Early Samoans Accepted the Bible Because It Spoke of Miracles

In the pre-Christian Samoan culture many stories were told. Some were stories of ancestors, traditions, or past historical events. Certain stories, however, contained accounts of the miraculous. The Samoans had a specific term for such stories. They believed that without the miraculous element being present, a story had no religious validity. For the Samoans, that “Divine spark” was essential to credibility.

When Christian missionaries arrived and told the stories of a God who spoke the world into existence in six days, parted the Red Sea to allow the slave nation of Israel to escape their enemies, turned the sun back in the sky in the days of King Hezekiah, and brought fire down from heaven in the time of Elijah the prophet, the early Samoans were greatly stirred. When they were told of Jesus being born of a virgin, and of him walking on water, calming the storm with a word, changing water into wine, and raising the dead, they quicky embraced him and his teachings. Curiously, the very thing that causes those affected by a materialistic world view in our Western society to doubt the validity of the Bible was exactly what validated its trustworthiness among the Samoans.

I learned of these things from the Samoan mother of one of my students during the time I was teaching in Hawaii. She was a doctoral student at the university, had a thorough acquaintance with Western culture, and was a committed, Bible-believing Christian. Like her ancestors, she counted the existence of the miracles in the Bible essential evidence of its trustworthiness. After all, wasn’t the miraculous required if something more than humans were involved? Who could accept any Book as coming from God if its stories contained no miracles?