HE was a cruel blood-thirsty savage, more cruel perhaps than the generality of his tribe, and for this reason carried out more successfully his duties as executioner to his chief, a Central African potentate, who knew no law save his own arbitrary will. Deeds of horror and of blood, which would make my reader shudder, were to this man but the everyday duties connected with his profession, while on his own private account he had been known to murder many a victim in cold blood who had dared to offend him, and many a tiny infant too, whose only crime was that its existence hindered its slave-mother from carrying out to the full the arduous toil enacted from her.
But the “light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” is shining, and beams of that light found their way even into “darkest Africa,” to dispel the darkness of ages, and shed the “light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” The strange news of a Saviour God—so holy that He could not look upon sin; so gracious that in order to spare the sinner He had given His own Son to die, and bear the punishment instead; so righteous, that all the claims of His holiness being met, He had raised that Son from the dead, and seated Him at His own right hand in heaven, and through Him sent to those lost Africans the message of forgiveness, salvation and eternal life—that strange, glad story was sounded out in the hearing of the King, his warriors, and his servants. . .
Years passed, and still messengers from the God of Glory told to the sable tribes the message of his grace; some, a very few, had believed it, and had found it true. They knew their sins forgiven; the past all blotted out; they could, by the power of the Holy Spirit, who had sealed them, look up to the glory where their Sin-Purger is seated, and cry, “Abba, Father”; their fellows knew the white man’s message was no idle tale, as they saw changed lives, holy living, and joy, such as they had never witnessed before.
One evening a little band had gathered together for prayer—the missionaries and those whose hearts had been opened to receive the word. One after another had prayed and spoken, when suddenly a swarthy figure rose at the back and began to address the meeting. “I have long wished to speak,” he faltered, “but have hesitated, for if anyone has sins, I have”—a shudder passed through his astonished audience, as they recognized the aforetime executioner, and recalled many a ghastly crime too well remembered— “but why should I not speak?” he continued. “For against my many sins stands the full payment made by the blood of Jesus for us black people, and you white people too.”
The meeting bowed in worship as they realized, as never before, the value of that blood which cleanseth from all sin, and could make full payment for, could expiate, such guilt, and turn such a man “from darkness to light, from the power of Satan unto God.” And was it so? Or was it merely a passing delusion, a phantom of a disordered brain? Ask the cannibal tribes around who first heard from his lips of a Saviour, even for such as they; ask the children he taught, the Christians he cared for, as, “in labors more abundant,” he spent the few remaining years of his life, and then departed with great joy to be with Him who had loved him and washed him from his sins in His own blood.
My reader is not a blood-stained savage, but he is a sinner “guilty before God,” and there is nothing that can atone for his sins, be they many or few, except the “full payment made by the blood of Jesus.” Thank God, it is “for you white men too.” Are you trusting it? Or, in the day that is coming, when “the Lord Jesus shall come to be glorified in his saints and admired in all then that believe,” and that once ferocious savage shall come in the glory with Him, shining in the likeness of Christ, and with many another African as his “crown of rejoicing”—then, where will my reader be found? Among the number of those on whom vengeance shall be executed as those that know not God, or in company with this once guilty sinner who came to the Saviour and proved the value of that precious blood that makes whiter than snow? Come to Jesus now, and you shall be saved as he was.