forever grateful for the linguistic training received from one of the Summer Institutes of Linguistics at the University of Oklahoma. This gave me the basic to a long, hard job. I could not find anyone to help me regularly. Many promised but they never followed through. The situation became desperate for with out people to sit down and help in their own tongue, it would be im possible to make any progress. One morning I woke up early with
for some foreign land. The commun ications barrier can be impossible in many instances. Linguists tell us that there may be more than four or five thousand different languages in the world. A few more statistics show that this is not as incredible as it may sound. Spanish is the national language in Mexico. But did you know that those of our nearest neigh boring country in the South speak between 85 and 100 other languages, completely unrelated to Spanish? Most of these Indian languages were in existence long before the Spanish conquest. Further south, there may well be 300 different languages spok en in the Amazon Valley alone. On another exploding continent, Africa, there are at least 1,000 completely different tongues. I am not referring to dialects either. The South Pacific area represents 1,200. Many of them are still without any witness of the Gospel. The complexity of it all should not frighten us away. God, in His infin ite love, wants to reach all men with the good news of salvations story. The diversity of languages is an evi dence of man’s sinfulness, not of his genius. Sin caused this curse upon the world. These languages as such have never really been used as ve hicles for conveying divine truth. Are they adequate for doing this? Our Lord Himself used the Galilean dialect of Western Aramic to speak to the people of His time. He con sidered it adequate (John 15:8). Yes, God has ordained languages to con vey His truths to those in darkness. Yet this language barrier to which I refer is a very real thing when the missionary goes abroad wanting to convey God’s truth to a lost world. When I first went to Mexico, I was just fresh out of seminary. Having pastored a church, I had been busy in meetings, evangelistic efforts and other responsibilities. When I got to this primitive tribe in Mexico, I knew not one word they spoke. I am Page 8
“In Africa there are at least 1,000 com pletely different tongues.”
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