SADHU SUNDAR SINGH

Posted: 01.09.21 in Articles category

Have you heard of Sadhu Sundar Singh? He was born in Punjab on 3 September 1889 into a Sikh family, but converted through seeing a vision of Jesus when he was a teenager and soon began his truly remarkable ministry as a missionary across north west parts of 'British India', Tibet and Afghanistan. Sundar dressed as a sadhu on his journeys , wearing a saffron robe and turban, as he thought western style clothing to be inappropriate for evangelising fellow Indians. Indeed, he strongly believed much of British colonial lifestyle with its shallow materialism had nothing to do with real Christianity.

I recently came across this quotation from Sadhu Sundar Singh which I find very helpful. Echoes, I suggest, of the creation narrative from the first chapter of Genesis. Only at the end of the sixth day does God say " It is very good".

God is revealed in the book of nature for God is its author. Yet we only comprehend this book if we have the necessary spiritual insight. Without reverence and perception we go astray. We cannot judge the truthfulness of any book merely by reading it. Agnostics and sceptics, for example, find only defects instead of perfection. Sceptics ask, "If there is an almighty creator, why then are there hurricanes, earthquakes, pain, suffering, death, etc?" This is like criticising an unfinished building or incomplete painting. When we see them fully finished, we are embarrassed at our own folly and praise the skill of the artist. God did not shape the world into its present form in a single day The whole creation moves toward completion, and if we see it with the eyes of God moving toward the perfect world without fault or blemish, then we can only bow humbly before our creator and exclaim, 'It is very good'.