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Home|English|Viewers|Links|“DON’T YOU WANT TO HAVE ETERNAL LIFE?”
By David Humble
Harvest Time Ministries Staff
| A | t a little past 5 a.m., Eiji Noda puts on his work gloves and grabs a broom from the storage closet. As he sweeps up the leaves out front of the building, he looks no different from the many other Ikoma |
| Bible College students who attend to a disciplined schedule of work, devotions, and study. | |
However, only four years ago, Eiji Noda was very different from everyone he now meets on campus. Then, the utensil in his hands was not a broom, but a metal bat he used to smash out the windows of dozens of police stations. Before he was through as one of the meanest motorcycle gang leaders in Osaka’s history, however, Noda would see more than just glass broken in his own life.
Noda, now 23, appeared as a guest on Harvest Time in April and traced the beginning of his private war with the world to a childhood scarred by his mother and father’s divorce. In an attempt to cover up the loneliness that increasingly possessed him, Noda began to spend his mother’s money on whatever he liked, and do whatever he liked -- including fighting, smoking, and generally gaining a reputation at school as a troublemaker.
“I really wasn’t any good at studies or sports,” he said, “so I started going out and stealing scooters and things and riding around all night. By the time I finished junior high, I was more than ready for the gang life.”
At 16, Noda had already been arrested once and he quickly rose through the ranks to become leader of his motorcycle gang. His reputation as a vicious and aggressive fighter gave him the respect he needed to lead his group of about 60 boys in thievery, drug selling, and generally terrorizing the neighborhood.
Detective Toshikazu Yoshinaga, who worked with Noda and is currently section chief at the Suminoe Police Headquarters, verifies it: “Yeah, he was definitely a real problem back then.”
Noda said that, in looking back, he can see how out-of-control he was. “I fully gave myself over to it just for the thrill of it. By that time, my mother was wishing I had never been born.”
Noda’s older brother, a member of Japan’s Self-Defense Forces and a believer in Jesus Christ, began to talk to him about where his life was heading and asked him point-blank: “Eiji, don’t you want to have eternal life?” Noda thought that his brother had surely gone off “the deep end,” but he greatly respected his brother and agreed to go to church with him.
“We had teams that would go out and commit murders, steal, beat people up, and just commit vicious crimes of all sorts. In every way, we became the slaves of sin and evil.”
“I don’t remember anything the pastor said in his sermon that day,” Noda recalled. “But one verse he read from the Bible stuck in my mind so vividly: ‘The wages of sin is death’ (Rom. 3:23). I couldn’t get that thought out of my mind.”
However, life for Noda not only didn’t change, it got even worse. The pattern of violence escalated, as fights with rival gangs became more frequent. Noda began to carry a knife in his pocket and showed no qualms whatsoever when it came to using it against his enemies. Noda found himself settling into this new level of brutality in life with amazing ease.
“Our gang’s whole motivation for living,” he said, “was to make a name for ourselves that would strike fear in the hearts of everyone. We had teams that would go out and commit murders, steal, beat people up, and just commit vicious crimes of all sorts. In every way, we became the slaves of sin and evil.”
Though trying his best to keep from getting caught, 19-year-old Eiji Noda’s luck ran out when he was arrested for the fifth time and quickly found himself in custody at the Juvenile Classification Office. This was his fourth incarceration there and he began to take stock of his life. Though feeling little in his now-hardened heart, somehow the words he heard once before in church broke through the fog to assail him with piercing clarity: “The wages of sin is death!” His heart, he said, became filled with the reality of his own foolishness and his life’s impurity. Thoughts of the “wages” due him for his own sin began to grip him with fear. With this realization, a hunger to read the Bible his brother had given him began to take over.
“What I read at first just made my head hurt,” he said. “I didn’t understand much. But I was scared and suffering from my own sinfulness, so I began to believe in Jesus little by little. I had a sense that the Bible spoke with real authority.”
IN THE COMPANY OF THE REDEEMED
Eiji Noda (third from left) spends much of his free time trying to reach out to gang and street kids through the ministry activities of Disciple Church in Osaka’s Ikuno Ward. Noda, himself a former motorcycle gang leader, says he is constantly encouraged by how powerfully God’s Word touches these kids’ lives. The producers of TBS television’s “News23” program made Noda and Disciple Church pastor Yasuhiro Kanazawa the subjects of a Special Report segment on an October 20th broadcast last year. The segment was entitled, “Ikikata Kaeta Otokotachi.” Still half in doubt, half in faith, the old “down deep inside” Eiji Noda was far from dead. Repeated violence against other inmates and fights with guards tabbed Noda as a troublemaker and facilitated his transfer to the Juvenile Detention Center -- the last stop for incorrigible juvenile offenders. Noda said that as he continued to read the Bible, the bitterness and violent feelings he had toward others inside of him began to come to the surface and be revealed to him as the ugliness that it truly was. “The Holy Spirit began to work in me,” he said. “I fasted and began to truly repent of my sin."
"As I read the Bible, I became aware of the sin that it revealed and I immediately went to God in prayer for forgiveness. And I soon found myself so changed that I was constantly trying to introduce the God of the Bible to the inmates around me.” After being released, Noda said that he had to make a clear decision to separate himself from those friends who were now members of organized crime groups or were involved in criminal activity. In place of that, he determined to follow this new life in Christ with all his being.
The people around him immediately noticed the change. No longer was Eiji Noda talking about hurting people, rather, he spoke to anyone who would listen about God’s love and the life-changing power of Jesus Christ. The power of Noda’s testimony touched another of his brothers and his father, as well. Both of them soon received Christ as their savior. His mother, of course, was so pleased at first that he was out of prison. But then she began to worry about the radical nature of this change in her son. She thought that somehow his past behavior and time in prison must have affected him mentally. “But now,” Noda says, “she’s my biggest fan.”
“I’m going to keep sharing the message of Jesus,…my greatest wish is, in the near future, to build a church to God’s glory in the same neighborhood I used to terrorize as a gang member.”
Noda began putting his life back together by first finishing high school at night. He says that he has continued to see the mighty power of God at work, not only in his own life, but in the lives of numerous friends who, like him, have emerged from the swamp of drug addiction, prison and the hell-on-earth that sin makes of people’s lives. Noda spends much of his non-study time working with former Yakuza gangster Yasuhiro Kanazawa, pastor of Disciple Church in Osaka’s Ikuno Ward (cf. Harvest Report #7). The two visit the local haunts of troubled kids -- like the busy Umeda area in Kita Ward -- and often run into many of Noda’s former gang friends. Often catching them between sessions of sniffing paint thinner, they talk to them on the street about Jesus.
“The number one characteristic of these kids is loneliness,” he said. “They are isolated and hopelessly alone in their struggles. In meeting Christ, the biggest change in my life was in my attitude toward people. The message that loving others is possible when you know that God loves you revolutionized my life and gave me real hope. Now, among the kids we take in at the church, we’re seeing the same thing. Even the worst of them are being changed by the message that God loves them.”
Now in his last year before seminary graduation, Noda is confident about God’s protection for him as he sets his sights on becoming a pastor and ministering to the type of violent and destructive people he himself used to be. Taking Isaiah 41:9-10 as his shield, he boldly pursues God’s call in his life and has already seen powerful results. Noda often visits prisoners to tell them about God’s love and, just like his brother did for him, give them a copy of the Bible. Some have already responded to the Word as he did -- and even are praying for his ministry.
“Iron bars are no barrier to the Holy Spirit’s work,” he said. “I’m going to keep sharing the message of Jesus, I’m going to keep giving people Bibles.”
“And,” he added, “my greatest wish is, in the near future, to build a church to God’s glory in the same neighborhood I used to terrorize as a gang member.”
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02/08/10
