The Natives’ Time Board with Its Seven Holes
By T. E. Bowen
IN the Bible Society Gleanings, published by the British and Foreign Bible Society, of London, there appeared recently a little item as follows: “In West Africa, a town on the delta of the river Niger was visited for the first time in 1909; and early last year, in response to repeated invitations, the Rev. J. D. Aitken went thither. The whole town turned out to meet him, and he was taken to see a spot where they proposed to build a school. He observed in their houses pieces of wood bored with seven holes, and a peg inserted in one of them. This was their contrivance for keeping the recurrence of Sunday in remembrance, tho in their ignorance they observed it on Saturdays.” We have in this contrivance of boards with seven holes and pegs, by the natives in this West African village, something well worthy of more than passing notice. These people knew there are seven days in each week, and had found out in some manner that one of these days ought to be observed as the Sabbath. Our missionary friend states that “in their ignorance” they had put their Sabbath pegs into the wrong hole, as he found them in the Saturday hole in place of the hole for Sunday. But in what a terrible dilemma this Bible agent (for he was engaged in selling the Bible in these parts) finds himself as he undertakes to straighten out the heathen people at this village by showing them into which hole their pegs should be placed for the Sabbath! Surely he could not use the good Book of God, which he was circulating among them, in showing these people they had their pegs in the wrong holes. Imagine him taking his Bible from his pocket and beginning to read to them, after turning to Ex. 20:8-11, where God says: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work: but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord thy God: . . . for in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it.” Should the chief speak up and say, “Why, missionary, this is the very hole our pegs are in now; and how is it that you tell us they are in the wrong place, when your God plainly tells you, in His Book you bring to us, that it was upon this very day that He rested, and then commanded you to keep the day holy?” what answer could this representative of the gospel give? Turn to any portion of the Book he likes, it reads the same in every place: “And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it: because that in it He had rested from all His work which God created and made.” Nowhere can a blessing or like command be found that would indicate that the natives ought to put their pegs into any other hole than the one in which he had found them — that for the seventh day, or Saturday. If the missionary can supply his own ideas, entirely apart from the Book, in place of what the Book says, by substituting a day not spoken of at all in his Book as the day he must keep for the Sabbath, what assurance have these “ignorant” heathen that the Jesus of whom the missionary reads is the One after all who can really save them from their sins? If pegs can be moved in one instance, why not in another? The only way in which this missionary, or any other, can prove to a heathen man that the stone or tree he worships is not the true God, is by proving to him that his god did not create the heavens and the earth. He must be made to see that the God of the Bible is the true God, and the only one to worship, because He created all these things the heathen beholds in the earth and sky. It is thus that the poor heathen sees his error, and renounces his false god. Then is it not a cruel thing for a missionary to turn squarely about and deny that that day upon which God rested after finishing His creative work — that day He set apart, to keep fresh in the minds of all that He is the Creator of the heavens and the earth — is the Sabbath, and that another must be kept that has not thus been set apart at all by the Lord, and which must rest wholly upon the authority of men? Can you conceive of a more confusing thing to do in trying to convert the heathen to God? Ah, reader, the heathen people back on the delta of the river Niger in West Africa made no mistake when they put their peg into the seventh-day hole for the Sabbath. This is the hole into which the Lord Jesus Himself thrust His peg for the Sabbath day at the close of creation week (see John 1:1-3; Eph. 3:9; Gen. 2:1-3), and He has never changed it. It is safe to teach the heathen, as well as all others, to follow Jesus; and, furthermore, He “is Lord also of the Sabbath.”