THE CHINA LETTERSA Series of Articles byDavid Lin
DAVID LIN ~ is a Chinese Christian who believes he is commissioned of God to carry the message of the soon-coming Savior to his countrymen. He was born in Manila. In infancy he was dedicated by his mother to be a preacher of the Gospel. He received his first three years of schooling in Canada. Then he studied in Java, Shanghai and Beijing. He graduated from Pacific Union College and completed his religious training in the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary at Takoma Park, Washington, D. C. In 1946 he returned to China, where he spent 45 years in his calling. During those years he was for some time isolated from the church in America, but remained interested in its welfare. Soon thereafter he resumed contact with friends in America and started writing letters and articles to share his concerns. David Lin's letters and articles appeared in various Adventist periodicals at a time when Desmond Ford's teachings were the center of attention in the Adventist church. Due to a revival of interest in him in recent years many readers have requested that Lin's analysis of Ford's theology be published in book form. A selection is here presented, set in chronological order, with the exception of two articles, which are written to acquaint readers with the author's life. These two articles are his biography: My Own Story, and Gain That Is Loss. The other articles, deeply rooted in the Bible and in the Spirit of Prophecy, are a joyous affirmation of the Seventh-day Adventist faith. The reader is filled with wonder at his penetration of the deepest inquiry and his joining together of the beautiful present truths. One is left with an exuberant faith in the old paths, and with a tearful recognition of our Saviour's love for us. TABLE OF CONTENTS
6 Is Adventism Patchwork Theology? 24 The Time Problem in Hebrews 25 The Sixth Plague....................259 26 Thoughts on the Tamid...............273 27 James White on the Daily............277 28 Heaven Open.........................279 29 God's Naked Word....................285 30 God's Grand Strategy................290 31 The Word of the Lord................296 32 Gain that is Loss...................305 33 Ellen G. White, The Theologian......307 34 Combating Doubt.....................326 35 The Christ-Image....................337 36 Into All Truth......................346 37 Hold Not Thy Peace..................354 38 The Book of Enoch...................358 39 On Godly Fear & Christian Courtesy..369 40 Dives and Lazarus...................372 41 Azazel..............................376 42 God's Triple Seal...................379 43 A Gainsaying People.................381 44 Past, Present and Future............385 46 The Sign of Jonas...................391 47 The Faith Once Delivered............397 48 The Pride of Men....................401 49 The "Daily" Riddle..................406 50 The Adventist Contribution..........411 51 The Flesh Profiteth Nothing.........416 52 Nine Short Articles Raised for Our Justification..419 Three Useful Texts............420 The White Stone...............421 A Critical Conjunction........422 A Fair Test...................423 A Real Danger.................424 The Daily Prayer Meeting......426 Day of Love...................427 Quiz Corner...................427 The Spirit and Power of Elijah
Chapter 1MY OWN STORYI was born in 1917 as the second son of Lin Bao Heng, a graduate of Columbia University, when he was serving as Chinese vice consul in Manila, P.I. My mother, Pan Cheng Kun, had in her childhood attended a Christian school in Suzhou, Jiangsu. An American missionary, Miss Pyle, had taught her to pray, a habit she neglected for many years until after she was married and gave birth to my brother Paul and me. The trials of married life drove her to her knees. One day I ran a high fever and was rushed to a hospital. My worried mother knelt in prayer and promised God that if He healed me, she would bring me up as a preacher. Before the doctor had diagnosed my case, I recovered instantly. Since that day Mother drilled into my head that I belonged to God and would become a preacher. In 1919 my father was transferred to Vancouver, B.C., Canada, where he served as Chinese consul. Mother, Paul, and I joined him in 1921, and from 1922 to 1925 we both attended the Magee school and went to the Baptist church in that city. In 1925 we returned to Shanghai, then went to Soerabaya, Java, where Father continued to serve as Chinese consul. There Paul and I attended a private school run by an English lady, and learned to speak Malayan and also to walk on bare feet like the Java children. In 1927, when Chiang Kai Shek came to power, Father lost his official position under the defunct Peking regime. We moved back to Shanghai, where Paul and I attended a school run by British schoolmasters in the British settlement. There we learned to sing "Auld Lang Syne" and "Good King Wenceslas." In 1930 we moved to Peking, where Paul and I attended the Peking American School. I began in the sixth grade, taught by Miss Moore, the principal. One day she let the pupils say what they wanted to be after they grew up. When I said I was going to be a preacher, all were surprised, and after that I was regarded as an odd fellow. On Sundays Mother took us to the Methodist church, where we made friends with Pastor and Mrs. Fred Pyke, whose children, James, Louise, and Ruth, were my schoolmates. In 1932, when Father moved to Hankow to work in the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Mother joined him and left me to stay with the Pykes. In Hankow there was no Methodist church, so Mother visited different churches in the city. One day a Seventh-Day Adventist missionary came to solicit for Ingathering. Father bought a subscription and conversed with him in English. Thereafter a Bible worker, Miss Abbie Dunn, visited us and invited Mother to attend the Hankow Adventist Church, where she was impressed by the reciting of the Ten Commandments by the church members. She recalled an instance when her brother-in-law, who was a lawyer, questioned her regarding the rules of the Christian faith. When she said that Christians lived by the Ten Commandments, he asked her, "Which ten?" She tried her best to recall them, but all she could repeat were nine precepts. The relative smiled and remarked, "You've been a Christian for ten years, and can't even recite the Decalogue correctly!" Mother was chagrined. Now in the Adventist church the emphasis on the Ten Commandments convinced her that they taught the truth. During summer vacation I went to be with my parents in Hankow, and Mother explained to me the Sabbath doctrine. When I returned to Peking and the Pykes learned of my new belief, they tried to dissuade me. Meanwhile Abbie Dunn wrote to another Bible worker in Peking--Miss Lucy Andrus, who came to my school one day, introduced herself and invited me to study the Bible with her. Thus began a tussle which put me in a strait--to keep or not to keep the seventh-day Sabbath. In 1934 Mother came back to Peking and we attended the Adventist church together. When I graduated from high school in 1935, Paul was studying in Park College near Kansas City, Missouri. One day he was killed while speeding on a motorcycle, and that left me the only son in our family. Relatives tried to dissuade me from my intention to study for the ministry, stating that I should strive for a more lucrative vocation in order to bear the family's financial burdens in the future, for preachers in China were poorly paid. The Lord arranged for me to attend the China Training Institute in Chiaotouzhen, an Adventist junior college, where I majored in Bible. I happened to be the only ministerial student who paid my own tuition. All my classmates were beneficiaries of a scholarship set up to encourage young people to train for the ministry. Any student who could afford to pay tuition took either the pre-medical, the business, or the normal course. Only those who could not afford an education applied for the ministerial scholarship. In this respect I was again an "odd fellow." When the Sino-Japanese war began in August 1937, the school closed down. I went to Hongkong, where I received funds from my parents to enable me to obtain passage to Pacific Union College, and to continue to study for the ministry. During the dreary war years my parents were safe in the northwestern city of Lanzhou, which was never occupied by Japanese troops. However, it was badly hit in a big air raid. All buildings around the house where my parents stayed were razed, but their one lone structure remained standing amid the rubble--a mute witness to God's loving watchcare. The first summer in the United States I spent canvassing in Chinatown, San Francisco. Otherwise I worked in the college cafeteria, the machine shop, the bindery, or in the forest cutting cordwood, paying my way through in four years. After graduation in 1941 I studied at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary in Takoma Park, where I also canvassed for a living during my spare time. In the winter I worked in Danville, Virginia, as a colporteur. I began working on my Master's thesis, which was a study of the "Today" in Hebrews 3:13 and its connection with the "Sabbatism" of Hebrews 4:9. I did not complete it until 1946, when I received my degree. To acquaint myself with the use of Psalm 95 (where the "Today" occurs) in Jewish liturgy, I attended the services of a synagogue and befriended its rabbi. In the fall of 1942 I was called to teach Chinese at Pacific Union College. In 1943 I resigned and went to Honolulu to spend a year as a colporteur. I set a few sales records, gave Bible studies to a Japanese family and won them to the Sabbath truth. In 1944 I was called to prepare Chinese Bible correspondence lessons at the Voice of Prophecy. Lacking Chinese type, I printed the lessons by hand and had them duplicated by offset. After peace was restored, I returned to Shanghai with a group of missionaries in December 1946, and worked with Milton Lee in the Radio Department of the China Division. In 1948 the civil war in China was reaching a decision in favor of the Communists. The liberation of Shanghai was imminent. By December most of our missionaries had withdrawn to Hongkong, where a provisional China Division headquarters was set up. The Radio Department moved to Canton, functioned for six months, then moved to Hongkong in June 1949. I was appointed editor of the Hongkong edition of the Signs of the Times. In December 1949, the provisional office of the China Division turned over all duties to the Chinese staff in Shanghai, and I returned to Shanghai as Division secretary. Hsu Hua was Division president, and S. J. Lee was treasurer. The Korean war broke out in June 1950. As American GIs fighting under the United Nations flag drove into North Korea, Chinese volunteer troops marched across the border to push them back. Meanwhile the U.S. seventh fleet was ordered to patrol the Taiwan straits to block any attempt by the Red Army to liberate Taiwan. China and the United States were at war. Since the Seventh-day Adventist mission was an American organization, its assets were frozen in December 1950. In time it wholly disintegrated. Politically active elements among our workers got the upper hand, and the Division officers were replaced by more suitable persons. That was December 1951. From 1952 to 1954 some of us who were discharged got together to make slide rules for a living. At the same time we translated The Desire of Ages. The other volumes of the Conflict Series were eventually also translated. A group of young people of the Shanghai Seventh-day Adventist Church produced mimeographed copies of these books and distributed them. In 1955 I quit making slide rules for a living to compile a book on servicing X-ray machines, and then wrote a condensation of Amateur Telescope Making. In April 1958, I was arrested on a counterrevolutionary charge, and in 1960 sentenced to 15 years. I was sent to a water conservancy project, where I pushed wheelbarrows, operated a power winch, and served successively as X-ray technician, power-station switch operator and tractor electrician on a State farm. In all these years I received humane treatment and at times I could so arrange my work as to keep the Sabbath fairly well. My children came to visit me several times, and on one occasion I baptized my son Roger in a moat. It has been said that I baptized some souls in prison, but that is not true. It was possible then only to tell others of the truth. On March 28, 1991, I was fully exonerated. In retrospect, I praise God for His providential care in making all things work out for the good of all concerned. First, the years of trial have revealed many flaws in my character, stressing my need to overcome them. I can honestly say, "It is good that I have been afflicted; that I might learn Thy statutes." Second, He who sees the end from the beginning put me in "cold storage" to tide over the perilous years of the "Cultural Revolution," when the whole nation went berserk. A labor camp warden observed that I was in an "air-raid shelter." Only after many years did I realize that God had protected me from virtual disaster, for a political tornado struck our home in 1966. My father had died in 1959; my mother, wife, son, and four daughters remained to brave the storm. If the Lord had not also miraculously preserved them in those trying years, they would not have come through alive. The rumpus was started by the organizing of young people into "Red Guards" to protect Chairman Mao from "bourgeois elements" who, it was said, threatened to undermine the socialist system. Christians naturally became targets of attack. And because our oldest girl, Flora, had given her school much difficulty by her Sabbath "truancy," our home was the first one to be attacked when the Red Guards launched a city-wide onslaught on the bourgeoisie. Our home was searched six times through those tempestuous months. And they made it a point to come with their war drums on the Sabbath. All my books were piled in our alley and burned. A voice told my mother to go stay with her aunt in Tientsin. She was already 72, so the Lord arranged for a young niece to accompany her, and she stayed long enough in Tientsin to tide over the most dangerous months, during which my wife, Clara, was beaten, her hair was cropped and she was forced to stand on the street to be a public spectacle. "There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it." 1 Corinthians 10:13. In the light of these words, in moral stamina my wife stands highest in God's estimate; for He suffered her to undergo the toughest trials, and though she faltered once and lost His presence, by His grace she finally overcame. As for Mother and me, God saw that we might not survive, and put us under shelter. Another fact which speaks in favor of a high score for my wife is that she managed by God's help to bring up all five children in the nurture of the Lord. Every one of them kept the Sabbath during their school years and continued to keep it while employed in various capacities under the Socialist Regime. We must stress the fact that it was by the grace of God that they have witnessed for Him successfully. When our youngest girl, Angelina, was quizzed by a panel of grade school teachers, they asked her, "Who taught you to keep the Sabbath?" "The Bible." she answered. "Do you mean that you read only the Bible and not Karl Marx?""I read the Bible and also Karl Marx," Angelina replied, "and will practice what is right." That answer was unusual for a girl of eleven. We believe that such a wise rejoinder was not her own, but given her by the Holy Spirit. Yet in the last analysis, if her mother had not taught her to love the Lord and His Sabbath, the Holy Spirit would not have been with her in that crucial hour. My seminary teacher, Professor M.L. Andreasen, once remarked that when we dedicate ourselves to the Lord, He will see to it that we will find the right life companion. The many years of test and trial have proved the truth of these words. God saw fit to take me away from my family and to put the burden of educating the children on my wife. The result is for all to see. However, the bringing up of children was not tearless. Clara too had her failures. The hot temper of our third child, Eva, proved a real challenge. Clara resorted to beating, but it made things worse. Eva felt that any place on earth would be better than home, and signed up for the rustication program which was implemented in 1969, after all schools had been closed for three years, and the roaming "Red Guards" became a social problem. To go "up to the hills and down to the countryside" was Chairman Mao's call to the unschooled youth. Eva jumped at this chance to flee from home. Flora and Roger succumbed to the political pressure and also signed up to go; together the three went to the hills of Gweizhou. Life was tough, and only Roger, who could cut wood in the forests, made a fair living and helped his sisters tide over eight dreary years. After they came back to Shanghai, I, like Clara, failed to adjust properly to Eva's temper. Her behavior tried my patience, and I realized my inability to be Christlike under all circumstances. But God did not forsake Eva. As she found work in a factory, she faithfully observed the Sabbath by relinquishing the bonus paid to workers who put in full hours. It meant a drastic reduction to her paycheck. The management, seeing that she was truly conscientious, arranged for her to finish her weekly quota in five days if she could improve productivity. The Lord gave her hands celerity of motion, so that she became the only worker paid a full bonus for working five days a week. After she was married, she urged her husband to pay a faithful tithe. In many ways she has proved to be honest in heart, generous to friends, and responsive to the love of God, who has shown more patience toward her than her parents. How did my family fare financially during those years of trial? God arranged for a rich aunt to supply most of our needs. She entrusted her funds to my mother when she left China to be with her children in the United States, asking her to assist needy friends and kin. She later died in the United States. Apart from a savings account, she had some gold bars and silver coins deposited in a rented box in the vault of the Bank of China. Actually, the Lord was the real custodian. For when the notorious "Gang of Four" came to power and looted all the boxes in the bank vaults, the box containing Auntie's valuables was left intact. After the "Gang" lost out and we opened the vault, the bank clerks were amazed at the miraculous preservation of this one sole box. When communication with the outside world was restored, Mother notified her nephews in the United States to claim the assets of which they were the rightful heirs. Before this time, they had never known of these funds entrusted to my mother. After my term was over, I was transferred from the State farm to a coal-mining company in Huainan, Anhui, to translate technical literature. There I worked for five years, earned regular wages and enjoyed Sabbath privileges. Now in retirement, I receive a pension and live in Shanghai, serving as one of the pastors in Mu En Tang. As I review the past, the most precious remembrance is the example of Mother's prayer life. It was her prayer which dedicated my life to God. After that, when in Peking, she spent time on the porch praying and singing praises to God. One day my aunt invited her to a movie. Mother declined, having sensed in prayer that the scenes in the movies were sinful. Since then her example has taught me also to keep close to God in prayer and praise. Yes, we all need to pray more fervently as the end draws near. God wants me to be a man of prayer. Only thus can I finish my task. It was on his knees that Enoch walked with God; on his knees Jacob prevailed with God and with men. And on His knees the Son of man overcame the world and prevailed in the garden of prayer. If we are to receive the "latter rain," we must pray as never before. Teach me the secret of prevailing with God; Teach me the secret of prevailing with men; Teach me the secret of o'ercoming the world-- Of fervent, effectual prayer. Many are concerned for God's cause in China, being worried over the matter of religious liberty. Their attention needs to be directed to the greatest need of God's people today--to overcome the flood of worldliness which engulfs them. And this danger is most real in countries which boast of their "freedoms," among which the freedom to sin has become a plague, infecting even Christian institutions. Insensibly the church has yielded to the spirit of the age, and adapted its forms of worship to modern wants. . . . All things, indeed, that help to make religion attractive, the church now employs as its instruments. The Great Controversy, 386 One visitor from the West remarked that Chinese TV programs are more decent than those in the United States. That is due to the Chinese authorities' aim for high social standards. Imported TV programs and movies are screened by a committee to cut out the obscenity and the violence. Think of it, a Communist government rejecting the filth from "Christian" countries. Our great aim must be to possess and to exalt Christ. He promises that "the LORD shall arise upon thee, and his glory shall be seen upon thee" (Isaiah 60:2). The magnificence of the crucified Christ will bring home the truth that God will actually dwell in a man wholly given to Him. Christ prayed, "Glorify thy Son, that thy Son also may glorify thee." So today, when God dwells in man, man is glorified by His presence, and then only can a man glorify God. |
