Atheist Missionary Reviles Fallen Rival

I have been reading about John Chau, the man who tried to evangelize North Sentinel Island in the Indian Ocean. If you haven’t heard about him, the story is brief. There are a few dozen or maybe a few hundred tiny black people on the island. They are completely backward. They don’t wear clothing, they have no technology, they can’t make fire, they are illiterate as far as anyone knows, and they are extremely xenophobic. With some exceptions, they try to kill anyone who lands on the island, and their success rate is high.

In Mark 13:10, Jesus said the end of this age would come after the “gospel of the kingdom” had been preached to all peoples. The word I translate as “peoples” supposedly means “peoples joined by practicing similar customs or common culture,” so it may not be synonymous with “nations.”

I put “gospel of the kingdom” in quotation marks, because I don’t believe the gospel of salvation is the same as the gospel of the kingdom. We’re supposed to inherit the kingdom of God here on earth; it’s inside us. A lot of people preach salvation, tell their converts they are permanently saved no matter what they do, and never go on to teaching about the kingdom. I think most missionaries don’t know what the kingdom is.

Chau belonged to All Nations, a charismatic group which is trying to see to it that all peoples are reached.

The story says he made several approaches to the Sentinelese. The first time, he brought gifts for them and proclaimed his love for them. They ran him off, firing arrows at him. He made more attempts, and a boy shot an arrow at him, piercing the waterproof Bible he carried. He eventually had himself dropped on the island with no way off, and he was killed.

Nice people.

It is illegal to visit North Sentinel Island because it is believed the natives have no immunity to common pathogens the rest of us carry. Indian anthropologists visited successfully some years ago and threw coconuts to the natives, and the news stories don’t say it caused an epidemic, but in an unrelated incident, natives on another island supposedly died after drinking from a plastic jug that washed ashore.

I don’t know if Chau was supposed to visit the island. I don’t think he was. Ordinarily, when people who are Spirit-led evangelize, God sends them to people who are receptive. It’s a crazy thing to watch. Even hard core Jews and Muslims have been known to accept Jesus quickly. When you choose your own mission, you’re not likely to get as much support from God.

We’re not supposed to go wherever we want and try to evangelize. We’re supposed to wait for God to send us. Paul was not allowed to go into Asia to preach. A carnal Christian might get angry at a person who refused to preach in a certain area, but we’re supposed to obey God, not our egos.

Carnal Christians are always burdening us with jobs God doesn’t want us to do. “Crawl a mile on your knees with a cross on your back.” “Flail yourself on Easter until you bleed profusely.” “Tithe.” They waste our energy, and because God doesn’t help us with the things they tell us to do, we fail and become discouraged and bitter.

God shows evangelists where to cast their nets. In the Bible, the lake of Galilee represents the earth, and fish represent people. The disciples were fishermen, and on one occasion, they fished all night and caught nothing. Jesus then told them where to cast their nets, and they got more fish than they knew what to do with. Jesus did this so future evangelists would know they were supposed to wait for his orders.

Maybe God told Chau to preach on the island, but it does not look that way.

The public reaction to his trip has been disturbing. People are ridiculing him. Many are glad he died. Many are demanding that the Sentinelese be left in their ignorance and squalor. Some cite the danger of disease, but others are just furious at Christianity and white people, even though Chau was not white.

Boston Globe columnist Renee Graham wrote a scathing piece about Chau. It’s shocking. The title: “Missionary didn’t die from tribesmen’s arrows. He was killed by his own arrogance.” That may be true, but it could be put more kindly, and a non-Christian who doesn’t hear from God is not really in a position to draw the conclusion anyway.

Here are her last two paragraphs:

Some Christian compatriots have already anointed Chau as “a martyr.” He’s not. He did not die in defense of his religion. Instead he made a fatal miscalculation in deciding that his way and his God were the only acceptable path. He cared more for his flawed ideas about saving souls than about respecting lives.

Chau died trying to force on others his way of life; the Sentinelese did what they deemed necessary to protect theirs.

“Flawed ideas.”

Graham is a missionary, too. She is a missionary for atheism or whatever it is that she believes. She is against Christianity, and she takes Chau to task for believing and evangelizing.

That’s pure antichrist. People who belong to the Beast come up with all sorts of rationales for preventing evangelism, which is the sole reason God allows Christians to remain on earth after receiving salvation.

Her blatant persecution is really something. I’ll bet she would get in trouble with her editors if she called Islam or Hinduism false religions based on “flawed ideas.”

The Boston Globe is now, openly, an instrument of evangelism for atheists. What a strange development.

Atheists have always been ardent evangelists for their faith. They can be very shrill and pushy. Well, it goes farther than that. They have murdered, imprisoned, and enslaved countless people in socialist countries, trying to stamp out Judaism and Christianity.

How can you be angry at a man who tried to share the love of God with others, even if you think God doesn’t exist? How can you have no respect for his good intentions? It’s not a reasonable stance; it comes from demons. I can understand being angry at a person who risks infecting primitive people with diseases, but most of Chau’s critics are angry about his evangelism, not his microbes.

Incidentally, the disease argument is not very strong. The highest estimate for the population of the island is in the hundreds. These people have been there for thousands of years, and their numbers don’t increase. What does that mean? High infant mortality and short lifespans. The Sentinelese have been suffering a critical health crisis for as long as they’ve existed. They are a failed people. There are ways to reach them and improve their lives, without spreading disease.

The world is filling up with hatred of Christians, and we’re acting like the frog in the mythical story of the pan on the stove. Most of us will be sitting complacently when the water starts to boil, because we don’t listen to God. In the past, the hatred was more covert, but now it’s blatant and pervasive, and it’s going to get much worse, very soon.

Most of us will be like Jews who waited to long to leave Hitler’s Europe. Most Christians ridicule those who say we’re in for persecution resembling that which Hitler inflicted on the Jews. In time, they will see that we were right.

The Sentinelese make me wonder how many peoples have not been reached. I read something interesting: according to some Bible translations, Peter said Christians were “expecting and hastening” the end of this age, suggesting we could speed up the return of Jesus. Maybe we’re supposed to be praying for God to help missionaries get the job done.

Talk about a worthy objective for prayer. This world is like a full diaper. I’m for anything that expedites the termination of the project. The sooner this age ends, the sooner the messianic age begins.

I’m not sure Peter was understood correctly, though. He may have meant “hurrying toward” instead of “hastening.” There is some evidence that God planned for Jesus to return after 2000 years, and if that’s true, can we make any difference? Maybe we can shift things a few, or a few hundred, years. That would certainly be worth praying for.

It’s strange seeing leftists stand up for squalor, ignorance, poverty, xenophobia, violence, and a high death rate. They’re always trying to control others, forcing them to accept their odd culture in its entirety. In the case of the Sentinelese, they are striving to keep “little brown people”–the people they always say they’re trying to help–in a position of weakness and failure.

For all we know, the Sentinelese have a patriarchal society in which women and girls are slaves. They may kill homosexuals. Maybe they’re trying to kill off certain species on their island. They hunt and eat meat. They may have all sorts of customs leftists would hate. You would think leftists would be trampling each other, trying to get to the island to correct the natives.

The Sentinelese are kept isolated by a demonic stronghold. Satan wants to prevent Jesus from returning, so he walls people off. That’s what’s really happening. Sooner or later, the Sentinelese will be reached, or they will disappear. You can’t stop prophecy with a few arrows. My own ancestors probably killed missionaries with primitive weapons. If so, it didn’t stop them.

Wow. Where would I be if leftists had stopped missionaries and educators in 100 AD? I would be illiterate. My most impressive piece of technology would probably be a simple iron knife or axe. I’d worship ridiculous false gods. I’d live in a society where many women died in childbirth and most kids died in infancy. Most people I knew would be dead by 35. Thank goodness no one had the common sense to preserve my ancestral culture. It was inferior and toxic.

Where did we get the backward idea that primitive cultures are as good as, or better than, advanced cultures? I know Montaigne put the general notion forth in a silly essay about “cannibals.” What are the odds that he actually knew anything about “cannibals”? Slim. He lived in France.

Interesting thing: overwhelmingly, when presented with a choice, primitive people choose Western culture over whatever it is they have to begin with. They learn to read and buy TV’s. It’s pretty unusual for people from sophisticated cultures to go the other way. Liberals from Cambridge, Massachusetts aren’t knocking themselves out trying to move to huts in New Guinea.

Maybe if things keep getting crazier, leftists will start refusing to teach their kids to read. As it is, many of them are against vaccinations.

I hope some of the Sentinelese get to know God. It’s a shame to see their lives amount to so little. I don’t think they go to hell, because the Bible says that where there is no law, there is no sin. That doesn’t mean it’s okay for them to have no relationship with God here on earth. Every human being is supposed to know God and receive salvation and sanctification.

The attacks on John Chau are sick. I hope Christians are taking notice of them. Many of the people who are celebrating his death today would gladly take life from the rest of us if they could.