The famous missionary, Elisabeth Elliot, wrote a book, No Graven Image. It’s a story about a missionary who goes into the rainforest and wants to translate the Bible. At the end of the story, everything falls apart. The one man in the tribe who can enable her to do the translation and connect her to the tribe, she kills accidentally, and she’s expelled from the tribe. So, at the end of the book, everything falls apart.
Elliot once talked about that book and the response it generated. Numerous people wrote angry letters to her saying, “God would never treat a faithful person like that. God would never let those sorts of things happen.” She was even informed by the president of a seminary that he had purposely kept it off the best books of the year shelves to make sure fewer people would read it.
There’s an enormous irony in all of it because the book was based pretty much on what really happened. Many of you know her story. She and her husband Jim, along with four other missionary couples went into the rainforest to translate the Bible and reach the lost tribes of that region. The night before they went to make contact with the tribe, they sang a hymn that talks about God being our shield and our defender. The next day, Elisabeth’s husband, Jim, and the other four men were speared to death. They left behind wives and children. And there was no sense to it. Why did God let that happen?
Here’s how Elisabeth wrote about that incident:
“I dethrone him if I demand that he act in ways that satisfy my ideas. God is God. If he is God, he is worthy of my worship and my service. I will find rest nowhere but in his will and that will is infinitely, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notion of what he is up to.”
In a different place, Elliot says it this way:
“Although I have not found intellectual satisfaction, I have found peace. The answer I say to you is not an explanation but a person, Jesus Christ, my Lord and my God.”
