The Light of the World
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus told His followers, “Ye are the light of the world” (Matt. 5.14). Christianity has indeed been the light of the world, always standing in opposition to the world’s great evils, be it slavery, abortion, infanticide, human sacrifice, or any such atrocity.
The mutineers of the British ship Bounty in the eighteenth century provide a particularly notable example of the beneficial nature of Christianity on sinful humanity. Led by Fletcher Christian, the mutiny on the Bounty overthrew the ship’s brutal commanding officer, Lt. Bligh. After Bligh and his loyal officers were set adrift, Christian led his followers to tiny Pitcairn Island in the Pacific Ocean, where they settled, along with six Tahitian men and several women.
The February 1988 issue of the journal Smithsonian featured an article on the fate of the settlers. “At first,” the journal reported, “Pitcairn was the Eden that Fletcher had envisioned.” However, according to Pitcairn Islander Andrew Young, a surviving descendant of one of the mutineers, things soon went dreadfully wrong. Young told Smithsonian that “the six Tahitian men were treated like slaves. . . .They were not allowed to own land and after a few years there were quarrels over the women.” As a result of this treatment, the Polynesian men rose up and killed some of the mutineers, including Fletcher Christian, and the remaining mutineers in turn killed the Polynesian men with the collusion of the women. Four years after landing on Pitcairn, only four original mutineers remained—sailors named Young, Adams, Quintal, and McCoy—as well as the Polynesian women and the children they had born to the mutineers.
Soon a new sin beset this island of Eden—drunkenness (cf. Rom. 13:13). McCoy, who had once worked in a distillery in Scotland, discovered how to brew a strong alcoholic drink from the roots of the native ti plant. Quintal went berserk while drunk on this concoction, and Young and Adams killed him in self-defense. McCoy, in a drunken fit, jumped off a cliff into the ocean with a rock tied around his neck (cf. Matt 18:6). Adams, who by now had become an alcoholic, experienced what Smithsonian called “a religious vision,” and he quit drinking.
A Bible that had been brought from the Bounty sparked off Adams’ conversion. When Young died of asthma, Adams, now a Bible-believing, soul-winning Christian, was the only surviving member of the original mutineers who had settled on Pitcairn. Under his guidance were ten Polynesian women and twenty-three children. Andrew Young, the descendant of the ill-fated asthmatic, told Smithsonian, “Luckily for us, Adams set the standards early on for being industrious and good Christians, and although he had a limited education himself, he taught all his descendants to read and write from the Bounty Bible.”
This couldn’t possibly be a more appropriate assessment of the true nature of the gospel of Christ. Jesus, for example, said, “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes” (Matt. 11:25; Luke 10:21). In Acts 4:13 we read, “Now when they [the Pharisees and the Sadducees] saw the boldness of Peter and John, and perceived that they were unlearned and ignorant men, they marvelled; and they took knowledge of them, that they had been with Jesus.” It is not wisdom and education that can turn sinful, rotten humanity around—it is the message of the gospel, a message found nowhere else but in the Bible. Christianity is truly the hope and light of a sinsick world, just as it was the hope and light of sin-sick Pitcairn Island.
At the time of original publication, Stephen Caesar was a freelance writer and professor living in Arlington, Massachusetts.
[Editor’s note: In 1886 a Seventh Day Adventist missionary came to the Island and since his time the majority of Pitcairn Islanders have been Adventists. Despite that turn of events, the story of God’s grace among the mutineers about eighty years before is a testament to the faithfulness of God to his Word which can bring change to men’s hearts.]
(Originally published in FrontLine • November/December 2006. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.)