Adoniram and Nancy Judson -- Buddhism
by Parthenia Stout
In 1814-1815 Burma learning the religion of the Burmese 9-6-08
Although they were fluent enough to talk fairly easily about ordinary subjects they said, “We find the subject of religion by far the most difficult, on account of the want of religious terms in their language. They have not the least idea of a God who is eternal----without beginning or end. All their deities (gods) have been through the several grades of creatures, (not the Creator) from a fowl to a god. When their deities are taken to heaven as they express it, they cease to exist, which according to their ideas, is the highest state of perfection. It is now 2000 years since Gautama, their last god, entered on his state of perfection; and now though he ceases to exist, they still worship a hair of his head, which is enshrined in an enormous pagoda, to which the Burmese go every eighth day. They know of no other atonements for sin, than offerings to their priests and their pagodas. You cannot imagine how very difficult it is to give them any idea of the true God and the way of salvation by Christ, since their present ideas of a deity are so very low.” (God’s thoughts and his ways are higher than man’s as we find in Isaiah 55:8-9)
Adoniram had a Burmese teacher who had been with him for three months learning Burmese, a man 47 years of age who had proved to be ‘the most sensible, learned, and candid man that I have ever found among the Burmans’. The conversation had begun one day when they were working together and as always alert for an opportunity to bring up religion, Adoniram had remarked that a man they both knew had died. The teacher admitted he had heard so. ‘His soul is lost, I think,’ said Adoniram. ‘Why so?’ asked the teacher. ‘He was not a disciple of Christ’, answered Adoniram. The teacher was skeptical. ‘how do you know that?’ You could not see his soul.’ ‘How do you teacher know whether the root of a mango tree is good? You cannot see it; but you can judge by the fruit on its branches. Thus I know the man who died was not a disciple of Christ, because of his words and actions were not such as to indicate the disciple.’ answered Adoniram. And so all who are not disciple of Christ are lost!?’ The teacher was amazed. ‘Yes all, whether Burmans or foreigners.’ said Adoniram. ‘this is hard answered the teacher.’ ‘Yes it is hard, indeed; otherwise I should not have come all this way, and left parents and all, to tell of Christ.’ said Adoniram. The teacher paused, nothing in his experience or reading had ever hinted a religion like this. Yet there was a force in Adoniram’s last statement. Why should a man leave country and home except on a matter of desperate urgency? It was a strange moment: the young black coated missionary, not yet thirty, facing the turbaned Burmese man, learned and wise, beginning to grasp for the first time in his many years that here was a man---one of many white men, he knew---who believed with his whole heart in a future existence which involved perpetual punishment for one’s belief on earth if they were wrong, but evidently something better if they were right.
The thought led him to a question: ‘How is it that the disciples of Christ are so fortunate above all men?’ Adoniram asked a question in return, ‘Are not all men sinners, and deserving punishment in a future state?’ ‘Yes,’ the teacher admitted at once. ‘All must suffer, in some future state, for the sins they commit. The punishment follows the crime, as surely as the wheel of the car follows the footsteps of the ox.’ Adoniram answered, ‘Now, according to the Burman system, there is no escape, but according to the Christian system, there is. Jesus Christ had died in the place of sinners; has borne (carried) their sins, and now those who believe in him, and become his disciples, are released from the punishment they deserve. At death they are received into heaven, and are happy forever.’ Adoniram had unveiled the heart of the Christian doctrine: the innate (as you are born) sinfulness of man; the atonement of Jesus, the prospect of heaven instead of hell. (This is why a man must be born again as Jesus said in John 3:1-8)
The teacher could not believe without God bringing him into the light from his darkened mind. As he said, ‘my mind is very decided and hard, and unless you tell me something more to the purpose, I shall never believe.’ ‘Well teacher,’ said Adoniram, ‘I wish you to believe, not for my profit, but for yours, for whether you will believe in this world I do not know, but when you die I know you will believe what I say now, for you will appear before the God you now deny.
How do we all get the sin we are born with? You have to go back to Genesis 3 where Adam and Eve ate of the wrong tree and from then on the serpent had gained control over all humans born after that. At the end of the chapter 3 the angel with the flaming sword turned every way to keep anyone from eating of the tree of life. God can not live with anyone who has sin in heaven, for He is holy, and righteous, and merciful, and kind, and loving yet he must judge sin. Sin creates strife and hatred and in John 10:10 the enemy who has control ---steals, kills and destroys which is from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Jesus came to give life and that more abundantly.
