[AI translation] Today, all over the country, in churches and outside churches, wherever people gather, we are all concerned with one theme: what will make April 4th forever memorable in the lives of our people. We look back with a grateful heart to the momentous fact that nine years ago, after much destruction, suffering and anguish, it was the day on which the guns fell silent and the sirens ceased to sound. The whole territory of the country could be freed from the demonic power of war and the heroic work of rebuilding a country in ruins could begin. That day has since become a historic landmark, marking the beginning of a new phase in our millennial history. The significance of this day for the life of our people as a whole has been celebrated many times, and will surely be celebrated again today. We are now trying to see, in the light of God's Word, what this great historic turning point means for our Reformed Church.We would be ungrateful and blind if we did not see in it first of all the judgment of God. We confess that history is not an arbitrary play of free forces independent of God, not a succession of random turns of fate, but the arena of God's glorious reign, the means of the unfolding of His plan of salvation, in which He moves events towards the purpose He has for them. The great turning of the tide nine years ago is also received from the hand of the living and mighty God as an event by which God judged his people, his Church, above all else. By bringing to an end a phase in the history of our Church and placing us in a completely new situation, in a social order hitherto totally unknown and unusual - one which is based, with honest frankness, on materialism - God has led us to recognise and repent of our faults and sins. It is good to recall this, because this recognition, still less repentance, has not yet become universal and true! Never before have so many theologians addressed the problem of the Church's essence and mission as in the last nine or ten years; the realisation that the Church - we ourselves - are burdened with terrible failings is becoming more and more clearly expressed in theological literature. As the Lord of a house of Christ, it should have the task of proclaiming the Gospel to the poor, of being for the poor, of showing solidarity with those suffering from social disenfranchisement, of bringing the compassionate love of Christ into the world of the suffering. And it was precisely the poor who did not find the comfort and help of the Gospel in the Church, precisely the poor who did not find understanding in the Church and who, in the end, no longer sought it. It was precisely the oppressed, the threatened, who were almost completely cut off from the Church, those for whom the Church should have been their home. It was precisely these people whom the Church did not reach and no longer wanted to reach with the divine message entrusted to it, but allowed its life to become attached to certain social strata.
In 17th and 18th century Europe, the Church became the church of the aristocracy, then it became attached to the rising bourgeoisie, and later, when the upper classes of the bourgeoisie and intelligentsia turned their backs on it, it became the church of the bourgeois middle class. In the 19th century, the legitimate self-defence and struggle for social justice of the oppressed classes was seen as an assassination attempt against the recognised bourgeois order. The Church thus stopped at a certain stage of social development, it stagnated, and it did not regard the great problems raised by modern industrialisation, the workers' question and the problem of the masses as its own personal problem. He avoided such questions. We have not proclaimed to the world the supreme Lordship of Christ, we have not represented to the world the lordship of Christ in every sphere of human life, we have not been able to show the way to true communion for a humanity that is becoming too crowded - because we ourselves have not been and are not a church community in the true sense of the word.
Moreover, the church has become increasingly secularised from within. Membership was not by personal choice, but by an increasingly colourful inheritance from father to son. Everyone born a Reformed was a Reformed, whether or not he knew and professed the saving truths of divine revelation. No wonder at all at the increasing alienation and growing indifference of the great masses to the official church. God has shown us that the church is not threatened with danger when attacked from without. The threat to the church does not come from those of a different worldview, but from the denial of its churchhood! The Church is threatened with the gravest, deadliest danger when it pretends to exist by its disobedience, when its word becomes weakened and is therefore fit only to be cast out!
All this God has made plain to us in that judgment. And see how gracious God's judgment was: it was not what might have been done according to our merit, that the unleavened salt should be cast out and trodden under foot by men - and that would not have been injustice on God's part either. God did not take away our churches, scatter our congregations, withdraw his word, silence the psalm from our lips - and he could have done all these things. He has shaken us to wake us up, he has pruned us as he pruned the vine in the spring, so that we might bear more fruit. He allowed state laws to guarantee religious freedom in this radically new situation - He gave His Church a new lease of life.
Let me quote here the following statement of the Synod of the Reformed Church in the Netherlands: 'God has called the churches by events to give an account of their actions in the past and in the present. If the churches were to try to go on living calmly as if nothing had happened, or to consider their own security as their highest value, they would prove themselves deaf to the divine call. From a Christian point of view, one could not imagine a more fatal attitude than that of the Church living through these times without being radically changed." - So, if our church wants to continue to play its old role in spite of the changed situation, and to maintain itself by all means of apologetics and the art of persuasion, it has already failed. If he defends himself and tries to secure himself, he will fall into the danger of what our fundamental doctrine says: he will want to keep his life and will lose it. So, if the Church continues to cling convulsively to its lost position, to its habitual framework of life, to a certain outward form and methods of work, that is, to its whole condemned past - it will lose its life. "For whoever wants to keep his life will lose it. But he who loses his life for Christ's sake, keeps it!"
And behold, the greatest grace in this judgment is precisely that God Himself helps man and the church to lose their lives. He helps us by breaking the old forms, by humiliating class prejudice, by bankrupting the non-church ambitions of the church, by freeing us from social prejudices, from bondage, from the spell of mammon, from the bondage to a certain social order - from a lot of the habitual attachments in which the church has lived its life for centuries and which it could not have lost on its own, and which have prevented it from finding its true self. God has changed a whole world around us to make it easier for us to "put on Christ" for Christ and in Christ: "For whoever loses his life for my sake will keep it!"
What does this mean in practice? Jesus exemplifies it, shows it in his own life. He says: "Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except a grain of corn fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit." (Jn 12,24) In the grain of wheat, life is stored up in a tiny, tiny place. But in order for this life to unfold in all its richness, the grain of wheat must be taken into the ground, there it rots, "dies", and from this death the seed will produce its fruit. It is precisely by its willingness to die that it triumphs, that it triumphs. Christ sowed a part of His divine life in the earth, and here on earth He sowed the seed right into the earth, into the grave. There He lay in the earth, in the grave, like a grain of wheat in the furrow, under the clods. And out of this death of the seed of eternity came true life, full life. It is through this very death that the life of Christ can be multiplied in the lives of millions and millions of people. So, let him lose his life for my sake, that he may keep it.
Faith in Christ is not an ideology or a worldview, it is following Christ. He believes in Christ who takes up with Him and in Him the fate of the grain of wheat; who dares to give himself to Christ's death, so that His life may then be manifested in his works. For us Christians, the great mission is to proclaim the life of Christ for the benefit of the people with whom we live, taking responsibility for our miseries, our sicknesses, our sins - but also for our hopes and our plans for the future.
It is easy and comfortable to judge the world, but indescribably harder to serve the world in love and sacrifice. And however much the world around us has changed, however ideologically a new social order is being built, we have only one task: to bring into the new society, through the true witness of our faith in Christ, what we believe is indispensable. That is, where hatred rages, to bring love; where sin reigns, to go with forgiveness; where strife crushes, to bring trust; where sadness suffocates, to bring joy. To comfort others rather than to comfort myself, to understand others rather than to want to be understood, to love others rather than to love myself; for blessing makes rich, in forgetting myself there is peace, in forgiveness there is pardon, in death there is resurrection - in losing life for Christ's sake there is finding true life. We, His people, His Church, can thus be instruments of His peace in the world.
Can we accept God's grace in this great turning point in our history nine years ago? Come, let us confess together that
The Lord God is good and just
For ever and ever,
To convert the wicked
To his righteous paths;
And the wretched
He guides in their lives,
With great mercy to them
In his way he keeps.
(Psalm 25:4)
Date: 4 April 1954.