“The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.” Proverbs 27:12
Is it prudent to always avoid danger? If the danger is attached to sin, yes. If the danger is not attached to sin, then it is not necessarily prudent to avoid danger. Let’s look at two examples. In the first example a house church leader in China is alerted to the fact that the PSB (Public Security Bureau) has been monitoring his activities, and because house churches are not registered with the government, it is illegal that they exist. 80-100 million Chinese house church members are therefore worshiping illegally according to the Chinese government. Unperturbed by the increased attention, he goes to an early morning meeting anyway to gather for Bible study and worship with ten fellow believers, and halfway through the police break in, beat them, confiscate their Bibles, and take them all in for further questioning. Two days later everyone is released except for the leader. He is never heard from in that community again because he has been shipped off to a prison far away where the idea is to reeducate him through hard physical work. As a man held tight by God and holding tightly to his God, he does not remain silent about his sustaining faith in Jesus Christ, and over the next year, twenty-five fellow inmates come to Jesus Christ and surrender their lives to Him and enter new life. Tired of the man’s relentless witness, the prison authorities set up a kangaroo court, he is charged with treason against the state and is shot by a firing squad after being tortured to within an inch of his life.
The question; was this man (and by the way, this happens all the time, every day, all over the world) prudent by going to that meeting when he knew he was being monitored more closely than ever? Should he have remained quiet for awhile until perhaps the authorities lessened their attentions? If you were to ask him as he stood side by side with his Lord in heaven, whether he had been prudent by not hiding himself, he would look at you with a look that said, “Are you serious?!” He would say, “Twenty five inmates halfway across the country who might never have heard the Gospel, heard it because I did not play it safe. It was worth it! And now I’m with Jesus.” So there are dangers from which we should not try to hide.
But now let’s consider another common, though different real life example; in this case we have a man who sees danger, this time in the form of betrayal against his wife. In his thinking he has slowly become convinced that sexual titillation outside of marriage is acceptable, and so he has become comfortable with browsing the Internet for cheap, seemingly no-strings-attached entertainment. From there he notices that one of the girls in his office seems to really appreciate his ideas, and affirm him in almost everything he does, not like his wife (he thinks). He is a Christian. Several years ago he stood at the top of a downward spiraling staircase (sexual infidelity), saw the danger, was not prudent, and took the first step. Now two years into what became a sexual addiction, he begins to pursue his fellow worker, and not long after he tells his wife and kids he no longer loves mom, and so he’s moving out. “The prudent sees danger and hides himself, but the simple go on and suffer for it.” In this case the danger set before him was the invitation to engage in the pursuit of sexual pleasure outside of marriage. He cast prudence aside, as too many often do, and then eventually suffered for it as he became estranged from his kids, his wife, his extended family and his co-workers. The debris trail was huge.
So whenever danger comes attached to sin, the proverb yells at us to hide. Elsewhere in scripture we are told to run! (1 Corinthians 6:18) But hide and run to where or to whom?
Let me answer that question by giving over the rest of this musing to John Paton, missionary to the New Hebrides in the mid nineteenth century. In the mid-1800s, the thirty-four year old Scottish pastor left his successful Glasgow inner city pastorate with his pregnant wife Mary Ann, and left by boat for the long voyage to the New Hebrides, a collection of small islands in the Pacific, roughly half way between Hawaii and Sydney, Australia. The islands, now known as Vanuatu, had hosted two missionaries twenty years prior, who had gone to the beach, been greeted by the islanders there, clubbed to death, cut up and eaten in full view of the ship. Paton was warned by well-meaning people not to go, for he would surely be eaten by cannibals, but God had put another call on his life, an irresistible call, and so he went.
He described the first months as life as living on an island paradise, but that did not last long, for within four months of landing, Mary Ann died, and 2 weeks later their baby boy was laid to rest. Paton describing this time, wrote, “Let those who have ever passed through any similar darkness as of midnight feel for me; as for all others, it would be more than vain to try to paint my sorrows….my reason seemed for a time almost to give way.” But he stayed and ministered to the people despite this tremendous hardship and the slew of hardships that were to follow and would characterize his time there.
Paton had won people to Christ and made friends there, but he also had many people who wanted to kill him. Some chiefs loved him and others despised him, so he lived each day knowing that it could very well be his last. On one occasion he was called to someone’s home because this person was apparently very sick. When he got there and bent over his patient, the covers were thrown open, the man lying there raised his machete as if to strike, paused………….. and buried his machete into a melon instead, crying, “Run Missi!” Paton ran for his life all the way home. On another occasion a man stalked him all day with his gun pointing at his chest as he worked outside. Things continued to heat up and after I believe three years of this he concluded that to stay would really be embracing a type of suicide, and so he ran for his life in an attempt to get off the island. In his attempt he had to trust another group of people who really could not be trusted, but Paton had run out of options. The chief told him to climb into a big chestnut tree and so he did, wondering if he had just signed his death warrant. This is the account, written as an old man years later, that answers the question, “Where do you hide?”
“Being entirely at the mercy of such doubtful and vacillating friends, I, though perplexed, felt it best to obey. I climbed into the tree, and was left there alone in the bush. The hours I spent there live all before me as if it were but yesterday. I heard the frequent discharging of muskets, and the yells of the savages. Yet I sat there among the branches, as safe in the arms of Jesus. Never, in all my sorrows, did my Lord draw nearer to me, and speak more soothingly in my soul, than when the moonlight flickered among these chestnut leaves, and the night air played on my throbbing brow, as I told all my heart to Jesus. Alone, yet not alone! If it be to glorify my God, I will not grudge to spend many nights alone in such a tree, to feel again my Savior’s spiritual presence, to enjoy His consoling fellowship. If thus thrown back upon your own soul, alone, all, all alone, in the midnight, in the bush, in the very embrace of death itself, have you a Friend that will not fail you then?”
James Paton: The Story of John G. Paton, p.183 LifeLINE Philippines