More Than Conquerors

More Than Conquerors

Corrie ten Boom and her sister Betsie were imprisoned at Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1944 for hiding Jewish people during the Nazi occupation. Betsie died in the camp. Corrie survived — the last of her family — and was released through what turned out to be a clerical error, days before the women her age were executed. She spent the rest of her life — thirty-three years — traveling the world sharing the message that 'no pit is so deep that God's love is not deeper still.' She was not a conqueror by defeating the Nazis or escaping the camp. She was more than a conqueror by emerging from the worst the world could do with her love for God and for people intact and increased.

Paul's 'more than conquerors' (hupernikomen) in Romans 8:37 is placed in a list of things that cannot separate us from the love of Christ: tribulation, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, sword. He quotes Psalm 44: 'we face death all day long.' These are not hypothetical dangers — they are the lived realities of the people Paul is writing to. And his answer is not that these things will not happen. It is that in all these things — not despite them — we are more than conquerors. The victory is not over the circumstances but through them, and its source is not our resilience but His love. 'Through him who loved us.' The love that holds us is the love that conquers through us.