Cities tempt us to see them as permanent dwelling and ourselves as sojourners no longer. Cities make people think “This world is my home, I’m no longer passing through.” But their permanence is a lie; cities made by human hands are still just way stops in our journey to a City with Foundations, whose builder and architect is God (Heb 11.10).
Category Archives: Spiritual Geography
Not Built with Hands: Cities as Tabernacles
The story of city builders in the Bible is an infamous list, a sort of Who’s Who of folks who traded in God’s promised Garden for creations of their own hands (we talked about that last time). Among such a distinguished list of city-builders, city-lovers, and city-dwellers, we might be surprised at the “sudden” changeContinue reading “Not Built with Hands: Cities as Tabernacles”
Living as Exiles: Cities and Sin
One of the type scenes (or tropes, like the Woman at the Well) folks run into in the Bible is also one of its most prevalent metanarratives: “Cities are bad.” You look at Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, or Gibeah and quickly realize “No, cities are really bad.”1 But sometimes we don’t think further about whyContinue reading “Living as Exiles: Cities and Sin”
Ben Neviim 