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Our choice was to ride camels or walk. All of us decided to walk. After all, this was a trekking/team-building experience. And we had all had camel-riding experiences, and everyone had the same feedback—like sitting on a small boat in the middle of a choppy sea.
Our leadership team had paid three Bedouin guides to help us explore the Sinai Desert. We packed our gear on the backs of two camels and a third camel went with us for one of the Bedouin to ride ahead of us to prepare camp. He prepared food over an open fire. We drank hot tea mixed with some sand and the guides made bread like pizza crust that was tossed on the coals and covered with sand until it was golden brown—and yes, it was delicious with wild honey.
The terrain was desolate with little vegetation and many rocks. We wore keffiyehs to protect our heads from the blazing sun. Truly we could understand the moaning and complaints from the people of Israel. Moses had to put up with them for 40 years!
Standing on a cliff looking over the parched valley not far from Mt. Sinai, one of the guides said to us, “Our ancestors claimed this land for our people.” My thought was “Why would they want it?” They must really be into earth tones! But it was theirs, and they had a rich heritage of honoring their birthright of stewarding that land because their forefathers had claimed it for them.
I started thinking about the fact that God had been with the people of Israel in this desolate place so long ago, but I caught myself thinking in the past as if God had left this place. He never left it. The Bedouin have been there for thousands of years, but we Christians have not been there. God intends for the people of the Sinai Desert to worship Him. The Bedouin forefathers had claimed this land for themselves. Who will claim it today for the Lord Jesus?
I had similar experiences in other places. As I stood on the roof of a colleague’s apartment in Amman and looked at all the rooftops with satellite dishes, knowing they provided access to programming that would introduce them to the Gospel, God affirmed that He was there.
I was in a high-rise apartment building at night, overlooking the great city of Cairo with 23 million people. I saw a myriad of minarets glowing with green fluorescent lights. God wants us to claim this great city for Him.
In Dhaka, Bangladesh, another city with the same massive population as Cairo, I was standing on an arched pedestrian bridge above a busy city street that was as wide as a four-lane interstate highway. I looked down on literally thousands of people that looked like fire ants scrambling out of a disturbed anthill. God is in Dhaka, but only a few workers are there to claim that land for Christ.
Tunisia and other countries of North Africa have some of the best-preserved Roman ruins. We were prayer walking the ruins of a great basilica that had been built during the first few centuries after the time of Christ. There are many such former churches that the Berbers built after the Gospel was introduced to them. This particular place was large enough to accommodate 3,000 people who gathered to worship the Lord. Today that great church is a pile of ruins. This building and others decayed and crumbled after the seventh century with the invasion of the Arabs and Islam.
God spoke to my heart as I walked through the remains of this once great church, “When will you return here to worship Me in the name of Jesus Christ?” God never left North Africa, and He is waiting for us to claim this land for His glory.
In Joshua 13:2 God instructed an aged Joshua in how to divide the Promised Land. Much of the land was unconquered at this point in history, but God’s plan was to go ahead and include it in the divisions among the tribes. God’s desire was that it would eventually be conquered and claimed by the Israelites.
Under God’s leadership there are victories that lie ahead in the lands that we must claim. But just as the Israelites still had to go into battle and fight, we must still face the work of the Evil One and fight the battles of our unconquered lands and claim them for the glory of God.