According to Wikipedia, there are at least 70 tribes of people in the world who have never had any contact with 'civilization' outside their tribe. They live in the forests of Brazil, New Guinea, and on islands near Indonesia. In most instances, they resist any contact with the outside world through acts of violence. They want to be left alone.

To make matters worse, if we did contact them, up to 50% of them would perish of disease. They have no immunity to things like pneumonia. To contact them would likely result in death for the one who contacted them, or else it would lead to death of many in the tribe by disease.

The Bible is clear that all men and women are sinful and morally bankrupt before God, and that the only hope of salvation lies in Christ Jesus the Lord. These people must hear the gospel or they will die in their sins. Someone must go to them, at the risk of their own lives and the lives of the tribe, or these tribes have no hope.

Jesus said, "Whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God" (John 3:18). We need not fear killing the natives with disease if we realize that they are dead already apart from the only gospel that can save them.

As for us, we need not fear dying at their hands. We are a crucified people. We, too, are already dead.

Labels: death, evangelism, Gospel, Great Commission, salvation

Because Adam set aside the command of God, taking to eat the fruit from the Tree Of The Knowledge Of Good And Evil, God drove him out of the Garden of Eden, and cursed him to boot.

One noteworthy effect of this fall is not defined so much by what we see but rather what we no longer are able to see. Consider this: in the garden Adam and Eve could sense the presence of God, not as some airy-fairy feeling, but through their natural senses - they knew where God was and could "see" Him in some sense (I say in some sense lest we forget that God is Spirit). They communicated with God directly and not merely through prayer. The moment Adam forsook the command of God he made forfeit his "right" to be experientially aware of God.

That isn't to say that there weren't moments throughout history where God spoke to men; He did speak to individuals occasionally throughout redemptive history, and in a variety of ways, but mankind as a whole was cut off from God by Adam's sin. By and large (second to such things as sin and death of course) the misery of God's absence (or more properly the fact that we are unable to see God experientially) is the most penetrating reality of our existence.

Do we have to work for our food? Yes. Do we get sick in this world? Yes. Is there corruption and violence? Yes. Fear? Hate? Suffering? Yes, yes, all of those things. Are these things the cause of our misery? The thoughtful answer is that these are all expressions of the misery of God's absence. Not that God is actually absent, but rather that God withholds (from our awareness) His presence from us. This is the very heart of our misery.

You see: hunger, thirst, sickness, and death all came upon us because of Adam's sin, but what defines the nature of our misery is not these things, it is the absence of an awareness of God. The most horrible thing about the curse was not what God added, but what God took away. Just as death is defined as the absence of life, and isn't a thing itself, but is the word we use to describe a lacking of life. Just as darkness is a non-thing: the absence of light; so also the misery that is in this world is defined by what we lack: the awareness of God.

The fall introduced many things: pain, suffering, death, sickness; but it's what the fall took away that brought misery.

Labels: Catechism Buzz, death, sin, The Fall