Adoniram Judson: The Prospects Are as Bright as the Promises of God
He wrote that from a death prison.
Adoniram Judson, hanging upside down from a bamboo pole by his ankles every night in the most notorious prison in Burma, watching fellow prisoners dragged out for execution every morning, not knowing if his wife was alive or if his newborn daughter had survived – he wrote: The prospects are as bright as the promises of God.
Let me tell you how he got there.
Adoniram Judson was born in 1788 in Massachusetts, the son of a Congregationalist minister. He graduated valedictorian from Brown University at 19, brilliant and proud and, for a season, completely convinced by his best friend Jacob Eames that Christianity was a superstition for weaker minds.
Then one evening Judson stopped at a country inn on a journey and was kept awake all night by sounds of distress from the room next door. In the morning the innkeeper told him the man had died during the night.
The man was Jacob Eames.
Judson was shattered. He returned home, enrolled in seminary, and never looked back.
He married Ann Hasseltine in February 1812. They had been married less than two weeks when they boarded a ship for Asia, expecting never to return to America. They arrived in Burma in July 1813, in a country where no Protestant missionary had ever preached.
For six years they labored without a single convert. Their first child was stillborn. A second died in infancy. Tropical fevers ravaged them both repeatedly. The language was brutal to learn. The culture was deeply hostile to the gospel.
And then, slowly, one by one, people began to come.
In 1824, suspected of being a British spy during an Anglo-Burmese war, Judson was arrested and thrown into the Let-ma-yoon death prison in Ava. Every night his legs were bound to a bamboo pole and lifted until only his head and shoulders touched the filthy ground. He watched men around him die. He watched others dragged out for execution.
Ann was pregnant when he was arrested. She bribed guards with silver to get food to him. She hid his precious Bible translation manuscripts inside a pillow so they would not be confiscated. Their daughter Maria was born during his imprisonment. Ann pleaded before official after official on his behalf. The effort destroyed her health.
After 21 months, Judson was released. He came home to find Ann dying. She died on October 24, 1826, at the age of 36. Their daughter Maria died six months later.
Judson went into the jungle. He built a small hut he called The Hermitage and spent weeks there, eating almost nothing, digging his own grave and sitting beside it in the dark. He wrote in his journal: God is to me the Great Unknown. I believe in him, but I cannot find him.
He found his way back. Slowly, painfully, across 1830, he emerged.
And he kept translating.
The Burmese Bible manuscript that Ann had protected in that pillow was eventually completed in 1840, after 27 years in Burma. It was the first time the Word of God had ever existed in the Burmese language. Judson also compiled a complete Burmese dictionary and grammar that missionaries still use today.
He was married twice more after Ann. He buried two wives and seven children in Burmese soil.
He died on April 12, 1850, at sea in the Bay of Bengal, at 61 years old. His body was committed to the ocean. He never came home.
Today the Myanmar Baptist Convention numbers 3,700 congregations and nearly two million affiliates. The fruit of a man who gave everything and received, in this life, almost nothing back.
He wrote that the prospects were as bright as the promises of God from inside a death prison. He meant it. The darkness could not reach far enough to touch what he had found.