I have another amazing story to share with you in this Nugget. I want to preface the story with the background as to the source of this story. Then I will relate the story as I received it following which I will deal with the issues this story and the Auca story from last week raise.
Preamble:
This comes from a group who work in the Middle East, amongst the S M* People.
One Friday at the time of m*sque prayers ten of us were meeting in our living room and we asked God what He wanted us to do. He spoke to us and said “You really don’t have the faith to believe that I can do the impossible, to do more than you can imagine or think.” I personally felt deeply convicted that day and we collectively as a team felt like God wanted us to be really intentional about agreeing together to ask Him for specific things among the S M people in His name. He led us to pray for two things in particular and to ask thousands of other Christ followers around the world to pray with us. We prayed two things: we prayed that S M people would have the same dream in the same night so that they would follow Jesus together. That came out of our pain at seeing the isolated individual S M Christ followers. We wanted to see families that were following Jesus not just individuals. The Holy Spirit convicted us to pray for whole families to have the same dream in the same night and follow Jesus together. The other thing that we prayed was that S M religious leaders and clerics would come to Christ and that they would lead many other S M followers to follow Jesus. We prayed those two specific things. Honestly I lost count of how many people around the world from Chinese in the House Group movements in China, to believers in Korea staying up all night to pray, to Christ followers in American setting their alarm clocks to wake up in the middle of the night to pray. We agreed that we would pray in accord with the time zone of 12 noon on Fridays in the Middle East. We also had a ten day prayer guide. All that is to say, we asked others to pray very specifically and intently with us those two things for S M people. I want to encourage you today about corporate specific prayer by sharing this true account of what happened.
Following is the story that was told me, when God in his sovereignty allowed me to meet a woman who told me the story below. She said, “Oh, you work with S M people”, then “I want to tell you a story.
We had a pastor who came to work in a particular neighbourhood to start a church among S M people. He knew very clearly that the Lord said, “Go to this neighbourhood and take your family and start a church.” He went and a few days after he arrived, the doorbell rang and he went out to the gate to open the door. Three masked men stood at his outer gate, when one of the men put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger and murdered him that day. Not long after God spoke to another man of God, a pastor, and told him I want you to take that murdered man’s place. I want you to take your family and go to that same place, that same neighbourhood and I want you to plant my church among the S M people there.”
That Christ follower, the pastor, willingly obeyed the Lord’s instruction, took his family and moved into that same flat where the previous pastor and his family had been. Not long after he moved in there there was a ring at the bell on the gate outside. He went out to the gate and three masked men were at the gate. They grabbed him, put a hood over his head and threw him into the trunk of a car. He said that he rode for a long time in the trunk of that vehicle not knowing where he was going. The vehicle came to a stop and they opened the trunk and pulled him out. He was still masked and they walked him up a path and then up some steps and he heard a door open. They stepped inside and the masked men took the hood off the pastor’s head. He looked around the room. It was a giant room in which he saw 900 men sitting around the room – 900 S M men. At that point the pastor thought “Oh my, they are going to carry out a public execution for me (and film it).” One of the masked men, who had kidnapped the pastor looked at him and said “Sir, we did not mean to frighten you but do you remember the man who lived in that home before you did?
“Of course”, the pastor said “Yes, I do.”
Then the man said “Well, I am the one who pulled the trigger. The three of us are the ones that murdered him. The night that we killed him, do you see the men in this room?”
He said “Yes.”
“Well” the man said, “the night that we killed him, every single one of us in this room had the same dream. We dreamt that the blood of that man was on our hands but that God in his mercy would send someone in his place who could tell us how to get the blood off our hands. Are you that man?”
That night that pastor had the blessed opportunity to share the gospel with 900 S M men who had the same dream on the same night. That night we were told that all 900 of those men choose to follow Jesus the Messiah. We heard later that their entire families, their wives and children, came to know Christ and follow him as well.
Now I am sure you have questions flooding your mind like the one I have used to title this Nugget.
- Would God really send a Person to their Death for the Sake of the Gospel?
- How could God deliberately send someone to their death in order that others could hear the Gospel?
- Doesn’t God love us enough to want us to live to know Him and praise Him?
- Does God care so little for a single human life that He would allow someone to die so others can hear the Gospel?
- Do you find this story offensive? Maybe it convinces you that God doesn’t love and care for each individual when He can sacrifice one to save many.
These are my questions. I am just doing what Paul did in his letters, asking rhetorical questions, prefiguring what some readers may be thinking. I am sure whichever way you view this story, it will challenge your preconceptions. As no doubt the Waorani story last week may have done. Let’s unpack these stories a little more.
The murder of the five missionaries in Ecuador is shocking enough. It was a story which captured World Headlines. It was a story which juxtaposed hostile murdering savages who lived in the jungle with civilised modern city dwellers whose expressed purpose was to take the greatest story ever told to those same people. It was a story tailor-made for the news media. But what was most shocking about it was that it didn’t work out according to the script. Furthermore, where was the God, whose salvation story the missionaries were taking, in what subsequently happened? Each of the five missionaries and their wives were committed to taking the message of God’s love to those who had never heard. What a paradox! The all-powerful-God, who sent the 10 to Ecuador to share the Gospel with the fiercest tribe of people on earth could have / should have protected His emissaries from death and danger. Yet He didn’t. Why? Why not?
The Principle:
There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
John 15:13
The Response:
- “Every time I take off, I am ready to deliver up the life I owe to God.”
- “I would gladly give my life for that tribe.”
- “I pray that God will spare the lives of these Indians.”
- “We would never kill the Waorani because they are not ready for heaven but we are.”
Each of those men and their wives were willing to lay down their lives for the sake of the Gospel. I marvel at the courage and the dedication of the second pastor in the story above. When asked by God to go to same town, the same place, the same people who killed the first pastor, he was willing, even to the point of taking his family with him. I think I may have wanted to spend time bargaining with God.
- “What if I went alone at first?”
- “I will take my family when I know it is safe.”
- “Lord, l know you said to take my family. But can I leave them home until I know it’s safe? I will willing to die for you, but please spare my wife and children.”
It is unquestionable that there is an added dimension to this story when women and children are involved in the kind of danger depicted by this story. In fact Elisabeth Elliot suggested a different first approach to the Auca. [I have deliberately used the name the other tribes called the Waorani at this point given what the name symbolises.] Elisabeth felt one man going with his wife and child would send a different message to the tribe which would be more well received and send a conciliatory message.
We might blame the Waorani for such a brutal act, but God used the tragedy to speak to them. However, there was a strand of the story behind the scenes which sheds a totally different light on what happened. I have been reading on in Steve Saint’s book and will follow the story into Menkaye’s book as well to understand as much as I am able about this encounter. I will sum it all up at the end. I wish to understand as much as I am able of God’s Ways. There was a sub-plot to the Waorani story that has not been told until Steve Saint’s book, written after he had the opportunity to sit down with “the missionary killers” and ask his questions. I won’t go into all the twists and turns now. Suffice to say something else was going on at time involving Nenquihui (pronounced Nenkiwi) and Gimade (George and Delilah). The reason the five missionaries gave them the names George and Delilah was because something was going on between them. In fact there was a planned marriage in place for Nenquihui to marry one of Guikita’s relatives. Guikita was upset, sensing Nenquihui was more interested in Gimade. When he heard that Nenquihui had followed Gimade into the jungle alone he was incensed and felt he had to kill him and probably some of his relatives in order to preserve the honour of his clan. The story in brief is that Guikita suggested killing the cowodi (foreigners) to take out his anger on them and preserve tribal relations. Menkaye disagreed sensing this was a chance for their first friendly contact with cowodi.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
Isaiah 55:8-9
Having heard another side to the Waorani story, I wonder whether God didn’t have other plans in mind. The contact between the Waorani and the five missionaries had been proceeding favourably through several gift exchanges and even the Waorani warriors were open to contact. The missionaries had been moving forward cautiously. Future contact was looking favourable. The sudden killing of the five men was unexpected and the Waorani themselves were left remorseful. Only God knows His intention for that first encounter with the Waorani, but the indicators behind the scene suggest a lot more was going on than suspected. Still I believe with all we saw in the previous Nugget we have to agree that whatever the full implications were, God redeemed the Waorani to the fullest possible extent and still is.
I will leave both stories at this point and let them percolate in your thinking. I intend to wrap up all I have given you with more to come at the end of this series. There is much more to share with you all yet. Next week’s story is another shocker in a different way. Don’t miss it. “