"I have experienced His presence in the deepest hell that man can create. I have really tested the promises of the Bible, and believe me, you can count on them"

Corrie Ten Boom speaks from a life forged in catastrophe, not from the safe distance of abstraction. Having endured the Nazi camps after aiding Jewish neighbors, she names the terror she encountered as “the deepest hell that man can create,” placing responsibility squarely on human agency. Evil here is not a metaphysical riddle but a historical fact, constructed through choices, systems, and cruelty. Against that bleakness she sets not triumphalism, but the claim of companionship: a presence encountered, not imagined. God does not appear as an escape hatch from suffering but as an unexplainable nearness within it.

Her language of “testing” the promises of Scripture is striking. Faith becomes an experiment under pressure, where words must either bear the weight of reality or collapse. Promises like “I am with you” and “I will never leave you” are not sentiments for greeting cards; they are lifelines tried in the crucible. To say “you can count on them” is not to assert a theory, but to report a result. The promises do not erase the hell; they furnish courage, forgiveness, and a stubborn hope that resists dehumanization when everything conspires to destroy it.

There is also a moral summons embedded here. If hell is man-made, it can be resisted; if presence is real, it can be mirrored. The experience of divine fidelity empowers human fidelity, the choice to protect the vulnerable, to refuse hatred, to keep one’s soul intact. Ten Boom’s testimony refuses both despair and naïveté. It does not deny the abyss; it announces that the abyss is not final.

For readers in any age of disillusionment, her words challenge the assumption that faith thrives only in comfort. They suggest that credibility comes when promises hold in places where institutions fail and language falters. What survives the test is not optimism, but trust, quiet, stubborn, and reliable enough to be counted on.