Speaker: Dr. Harold J. Sala | Series: Guidelines For Living | Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? Luke 18:18, KJV

There is a strange paradox. While most of us think that God is distant, obscure, and disinterested, the reality is that He pursues us relentlessly. We run from Him until exhausted we fall before Him and acknowledge that, unbeknown to us, He is really what we were seeking but didn’t know it.

If you question that, consider the strange path that Helmut Simon took in finding God. Born in 1937 to a very ordinary German family, Helmut grew up in a traditional Protestant village with parents who were atheists. To accommodate the expectations of the community, Helmut received a very nominal religious education. He didn’t bother God and he expected the same treatment from Him.

Stranger than fiction is the fact that a nameless man whose age is estimated to be more than 5000 years was the cause of Helmut’s coming to know God. How so? Lacking much education, Helmut earned his living working in a shoe factory, then doing road construction, and as he grew older, working a less strenuous job in the public library of Nuremberg. His holidays, however, were his escape. When he could, he and Erika spent their summers in the Alps.

That’s where he was on September 18, 1991—an unforgettable day that changed his life and eventually his spiritual destiny. On that day the Simons were taking a ten hour hike from the Vernagt reservoir to the Similaun summit . After they had reached their destination, they took a short cut across a snow field. By-passing a pool of melted snow and ice, Helmut saw something partially covered with slush, something that he described as looking like garbage. “Strange,” he thought, “at this altitude.” He took another look, and to his amazement he cried out, “This is a human being.” One frame was unexposed on the film in his camera, and he snapped a picture, hoping to offer evidence that someone was submerged in the ice and snow.

Eventually Reinhold Messner, a famed Italian mountaineer, inspected the site, and the man who has rested there for more than 5,000 years was identified as a mummy, the remains of the oldest human ever found. Anthropologists called the mummy “Oetzi,” after the Oetz valley where he was discovered.

And how did this change the spiritual direction of his life? Over a period of time, Helmut and his wife began to see the hand of God in all of this—the chain of accidents leading to his discovery, far too long to relate. In all of this he began to ponder what life is about. Who was this person who had lived so long ago, and what happens after we die?

He began attending a Bible class, asking questions, and more questions. In 2003, he sought baptism and marked that event as the turning point in his life when he embraced faith in God and His Son, Jesus Christ. “Now I have become a disciple,” he says.

Strangely the very questions that confronted Helmut Simon and his wife Erika as they looked at the shrunken, weathered, emaciated remains of someone who lived before Moses and the Pharoahs of Egypt, even before Abraham, are the same ones that confront us today.

What is life about? Where did I come from? What happens to me after I die?

The answers to those questions are the most pressing ones that confront people today, and the quest takes us to God who made us and His Word, which alone gives us answers to those questions.

It was a strange path that Helmut Simon took to the cross, but when he got there, he found satisfaction, forgiveness, and meaning in life. Interesting how God pursues us when we least know it.

Resource reading: Luke 18:18-30.