A Spy Story
Taken from Numbers and Deuteronomy for Everyone
Description
A Spy Story
NUMBERS 13: 1-14: 38
I like to raise student eyebrows by pointing out occasions when God has abandoned segments of the church. In the first Christian centuries, the eastern Mediterranean (Turkey, the Levant, Egypt, North Africa) was full of lively Christian churches, but now there are hardly any Christians there. In sixteenth-century Europe, the only question was whether the churches would be Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran, or whatever, but now the continent is post-Christian. And (I go on to say) that is how the United States will be in ten years. God will never abandon the church, but God can abandon whole areas or generations of it. (Of course, we can trust that God will not abandon an area or a generation except where it has already abandoned God.)...