Daily Thoughts from Hebrews: Not Our Home (11:13-16)

These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (Hebrews 11:13-16, ESV)

Our author interrupts his description of Abraham’s faith to make a point, to bring home a principle.  And the principle he wants to bring home is that this is not our home.  When Abel, Noah and Abraham died they had not yet received all God promised.  His kingdom had not come to earth after being lost in the Garden of Eden.  The garden had not been restored.

That meant that their faith in God’s promise was awaiting a future fulfillment and in the meantime they were “strangers and exiles.”  If you have ever been a stranger in a foreign land who doesn’t know the language or the customs and has no one to advocate for you, you have bit of a sense of how we are to live in this life on this side of the coming kingdom.  We’re still seeking our home.  If we, as the Hebrews were tempted to do, choose to be content with the way things are, we are not genuinely believing God’s promise.

God will be ashamed to be called your God if you are content with this earth, this country.  He has promised a better one, a heavenly one, a city that will come to earth and show the great inadequacy of all other cities.  Can you see it?  The heroes of faith saw it and greeted it.  It was real to them.  They weren’t willing to give all to their current political or national home.  They remained expatriates of heaven.

I had a sense, sometimes enormously vivid, that I was a stranger in a strange land; a visitor, not a native…a displaced person….The feeling, I was surprised to find, gave me a great sense of satisfaction, almost of ecstasy….The only ultimate disaster that can befall us, I have come to realize, is to feel ourselves to be at home here on earth.  As long as we are aliens, we cannot forget our true homeland.  (Malcolm Muggeridge, a British journalist who spent most of his years battling Christianity, finally succumbing to Christ in his seventies, in Jesus Rediscovered)