The Importance of Creation in Foreign Missions
Vital lessons can be learned from the preaching methods used
in the apostolic period.
by Dr Henry Morris
Bible believing Christians and churches, believing as they do in Christ’s
Great Commission to preach the gospel to every creature (Matthew
28:19–20), have tried many methods to reach non-Christian cultures,
some of which have not been very effective. Often they have found that preaching
the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith in Christ, apart from scriptural
and historical foundations of this doctrine, has produced little fruit.
On the other hand, the best results have usually been achieved by those who realized
that the scriptural way to approach such people was in terms of the foundational
truth of Creation. Once the existence of the true God and His interest in humankind
is established, then the missionary can go on to show that it is only the Creator
of all men who can really save them from their sins. That same Creator has become
man, borne God’s judgment, died for their sins, and been raised again.
Learn the Biblical Example
That this order is the Biblical norm is evident from the fact that, in the days
to come, when God sends an angel to preach the Gospel on the foreign mission field
(perhaps because the believers in that day either can’t or won’t do
so), this is the way the angel does it. ‘And I saw another
angel fly in the midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to preach unto them
that dwell on the earth, and to every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people.
Saying with a loud voice, Fear God, and give glory to Him: for the hour of His judgment
is come: and worship Him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains
of waters’ (Revelation 14:6,7).
When Paul went to the Jews with the Gospel, he always ‘reasoned
with them out of the scriptures’ (Acts 17:2), for they already
knew and believed the Biblical record of Creation and the Fall, needing only to
be shown from Scripture and the resurrection that the Creator had become the promised
Saviour.
However, when Paul ‘preached the gospel’ to the pagan Lyceonians (Acts
14:6,7). he cried: ‘We … preach unto you that ye
should turn from these vanities unto the living God, which made heaven, and earth,
and the sea, and all things that are therein’ (Acts 14:15). These
were men who did not have the Scriptures, so the Apostle first had to reach them
in terms of something they did have, the foundational knowledge of God as Creator,
long submerged under their everyday idolatries, but still there in dim remembrance.
‘He left not Himself without witness’
(Acts 14:17), and that witness was all around them in nature and in their very consciences.
Likewise, when Paul preached to the Athenian philosophers, surrounded by images
of a multitude of ‘gods’, he realized they still believed in an ‘unknown
god’ who was their Creator, and so began there. ‘God
that made the world and all things therein … giveth to all life, and breath,
and all things’ (Acts 17:24,25). He then preached against their
pantheistic idolatries and urged them to repent (or ‘change their minds’).
The God of Creation had become an ordained man who would some day
‘judge the world in righteousness’, and this fact had been
uniquely confirmed when God ‘raised Him from the dead’
(Acts 17:30,31).
And so it was throughout the apostolic period. When preaching to those who already
believed the Bible, they began with Christ and the resurrection. When preaching
to pagans, they first preached Creation, and then the life and work of Christ.
The Wonderful Witness of Creation
In Paul’s great missionary message to the Romans, he asked:
‘How shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach, except
they be sent? ... But I say, Have they not heard? Yes verily, their sound went into
all the earth, and their words unto the end of the world’ (Romans
10:14,15,18).
Thus they have already heard, through the message of Creation itself. The Apostle
is quoting from
Psalm 19, which begins: ‘The heavens declare the glory
of God’. Jesus Christ is the very ‘brightness
of His glory’ (Hebrews 1:3), and to those who have eyes
to see, the Creation does, indeed, reveal His glory. This is also the testimony
of Romans 1:20: ‘The invisible things of Him from the
creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are
made, even His eternal power and Godhead’.
Nevertheless, such general revelation is not sufficient in itself to lead men to
a saving knowledge of Christ. The specific revelation of Scripture, with its wonderful
message of redemption, is essential, and so is the missionary. At the same time,
the missionary has the invaluable assistance of the witness of Creation in nature
and conscience, if he will only use it as his foundational emphasis in reaching
his hearers.
Heeding the Voice of Experience
This apostolic example and the effectiveness of the Creation testimony in nature
and Scripture have been abundantly confirmed in missionary experience, even though
this fact is not yet widely known or appreciated. The popular missionary writer,
Don Richardson, has a fascinating exposition of this phenomenon in his book, Eternity
in Their Hearts.1 This book gives numerous examples of previously
unreached peoples who had retained enough knowledge of the true God and Creator
to respond gladly when the complete Gospel finally reached them through missionaries.
Particularly citing the monumental six-volume work of the Roman Catholic ethnologist,
Dr Wilhelm Schmidt (The Origin of the Concept of God , 1934), Richardson
says: ‘Probably 90 percent or more of the folk religions on this planet contain
clear acknowledgment of the existence of one Supreme God!’2
The nineteenth century notions of the evolution of religion from primitive animism
to polytheism to monotheism have been falsified in tribe after tribe all over the
world. The real changes have been in exactly the opposite direction, as is documented
extensively by Dr Schmidt and others, from original monotheism to evolutionary pantheism
to polytheism to animism and even (in our modern enlightened age) to atheism and
communism.
The tragedy is that the ancient folk religions, with their traditions of the ‘high
God’, Creation, the Fall, the Flood and often even the Dispersion, have been
opposed from the beginning by the various formal religions that developed around
the concept of evolutionary pantheism (for example, the ancient pagan religions,
then Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, and others), all of which denied the Creator
and identified ultimate reality with an eternally evolving cosmos.
Consider the ancient nation of China. C.H. Kang and Ethel Nelson have demonstrated
that the very characters in the complex Chinese written language were derived from
the primeval events recorded in Genesis.3 For a long time, the Chinese people worshipped
just one God, Shang Ti, the Lord of Heaven, retaining a clear tradition of the Great
Flood and their migration from the region of Babel. Eventually, however, this system
was replaced by the humanistic religion of Confucius, still later by the occult
religions of Taoism and Buddhism, and finally by the atheistic religion of communism.
Richardson shows that the greatest missionary successes ( for example, the Koreans,
the Karen people of Burma, and many others) have come when the peoples had retained
a remembrance of the high God and the missionaries had been willing to identify
this Creator God of their folk religion with the true God of the Bible. He then
comments as follows concerning those who have neglected this approach: ‘Followers
of Christ around the world and down through the centuries could have had 100 times
more missionary vigor if seminary professors, pastors and church school teachers
had understood and communicated this central theme as the Bible communicates it’.4
Dealing with the menace of evolutionsim
With the explosive growth of science, travel, and communication in the past century,
the hold of the world’s pantheistic and occult religions on the nations has
become stronger than ever. Since these are all evolutionary religions anyway, modern
propaganda on behalf of ‘scientific’ evolutionism has been readily accepted
by them and used to convince their adherents of the scientific validity of their
respective religious systems.
Evolutionism is now taught as vigorously in the schools of Africa, Asia and the
Pacific islands as it is in America, Europe, and Australia. It is now even more
readily accepted and widely believed on these ‘mission fields’, where
evolutionary religions have held sway for centuries, than it is in the ‘Christian’
nations of the West. It is, therefore, more vital than ever that these peoples be
reached first of all with the truth of Creation, except that now it must be Biblical
creationism in a scientific context, showing that their evolutionary premises and
teachings have been false.
The Islamic nations and the Jewish people constitute a special case, of course,
for these are at least nominally monotheistic and creationist, all believing, to
some degree, in the Book of Genesis. The problem is that while they believe in the
Creator, they fail to see that He has (and must) also become the Saviour. They accept
the foundational component of the Gospel, but stop there. Consequently, their religions
also have become humanistic in soteriology (the study of salvation), even if not
in theology, and so they also often become easy prey to ‘scientific evolutionary
humanism’, just as do the ‘liberals’ in Christian cultures.
Emphasis on Creation Urgently Needed
Evolutionism is not merely a scientific issue. In one form or another it has always
been present, in every land and among every people, opposing the true God of Creation
and His purposes for mankind. With the increasing modern drive towards ‘globalism’
as espoused by the many pronged thrusts of the so-called New Age Movement and its
promotion of occultic evolutionary pantheism as the world religion of the future,
it is more dangerous than ever, backed as it is by the scientific and educational
establishments in almost every nation.
A strong emphasis on genuine creationism, centered both in clear Biblical revelation
and the real facts of science, is therefore more urgently needed now than ever before
on what we have traditionally regarded as the ‘foreign fields’. To achieve
real and lasting success in winning the people of these lands to Christ, missionaries
must be well equipped to deal with this foundational issue wherever they go.
The encouraging thing is that this has been the clear Biblical precept and example
all along. Following in the path of both the first century missionaries and the
early missionaries of modern times, they will find their message of creation/salvation
still supported by the witness of the created world and the internal heart witness
of men and women created in God’s image, ‘of all
nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues’ (Revelation 7:9).
Related articles
References
- Don Richardson, Eternity in Their Hearts. Regal Books, Ventura (California),
1981.
- Ibid, p. 44,
- C.H. Rang and Ethel Nelson, The Discovery of Genesis. Concordia. St Louis,
1979.
- Ibid, p. 129.
© Copyright ICR. Used with permission.
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