This post is extracted from our eBook, Warriors of the Way: Christian Training, Combat and Victory. You can download a free copy from the E-Books page on this site.
Victories of biblical proportions did not end with the completion of the Bible.
In one night in June, 1981, a clandestine Christian operation successfully smuggled a staggering one million Bibles into China, where they were distributed and gratefully accepted as great treasures by those who longed for Bibles, but had no way to obtain them.
The mission, code named “Project Pearl,” was primarily organized by a former Marine and carried out by Christians during a time when the Communist Party was actively trying to destroy Christianity in China; the level of success achieved by Project Pearl was nothing short of astounding. Reporting the incident later, Time magazine called it “the largest operation of its kind in the history of China.”
The story is a fascinating one. On the night of June 18, an innocuous-seeming tugboat churned its way across the sea near Shantou, China. The twenty crew members on board were all taking a great risk. They were not Chinese. They were from Australia, Canada, Holland, New Zealand, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and the United States. And this was no ordinary tug. It pulled a specially built barge loaded with 232 one-ton waterproof packages of Bibles.
Interception of the cargo would have led not only to the destruction of the Bibles by the Communist authorities, but also to serious repercussions for the crew members. But the tug continued, undetected, past the ships of a Chinese naval base to a position just off a secluded beach where a group of Chinese Christians were waiting. The specially built barge was then partially submerged so that the packages of Bibles floated off its deck and were carried by the waves to the beach.
There, the assembled Christian team hurriedly opened the packages and carried the Bibles off to distribution points in cars, on motorcycles and bicycles, and by foot in backpacks and other containers. From each distribution center the Bibles were carefully released to avoid the suspicion of the authorities. To help in this process, the Bibles had been bound with red covers and made to the same size as Chairman Mao’s famous “Red Book,” so that they were easily mistaken for that.
Some containers of the Bibles not moved from the beach in time were found by Chinese guards who threw the Bibles into the sea, but even these copies were retrieved by fishermen who dried them on the roofs of their houses, and they were then passed on to others. Several hundred copies that were found by the authorities were thrown into a cesspool only to be later carefully retrieved by Christians who thoroughly washed them and sprayed them with perfume. Even these so-called “wet” and “perfumed” Bibles were accepted just as gratefully by Christians who had no other access to the word of God.
Although conditions have changed in the years since this daring mission was accomplished, and printed Bibles are no longer the most effective manner of getting the Scriptures into China, Project Pearl remains a wonderful story of what was accomplished by the dedication of Christian warriors who, with the help of God, were able to accomplish a truly astounding victory. We cannot even begin to calculate the total effect of this project, which placed Bibles in the hands of one million people who did not have access to them. But one thing is sure, Project Pearl played no small part in the revival and spread of Christianity in China – where there are now more Christians than in any other country in the world.
The New Testament Book of Acts contains many fascinating stories of the growth of early Christianity. One of those stories tells of the conversion of an African man from Ethiopia whose coming to belief had great significance for early Christianity – more than we might realize …
“Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, “Go south to the road – the desert road – that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.” So he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, an important official in charge of all the treasury of the Kandake (which means “queen of the Ethiopians”). This man had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and on his way home was sitting in his chariot reading the Book of Isaiah the prophet. Then Philip ran up to the chariot and heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet. “Do you understand what you are reading?” Philip asked. “How can I,” he said, “unless someone explains it to me?” So he invited Philip to come up and sit with him …” (Acts 8:26-31).
Reading the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch it is hard for us, as modern readers, to grasp the way in which the story would have been perceived by its original hearers in the early Church.
In the ancient world Ethiopia epitomized the idea of remoteness. The Greek poet Homer spoke of the inhabitants of Ethiopia as the “farthest of men” – the most remote known peoples (Odyssey 1.23), and the term Ethiopia was often used by classical writers to mean all of unknown sub-Saharan Africa – to “the ends of the earth.”
This sense of the exotic and distant land from which the eunuch came was heightened by other details of the story – the fact that the inhabitants of Ethiopia were dark-skinned was exotic in itself. The fact that the man was a eunuch also placed him in a small minority of Jews or Gentile proselytes to the Jewish faith. Even more exceptional was the nature of the eunuch’s position as an important official in a distant land perceived to be “ruled by women” (a number of the Kandake queens ruled Ethiopia during that era). All these factors would have come together in the minds of early Christians to form a very vivid image of a man from the ends of the earth.
We see how these facts would have been perceived when we apply them to the wording of the great commission given by Christ to his disciples before his ascension: “…you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8B). Acts records that commission being fulfilled in Jerusalem (Acts 6:8-8:3), in Judea and Samaria (Acts 8:4-25) and, in the story of the Ethiopian eunuch, to “the ends of the earth” (Acts 8:26-40). That is doubtless why, out of all the thousands of people that were converted at that time (Acts 4:4, etc.), the story of the Ethiopian eunuch was selected to be told in detail. The commission certainly was to take the Gospel to all the Gentile world, not just to Ethiopia, but the early readers of Acts would have immediately recognized in that account how God was working out His purpose and beginning to fulfill His intentions.
There are many exemplary lessons we can see in the story of Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch: the willingness of Philip to follow the Spirit’s prompting to do the work of God, the devotion of the Ethiopian to travel the huge distance to Jerusalem to worship, the humility of the powerful man in the way he asked Philip’s help to understand God’s word, and many more. But a lesson we should not forget is that if we keep in mind the plan and purposes of God, we will see them being fulfilled in and around us if we are observant. If we look for them, we will see the signs of God’s work being done and be strengthened by them, as the word continues to go out to “the ends of the earth.”
The expansion of the Christian universe was indeed a clear one. Starting in Jerusalem, the beginning of Christianity’s “Big Bang,” the word surged outward throughout the land of the Jews, then further through the areas of the culturally-related Samaritans, and finally into the lands of the Gentiles – outwards toward the ends of the earth. Obviously, this is to over-simplify the analogy with the expanding physical universe (which appears to be expanding from every point), but the analogy works at the basic level of the concept of expansion. This certainly meshed with Jesus’ earlier teachings of the Kingdom of God growing and spreading throughout the world (see our article on Christ’s parable of the mustard seed here).
We may (depending on translation) perhaps see this expansion of the Kingdom in Isaiah 51:16: “I have put My words in your mouth, … in order to plant the heavens, to found the earth, and to say to Zion, ‘You are My people.’” (Holman). If this translation is followed, the expansion of the message of God seems to be viewed in reverse here – from the heavens themselves – back to earth – back to Jerusalem.
What is clear about the expansion of Christianity is that – as in our analogy of the expanding universe – there are two competing forces at work: expansion and entropy. The force that appears to continually expand the universe is countered by the principle of entropy, of the running down of energy and the lapsing into lack of motion, stillness, and eventual energy-death. In the expansion of Christianity we see the same thing. The word has come to many, but not all continue the expansion. Viewed this way, although we may see some of the evils of this world as primary forces holding back and attempting to slow down the spread of Christianity, how much more is the expansion slowed by the millions who know the name of Christ, and accept His teachings, but who are hindered in expanding the Kingdom of God through their own entropy and inaction.
This is part of what we find in the parable of the talents – of the servant who simply buried his part in the kingdom’s expansion in the ground (Matthew 25:24-30). On the other hand, Christ talked about the opposite – the potential for true expansion we all have – in saying: “… whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these…” (John 14:12). While we may get caught up in wondering how we can do greater works than Jesus himself, we miss the point that if we are part of the expansion, then we will be doing work toward the same goals.
So it’s a decision that we, as Christians, must make each day: What will my day be today? Will I be part of the entropy, or part of the expansion?
Gideons International photo from NYC Bible Blitz
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