The Ways of DEATH by Erwin W. Thurber

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California, U.S.A. · Nov 25, 1930

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 57, No. 46.

The Ways of DEATH

By Erwin W. Thurber

The true story of a sailor boy who sowed his “wild oats,” but who before his untimely death, like the prodigal son, found his way back to his Father’s house.

Told by

Erwin W. Thurber

Barranquilla, Colombia

He died the other day, an old man,—so old, in fact, that his wasted body was unable to resist the effects of getting wet in an ordinary shower of rain. He took a hard cold, and died a few days later. The worst of it was that his death was entirely unnecessary at his age. He hadn’t lived so many years as most old men; in fact, hadn’t lived so many years as I have, and I am not yet fifty years of age. Then, why do I say he was old? Because his body was already in the same condition of weakness and lowered resistance as are the bodies of men of seventy or eighty years of age.

BORN IN CHRISTIAN HOME

He was born and brought up in a Christian home. Not so many years ago he was a boy playing around his home in the beautiful fruit belt of New York State, with all the promise of life before him. Before him were those years of manhood waiting for him to fill them with earnest work and noble deeds, so that at the close of his active life he could look back with pleasure upon days made happy by the fulfillment of the duties and the enjoyment of the legitimate pleasures of a well-ordered, respected Christian life.

I do not know where he made the first false steps that led him finally to a life wholly dedicated to sin. I do not know what was the first occasion when he deliberately disregarded the principles of morality that his godly parents had taught him. Only his companions of those days, and the angels who recorded his life’s deeds and misdeeds, know when, where, and why, he made the fatal decision to cast off the restraints that his conscience recognized as proper and plunge into the license of those who believe they are free, but who finally awake to the fact that they are slaves of the worst kind.

He joined the navy to see the world. Of the geographical world he saw some; of the social world he also saw some, but always the lowest part; of the world in its theological sense, as distinguished from the church and kingdom of God, he saw about all there was to see. In the brothels of Panama, where so many young lives have been dragged down to perdition, he wasted his manhood’s powers. Wherever he went the same haunts of vice beckoned, the same temptations were found, and the same sins were indulged. His body, enfeebled by vice, poisoned by cigarettes, inflamed and seared by liquor, no longer responded as in his youth to the demands made upon it by labor and duty. He was growing old. He left the navy in a foreign port, and wandered about in countries of a different language and of different customs from those of his boyhood home. He left the navy, it is true, but he did not leave behind the scenes of vice nor the unholy desires that were dragging him down. Everywhere those who make their ‘living’ by depriving others of life itself in exchange for their ministering to passion and vice were ready to help him on in the downward path. We sometimes speak of these as “human vultures,” but the vultures that I see from my window as I write this only eat corpses—they do not make them.

QUITS USE OF LIQUOR

He left off the liquor. I do not know whether it was the voice of conscience or material considerations that led him to do so. The black coffee was better, but still far from being as good as nourishing food for the body that did not need stimulants but nourishment. He was able to secure work now, but only the kind that gave the poor wages of day laborers in these countries. With such wages it is practically impossible for a man to get enough ahead to have a capital of his own. He did, however, get a few carpenter’s tools, and the day I first met him he was building a small house, the total cost of which was only a few hundred dollars.

There were still the cigarettes. He knew they were hurting him. He knew they were poisoning his stomach and lungs. He wanted to leave them off. He did reduce the number somewhat, but the habit held him in that terrible, merciless grip that thousands of addicts know and fear. He would resolve not to use more, but the resolutions were but ropes of sand. Only help from a higher source could set him free.

A NEW DETERMINATION

It was my privilege to point him to that higher source. I used to visit him in his humble home, but he would never visit me in mine. He would not be recognized by his prosperous fellow countrymen of business and society, even though some of them were no better in character than he. So he felt like an outcast, and it touched a very responsive chord in his heart when I treated him as I would any other neighbor, and showed an interest in his welfare. I urged him to trust in the Lord for strength to free himself

from the terrible habit, and encouraged him to believe that he could still be a man among men. The old, dormant impulses began to awaken. He began to read the Bible and religious literature. New ambitions began to form.

Then came a Christian building constructor. He worked under him for weeks, and the conversations with him, and the quiet, godly life, free from cigarettes and black coffee and filthy language, showed him what he might become by the grace of God. He determined that with the Lord’s help he would be free. The struggle was hard. His whole body craved the poison, and it seemed as if he must smoke. Even in his dreams he would see beautiful packages of cigarettes, tied with ribbons, being offered to him, and an almost irresistible desire to accept them would arise, but on awakening he would not reach for them, although he had a package in the closet near his bed. The Lord did help him, even as He has promised to help any other one who is in that terrible condition expressed by the wise man, “holden with the cords of his sins.” As I visited him from day to day, he would say, with a note of triumph new to him in his voice, “I haven’t touched them since that first day that I left them off.”

He gave his heart to the Lord. Like the other prodigal son, he said in his heart, “I will arise and go to my Father.” And our heavenly Father, who looks down with merciful, pitying love on the wrecks of mankind that sin has made, accepted him and gave him the assurance of sins forgiven. A new joy filled his soul, so that he could say with the apostle Paul, “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” He fully decided to keep the Sabbath, be baptized, and join the church. He was looking forward to a new life of freedom in Christ Jesus,—freedom from those old, degrading habits, freedom from the slavery that had been his lot before, freedom from the condemnation of his conscience, freedom from fear to meet his Maker in the judgment. He would redeem those wasted years by filling the rest of his life with the fullness of Christian manhood.

UNFULFILLED AMBITIONS

Those hopes and ambitions were not to be fulfilled. All the good resolutions could not restore the strength that had been wasted in those former sinful years. Unexpectedly, after a few days’ illness, in which only a part of the time he was confined to his bed, he passed away. As I folded the toil-worn hands over the hollow chest, I thought deeply upon the folly of a young man’s choosing a life of sin, and the fearful results of such a choice. Sin was the only reason why he, hardly my age, should be lying there lifeless before me.

We laid him to rest in the Calancala cemetery. There he will await the resurrection day, when he will come forth, not with that sin-racked body, but with a glorious new one,—come forth to live a life, not of a few short years, as he expected to do here, but a life without end,—a life in which the grandest enterprises can be undertaken, and the highest ambitions fulfilled. It will be, in a far deeper and wider sense, a life of freedom, as he had expected to have here. Perhaps the Lord foresaw the struggles that would have been his if he had lived, on account of lack of work and lack of strength to cope with the hardships of life, and in His wisdom gave him rest.

His experience can be a help to others. If these words fall into the hands of one who is looking backward with regret over wasted years of life, and forward with uncertainty and dread to probable suffering here, and the judgment hereafter, let him remember the gracious invitation, “Seek ye the Lord while He may be found, call ye upon Him while He is near: let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon.” Isaiah 55: 6, 7. It is too late to relive those sin-filled years. We cannot undo them if we will, but as long as life is granted to us, it is not too late to accept our Father’s love, and find pardon and peace, like weary children, in Him.

Other young men—and women also—are standing where he stood. Life is still before them, to be filled with something. What shall it be? Voices are calling, inviting, promising pleasure and happiness in a life free from the restraints of religion. They promised the same to him. But they never fulfill their promises. They cannot fulfill them. On the other hand, the Lord, through His word, through truth-filled literature, through His preachers, is inviting the young man and the young woman, not to a living, not to an existence, but to a life. Does any one of us know how much of love, and joy, and happiness, and triumph might be crowded into a life wholly ordered by the Lord? Some of us know some of these things to a certain degree, but as we think of knowing them in their fullness, and during a life stretching out through all eternity, we can see that the Lord is offering us far more than we can now understand. And best of all, thousands in all ages have testified, and thousands in this age can testify, that in so far as their consecration and the time they have served Him, would allow, He fulfills all that He promises, for He is able.

BIBLE STILL UP-TO-DATE

Let no one think that the Bible and its teachings are out of date, even though it is fashionable to-day to believe that they are. It is still true, as Solomon said to the pleasure-loving, thoughtless young people of Jerusalem nearly three thousand years ago,

that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” a wisdom “more precious than rubies. . . . Length of days is in her right hand; and in her left hand riches and honor. Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is every one that retaineth her.” It is still true, as I knew in my soul as I looked upon the dead face of my friend, that “there is a way which seemeth right unto a man; but the end thereof are the ways of death.” It is still true that “the wages of sin is death.” It is still true that the Lord is saying to each one who has not yet accepted Him as a Father, and Jesus as a Saviour, “Choose you this day whom ye will serve,” and that He is waiting and longing for him to leave the “ways of death” and enter those “ways of pleasantness;” for those who have entered can say from the heart as did the psalmist, “In Thy presence is fullness of joy; at Thy right hand there are pleasures forevermore.”

(Continued on page 14)*

The Ways of Death

(Continued from page 11)