Jesus Christ is my betlenut!

As many of you may know for the last seven weeks of training here at the MTC in Camdenton we were taking the infamous “Dobu” class. For those of you who may be unfamiliar with this class, it is a mock culture acquisition practicum. During those seven weeks we learned how to properly and objectively acquire and record culture by daily role playing with our instructors who took on the characters of the “Dobu” people and culture of Papua New Guinea. Our instructors, hardly recognizable under all the body paint and costumes, took on the characteristics, personalities, and nuances of very specific characters. Each day was a challenge as we sat through culture sessions sifting through that individual’s perspective and life scenarios. Not a few times our interaction with our “Dobu” friends caused major commotion in the “village” affecting each individual in dynamically different ways.
Each day we were forced to realize that first and foremost we had to establish a personal relationship with our friends if we were ever to understand them. Usually it wasn’t until we had reestablished our interest in them as individuals that our friends would begin to give us the little clues that began to unlock their culture.
All the while back in the classroom our instructors were teaching us how to be objective with the questions we asked and the information we gathered. We learned to systematically file all of our information in a dependable and retrievable fashion. And all this for the sake of understanding those to who we long to clearly communicate the gospel of Christ.
At one point we discovered that the Dobu believe that Mt. Bwebweso is the best of three potential final resting places. When a Dobu person dies his relatives will place betlenut in his hand. (Betlenut is a mild narcotic not unlike the American chewing tobacco and carries a lot of significance in their culture.) Once the deceased has made his long hike to Mt. Bwebweso he is confronted by its gate keepers who demand from him some betlenut. If for some reason he does not have it or has lost it he is doomed to live out his spirit life in the terrible swamp!
As we work through our culture data we are always looking for good illustrations, correlations, and points of similarity that might be helpful for when we finally begin teaching the words of our God. The correlation in this case almost instantly jumped out at me. Our precious Jesus Christ is our betlenut! He is our “payment,” our Passover lamb. When we stand before God we will be accepted, not by any merit of our own but by the merit of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. He is our betlenut. No, better yet He is life itself!