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In 1858, the United States of America was speeding towards civil war, a young Presbyterian pastor in Scotland named John Paton was beginning to see a mob as a mission field. God was calling him to the New Hebrides (heh-bri-dees) islands, an archipelago in the South Pacific now known as Vanuatu. In those days, the islands were populated by cannibals. Two decades earlier, a famous missionary named John Williams had been killed and eaten by the natives. So when the young John Paton decided to see that mob as his mission field, he was sharply rebuked.

An elderly saint named Mr. Dickson exploded, “The cannibals, you will be eaten by the cannibals!”

To this, Paton replied: “Mr. Dickson, you are advanced in years now, and your own prospect is soon to be laid in the grave, there to be eaten by worms; I confess to you, that if I can but live and die serving and honoring the Lord Jesus, it will make no difference to me whether I am eaten by Cannibals or by worms; and in the Great Day my Resurrection body will rise as fair as yours in the likeness of our risen Redeemer.”

Indeed the day would come when John Paton was surrounded by cannibals threatening his life. Nevertheless his faith didn’t waver. Later he wrote: “I realized that I was immortal till my Master’s work with me was done. The assurance came to me, as if a voice out of heaven had spoken, that not a musket would be fired to wound us, not a club to prevail to strike us, not a spear leave the hand in which it was held vibrating to be thrown, not an arrow leave the bow, or a killing stone the fingers, without the permission of Jesus Christ.”[i]

[i] John G. Paton, The Autobiography of the Pioneer Missionary to the New Hebrides (Vanuatu), 1898 repr. (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth Trust, 2016), 207.