Can You Hear Him Calling Your Name?

[451 words]

While I was in school at Harding, I worked on the campus to help pay my expenses. I occasionally worked with a young man from Germany named Edgar Knobel. The name should give a clue to his nationality. Edgar and I had some unique situations in our conversations. He had his German accent and I had my rich southern accent. You can imagine how many times the statements, “I beg your pardon” and “could you repeat that?” occurred in our conversations.

When Edgar was very young, he and his family were captured by the Nazis and put in concentration camps. The living conditions must have been atrocious, to say the least. The barracks were old and over-crowded, cold in the winter and filthy in general. With new prisoners being brought in regularly, they had to eliminate some of the people in the barracks. Edgar said they would come to the barracks and call out names to be taken out and shot. They were lined up against a building and shot to death in plain view of the prisoners. In fact, they were STRONGLY encouraged to watch.

There was an old man in the barracks with Edgar and he told him one day that if they came in and called Edgar’s name before they called his name he was going to take Edgar’s place. His reasoning was that he was old and didn’t have many years to live even if they were fortunate enough to get out and Edgar was young and had his whole life to live. At first, he thought how fortunate he would be, but then with some serious thinking, he told the old gentleman that he couldn’t let him do it. Sure enough, they came to the barracks and called Edgar’s name for the firing squad. The old man said, “Here,” and passed by Edgar with a smile on his face. Edgar was speechless over the ordeal. He was fortunate enough to still be living when the allies came and delivered them from encampment.

Edgar told me this story following our conversation about Jesus taking our place to save us from the wrath of God because of our sin. He said that each Lord’s Day when he took the emblems to remember that Jesus had in essence called out his name and suffered death in his place, he recalled the old man who died for him in the prison camp. If only we could be so touched each Lord’s Day by vividly recalling Jesus’ death for us, calling out our name to the Father and taking all our sins to the cross, how much more sincere our participation would be.