Or, perhaps, I return to a sub-topic. The same God who oversaw the authoring of these texts, and the gathering and codifying of those texts into the set which make up the Bible, has also overseen the preservation of that text in what could reasonably be called miraculous fashion. No, we don’t see events such as the parting of the Red Sea involved in its preservation, but what we do see is marvelous and marvelously beyond the capacity of man to engineer. It begins even in the pages of the New Testament, as we see the Church all but forced by circumstance to spread out from Jerusalem and Judea into the wider reaches of the known world. We see it forced out at the start by the very one who would become one of its main carriers as it spread, as he, too, was brought to faith, very much to his own surprise, and very much to the surprise of the Church.
So, we find the Church well established through Asia Minor, Greece, and even into Rome by the time of Jerusalem’s fall. Imagine. If you’ve read accounts of that fall, the likelihood of the church having somehow survived the events is just north of nil. But, the church wasn’t confined to Jerusalem. It was even in the very capital of the empire.
Again, when the Roman Empire was crumbling, what do we discover? The Church, like the Empire, had spread far and wide. It had major centers along the North African coast, in cities like Alexandria and Carthage. It had also made its way to the far north, coming into the British Isles, and that, it would turn out, would prove a major preservative as the major cities around the Mediterranean fell under the scourge of battle and were overrun by barbarian hordes. Nations rose and fell, but the Word of God remained. The Church persisted, and the seed and center of faith moved to England, to Ireland, only to spread out into Europe from there when the soil was right.
We see it again as persecutions and corruptions in England and Rome alike threatened the Church. The center had moved. It was to be found once again in Europe, scattered across the landscape, where men of God were rediscovering the Truth of Scripture in spite of the Church of the day. We see it in the choice of persecuted believers (amongst others) to make their way to the New World and settle in America.
It should come as something of a caution, actually I would say a serious and severe caution that we see it again in our own day. America can hardly be described as a shining city on a hill anymore in its current condition. God willing, it may return to its senses and humble itself before God once more, but as things stand? I was reminded this morning of the situation that pertained in Judah as Micah wrote of the coming Messiah. No surprise, this comes from Table Talk. But, let me quote a bit of it, and you can see how it feeds my thinking this morning. “The prophet gave his oracles to warn the people of the consequences of their sexual immorality and their failure to show kindness and justice to the impoverished. The people of God were buying and selling justice, showing favor to the rich and ignoring the poor in the legal setting. All of these things are forbidden in the law of God, and Micah said they would lead to the greatest and final covenant curse of exile from the promised land, just as the law promised.”
Look around! What part of this, with perhaps the exception of the phrase, ‘the people of God’ does not describe the current state of America? And what do we see? The center of the Church has in many ways moved, hasn’t it? Arguably it has scattered to the far reaches. We have seen periods of explosive growth in South America, in Africa, and perhaps most significantly in the Far East. Is it not in keeping with the historical record of God’s governance of His Word and His Church that we should discover at some point that the primary locus of activity has moved away from the corruption of its current locale to more fertile grounds? This is wonderful news for His Church, and I would have to observe that even where the Church has fallen on hard times, there is ever and always a remnant whom God preserves as witness to Himself. But, surely there is a call in all this for pride to be humbled and repentance sought with ferocity of purpose.
