Peace Child

As Saloma was saying, my son and my older son and daughter-in-law, our two grandchildren, have been here with us, and we have absolutely delighted in the time that we've had here in Canmore with the brethren here in Canada. You have forever changed my mental image of the Feast of Tabernacles. I was listening to Dr. Rick Barrant's travel logs at the beginning of the feast as he would explain the items that were either on screen or a little bit of a travel log about the area. And we'll return next year to my home site, which is Bend, Oregon. And every year when the feast begins, one of the highlights is just before the feast, almost every year there's a dip in the weather, just cold enough to put a new fresh coat of snow on the highest peaks. And when we arrive at Bend, looking to the west, towering over the feast site are the three sisters, faith, hope, and charity. From this time onward, each time I go to my home site and look westward at the three volcanic peaks to the west, I will have this back-and-forth image of three volcanoes looking over Bend and three great craggy peaks overlooking Canmore, sharing a common name, sharing a common majesty, but very different in their structure. As a final comment about the last great day, I'd like to ask if you, and it's a rhetorical question because I know that you have, but have you ever stopped and tried to wrap your mind around the last great day? And as I said, it's a rhetorical question because I know all of you have. This day simply is unlike anything else in all of human history past, and it's unlike anything that will ever happen to human beings at any time other. There's a huge painting at the home office depicting the last great day, and I've sat and studied it on multiple occasions. It's a large-scale painting, and it shows people in various stages of coming to life, forming, gathering, and walking in the costume of every age that we know of, of every race, of both genders, and of all ages. It's a very complex painting. It's one that makes you stop and look and think and ponder. What will it be like when we see people of every century, every culture, every race, and every condition standing as one vast multitude? Hard to wrap your mind around, isn't it?

The last great day is not the millennium light. It isn't just a block of time smaller than the millennium tagged on the end. The start of it is so radically different than the start of the millennium that all by itself it creates all sorts of issues. The world is systematically and incrementally humbled prior to the millennium, so there is a systematic, incremental humbling of all the earth prior to the start of the millennium. At the beginning of the last great day, one moment, civilization is dead, and the next moment, civilization is alive. There is no conditioning. There is no preparation. There is no lead-in. You can well understand the valley of dry bones and the first comment that comes out of humanity's mouth. They're not saying, I'm alive again. Fantastic! They're saying, woe is me. My hope is cut off. Now, I don't know how that registers with other cultures and other generations, but in the spirit of what Mr. Scott Moss was saying, I understand it quite well. Among the hundreds of millions of Christians, to find yourself standing alive in a form that you can pinch and it hurts does not equate with, I'm in heaven. And in Christianity, the alternative is not too good.

Knowing the natural pessimism in human beings as they all rise to a human form, and they know there are no pearly gates. There are no great beings with pigeon wings flying around. This is not good. Other cultures, I can't even wrap my head around. When the millennium started, there will be no requirements for everyone alive to follow Christ immediately. There is no immediate requirement to be converted. As those of us know, it is even a progressive event of a yet undetermined length before this world is totally at peace. We know that after the captives have returned from captivity and have been there long enough to be able to have made a prosperous society, that there will come tidings from the north and the east saying, Come, let us go down against the land of unwalled villages and pillaging.

So there will be a lead-in. Last great day, it's a one-time, only-time event. Everyone resurrected to that time has his or her chance for salvation then. There is no other. When the millennium starts, everyone, no matter which part of the world they are in, are part of the current century. When the last great day starts, they will represent every century. All cultures, all ages, all alive simultaneously. I remember years ago a commercial, and I wish I tried to Google and find it, and I can't. There was a commercial on television. It had Adam and Eve in the garden, and Adam was being very naive. Eve looked at him, and she made a comment, and the phrase has never left my mind. She looked at Adam, and she said, this is paradise, not fantasy land.

There are times where we look at things, and we can make that transition, if we're not careful, from paradise to fantasy land. While the last great day is arguably the greatest supernatural event in human history, it isn't magical, and it isn't mystical. By that I mean all people, regardless of how mind-boggling the events of their resurrection will be, they have to follow exactly the same path to salvation that you and I have had to follow. There will be no difference in how those people, no matter when they lived, how they lived, who they were, there will be no difference whatsoever in how they get from where they are the day that they become conscious human beings once more to where you are and to where I am. That routing has never changed. It's never varied. It's the most significant part of understanding the last great day. It will begin with education. How do you start? In fact, after I finish mentioning these particular points, I'll emphasize them with the scripture that makes the same points. The vast majority of people who have lived in human history have never known God. They have never known Christ. The universal knowledge of Christ is a relatively new experience in human history. Knowing is knowing. Knowing about is knowing about. I know all sorts of trivia. You do, too. It's nothing more than information. There's a transition from simply knowing something in your head to moving to the place where you have some ownership, where you accept it. There is another huge gulf between accepting something and embracing something. Each of those is a huge leap. I know all sorts of facts that I have no investment in. I accept certain things as reality that I'm indifferent about. That I'm not a human being. I accept certain things as reality that I'm indifferent about. There are few things that I embrace, and every one at his own speed. So, this isn't just an assembly line process where everybody comes through and they all get stamped out and cut out at the same time. We human beings come to God and to salvation at different times and in different ways and at different speeds, even within families. Those of you here that represent families, when you look at the time that God first made himself known to you, did everyone in your family respond at the same time in the same way? If you have a large enough family, the answer is no. It doesn't work that way. This sermon is going to be built upon the principles contained in two scriptures. Luke 16.

Luke 16 contains the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. And in this story, in Luke 16, the rich man who is in agony is beseeching that somebody go and tell his brothers, warn them, give them counsel so that they don't end up just as he has. And the response to the rich man is very instructional. In verse 27 of Luke 16, the rich man is shown here as saying, I beg you, therefore, Father, that you would send him to my Father's house, for I have five brothers that he may testify to them, lest they also come to this place of torment. And Abraham said to him, they have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.

And he said, No, Father Abraham, but if what goes to them from the dead, they will repent. But he said to him, If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded, though one rise from the dead. It's hard for human beings to realize that miracles do not convert people. Here Jesus Christ, in giving a parable, was giving a point that is a profound point. If you can't take the instruction that is contained in the Word of God, if you can't read it, if you can't accept it, if you can't adopt it, and if you can't live it, there is no miracle that will transform you. By nature, people want the easy path. Give me one big shock. Give me one big jolt. And bang, I'm transformed. I'm a different human being. I see everything differently for the rest of my life. If the parable made the point, that doesn't work. That doesn't work. Romans chapter 10 is the other.

As you're turning to Romans chapter 10, let me simply state once more. The first concept is that men are not converted by miracles.

The second concept contained in Romans chapter 10, beginning in verse 13, it says, For whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who preach the gospel of peace, who bring glad tidings of good things.

Now I want you to go back to verse 10, because verse 10 tells you where conversion begins. For with the heart one believes to righteousness.

With the heart one believes to righteousness.

He gave the bottom line first, and then he gave the process second. He said, how are you going to respond to something you've never heard? How are you going to hear if no one comes to tell you? He says, we'll take care of those things. We'll take care of those things. But at the bottom, let me remind you that once all of this is done, it still comes back to it is with the heart that someone believes to salvation.

Let's try to wrap our minds around the task. How can you, as one of the potential teachers of those people, deal with that task? The easy part of the process, one that was mentioned again in passing today, is to wrap your mind around people of recent times, similar cultures, those of your own family or ancestry, those who speak your same language, those we all can understand. I look at the gravestones of my family members, my uncles and aunts, my grandparents, those who came from the same culture as I do, those who speak the same language that I do, and there is a strong bond, a knittedness that exists there. How about the vast majority that don't fit that description? The hundreds of millions or billions of men and women who lived in what we would consider total primitive conditions, completely immersed in superstition.

One of the things that people of advanced societies can forget about is that people in the most primitive of societies were still built in the image of God. Civilizations, broad reach into the world has been of very recent times. It hasn't been that very long ago that portions of this world, many portions of this world, were literally, to use the scientific way of describing things, Stone Age. The middle of the 20th century, the late 1940s, moving into the 1950s, was probably the period that the last Stone Age culture in this world was located.

In World War II, as the Allies were trying to defend themselves against Japanese incursion, the Allies in this case in the lower South Pacific and in Australia, a part of the flights to survey and investigate and to try to sense how far the Japanese had moved took place over New Guinea. As those flights took place, pilots whose first concern were the Japanese also spotted peoples and civilizations that had never been seen by white men, nor who had ever seen white men. In a relatively brief period of time, decade and a half to two decades, on the island of New Guinea, nearly a million people were discovered who spoke over a thousand different languages, who had never seen a white man, nor who had ever been seen by white men. The pilots could literally tell village from village by the markings of the people that their spotters spotted. They could say, I'm seeing markings I've never seen before. That indicates another grouping, another village.

How do you bring salvation to people like that? Now, we in the 21st century can say, well, those are unusual people. How long ago was virtually all of sub-Saharan Africa identical to that description? How long ago was it that the majority of Asia was simply totally, completely immersed in every form of demonic worship that you can imagine?

We're not talking hundreds of years ago. We're talking back over the last century, and we're there. Go back two centuries, and we are there fully immersed. The civilization of our day and time is an aberration. It's very, very recent. To demonstrate the magnitude and complexity of the task that we have as sons of God when the bulk of mankind are raised to their day of salvation, I'm going to spend the remainder of the sermon telling you a true story. And from that story, I think we can extrapolate what it will be like when we as sons of God are entrusted with the task of bringing many sons to glory. People who in many ages we would look at simply so primitive that there was no hope. As I said to you, in the midst of World War II, Allied pilots began flying over New Guinea, and they discovered multiple civilizations. As the war ended and as peacetime came about, missionaries began to move into those areas. And this story is about a young man and a young woman who started out, if we use Canmore as our base, and not too far from home. They were students at the Prairie Bible Institute just outside of Three Hills, Alberta. A missionary came to the school and said, who here would like to go into this part of the world, introduce the gospel, as they understood it, to people who are completely and totally removed in every single solitary way from who we are, what we are, how we think, and what we know? A young couple at Prairie Bible Institute in 1955 heard the challenge, accepted it. It took another seven years after they accepted it to be sufficiently schooled to handle the task.

In 1962, Don and Carol Richardson accepted the challenge to move to one of the jungle rivers on the southern coast of Netherlands, New Guinea. They had spotted a new village. It was identified as distinct and unique. Here was fertile ground for somebody to go to. This was all theirs. These people, as I said, had never seen a white man and no white man, other than spotters with binoculars flying overhead, ever seen them. All of these people were cannibals. They were all headhunters. Their assignment, and I realize as I go along through this, there will be areas where you will say, I can see the connection as a Son of God at the beginning of the last great day. There will be others that you will say, well, I'll have a leg up on that one, and I will agree with you. We will.

The first thing they had to do was to locate a tribe. These people were afraid of everything, and they were afraid of each other. So simply getting in a dugout and paddling down a river and waiting until you got to a civilization was not as easy as it seemed. They hid themselves. Their communities were hidden. They first of all had to find a village.

Once they moved into that village, they had to come to the place where they understood the structure of their language. So they would move in as white people. Their first task was, I have to come to understand these people. This wasn't about, I have to come in and teach these people English. This was about, I have to go in and learn their language. Once I've learned their language, and you can understand why the seven-year gap between nodding their heads and actually getting a ticket to the nearest jump-off point, they then had to develop a written form of the language once they learned it, because these people had no written language.

They then had to write the Bible in that language. They had to. How would you like to sit down? Pen and pencil and start writing. Genesis 1.1. How long before you get to the last verse in Revelation? Now, they had a typewriter. Some of you would make quick work of it. If you type like me, get out your pencil and paper. It might be quicker.

They then had to teach them how to read. And they had to develop a grasp of their culture and their values.

I'll read a few excerpts as we go along.

The Richardsons, when they arrived on the coast of New Guinea, found a village that they could begin to work with and began the process of immersion learning of their language. They experienced the same thing that most of us would experience. You hear some people babbling and jabbering and grunting, as it sounds to you. You think, well, I look at these people and they're Stone Age. They literally were. These people had no metal implements of any sort.

They'd never seen a metal implement. So, they were truly Stone Age and culture.

Don Richardsons said, I spent 10 hours a day trying to come to grips with the language. I would visit homes. I would sit with their elders. I would sit and go through the guessing game that you have when people say something. And through sign language, you try to let them know that you understand. And they either nod like this or they laugh at you. And then you go back to square one and you try it again. Now, I don't know how many of you speak more than one language. I know Canadians, because you are a multicultural nation. I was sort of chuckling to myself when we go through U.S.

Customs and they say, did you bring anything back with you in the way of food items? That's a no-brainer. All you have to do is look at a package and see if half of it's in English and half is French. And they know where we got it. Because that doesn't occur on the other side of the border.

I was required as an Ambassador College student, as were all other students, to take a foreign language. And when people ask me what I took, I say, well, I took one year of German and then one year of German took me. I got as far as Subjunctive I and then the wheels came off the trolley and at Subjunctive II, German started taking me and I was glad it was only two years and I was out of there.

Don Richardson wrote, the first obstacle was language. Speaking Sowie, S-A-W-I, so you know who I'm referring to, and those were the people and that was the culture. He said it was proving to be far more than an exercise in stringing simple terms together.

Now, as I said, these are Stone Age people. By the time I finished describing what he learned about their language, I think all by itself the view will be a little different. He said, often a single word turned out to be only a stem to which a seemingly limitless number of suffixes or chains of suffixes could be attached. Each verb, now most of us, I would assume, once we get out of English classes, are happy to forget all about tenses and cases and all the rest. But if you can remember the English cases and tenses, at least it will give you a basis of comparison.

Each verb in their language had 19 tenses in the indicative mood alone. So far, I had isolated the function of only a third of these 19. Also, each of the 19 tenses occurred in both the first person and the non-first person form, making a total of 38 verb endings to choose from every time I wanted to make a simple, indicative statement. It bothered me in German that I had to figure out der die das. He's got 38 verb tenses. Another group of verb endings were slowly emerging as the subjunctive mood of the language, a system for expressing if, could have, would have, should have.

Further, I was getting glimmerings of an imperative mood, a brace of suffices which say, let me, let us, let him, as well as give commands in the second person. Apparently, this is as he's learning the language, concrete verb stems became etymological phantoms which could assume any one of 15 different shapes even before one began extending them with suffices. One form of the stem proclaimed the subject as singular. Another is plural. Still another indicated action aimed at either a singular or plural object. Other forms signified operations which were either customary, progressive, repeated, reciprocal, experimental, conclusive, partial, excessive, and obstructed. This is the language of stone age men.

In Sowy, every sequence had to be in correct time order with no steps omitted. The grammar is correspondingly set up to handle long action sequences in a smooth flowing manner. Every statement had to be classified as either first-hand or second-hand information. Sowy wouldn't let you take credit for someone else's thoughts, nor will it let you avoid responsibility for your own utterances. It abhors in distinctiveness. It tolerates no nonsense. It would resist a translation of Alice in Wonderland like oil resists water. How many tens of thousands of languages have men spoken since the Tower of Babel?

Now, there's a scripture that says God will give us a pure language, and mentally you could simply dismiss everything I've read so far and say, oh, we'll have a pure language. I submit to you, and the more you have studied language and the more cultures you've lived in, I would submit to you that a people's language is the people. It is the way they think. It is the way they process. You cannot simply wave a wand and change everything in the way people think. We have had problems in the Church of God from the day we began publishing anything in more than one language trying to capture thoughts. Mr. Armstrong ran into it full force with the title of the magazine Plain Truth because there were languages that resisted that title. It simply did not fit the culture. La pure verite, the plain truth, the pure truth. That was as close as one language could get to the plain truth. In other words, we know what you English-speaking people mean by the plain truth. The closest we can come to saying so that our minds think the way yours think is to say the pure truth. Then it goes on and on and on and on. Add infinitum.

People cannot be stripped from their language because their language is who they are. I remember going to Brick and Wood as a student being told, now there are a number of American terms that are highly offensive to the English, and you need to know them and not use them. And then I found out when I got to Brick and Wood that there were some English terms that were horrendously offensive to an American here, but they weren't obliged not to use them. And so it was a very interesting experience. I forget who it was. It may have been Churchill. That may not have been saying that the Americans and the English were two people separated by a common language. Thankfully, we all speak much more like each other than do either Americans and English or Canadians and English. I haven't heard anybody talking about boots and spanners and bonnets. As an American, I love fish and chips, but I will never understand how an object that is square, in dimension, and rectangular in shape constitutes a chip.

When I see something come out of a potato chip bag, that's a chip. When I see a french fry, how that got to be a chip, I'll never know. But it is what it is.

These people, as I said, will serve as an illustration of the complexities that we have as we walk into cultures. The Sowie people, and that part of New Guinea, reared their children in a way that you can't imagine. I have been with my wife and my children to parts of the world where, in watching and studying the people, I saw cultures that reared their sons in ways that were entitled. I watched the way that young boys were given preference over their mothers and their sisters were virtually nothing. I watched as they became men how they acted as if they were entitled, and how could they act any other way. They had been reared from the time they were born to be entitled. I see entire cultures where this is who they are.

The child-rearing practices among the Sowie, if I can use a slang term, will blow your mind.

And yet, as I said, these people, people like them, people similar to them, they are sons of God. They are last, great day candidates for eternal life. Don Richardson observed the following. He said, In most cultures training for war if required does not begin until teenage years. Among the Sowie, training for war began in early childhood. I have often seen a father keep repeating a command to a three- or four-year-old son while the child ignores his father as if he were not there. Vainly, the father will harang and threaten, and then turn and boast to a friend that his son is truly quie, strong-willed. And the son hears his father boast. Every Sowie child knows that if he throws a violent enough tantrum, he will get away with it. I have even seen young children who have not yet learned to swim throw themselves into the river to compel their parents to come running and pick them up. On the rare occasion when a parent strikes a child with real intent to punish, the child will often strike back or at least throw himself into convulsive rage to bend the parent's will, and the parent will accept the reaction. The Sowie child is trained to obtain his will by sheer force of violence and temper. He is goaded constantly to take revenge every time he is hurt or insulted. And they're proud of it. It's not a hand-wringing event to say, what in the world did I produce as a son? It is, look what I produced as a son. He is quick-tempered. He is ill-tempered. He will take revenge at the drop of a hat. He will throw every form of tantrum necessary to get what he wants. This is what God is going to hand us when Ezekiel 37 joins all these bones together and puts flesh on them and breathes breath into them. And they stand a living mass. And God will say, my sons, here they are. Go to work. If we take our classic time frame, you have a hundred years. Roll up your sleeves. All of the child-rearing practices were practiced because they were all headed in one direction.

In our world, the world that we live in, we look at certain attainments as the top of the top. The beginning of the feast, one of the analogies used, was the analogy of the Olympics. A young American swimmer who has amassed more gold medals than any Olympian in history. In his world, the world of sports and athletics, he is at the top of the mountain.

I'm reading a book right now about the 13th century. I can't wrap my mind around it. It is written by a lady who has two Pulitzer Prizes. She has the top of her kingdom. Their men of science and medicine, the highest honor they can receive is a Nobel Prize for their achievements. In the world of football, baseball, and other sports halls of fame, and in acting, Emmys and Oscars, everybody has some top of the mountain to look at and say, this is where the greats go. Among the Sowy, the Emmys, the Oscars, the Hall of Fame, the Olympic medals, the Nobel Peace Prizes, were of no value. The top of their mountain was to become a legend maker. You will see very quickly how the child-rearing practices were the practices that led to achieving the most important achievement they could achieve. But before I go there, earlier in the Feast of Tabernacles, allusion was made to a statement that was made in the transition period between Abraham and Isaac, where they were told that they would not get the land that was promised to them for an extended period of time because the sin of the people of that land were not yet filled full. When God sent Israel into those lands, He said, do not spare them. He told Saul when he went up against the Amalekites, do not spare man, woman, or child. A world that does not know God looks at God as very harsh and brutal. You and I know they will come up in the last great day. I'm describing to you a kind of people that would help you understand why God would see a civilization and say, in this day and time, they are beyond repair. Now, none of those Amalekites have lost their chance for salvation, but at that day and time, God simply said, they have gone so far down a path that you can't imagine that there is no repairing them in this time period. The people, as I said, were headhunters. In fact, it was so much a part of their culture when one village went out after another village, if a man came back without a head, the women of the village beat him. So, he got a trip back into the village with all the village women, with whatever clubs they had, giving him a good thrashing for not coming home with the goods. In their ceremonial dances, the men of the tribe recounted in dance and chants how they had both taken the enemy and how they had eaten the enemy. Despite the primitive appearances of these people, they were very sophisticated in their own ways. The taking of a head was a very elementary display of prowess. So, the fact that you had taken a head, that really wasn't the achievement. The prize was how? And the pinnacle of achievement in this entire culture was deceit. What's the most prized virtue in our world, our society? I'm sure we'd have a collection if, you know, we raised hands and I identified your hand. I said, what do you think? We'd have different things. There was one among these peoples, deceit, and the people of the world, one among these peoples. They developed deceit to its highest art form.

As Donner Richardson came in among them, he watched one of the men and he had gotten a wild pig. He brought it into the village and he had it penned and he began to feed it and he began to take care of it and he began to show it all the necessary care. And eventually, he took the fence down. The pig stayed in the village. It was fed as it got fatter. Obviously, the day came where the pig, unbeknownst to himself, became dinner.

He pointed to that and he said, that's what we do with people because Don Richardson had heard a phrase and he said, I don't understand the phrase. And the phrase, as he understands the words, was fattening through kindness. And he said, you see what we did to the pig? We do that to our enemy.

We show them all forms of graciousness, kindness, generosity, and hospitality. And we do all of those things for one purpose only. Reducing them to the place where they are totally off guard. They would accept an invitation to our tribe for dinner and become the entree. Now, when everybody operates on that basis, how do you get anybody to accept an invitation to dinner?

If you can connive enough to get past somebody's defenses, you become a legend maker.

And if you have developed a way of deceiving an adversary that is beyond all of the subtleties of deceit that anyone has ever practiced before, you are the king of the hill. What you have done is spoken about around the tribal longhouse. Your actions, your deeds, they are regaled. They are told in story form. You see, Don Richardson found out that all the intricacies of their language were a part of being able to tell stories with such absolute precision that you could walk through every single nuance of it in a way that English would never allow because it was who they were. It was what they were. As he was trying to find a doorway into their world and into their lives, he on the front end was introducing them to various and sundry pieces of the Bible. And their responses are no different than the people that we try to reach. Some people listen. Some people just look around. Others, I have no use for that. He ran into all of that. But he told them one story and he noticed that everybody was glued. He told them the story of Judas Ascariot betraying Jesus Christ. And as a young missionary, he didn't realize that all of their attentiveness, all of their oooooooh, and as they talked to each other, was because he had just created a sowing legend maker. Judas, one of his faithful servants, walked with him, ate with him, slept with him for three and a half years, got him killed. That Judas is somebody special. And so there he was trying to take what he understood to be the Word of God to these people and came out because of their culture, having made Christ a dupe and Judas a hero.

How do you bring salvation to people who value all God holds in contempt and holds in contempt everything that God values? I think we need to be aware when the last great day comes there will be more of those than there will be those like us. I don't think there will be as radical in most cases as this, but I think there will be many who are very, very similar and very few who really think like Western 20th century Anglo-Saxon peoples, which is who we represent.

I would say when the day comes, brethren, that we will probably not plow new ground. Don Richardson used a term that is an integral part. It's not a part of our vocabulary as a church, but it's something that we wrestle with. It's been mentioned a couple of times that in doing the work that God has given to us that we need to find and we wrestle with ways of reaching the world. In the Christian community, the tool is referred to as redemptive analogies. So they have a vocabulary term for what we in the Church of God don't have a term for. We just simply say we need to be able to speak the language of the people that we're speaking to. When we preach to them, they hear us. It was no mistake that Jesus Christ by the disciples was referred to as the Lamb of God to the Jewish people. They understood a Lamb. They understood what a Lamb was for. They understood what a Lamb did. They understood what the blood of a Lamb signified. So you walked into the life of these people who were expecting a king to come and deliver them from Rome, and you addressed them with something that culturally they had known for the last millennium and a half, and you preached to them the Lamb of God. When John wrote his Gospel, he spoke to a Greek culture using the word logos, an integral part of their philosopher's vocabulary and their philosophical concepts because he was trying to speak to them in an area and in a language and in a terminology that was a part of them. When the Apostle Paul stood in Athens on the top of Mars Hill and addressed the sophisticated audience there, he did so by simply saying, I notice that you have a monument here to the Unknown God. Let me tell you who that Unknown God is. These are referred to as redemptive analogies, connecting with people where people are. Don Richardson was sitting in the midst of a society that had absolutely nothing that related to who, what, why, how we are or should be.

He took three villages. He built a house, and the village closest to the house wanted to be near him. First of all, he was a prize, the only white man they'd ever seen, and his wife and their baby son.

So this was a feather in their cap. We have a white man. What do you have? White man also was capable of giving them machetes and a few other simple tools which weren't handed out just simply as incentives, but when they worked hard physically, they built things. Those that worked the hardest may be given an iron tool, and so, obviously, a desire there. Three tribes, or three, not three tribes, but three villages of this one people decided to move in around him. In the first two months, there were 14 battles between the three tribes. For a people who are insulted at everything and at anything, and his only way of dealing with insult is to fight, there was nothing going on but fighting. These were not weak people. One of them, in hunting a pig from a pig blind, shooting a four-foot cane arrow, shot the arrow into the heart all the way through the animal, and the arrow exited the animal totally.

These people were fighting and shooting each other for two months, day and night, 14 distinct battles, and he said, I can't remember how many other battles. As a missionary, he said, you know, I failed. I allowed these three villages to move in around me on this high ground in the swamp along the river, and all I've got is war and fighting. He said, you know, the only way that I am going to be able to work with these people is simply to pack my bags and leave. And so he went to the tribal leaders. He said, out of concern and love for you before you all kill each other, I and my wife and my son are going to pack, and we're going to leave. And they said, please don't. Please don't leave us. One of the tribal leaders said, we will make peace.

And he thought, where? How? I've learned who these people are. There's nothing in their culture. And he said, we will have a peace child.

He watched from his raised cottage, from the porch on this stilted building and this swampy ground, a phenomenal experience. He watched men agitated, women nervous and shuffling. He watched the emotion and the tension. And as he watched, he watched a man grab one of his sons and begin to move toward the edge of his group into the clearing and across to the next group. As in the background, his wife was wailing and screaming. What happened was, a villager of one village took one of his own children. In the first instance, the man that did it, his wife, drug him down and literally grabbed the baby from him and ran back screaming into the crowd and disappeared. He had four or five children. One young man had one wife. Most of these men had two or three. He went up into his stilt house, took his six-month-old baby, which was his only child. He had one wife and one child, and one child picked up the child and came down the stilts. His wife was in the crowd, so she hadn't seen him depart the crowd or go up into the longhouse. He moved across the open space as she saw him disappear because he was giving their only child to a man of the other village as a peace child. In reciprocity, the man who received that child gave back to him one of his children.

In their culture, at that time, the man who gave his child to the man of the other tribe also gave that man his name. He, in turn, gave him his name.

They were bound as long as that child was alive to keep peace between the villages.

No harm, no actions of any sort that would disrupt or harm or hurt the village. The village would try to protect the life of that child because the infant mortality rate in that part of New Guinea was 50 percent. And if the child died, everything was over, and it was back to life as normal. Don Richardson watched three warring villages who had done nothing but fight and squabble and scream and yell become one united body, all invested in the protection of one another because of a peace child.

With that experience, Don Richardson had the ability to come to these people and say, you know I represent a God who has offered you a peace child, and his is the greatest peace child.

You give a peace child, and if that child dies, your peace is over. When God gave his peace child, that peace is forever because his child lives forever.

I can do nothing but admire the tenacity and the dedication and the perseverance and the devotion of this young couple and their two children, because while they were there, his wife had a second child, as they gave their whole beings to the most primitive people and background that you can imagine. And to feel sad for them at the same time that they, if I can steal a phrase from the Apostle Paul, would have a zeal without knowledge.

Even at the end of the book, Don Richardson was pondering the level of success as that part of New Guinea became a part of Indonesia, and people by the millions from Indonesia would come in and settle, and all of that would be disrupted, and he realized his work may in the end be for naught.

But he did watch transformation. Among those people, there were people who understood that analogy and embraced it. There were others that turned their back on it. There were those who stood aside and simply watched with a cocked head and a somewhat wait-and-see look and eventually reached the place where, for some reason, it touched them deeply enough that they, too, wanted to relate to the peace child that Don Richardson was bringing.

How many billion people in the last great day?

How many people from thousands of years in China, Japan, Southeast Asia, areas of the world that if you go and look at their culture and their statuary to this day have been so immersed in demonism that it's mind-boggling. You go into the jungles of Guatemala or Mexico and you see the Mayan and Inca cultures, and you see the who knows how many hundreds of thousands of people who've been sacrificed. One temple alone, one of the Spanish explorers witnessed, one temple alone was dedicated by 10,000 people as a single human sacrifice for the dedication of one Mayan monument.

Isaiah chapter 18 speaks of a millennial event that we are going to see on such a grand scale as we move into the fullness of the last great day. This is probably one of my favorite millennial scriptures, but when I move it mentally out of the millennium and I move it into the last great day, 20, 30, 40 years, it excites me even more. In Isaiah 18 and verse 23 it says, in that day, this is speaking of after Christ's return in the beginning of the millennium, in that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria, and the Assyrian will come into Egypt, and the Egyptian into Assyria, and the Egyptians will serve with the Assyrians. You know, the epitomization in God's vocabulary of idolatry has been Egypt, and the epitome of brutality has been Assyria. And in verse 24, in that day Israel will be one of three with Egypt and Assyria, each a blessing in the midst of the land, whom the Lord of hosts shall bless, saying, blessed is Egypt my people. You know, that's been a term reserved for the children of Abraham from the time of Abraham until this day and time that's being described. Blessed is Egypt my people. That is a phrase that has been reserved for the children of Abraham up to this point in time, and Assyria, the work of my hands, and Israel my inheritance. God is going to look at people who have been the nemesis of his people, enemies. And when he is finished, he will embrace them all, and he will take the terms of fondness that he is reserved for the sons of Abraham and expand it at that right time to all mankind. In closing, look at Romans 9 and the tremendous spirit that we see expressed in Romans 9 verses 24 through 26. Romans 9.

Verse 24 breaks into the middle of a thought, but it is a thought that combines the Jews and the Gentiles, even us whom he called, not of the Jews only, but also the Gentiles. And he says also in Hosea, speaking of all people, Jew and Gentile, I will call them my people who were not my people, and her beloved who was not beloved.

Brethren, when this day comes to fulfillment, you and I, as resurrected sons of God, are going to have the opportunity and the challenge of reaching people of every age, of every culture, of every language, to bring to them an understanding of what God is offering, and to see the transformation of all of these people of 6,000 years to become children of the living God.