Besides the news report on the World Congress on Evangelism and the text of its declaration, which appear in this issue, our readers might want to watch a report on it by the CBS-TV program Lamp Unto My Feet, scheduled Sunday, November 27.
While in Berlin for the congress, I looked east one day along the famous Wall. Beyond it, in no man’s land, are barbed-wire fences, concrete and steel barricades, guards in their observation towers or walking about with submachine guns, police dogs, searchlights, and warning devices. Communism, I thought, must be an incomparable blessing, if its beneficiaries must be thus walled in to prevent them from escaping!
Then I looked west, toward the free world. And I contemplated the philosophy of license that demands another wall. Not every barrier that signals man’s revolt against the will of God is visible. And the walls of the West may be as ugly in their way as the walls of the East. They may, in the long run, prove more costly.
Atheistic naturalism sooner or later will fall under the lash of divine judgment. So too will materialistic secularism. But the stark irony is that a holy God may use the one to destroy the other. A generation that shouts indignantly about the Berlin Wall may forget that the Nazarene who was crucified outside a wall may be as unwanted today as he was then.
