My job allows me to travel throughout China. Over the years, I have visited Beijing and Tianjin in the northeast, Shanghai and Hangzhou in the southeast, Ganzhou and Hong Kong in the far south as well as Tianzhen within the upper Mongolia region. No matter where I travel within China, each city boasts of its own distinct culture, customs, food, and dialect.
I must confess, to me they all smell, taste, and sound pretty much the same. But to people of China, the differences are very pronounced. Mandarin is the official spoken language of the nation, but Cantonese, Wu, and Min languages are also spoken. Within each of these spoken languages, there are numerous variations based upon people groups.
The inability to understand language has an origin. It started in the city of Babel as written about in Genesis 11. I visited a Buddhist temple in Tianzhen, China that reminded me of the story of Babel. The people of Babel, desiring to “make a name for themselves”, built a tower to become high and mighty like God himself. As a result, God scattered his people across the face of the earth and confused their languages. (Genesis 11:7).
To this day, spoken language is a barrier within China. What I find fascinating is the way in which God has preserved a portion of the Chinese written language for himself. The written language of China can be dated back to 1250 BC. (About the same time-line as the end of Exodus.) China’s writing uses logographic symbols to tell a story or to convey an emotion. Unlike languages such as English, French, Spanish, German (and many others) that use an alphabet with phonetic sounds for each letter, the people of China use ancient storytelling through graphic images. In 221 BC during the Qin dynasty, Emperor Li Si established the first unified system of writing for all of China. In the 1950’s, the Chinese government instituted a second major reform by introducing Simplified Chinese characters to boost literacy.
Today, children in China spend countless hours learning the correct method for recreating each graphic character. Each symbol written with a pen or a computer contains similar markings that were originally created thousands of years ago with a quill or a brush. Draw a line backwards with a pen and people of China won’t understand the meaning, simply because the fat part of the line where the pen starts is thicker than where the pen leaves the paper. Draw a character with too short of a line or a dash in place of a dot, and the image becomes unintelligible. Writing in Chinese is a very exact process.
In 1979, C.H. Kang and Ethel Nelson wrote a book titled, The Discovery of Genesis. The book contains several Chinese characters and their universal understandings. As you can see, each Chinese character is constructed with smaller elements that add up to portray a complete image, thought or feeling. Judge for yourself the origin stories for the following Chinese characters…
To Create
This is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made earth and heaven. Now no shrub of the field was yet on the earth, and no plant of the field had yet sprouted, for the Lord God had not sent rain upon the earth, and there was no man to cultivate the ground. But a mist used to rise from the earth and water the whole surface of the ground. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living person.
Genesis 2:4-7
Garden
The Lord God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden; and there He placed the man whom He had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God caused every tree to grow that is pleasing to the sight and good for food; the tree of life was also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and tend it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may freely eat; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die.”
Genesis 2:8-9,15-17
Complete, Finish
So, God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you; and to every animal of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food”; and it was so. And God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good.
Genesis 1:27-31
Forbidden, to warn
Then the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to cultivate it and tend. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, “From any tree of the garden you may freely eat; but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for on the day that you eat from it you will certainly die.”
Genesis 2:15-17
Tempter
Now the serpent was more cunning than any animal of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said to the woman, “Has God really said, ‘You shall not eat from any tree of the garden’?” The woman said to the serpent, “From the fruit of the trees of the garden we may eat; but from the fruit of the tree which is in the middle of the garden, God has said, ‘You shall not eat from it or touch it, or you will die.’” The serpent said to the woman, “You certainly will not die! For God knows that on the day you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will become like God, knowing good and evil.”
Genesis 3:1-5
To Covet, Desire
When the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable to make one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves waist coverings.
Genesis 3:6-7
Boat
Then God spoke to Noah, saying, “Go out of the ark, you and your wife and your sons and your sons’ wives with you. Bring out with you every living thing of all flesh that is with you, birds and animals and every crawling thing that crawls on the earth, that they may breed abundantly on the earth, and be fruitful and multiply on the earth.” So Noah went out, and his sons and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him. Every animal, every crawling thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth, went out by their families from the ark.
Genesis 8:15-19
Righteousness
And he said, “Look, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham said, “God will provide for Himself the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” So the two of them walked on together. Then they came to the place of which God had told him; and Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood, and bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. And Abraham reached out with his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” He said, “Do not reach out your hand against the boy, and do not do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from Me.”
Genesis 22:7-12
Christianity within China is legal, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) regulates the practice through State-sanctioned control. The CCP’s desire is to shape the doctrines and customs of the Christian Church with the socialist values and culture of China. In spite of government regulations, God continues to reveal himself through their written language. God’s story of creation, temptation, sin, punishment, and righteousness are on display for all of China to know, see, and understand.
Veritas, for thousands of years, God has been revealing himself to the people of China through their written language. This knowledge gives me great confidence when talking with my co-workers in China about matters of faith. God has already revealed Himself to them. All I have to do is clarify what they already know to be true. As you practice being an “everyday missionary”, have confidence in the knowledge that God has already gone before you. His invisible qualities, His eternal power and His divine nature have already been revealed to everyone you meet. (Romans 1:20)