Gone: One Man...One Tomb...One Sunday
By Rod Parsley
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About this ebook
In Gone Parsley takes readers on a profound journey to deepen our surface-level understanding of what happened between the first Good Friday and Easter Sunday by exploring the cultural, historical, and biblical context of Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection. Once readers’ eyes of understanding are opened to what truly happened that weekend and what one man, in one tomb, on one Sunday accomplished—their Christian walk will be irreversibly and eternally transformed.
Rod Parsley
Rod Parsley es pastor de la Iglesia World Harvst, en Columbus, Ohio, una iglesia dinamica que supera las 12,000 personas de assistencia cada semana y que toca vidas alrededor del mundo. Es tambien un gran impulsor de cruzadas evangelisticas e importante conferencista. El y su esposa, Joni, tienen dos hijos, Ashton y Austin.
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Gone - Rod Parsley
CALIFORNIA
INTRODUCTION
Why do you seek the living among the dead?
He is not here.
LUKE 24:5–6
AMAN WHO AT twenty-six years of age has already earned the right to be considered one of the greatest military heroes is sick and starving. He lies exhausted but sleepless on the concrete floor of a tiny jungle prison cell along with nine other US prisoners of war. At six feet, two inches tall, he weighs scarcely one hundred twenty pounds.
For Captain William Dyess, US Army Air Force, the Philippine island of Mindanao is a very long way from home. Home is little Albany, Texas, a few miles outside of Abilene. The pilot has already survived the ordeal that came to be known as the Bataan Death March. This was followed by a year of unspeakably punishing captivity at the hands of the Japanese military. He has watched countless friends and comrades die in the most brutal and shocking ways imaginable.
Dyess is only one of thousands of more-dead-than-alive American, British, and Filipino prisoners suffering unbelievable hardships in Imperial Japan’s infamous network of prison camps. What sets him apart is that he chose to be here. He could have avoided this, but he refused freedom, allowing another soldier to escape capture in his stead. It was a heroic decision that he made not once, but twice.
It hadn’t even been two years since America entered the global conflagration that was World War II. Even so, among the battle-hardened warriors of the greatest generation,
Captain Dyess’s exploits as a P-40 Warhawk pilot and his unflinching fearlessness in the face of grave danger were already the makings of a mighty military legend. Lying in that squalid cell racked with pain, he would be astonished to learn that one day an air force base in Abilene would proudly bear his name. On this day, however, Dyess had only two things on his mind. The first was to help himself and his comrades survive another day of hell in the Davao Penal Colony, a prisoner of war (POW) camp. Second, he thought of escaping so the world could learn the deplorable truth about what his fellow servicemen and their allies were brutally suffering as captives in this part of the world. He believed that if the United States military leadership and the American people could be informed of the barbarous and atrocious treatment of Allied prisoners, he might be allowed to lead an effort to rescue all of them before they all succumbed to starvation, disease, and systematic torture.
As background, it’s important to understand just how badly the war in the Pacific was going for the United States in order to grasp how truly desperate the situation was in which our honorable servicemen found themselves.
On December 7, 1941, with the sudden and brutal Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States lost a significant portion of its naval fleet in that half of the world. The blow was designed to cripple America’s ability to respond to Japan’s true objective: taking control of the entire southeastern Pacific by driving America out of the Philippine Islands. That strategy proved devastatingly effective.
Immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, the Japanese invaded the Philippines. Within ten days, Japanese General Masaharu Homma estimated that most of the US Air Force in the region had been destroyed. By January 2, 1942, the Japanese controlled Manila. General Douglas MacArthur, commander of the US Army Forces in the Far East, was forced to withdraw to Australia. When he arrived, he uttered his famous line, I came through and I shall return.
¹ After another week of relentless Japanese advances, Homma had the only remnant of US forces cornered in Bataan, a peninsula of the main island of Luzon.
In Bataan, roughly seventy thousand American troops and twenty-six thousand Filipino civilians were cut off and running out of ammunition, parts, and food. Anything that could be eaten—monkeys, dogs, cavalry horses—was. Even so, it took the Japanese four full months to overrun Bataan. Captain Dyess, commander of the Twenty-First Pursuit Squadron, was a major reason why. His strategic offensive tactics were exceptional, especially considering the dire circumstances surrounding