The martyrs of the 20th century
More Christians died for faith in the 1900s than all prior centuries
The twentieth century produced more Christian martyrs than all the preceding nineteen centuries combined.
The estimate is necessarily imprecise — martyrdom is difficult to count and define — but the scholars who have attempted it consistently arrive at numbers in the tens of millions. The victims of the Soviet persecution alone may number over twelve million. The Chinese Cultural Revolution targeted Christians alongside every other religious group. Nazi Germany executed thousands. The Armenian genocide killed hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians. In Burundi, Uganda, Sudan, Nigeria, and across the Middle East and South Asia, Christians have died for their faith in numbers the Western church has not adequately acknowledged.
This is the other side of the twentieth century's story — not only the Holocaust and the Gulag and Hiroshima, but the hidden story of men and women who held their faith while their world tried to take it, who went to prison camps singing, who died rather than deny.
They are the latest chapter in the chain that runs from Stephen to Polycarp to Perpetua to Hus to Tyndale to Bonhoeffer to the North Korean house church that is meeting right now.
The chain holds.
It has always held.
In every generation, in every geography, under every empire and every ideology that has tried to break it — the chain holds.
Not because of the people who held it. Because of the one who holds them.
“I saw a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne.”
— John, Revelation 7:9
“After these things I saw, and behold, a great multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation and of all tribes, peoples, and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, dressed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.”
The great multitude that no one could number.
John sees them standing before the throne — every nation, every tribe, every people, every language. He sees them as already there, already arrived, already whole.
They include everyone in this devotional. Stephen and Polycarp and Perpetua and Hus and Tyndale and Bonhoeffer and Romero and the nameless millions who died in prison camps and jungle clearings and church basements with their names unknown to any human record.
They are before the throne. They are whole. They are seen.
And the chain that passed through them is still passing. Through you. To whoever comes after you.
You are in the multitude. You are in the chain.
The question is what you will do with the place in it that has been given to you.