God has many good people in our city

Friday, 5/6/16

One night while Paul was in Corinth the Lord appeared to him saying, “No one will attack or harm you, for I have many people in this city.”

That was a needed reassurance for Paul. Corinth was the most wicked city in those centuries. It was seated on a narrow isthmus between Greece proper and the Peloponnesus to the south. That made Corinth a seaport on both the Adrian and the the Aegean Seas. There was heavy thieving of merchandise being carted from port to port; but the city’s notoriety rested mainly on the thousands of temple prostitutes that catered to the unholy superstitions of the sailors. Throughout the Mediterranean a prostitute was known as a “Corinthian Girl.”  

But the fact of God having many of his own people in Corinth leads to the certainty that he has many of his people in our city. Our news media thrives only on the wickedness around us, but what was true of Corinth is even truer of Jacksonville: namely, that the good people far outnumber the bad. They surround us on on the buses, in the Wall Marts, and Winn Dixie’s. “Howdy neighbor.”