Mr. Wang and The Doctrine

Mr. Wang from Ling Nang enthusiastically attended the new believer’s class taught by missionary John Bickford. He came with 30 other Chinese men to the week long class to learn “the doctrine.” But Christian ways were so different from Chinese ways. One of the rules Pastor Bi taught them was “Don’t sell your daughters or wife.” He asked if they couldn’t sell their daughters, could they buy a girl for their son for a wife? The other men said you shouldn’t, but Mr. Wang had been trying to buy an 11 year old girl for his 9 year old son. The other men told him the boy was too young.

“Oh, I’ll not marry them now,” he said. “I’ll wait till he is 16 years old.”

“Then the girl will be an old woman, and how do you know he will want her?” someone asked.

“Besides,” someone else said, “you should not use money to buy a wife. That should be voluntarily done.”

“Well,” he insisted, “I want to get her now so as to train her to be a Christian.”

But the others were quite sure he should not buy so young a girl.

Then the men asked the foreign pastor to make a statement about multiple wives. “If a woman is an animal to buy and sell, I guess he might be pleased to have two wives, but if she is a person like himself, I don’t see how he could care for two wives. Did God make one man and several women? No, he made one man and one woman.”

Someone asked, “If a woman is barren, can’t her husband take another wife?”

Pastor Bi replied, “Doctors say that sometimes the reason there are not children is the man’s fault, then could the woman take another husband?”

Of course, the men shook their heads at that strange idea.

Pastor Bi always used the Bible to instruct the class. Mr. Wang tried to remember the stories, but the others didn’t always agree with his telling. He was asked to tell the story of the temptation of Adam and Eve.

“Adam and Eve were in the Garden of Eden, when the Snake came along and Eve said ‘Who are you?’ and he said, ‘I am the snake.’ Then the snake said, ‘I can eat anything in the garden, how about you?’ And Eve said, ‘We can eat anything except that fruit, because God has said that if we eat that fruit we shall die.’ Then the snake said, ‘God is fooling you, you won’t die, you will be like I am, knowing good and bad. Why don’t you eat it?’ So she picked one of the fruits and started to eat it, and gave half to Adam. And just then God came, and Adam tried to swallow all his fruit, but it stuck in his throat. And see this bump on your throat? That is where that came from.”

When he finished, one old man said, “Huh, you don’t know if that is true.”

             Even if he didn’t always remember the stories correctly, Mr. Wang knew that the Christian God would always take care of him, even under trial. In China in the 1920s, bandits roamed the country kidnapping people for ransom. A band came to his village and carried him off with about a hundred other men.

As they walked along, Mr. Wang kept praying, “Oh Lord, save me from these robbers. You know we have no money in the house to pay a ransom. Please make something happen so I can get away.”

When they came to the edge of the village they met some other bandits and the man who was holding his arm let it go, thinking that among so many bandits he would be secure. So Mr. Wang walked away, praying all the time.

Afterward he told his friends, “I would walk a bit and then stop and pray, walk some more then stop and pray, until I got home. My God put his hand over the bandit’s eyes so they would not see me.”

That was more than the other men’s gods did for them; they had to pay ransom. For quite a while after that his neighbors wanted to stay in Mr. Wang’s house, because his God protected him.

Mr. Wang was one of many people discipled by my grandfather, John Bickford. Read the rest of his story in A Sincere Heart.