And so it is now, in reference to the assembly of God, in this world, which may truly be termed a moral wilderness. Looked at from God’s point of view, that assembly is not of the world; it is in complete separation. It is as thoroughly apart from the world as the camp of Israel was apart from Egypt. The waters of the Red Sea rolled between that camp and Egypt; and the deeper and darker waters of the death of Christ roll between the Church of God and this present evil world. It is impossible to conceive separation more complete. “They,” says our Lord Christ, “are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.” (John xvii.) Then, as to entire dependence, what can be more dependent than the Church of God in this world? She has nothing in or of herself. She is set down in the midst of a moral desert, a dreary waste, a vast howling wilderness, in the which there is literally nothing on which she can live. There is not one drop of water, not a single morsel of suited food, for the Church of God throughout the entire compass of this world. So also as to the matter of exposure to all sorts of hostile influences. Nothing can exceed it. There is not so much as one friendly influence. All is against her. She is in the midst of this world like an exotic—a plant belonging to a foreign clime, and set down in a sphere where both the soil and the atmosphere are uncongenial. Such is the Church of God in the world—a separated, dependent, defenseless thing, wholly cast upon the living God. It is calculated to give great vividness, force, and clearness to our thoughts about the Church to view it as the antitype of the camp in the desert; and that it is in no wise fanciful or far-fetched to view it thus, 1 Corinthians x. 11 does most clearly show. We are fully warranted in saying that what the camp of Israel was literally, that the Church is morally and spiritually. And further, that what the wilderness was literally to Israel, that the world is morally and spiritually to the Church of God. The wilderness was the sphere of Israel’s toil and danger, not of their supplies or their enjoyment; and the world is the sphere of the Church’s toil and danger, not of its supplies or its enjoyment. It is well to seize this fact, in all its moral power. The assembly of God in the world, like “the congregation in the wilderness,” is wholly cast upon the living God. We speak, be it remembered, from the divine stand-point—of what the Church is in God’s sight. Looked at from man’s point of view—looked at as she is in her own actual practical state, it is, alas! another thing. We are now only occupied with the normal, the true, the divine idea of God’s assembly in this world.