The Murderer Who Called Out

Tokichi Ishii was known as the most brutal criminal in early twentieth-century Japan. Convicted of multiple murders, he sat in a Tokyo prison cell awaiting execution, utterly unreachable by human compassion. Chaplains visited; he spat at them. Guards feared him. Fellow prisoners avoided his gaze.

Then two Canadian missionaries slipped a New Testament through the bars of his cell. Ishii ignored it for days. Eventually, out of sheer boredom, he opened it. He read the Gospel accounts, and when he reached the crucifixion, something broke open inside him. The words of Jesus from the cross — "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" — shattered him. This man who had shown no mercy encountered a God who offered it freely.

Ishii confessed Christ as Lord. He believed in his heart that God raised Jesus from the dead. And in the days before his execution, he wrote poetry and letters that stunned the nation with their tenderness and grace. The most feared man in Japan died singing hymns.

Paul writes that "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" — not some, not the respectable, not those who have earned it. Everyone. The word was near Tokichi Ishii, as near as a book slipped through prison bars. The same Lord who heard a murderer's confession hears yours today.