THE VOICE OF A PROPHET
A Tribute to Alexander Solzenhitsyn
By the late Paul E. Grant, May 2012
Published in Global Missiology, January 2014 @ www.globalmissiology.org
Under brutal rule and repression
More than sixty million people died[1],
This was unprecedented oppression
A ghastly history of genocide
People of every ethnic and cultural legacy
Across the vast spaces of a nation,
From nineteen seventeen to nineteen fifty three
A national killing and decimation
This is not exaggeration, rather, fact;
How could men and women take on brutality
Of such a kind, sustain, and enact
A holocaust of such monstrous ferocity?
One man stood out in protest
Against this ghastly slaughter,
It seems he was God-sent to contest
This evil, and become a universal reporter
Alexander Solzenhitsyn is his name
An extraordinarily heroic figure,
His passion was to fearlessly declaim
This diabolic evil with vigour
From Czar regimes, then Lenin and Stalin
There came totalitiarian rule,
Anti-God communism treated millions as vermin,
Monstrous oppression unspeakably cruel
A brilliant scientist and mathematician
He distinguished himself as a soldier;
Sent to prison camps for alleged sedition
He endured their horrors and torture
What helped him to survive
Those harsh, degrading conditions?
Not only so, he was to survive
Then publicise their terrible dimensions
His granite faith in God and teaching
In the traditions of Russian orthodoxy,
Also, his astonishing endurance in suffering;
At his core, he championed Christianity
Born in the year nineteen eighteen
Of the revolution and humanist state,
He watched anti-God teaching contravene
Bible values and the nation depreciate
He saw his motherland corrupted
But also the West as decadent,
All nations seemed to be driven and fated
In a whirlpool of moral impediment
“His target was modernity,
The flight from the spiritual world”[2]
Beginning with Renaissance currency,
A revelation for many unparalleled
He began to declaim, protest and expose,
A prophet indeed with a goal;
Not only against the corruption of those
Who were leaders, but society as a whole
An embarrassment, just like Noah,
“He put the whole world in the wrong”,[3]
But his Nobel prize for literature[4]
Would not be sung by him as his song
His denunciations of a world’s idolatries
Have awakened millions to discern
The temporalities and vanities
Of God-less systems we need to unlearn
The voice of a prophet! Is the world listening?
Are people hearing, perceiving and heeding?
Is the church awakening, responding and obeying
To such warnings and bestirring?
Within and without the church today
God has his prophets to carry his voice.
When Christ returns on his judgement day
Will we fear or will we rejoice?
Church prophets – there seem to be few,
At times bring some inspiration,
May God send prophets to bring a debut
Of national transformation