In 1994, over 800,000 Rwandans were killed in the span of three months. Killed not by a bomb or weapon of mass destruction, but by many weapons of small destruction; garden tools mostly.

Killed not so much by an army, like the genocide of WWII, but by neighbor turning against neighbor.

This is a hard fact to ignore while walking the streets of Kigali, even fourteen years after the Rwandan genocide. You find yourself subtracting fourteen years from the age of each person you meet, imagining the atrocities they witnessed as a child, or worse, the atrocities they may have committed. For a country with a population of only eight million, the death of over 800,000 at the hands of their neighbors means nobody was unaffected. Everybody who survived lost somebody, if not their whole family. Many witnessed rape or murder at close range. Most had their lives threatened. You can still sense the tension and hurt and pain people are carrying.

One youth I visited with after church told me, “Nobody trusts each other; they may smile when they meet you, but as soon as you go they stop smiling and consider you their enemy.” He had fled Rwanda as a four-year-old, grew up in Kenya, and recently returned to Rwanda. He told me how he wished he could go back to Kenya, where people were friendly and he had friends. “I have no friends here. You can’t have friends without trust.”

Ethnic and tribal tensions

But even Kenya is not exempt from ethnic hatred. Back in January this year, when some Kenyans were erecting roadblocks and checking IDs, turning against each other with machetes, and burning down churches – one of which was full of people – the comparison to Rwanda was often invoked. It was shocking at the time, but not completely unforeseen. Throughout the continent, tribal tension is present but often invisible, under the surface, suppressed. But when the opportunity arises and the fumes of hostility are ignited, unspeakable things happen.

So as I walked the streets of Kigali, I found myself asking, “where does that kind of hatred come from? How can people harbor such animosity – a hatred that pitted neighbor against neighbor?”

As I considered this, I realized we all carry this capacity within us. There is very little separating us.
“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment,” said Jesus in Matthew 5:21-22.

My sin has earned the same penalty as the man who cut down his neighbor in the middle of the night. We both earned eternal separation from God. Mercifully, my debt has been paid and I won’t have to pay that eternal price, although my sins still earn me my share of consequences. The people of Rwanda will be dealing with consequences of their own actions for a long, long time.

The church in Rwanda

We were in Rwanda to produce a video about a Bible college, the Rwandan Institute of Evangelical Theology. This college was created after the genocide by the evangelical churches of Rwanda to train pastors to help heal the nation and mature its believers. It’s the only evangelical Bible college in the country accepting students from any denomination. Hence the students come from a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

We interviewed one student who had to fend off wave after wave of militia coming to kill the hundreds of people seeking shelter in the church where he pastored.

We also interviewed students who were pastors in 1994 but knew little of the Bible, or what a life transformed by Christ looked like. People in their own congregations committed unspeakable atrocities. Today these pastors are studying God’s word – in part to divest the insidious hatred that still divides victim and aggressor.

The struggle

In a church in Nyamata, I stood in a crypt filled with the skulls and femurs of the ten thousand people who were killed there. The bloodstains are still on the walls, and the clothing of the victims that fills the benches of the church still carries the stench of death and decay. It was overwhelming, not just the sight and smell, but surrounding myself with something so terrible.

As hard as it was to take in, I’m glad I was able to see it, to get a greater sense of the kind of evil that lives in the hearts of men. To get a greater sense of the battle we are engaged in, which is mostly unseen but occasionally has visible manifestations like the Rwandan genocide. Surrounded by those bones, visualizing the magnitude of what had happened there, I had a real sense of Satan’s involvement. The organizational effort to kill over 800,000 people in just 100 days has his fingerprints all over it.

“For,” wrote Paul in Ephesians 6:12-13, “our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand.”

Or, as King Hezekiah encouraged his troops in II Chronicles 32:7-8 : “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid or discouraged because of the [king] and the vast army with him, for there is a greater power with us than with him. With him is only the arm of flesh, but with us is the Lord our God to help us and to fight our battles.”

These are encouraging words, both for myself and for my Rwandan brothers and sisters at the Rwanda Evangelical Institute of Theology who must play a critical role in the nation’s recovery.

There is a greater power with us.  (Learn more about the Rwanda Evangelical Institute of Theology: Watch the video, So We Do Not Lose Heart.)

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