Four Thousand-Year Old Code Can Tell Us if We’ve Fully Arrived

Photo Credit: Son Marki, Creative Commons, cc

In the pages, brave heroine Nancy Drew tapped out a Morse code message for her friends over the phone, all while talking inanely about trivial matters. The tip-tapping of her pencil on the phone receiver gave the appearance of distraction or nervousness, until studied closer. Suddenly her erratic taps spelled out a valuable message. I read spellbound, as a teen.

Codes and mysteries have always grabbed my attention so when I stumbled across a coded message from four thousand years ago, I was instantly hooked. Don Richardson in his book Eternity in their Hearts reveals an astonishing ideograph that is in the Chinese language.

Language learners in Mandarin Chinese have long loved yet wrestled with the complexity of the Chinese language. The beautiful intricate language uses a system of 214 symbols called radicals. Those radicals combine to form a staggering 30,000 to 50,000 ideographs, or word pictures!

Missionary linguists learning Mandarin suddenly noticed a wild combination of pictures in the Chinese verb “to come.” Pictured in the verb “to come” is first of all the image of a man, an upside-down y shape. The man pictograph is then superimposed onto a tree. At the bottom left and right of the ideograph are two smaller lines that mean “humans.” In other ideographs, those two lines mean “mankind” or “humanity.” Thus the ideograph for “Come” shows humanity coming to the man on the tree. 

So the Chinese language from over 4000 years ago tells us the ultimate place we need to go, to fully arrive, to be there, to come — Humans coming to the One on the tree. 

This Easter, how do you know if you’ve fully arrived? How do you know if you’ve “made it”? Have you gotten right with God who takes away the sins of the world? He has never left you, and is waiting right beside you.


How do you know if you’ve fully arrived? How do you know if you’ve “made it”? Have you come to the One on the tree? 

Happy Easter, friends.

Linking with Emily too. 


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