Proverbs
4:23 Good
News Translation
23 Be careful how you think; your life is
shaped by your thoughts.
Solusi, the first Adventist mission station amongst
non-Christian peoples, was founded in 1894 about 30 miles west of Bulawayo, the
second largest city in Zimbabwe, Africa. Elder William Harrison Anderson moved
to Solusi about a year later to replace several of the first missionaries, many
of whom had died of malaria and are buried on the campus of what is now Solusi
University. He was about 25 years old and stated he would take quinine to
battle the malaria, in spite of council against using it as a drug for humans. By
1901 he and his wife Nora Haysmer were the only missionaries left at Solusi.
The other missionaries were either dead or had moved on.
He spent 50 years as a missionary in Africa. About the
malaria, he is quoted as saying, “Ellen White or no Ellen White, I’m going to
take quinine.” She later supported his choice and remarked that she had not
been talking about the use of quinine for curing malaria. While teaching at
Solusi and Rusangu that he later founded in Zambia, he found that students
would start attending classes but would give up after the novelty wore off. He
is credited with taking a sjambok, or hippo-hide whip, to drive the students
into class. In support of this he quoted Christ’s parable of the feast where he
sent his servant to “go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to
come in, that my house may be filled.”
To eliminate lice, he shaved all of the students’ heads,
which became the common practice in almost all of the missionary and government
schools in Africa. One young fellow had a lock of hair that was over a foot
long. When Anderson went to shave his head, he protested that the witch doctor
had told him not to cut that lock—if he did, he would surely die. Anderson told
him that the Lord was stronger than any witch doctor’s curse and shaved the
lock off. Within a few days the fellow was dead! It was determined that he died
of malaria—but he was dead. As our verse teaches us, “Be careful how you think; your life is
shaped by your thoughts.”
Of course, all of the animists in the area were sure that his death was on
account of the curse. Animism is the major religion of Africa. Even Christians
and Muslims often follow what they believe their ancestors tell them today.
Satan’s
first lie to the human race was when he told Eve “That's not true; you will not die. God said that because
he knows that when you eat it, you will be like God and know what is good and
what is bad.” [2]
This doctrine
of Satan is the foundation of animism. Anyone who subscribes to this doctrine
can be deceived easily by having evil spirits impersonate the departed soul and
continue Satan’s deception on the unsuspecting victim. This lie of Satan is
perpetuated in many Christian churches that teach that when people die, their
spirit goes to heaven, and they spend their time looking back to earth to see
what foolish things their former loved ones are doing with their earthly lives.
It is then but a small intellectual leap to consider that the departed can
communicate with the living—and, voila, Christians are sucked down into animism:
direct manipulation by the evil one.
Lord! Preserve us from Satan’s trap of believing that at
least part of us continues to live after we die.
