Editorial September 5, 1977 Issue

A Place of Sanctuary

Nathan A. Talbot

Most of us, at one time or another, have needed a place to hide. Perhaps we made, without thinking, a regrettable comment in someone's presence and wished we could have simply slipped from sight. Victims of crime wish for a safe place from assailants. Natural disasters, such as earthquakes and hurricanes, send people into hiding.

Usual places of refuge have their limitations. But there is a safe sanctuary regardless of the kind of threat one may face. Neither time nor space separates us from it. It is fully secure. It is the true nature of man. Man is not a physical location we escape to but the spiritual identity we are blessed by. Man is the child of God. The term "man" describes who we really are from Spirit's point of view—our true identity, "hid with Christ in God."^{Col. 3:3;} The term "matter" includes what we seem to be from an ignorant and personal viewpoint.

This spiritual sense of man is a sanctuary, a sacred place of refuge. Isaiah tells us, "A man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."^{Isa. 32:2;}

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