TEMPTATION TO DOUBT by Samuel M. Zwemer

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Oct 5, 1904

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 30, No. 39.

TEMPTATION TO DOUBT.

By Samuel M. Zwemer

[By Samuel M. Zwemer, D.D., in Missionary Review.]

“If Thou be the Son of God, command that these stones be made bread.” “Thou still clingest to that vainglorious confidence that Thou art the Son of God, carried away by those illusory scenes at the Jordan. Thou wast born in a stable—but Thou art the Son of God! A carpenter’s roof supplied Thee with a home, and in the obscurity of a despicable town of Galilee Thou hast spent thirty years—yet still Thou art the Son of God! Be it so. But, after that, surely Thy days of trial should have an end. Why linger for weeks in this desert, wandering among the wild beasts and craggy rocks, unhonored, unattended, unpitied, ready to starve? Is this befitting the Son of God?”

In a similar way does doubt assail the missionary—distrust in God and despair of His love. And as the temptation, so is its occasion and environment. There is a solemn contrast in every missionary’s life between the hour of farewell to the homeland and that of arrival on the field. One has only to read personal missionary correspondence (not the printed reports), or the letters of Henry Martyn, for example, to find abundant proof. Every missionary’s diary will show it.

It is one thing, in the fervor of consecration and enthusiasm before an assembled congregation, to feel hands laid on you, and to be set apart to the work (a work which makes you conscious of the heroic, and this self-consciousness is fostered by sympathetic friends); it is a day on the Mount of Transfiguration; on the next, you descend to the Jewish rabble and the demoniac.

It is quite another thing to arrive on the field and find every circumstance and condition different from the ideal picture painted on the imagination; to find your whole environment not only strange (yea, often shocking), but to feel bitterly disappointed that things are not as you expected them to be. Yet this is the experience of nearly every one, I believe, who goes out to the foreign field; in a sense, utterly opposite to the words of the Queen of Sheba: “The half has never been told.” It is too often a one-sided picture that is drawn in missionary books and reports. We are all sinners, and our reports are too roseate. A recent writer says:—

How hard it is for the missionary to be patient when his friends at home are so impatient, and how great is the temptation to embellish the account of his annual labors. I fear there are grave scandals connected with reports, but the fault lies with the subscribers rather than with the missionary agents. For the simple, pious folk who take great interest in missionary enterprise, but who are entirely ignorant of the circumstances of missionary work, the sun must always shine; a cloud on the horizon is intolerable; this is, as it were, the condition of their support. The result is the issue of reports positively grotesque in their optimism, in which Scripture texts jostle strangely with palpably exaggerated retrospects and forecasts.

To the missionary comes a sudden awakening as out of a dream—a realism that shocks the ideal as when a man falls upon a live electric wire. And the result—a spiritual desert and the tempter!

You have left civilization, and are now with the wild beasts. Home and companionship are behind—you stand, or fall, by yourself. The moral atmosphere is a miasma that oppresses, makes faint, stifles. You learn for the first time from the window of the mission house that the dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty. You see the last verses of the first chapter of Romans in a daily panorama on the street. You are ignorant of the language, and yet are surrounded by it; its horrid tentacles take hold of you like a devil-fish on all sides;

you do not look at the language, but it rises like a monster and looks at you. You thought you came to preach, but find that you have come to wait (to wait in such a wilderness!), and to hunger and thirst for the privilege of preaching forty days and forty nights. A horror of great darkness comes upon you, and the horror is only the greater because you hide it in your bosom, and never whisper it to the committee at home or your fellow missionary. Except that you find relief in prayer, your spiritual life becomes a desert.

Now, I ask you candidly, where could there be a better opportunity for the Tempter? It is the supreme test.

At the London Missionary Conference, Professor Drummond said:—

I have met men in mission fields in different parts of the world who make zealous addresses at evangelistic meetings at home, who left for their fields of labor laden with testimonials, but who became utterly demoralized within a year’s time. . . . I would say that the thing to be certain of in picking a man for such a field as Africa, where the strain upon a man’s character is tremendous, and the strain upon his spiritual life, owing to isolation, even more tremendous, that we must be sure that we are sending a man of character and heart morally sound to the core.

O, Thou Son of God, who didst overcome for us, save Thy disciples with such perfect trust, and make them to so live by the Word from the mouth of God that their moral fiber may endure the strain! Under the awful weight the cables may stretch and swing and twist and tremble, but while He holds them they can not snap asunder. “Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear Him. For He knoweth our frame; He remembereth that we are dust.” “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat; but I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not; and when thou art converted, strengthen thy brethren.”