THE VOICE OF A PROPHET

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
,

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”

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”,

 But his Nobel prize for literature

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 

� Dimitri Panin (1976) quoted in Alexander Solzenhitsyn – A Century In His Life  by D.M. Thomas, 1998.

� From Alexander Solzenhitsyn, 1998 by D.M Thomas Page 461

� Hebrews 11:7  New English Bible

� 1970