Matthew 27:45
At noon, darkness fell across the whole land until three o’clock.
I felt like the world going dark at all of a sudden was a little curious, mystical for sure, the kind of thing that fit right into the worldview of the Papua New Guineans. So I wanted to inquire about what this meant to them, what they thought the ramifications were when the sky went black.
"When the skies get dark we know a bikman (prestigious man in the village) is going to die. Jesus is a very bikman, so the sky goes all the way black before He dies."
While I was sitting in a group of men who had a great deal of exposure to the church, to a man in that culture who had never heard the Gospel, how powerful would this story be to him? Not just a story with foreign cultural practice after foreign cultural practice to piece together in a patchwork to discern what happened and it's implication, but this story speaks to his own culture.
When the skies go black, these men know:
This man who is to die is Lord of All.
Check out more stories from the back translation here.
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