Hi, I'd just like to tell you about Je........ - Anything Goes - Other topics not covered elsewhere - Tartan Army Message Board Jump to content

Hi, I'd just like to tell you about Je........

Eisegerwind
 Share

Recommended Posts

Eisegerwind

Eisegerwind

Posted
  • Author
Posted

 

1 hour ago, thplinth said:

You are quite clearly reveling in a stupid young man's death because he was a christian. No doubt tomorrow you will be telling us Scotty is some bad cunt again.

 

If you say so.

Since a feature of your ill tempered return to the forum is dragging up old posts,  have some of this, should've stuck to your guns.

 

On 4/8/2017 at 8:58 PM, Eisegerwind said:

Can the horsie thing still do an L shape in 4d chess. Is that the game they played on Star trek when it was on the telly.

 

 

 

On 4/8/2017 at 9:06 PM, thplinth said:

Do you mean the rook? Probably.

On star trek it may have been 3d chess. I think they had three chess boards stacked and you could move up and down boards as well as left or right. A normal board is 2d chess.

4d chess is when you have dimensions you cannot immediately perceive but if you did they would make sense of the moves.

You are so dumb it is not worth talking to.

 

 

 

On 4/8/2017 at 11:36 PM, Eisegerwind said:

I'll just mark that down as  another win then.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
thplinth

thplinth

Posted
Posted
10 hours ago, Eisegerwind said:

Win x 2

Well I read that two fisherman who ran aground on the island a while ago were killed and buried on the beach in the same manner and then a week later they dug them up and stood their bodies up on the beach using bamboo (which is when their bodies were recovered by the authorities). So that is a potential bonus for you to look forward to. 

Link to comment
Share on other sites
Scotty CTA

Scotty CTA

Posted
Posted
On 11/24/2018 at 6:16 PM, Eisegerwind said:

Oh dear, how sad, never mind.

No, we can talk about it... 

In 1606, a chain of eighty islands in the South Pacific was discovered by Fernandez de Quiros of Spain. In 1773, the Islands were explored by Captain James Cook and named the New Hebrides because of the similarities with the Hebrides Islands off the Northwest coast of Scotland. In 1980, the New Hebrides gained its independence from Britain and France and was named Vanuatu. The chain of Islands is about 450 miles long. If you draw a line straight from Honolulu to Sydney, it will cut through Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu, two thirds of the way between Hawaii and Australia. The population today is about 190,000.

To the best of our knowledge, the New Hebrides had no Christian influence before John Williams and James Harris from the London Missionary Society landed in 1839. Both of these missionaries were killed and eaten by cannibals on the island of Erromanga on November 20 of that year, only minutes after going ashore. Forty-eight years later John Paton wrote, “Thus were the New Hebrides baptized with the blood of martyrs; and Christ thereby told the whole Christian world that he claimed these islands as His own” (p.75; All page references in the text refer to John G. Paton: Missionary to the New Hebredes, An Autobiography Edited by His Brother [Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1965, orig. 1889], 1891).

The London Missionary Society sent another team to the Island of Tanna in 1842, and these missionaries were driven off within seven months. But on the Island of Aneityum, John Geddie from the Presbyterian church in Nova Scotia (coming in 1848) and John Inglis from The Reformed Presbyterian Church in Scotland (coming in 1852) saw amazing fruit, so that by 1854 “about 3,500 savages (more than half the population [Kenneth Scott Latourette, A History of the Expansion of Christianity, The Great Century: The Americas, Australasia and Africa, 1800 AD to 1914 AD. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1970, orig. 1943), p. 228.]) threw away their idols, renouncing their heathen customs and avowing themselves to be worshippers of the true Jehovah God” (p. 77). When Geddie died in 1872, all the population of Aneityum was said to be Christians (George Patterson, Missionary Life among the Cannibals: Being the Life of the Rev. John Geddie, D.D., First Missionary to the New Hebrides; with the History of the Nova Scotia Presbyterian Mission on that Group (Toronto: James Campbell and Son, 1882), p. 508.).

This is part of a great work God was doing in the South Sea Islands in those days. In 1887 Paton recorded the wider triumphs of the gospel. When certain people argued that the Aborigines of Autstralia were subhuman and incapable of conversion or civilization Paton fought back with mission facts as well as biblical truth.

Recall . . . what the Gospel has done for the near kindred of these same Aborigines. On our own Aneityum, 3,500 Cannibals have been lead to renounce their heathenism . . . In Fiji, 79,000 Cannibals have been brought under the influence of the Gospel; and 13,000 members of the Churches are professing to live and work for Jesus. In Samoa, 34,000 Cannibals have professed Christianity; and in nineteen years, its College has sent forth 206 Native teachers and evangelists. On our New Hebrides, more than 12,000 Cannibals have been brought to sit at the feet of Christ, through I mean not to say that they are all model Christians; and 133 of the Natives have been trained and sent forth as teachers and preachers of the Gospel. (p. 265)

This is the remarkable missionary context for the life and ministry of John G. Paton, who was born near Dumfries, Scotland, on the 24th of May, 1824. He sailed for the New Hebrides (via Australia) with his wife Mary on April 16, 1858, at the age of 33. They reached their appointed island of Tanna on November 5, and in March the next year both his wife and his newborn son died of the fever. He served alone on the island for the next four years under incredible circumstances of constant danger until he was driven off the island in February, 1862.

For the next four years he did extraordinarily effective mobilization work for the Presbyterian mission to the New Hebrides, travelling around Australia and Great Britain. He married again in 1864, and took his wife, Margaret, back this time to the smaller island of Aniwa (“It measures scarcely seven miles by two,” p. 312). They labored together for 41 years until Margaret died in 1905 when John Paton was 81.

When they came to Aniwa in November, 1866, they saw the destitution of the islanders. It will help us appreciate the magnitude of their labors and the wonders of their fruitfulness if we see some of what they faced.

The natives were cannibals and occasionally ate the flesh of their defeated foes. They practiced infanticide and widow sacrifice, killing the widows of deceased men so that they could serve their husbands in the next world (pp. 69, 334).

Their worship was entirely a service of fear, its aim being to propitiate this or that Evil spirit, to prevent calamity or to secure revenge. They deified their Chiefs . . . so that almost every village or tribe had its own Sacred Man. . . . They exercised an extraordinary influence for evil, these village or tribal priests, and were believed to have the disposal of life and death through their sacred ceremonies. . . . They also worshipped the spirits of departed ancestors and heroes, through their material idols of wood and stone. . . . They feared the spirits and sought their aid; especially seeking to propitiate those who presided over war and peace, famine and plenty, health and sickness, destruction and prosperity, life and death. Their whole worship was one of slavish fear; and, so far as ever I could learn, they had no idea of a God of mercy or grace. (p. 72; This description was made of the natives on the island of Tanna, but applies equally well to the conditions on the nearby island of Aniwa.)

Paton admitted that at times his heart wavered as he wondered whether these people could be brought to the point of weaving Christian ideas into the spiritual consciousness of their lives (p. 74). But he took heart from the power of the gospel and from the fact that thousands on Aneityum had come to Christ.

So he learned the language and reduced it to writing (p. 319). He built orphanages (“We trained these young people for Jesus” p. 317). “Mrs. Paton taught a class of about fifty women and girls. They became experts at sewing, singing and plaiting hats, and reading” (p. 377). They “trained the Teachers . . . translated and printed and expounded the Scriptures . . . ministered to the sick and dying . . . dispensed medicines every day . . . taught them the use of tools . . .” etc. (p. 378). They held worship services every Lord’s Day and sent native teachers to all the villages to preach the gospel.

In the next fifteen years, John and Margaret Paton saw the entire island of Aniwa turn to Christ. Years later he wrote, “I claimed Aniwa for Jesus, and by the grace of God Aniwa now worships at the Savior’s feet” (p. 312). When he was 73 years old and travelling around the world trumpeting the cause of missions in the South Seas, he was still ministering to his beloved Aniwan people and “published the New Testament in the Aniwan Language” in 1897 (Ralph Bell, John G. Paton: Missionary to the New Hebrides (Butler, IN: The Highley Press, 1957), p. 238.). Even to his death he was translating hymns and catechisms (Ibid., 238) and creating a dictionary for his people even when he couldn’t be with them any more (p. 451).

During his years of labor on the islands Paton kept a journal and notebooks and letters from which he wrote his Autobiography in three parts from 1887 to 1898. Almost all we know of his work comes from that book, which is available in one volume now from the Banner of Truth Trust.

Paton outlived his second wife by two years and died in Australia on January 28, 1907.

Today, 93 years after the death of John Paton, about 85% of the population of Vanuatu identifies itself as Christian, perhaps 21% of the population being evangelical (Patrick Johnstone, Operation World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1993), p. 572.). The sacrifices and the legacy of the missionaries to the New Hebrides are stunning, and John G. Paton stands out as one of the great ones.

-------------------------------------------------

God's Kingdom is unstoppable. :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
 Share
Go to topic listing


×
×
  • Create New...