430129DR

Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. (John 1:29)

God has been seeding the cultures of the world with foreshadowings of the Savior — and frontier missionaries keep finding them.

The Most Important Introduction in History

The most important introduction in the history of the world happened about 2,000 years ago, when John the Baptist had the privilege of introducing Jesus as the Messiah among the Jewish people. For that introduction, John used what must surely be regarded as the most meaningful metaphor ever used in any language. Pointing to Jesus of Nazareth, he said, "Look, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world."

That metaphor was so meaningful within the Jewish cultural context because for centuries they had been offering animal sacrifices to illustrate the need for an atonement — an atonement God could accept as a basis for forgiving the guilty. Those who sacrificed oxen, goats, sheep, and doves across the centuries probably thought the animal blood itself was atoning for their sin. But the Epistle to the Hebrews tells us the blood of bulls and goats does not put away sin.

That does not mean they sacrificed those animals in vain. The practice kept alive before the minds of the people the need for an atonement and served as a cultural compass pointing forward in time to Jesus, who would be revealed as the Lamb of God. Just as physical compasses everywhere on earth point to one place — magnetic north — so God ordained cultural compasses to point not to one place, but to one person: Jesus.

More Old Testament Compasses

The Gospel of John gives several examples. In chapter 3, Jesus told Nicodemus, "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up," identifying an event from the exodus as foreshadowing his own lifting up on the cross.

In chapter 6, Jesus referred to the manna provided in the wilderness and said the true bread from heaven is he who comes down from heaven and gives life to the world — and then declared that he himself is that bread of life. How could a man dare to make such a claim and expect to be taken seriously unless it really is the truth?

The Epistle to the Hebrews carries this further, taking care to show that the tabernacle, the temple, the priesthood, and the sacrifices all foreshadowed one aspect or another of the redemption later provided in God incarnate, Jesus. It was good of God to give the Jewish people all these foreshadowings of the Savior.

What About the Rest of the Human Race?

But here is a major question to ponder. Did God give only a small percentage of mankind foreshadowings of the Savior and leave the rest without that providence?

Those of us trained to be frontier crossers with the gospel — going into regions where the message had never been proclaimed, learning languages in which it had never been expressed — were not encouraged by our instructors to expect to find Gentile cultural compasses waiting on the other side of those frontiers. Apparently they didn't think God went to that much trouble.

Yet guess what we frontier crossers have been finding and using down through the centuries: Gentile cultural compasses. We have been privileged to loosen the little arrows on their dials and watch them point men and women to Jesus in culturally relevant ways, and lives have been transformed. Let me share some secrets from the other side of those frontiers.

Robert Morrison and the Code of China

Travel back in time with me to 1807, to the docks of a port city in China. A ship flying a British flag is docking, and one Britisher disembarks: Robert Morrison. He has come to be a missionary — one man, in a nation already entrenched with Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and in places Islam. What chance does he think he has?

He soon discovered the Chinese language is tonal — you must produce the right sound at the right pitch, or you may think you're saying "grandmother" while people hear "pig." He also found that the Chinese, instead of a phonetic alphabet, use a writing system of more than 200 little pictures called radicals, combined in complex ways. Looking at a sample, Morrison shook his head and said it reminded him of chicken tracks in the mud. But he had no choice; he had to master it.

A Chinese man with some English helped him crack the grammar and amass vocabulary. One morning Morrison asked which symbols form the word "righteous." The man drew two symbols, one over the other. The upper symbol is the Chinese symbol for a lamb — with a knife, showing it is a sacrificial lamb. Beneath it is the symbol for the first-person pronoun, me. When the Chinese write "righteous," they are writing "the lamb over me."

Morrison asked, "Sir, do you know where is the lamb under whom you and I must be found in the sight of Shang Ti, the Lord of Heaven, in order to be righteous in his sight?" The man said, "No. Do you?" That enabled Morrison to say, "Do I have good news for you and for your people."

One Hundred and Twenty Compasses

Morrison realized there might be more such encoded messages — and there were. He eventually found about 120 Chinese words carrying spiritually significant meanings encoded in how the ancestors combined their pictures.

The symbol for "ship" requires drawing the hull of a vessel — but it doesn't mean "ship" until you specify eight people sailing in it. Why eight? According to Genesis, how many people were delivered from the flood in the ark? Eight people in a ship. The word for "covet" requires drawing two trees and a woman between them, making a choice. And the verb "come" begins with a tree shaped like a cross, with the symbol for a man — an upside-down Y — superimposed over its center, joined with the symbol for mankind. It reads like an encoded message: mankind, come to the man who hung on a tree.

The Chinese people had no inkling how these symbols could be explained — but Robert Morrison did. He had 120 uniquely Chinese cultural compasses ready to point his hearers to Jesus. More and more Chinese began to say, "He's showing us how our own ancestors anticipated his teaching." Morrison translated the entire Bible into Chinese.

The Church Communism Could Not Stop

Others followed the trail he blazed — some, like Hudson Taylor, becoming more famous than Morrison himself. By 1949, when the Communists took control, the number of Christians is believed to have risen to about one million.

The Communists set out to eradicate religious belief. According to the U.S. State Department, they may have killed as many as 70 million Chinese, including about 500,000 Christians. They confiscated churches and schools, turned churches into warehouses, and warned surviving Christians that unless they renounced their faith they could work only as gravediggers, garbage collectors, or field laborers. An estimated 200,000 capitulated. About 300,000 remained faithful.

A committee in Beijing devised a plan to weaken Christian faith without the expense of imprisoning or killing believers. One member said, "Christians depend on meetings to sustain their faith. So wherever Christians are found together, leave only one believer or one family, and scatter the rest to communes with no Christians." The committee praised the ingenuity.

But in scattering them, the Communist government — entirely at its own expense — became the most efficient missionary-sending organization in 2,000 years of church history. The very people whose faith they had strengthened through persecution now radiated joy, honesty, and integrity throughout the commune system, and the church grew exponentially.

The Christianization of Communist China

It is now believed the number of Christians in China is at minimum 80 million, with some estimates of 100 or even 120 million, growing at an average daily net gain of nearly 30,000 new believers. Even secular scholars now write papers about the "Christianization of communist China."

Scratching their heads, the Communists have grudgingly given some warehouses back. Christians gladly refurbish them into the churches they once were, and so many people throng to them that some have a rule: you may not attend two Sundays in a row, lest you steal standing room from others who need to hear God's word. Elsewhere pastors say, "I didn't see you last Sunday." In China some pastors say, "Didn't I see you last Sunday? You shouldn't be here."

Did God prepare the gospel for China — and prepare the Chinese for the gospel? They already had a name for God: Shang Ti, the Lord of Heaven, the uncreated Creator. They had their idols, but they also knew about him, and knew he did not want to be represented by an idol.

William Carey and the Upside-Down Tree

In 1792, William Carey and his wife Dorothy arrived in the predominantly Hindu north of India. In a culture given to literally millions of gods — for polytheism has a built-in inflation factor; once the infinite God is rejected, it takes an infinite number of finite deities to fill his sandals — it didn't seem likely one could find anything pointing to Jesus.

Carey was also horrified by sati, the custom of burning a widow alive on her husband's funeral pyre. He urged the British East India Company to make it illegal, but they cared only for their cash flow and even threatened to imprison him. His Danish friends in the enclave of Serampore solved the problem by giving him a Danish passport to wave in the Britishers' faces. Carey's letters home stirred Christians to petition Parliament, and sati was made illegal. Some Hindu intellectuals secretly agreed but had been afraid to speak until the bold foreigner took the lead. Tens of millions of women in India owe the extension of their lives to the goodness of God reaching India through William Carey.

India also had the world's most massive system of racist apartheid — the Aryan conquerors made themselves the high castes and relegated the original Dravidian population to the low castes, the lowest of whom, the Dalits or "untouchables," were told their very shadow defiles.

Yet as Carey and others learned Sanskrit — India's Latin — they found that the oldest writings, the Vedas, written before Hinduism emerged, contain myths that read like biblical prophecies. One describes an upside-down tree, rooted in heaven and growing toward earth, spreading branches yielding fruit for all mankind; its trunk is gashed, and the sap that bleeds from the wound in its side is for the healing of mankind. Strange as that is, who else but Jesus corresponds in every detail?

The greatest response has come not among the high-caste Aryans on their pedestal of privilege but among the Dravidians, especially the Dalits. An estimated 200 new house churches open every month. People taught they are virtually subhuman discover they are created in the image of God, loved enough that God himself died to atone for their sin, and invited into full citizenship in the kingdom of God.

A Headhunter Tribe in New Guinea

But what about Stone Age tribes hidden in remote jungles — cannibals and headhunters? In 1962, my wife Carol Joy, our baby son Stephen, and I sailed to New Guinea, a vast island home to 1,000 tribes speaking 1,000 languages — almost one of every seven languages on earth. We served under World Team (WorldTeam.org), the second-oldest interdenominational faith mission.

The mountain Dani had already begun responding to the gospel, but another tribe had been discovered in the swamps to the south — 30,000 square miles drenched with 22 feet of rain a year, with crocodiles, snakes, leeches, and malaria. We could have stayed in the cool, safe mountains, but as I prayed, the Lord clearly called us to the swamp tribe, the Sawi. I asked God to give Carol her own assurance, and he did. "Don," she said, "ever since I heard the name Sawi, I can't forget it. Do you think God might want us to go to them?"

Welcomed by the Sawi

The Sawi had been hearing positive reports about pale beings called Tuans who brought medicine, salt, steel tools, and never hurt anyone. Their enemies mocked them: "You wretched Sawi will never be favored by one of these rare beings." But the Sawi resolved that if a Tuan ever chose them despite the propaganda, they would choose him in return.

After they helped me build a little thatch-roofed house — our "thatch box" — I returned three days later with Carol and Stephen, ten hours by dugout canoe. We rounded the last bend at sunset and found 400 Sawi massed on the riverbank, the men in war paint, holding weapons. There was nothing to do but climb out into their midst. Then someone shouted the signal, and they erupted in leaping, dancing joy, baptizing us not with water but with Sawi humanity. They danced around the thatch box for three nights and two days. We were welcome.

Learning a Language with No Alphabet

I had to learn a language no one had ever written down — no grammar, dictionary, alphabet, or bilingual instructor. So I pointed at things, hoping they would give me the word. I pointed at a man; they said, "Didig." At a woman, a dog, a house, a tree, a canoe — always "Didig." Had God led me halfway around the world to learn a language with one word? Finally I realized didig means finger. It is forbidden among the Sawi to point with a finger unless you are placing a curse. Thank God they gave their dense Tuan the benefit of the doubt. Later I learned to point with my lips.

Mimicking actions for verbs and pointing with my lips for nouns, I gained enough Sawi to explain God, creation, the fall, the promise of a Redeemer, and Jesus. It was hard to hold their attention — until I told the story of Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss. Suddenly they burst into cheers for Judas, exclaiming, "He's the sort of man we call a tare duan, a master of treachery! Using a kiss that way is tui asanaiman — fattening a victim with friendship for an unsuspected slaughter." Among the Sawi, treachery was idealized. We had been so encouraged by their friendliness.

The Peace Child

I prayed for wisdom, for the Bible says if any man lacks wisdom, let him ask of God. Then three villages relocated and built around our home, giving us 800 people. My wife, a registered nurse, began saving lives — combating malaria, dysentery, snakebite — averaging about one life a day over our 13 years. They called her "the woman who makes all the villages well."

When warfare broke out between two of the villages, I pleaded for peace, but they kept saying I didn't understand what I was asking. I learned that for a Sawi father genuinely to end bloodshed, he had to make a sacrifice so great that no insincere man could imagine it: he had to take one of his own children, a baby son, and give him as a peace child to an enemy father, who would raise the boy in that other village.

A father named Kayo could not bear to think the senseless violence might drive us away and end all the blessings we had brought. So he picked up his only son — the only child he and his wife would ever have, about the same age as our Stephen — embraced him one last time, and, despite his wife's wailing protest and his own breaking heart, ran out and placed his only son in the arms of an enemy father. That father said, "Kayo, you have given an only son. We are reconciled. It is enough." All the village touched the peace child and pledged, "As long as Kayo and I are living, I receive this child as a basis for peace." The hatred was gone.

Behold the Peace Child

A father giving a son to his enemies for reconciliation — why did that seem so familiar? Suddenly it hit me. I could not say "Behold the Lamb of God"; they had never seen a sheep. They had pigs, but I could hardly say "Behold the pig of God." But I could say: Behold the Peace Child whom God has provided — the greater Peace Child given by the greater Father to establish the greatest peace.

When I preached in those terms, they listened intently. Then they asked, "Didn't you say someone named Judas betrayed this Jesus with a kiss? Don, you didn't tell us he betrayed a peace child. If you had, no way would we have acclaimed him." Judas's ratings plunged, and Jesus was unveiled as the perfect fulfiller of their own Sawi peace-child custom.

The day came when a one-eyed chief named Hatho, listening to me trace the parallels, stood up, his one good eye glowing like a lamp. "Don, your words make my liver quiver. I am ready to lay my hand by faith on Jesus, God's Peace Child. I want the Father King to know that this Sawi receives his Peace Child." He brought his four wives and all his children to pray, became the first family to believe, and traveled with me to explain the gospel to all 18 villages. Today some 70% of the tribe profess faith in Jesus.

God-Prepared People

When I found the Sawi peace child and saw what happened in China and India, I asked: what about other tribes and other cultures? That launched me into decades of study, unearthing more and more examples. I learned of a mountain tribe that killed two of my fellow missionaries in 1968, yet had places of refuge reminiscent of the Old Testament cities of refuge. Another tribe makes peace through a symbolic new birth — they grasp new birth far better than Nicodemus, who responded with a naively literal objection. These redemptive analogies are everywhere. God has been seeding the cultures of mankind in a preparatory way for the proclamation of the gospel.

So what is this thing we call missions? Many Christians think it is something God invented to keep hyperactive zealots out of everyone's hair, or only for those not qualified to pastor at home, or only for Christians so holy they can read at night by the light of their halos.

What is it really? It is God-prepared messengers from fellowships like this one, bringing the God-prepared message to God-prepared people. Does that not sound like a doable mission — a God-glorifying one, an eternally significant one? God-prepared people, for the glory of God.