Called Out from the Gulag

In 1945, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was dragged from the front lines of World War II and sentenced to eight years in Soviet labor camps for privately criticizing Stalin. The Gulag was designed to bury men alive — freezing barracks, starvation rations, backbreaking labor. Then came cancer. His doctors gave him no hope. By every human measure, he was a dead man.

But something happened in that tomb of ice and wire. Solzhenitsyn later wrote, "Bless you, prison, for having been in my life." In the depths of suffering, he encountered the living God. And when he emerged — cancer in remission, sentence complete — he carried within him a witness that would shake empires. His books, including The Gulag Archipelago, exposed Soviet tyranny and helped unravel a regime that had buried millions.

When Martha stood outside her brother's tomb, she believed in resurrection — someday, at the last day. But Jesus had something more immediate in mind. "Lazarus, come out!" He called, and a dead man walked into the light.

The God who met Solzhenitsyn in a frozen prison camp is the same God who stood before a sealed tomb in Bethany. He does not merely promise life after death. He is, as He told Martha, "the resurrection and the life" — present tense, breaking into our darkest tombs right now.