that nobody else present could understand the Shona language (including brother Pletts who had sung the words and who verified later that he did not speak Shona). 

I was thrilled that the Lord cared for me enough to let me know it by means of the miracle of a beautiful song in the Spirit.

Thank you, brother, for being in such a place of yieldedness that the Lord could use you to bring such courage to me. 

Joan Cordell, Elim Missionary.” 

Joan Cordell’s testimony illustrates the following about God: 

1. God’ capacities, for example to speak or sing in any known human language, is way beyond our silly attempts to impose human logic on Him. It is supernatural, and thereby above and beyond the natural.
2. God’s capacity for us to speak or sing in a language we have never learned is termed ‘Speaking in Tongues’. It is a public gift given by the Holy Spirit only in certain circumstances – in this case Roland singing fluently in Shona.
3. God is there during our darkest hours of fear, such as hearing those wanting to kill you searching for you.
4. God’s comforting words to Joan ring out to us also during times of danger: “Your Lord has conquered, you need not be defeated. Because your Lord has conquered, you will conquer too.” 

That same Roland Pletts who appears in Joan Cordell’s account above has, on request, sent me this testimony of his experiences trying (bravely) to minister in the Rhodesian bush during the war. Those of us in the cities had little concept of how dire and dangerous things had become for Christian ministers.

 During the “bush War” that took place in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) people had experiences that can only be explained as divine interventions. We personally lost close friends both black and white who were murdered because of their faith as Christians. Many dear missionary friends of ours were hacked down and others of our congregations murdered. There were terrible tragedies. We realised we were blessed on several occasions to be delivered from what would have been either serious injury or even death.

 One such occasion was when a close ministry colleague and I went out to a remote rural area to hold meetings to preach and teach the Gospel. It was the height of war and the area had already been infiltrated by combatants but we went to support a man we knew who had pioneered a Christian church there. We arrived to conduct several days of teaching and outreach. Our African friend, who I will call Kebu, had built a pole and grass meeting place on top of a hill prominent for all to see. It was no cathedral but people flocked there during the day and evening meetings. They did not sit on nice pews but on the ground or on rough logs for benches. The sides of the building were open in order to let fresh air through. At night it was lit by a paraffin lamp. The people were so keen to hear the Gospel that they walked miles to attend. They were old and young, from tiny babes in arms to wrinkled grey haired ancients. Standing at the front at night and peering out at the sea of faces was quite an experience and things went well at first.

 Then quite unexpectedly a foreboding fell upon me and I became very troubled. I could not shake it off so spoke to my colleague and suggested we cut short our visit. He was keen to stay so we prayed and committed it to the Lord and agreed to stay.

 However, the foreboding remained with me and intensified. We decided to speak with Kebu and without hesitation he said we should go immediately. He knew the situation in the area and seemed to endorse how I felt, and so we left.

 Sometime later when we met up with him, he told us what had happened; that very night we left the “boys from the bush” had come looking for us, a polite way of saying that they had come to kill us. As already expressed, numerous missionaries were brutally killed just because they were missionaries.  

In fact, two men had secretly come in to spy out who we were and what we were doing and had gone to call their comrades in arms. I recalled seeing during the previous evening as I stood at the front, two rough-looking men sitting right at the back of the gathering, who seemed as if they were detached from the rest of the people, as if they did not belong. I believe the Holy Spirit had shown me this and then warned us to leave.

Shortly after we had left they returned with their comrades and I shudder to think of our fate if they had found us.

 This was not the first time the Lord had shown me through his Spirit things about people as a warning. Very often, if we listen to the inner voice of the Lord, we can become aware of things that our natural senses cannot discern. The Holy Spirit communicates to us from within. The Holy Spirit can also provide us with a ‘gift of knowledge’ or a ‘discerning of spirits’, which are both marvellous supernatural gifts for our safety and guidance.

I believe this was a miracle of deliverance from the hand of Satan and it was not the only time I experienced the intervention of the Lord in those difficult times.

Roland’s account illustrates the following about God during war:

1. God does not stop war and seldom intervenes directly, but can warn His people about danger and when to leave a situation.
2. God’s warnings during danger require immediate attention and obedience.
3. God expects us on earth to learn to follow His instructions wherever and whenever Satan is active; our logic is nowhere near sufficient to defeat Satan.