When God called him out from Ur of the Chaldees, Abraham obeyed. By faith he went out into the unknown future. Later God promised to give him the land to which He led him. The promise was in these terms: “I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession” (Gen 17:8). As yet Abraham had no seed and, as the years went by and he and Sarah advanced in age, it became more and more unlikely that they would ever have a son. Abraham believed God’s promise. If God had spoken, then what He said must be absolutely true – even when all the evidence pointed in the opposite direction. Here is another example of God-given faith – a living faith resting on God’s bare word. This faith is not extinct today. Yet there is a great difference between faith and the presumption which is so often in evidence; faith is a soul taking God at His word and acting accordingly.
Abraham’s descendants, Isaac and Jacob, exercised the same faith. They too lived in the land of promise; they too were convinced that God would, in His own time, give it as a permanent dwelling place to their descendants. Yet they treated it as “a strange country”, a foreign land (Heb 11:9). Canaan was not their home; indeed they could not treat any place in the world as a permanent home. They were on pilgrimage through the world; they could not put down roots anywhere. And, as a sign of their sense of the impermanence of this life, they lived in tents. These tents could be easily taken down, carried somewhere else and put up again without difficulty. And every time they did so, they might remind themselves that their life in this world could not last for long. Yet God’s promise was sure – that the land would belong to their seed. And by faith they kept hold of the promise.
As Abraham and his family wandered from place to place in the promised land – as they remembered the certainty of death and the impermanence of life – they believed that they were on their way to a permanent home beyond this life. Abraham, in particular, “looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb 11:10). That city was heaven; it was a promised land of a higher and a better kind. And the promise of heaven was just as sure to Abraham’s faith – and to Isaac’s and Jacob’s – as the promise of the land.
Matthew Henry goes further: “As the land of Canaan was secured to the seed of Abraham according to the flesh, so heaven is secured to all his spiritual seed by a covenant, and for a possession truly everlasting”. We should all be conscious of the uncertainty of time; we cannot be sure that our life will be prolonged for another year or even another day; indeed we cannot promise ourselves one more moment. And yet, if we are among Abraham’s spiritual seed – if we are spiritually alive and have a living faith in Christ Jesus – we have a sure promise of a permanent home in heaven. The best-built houses in this world are unlikely to last for many centuries, but when our spirits leave our bodies, we will need an eternal home – one whose foundation will never be washed away.
Paul was clearly one of Abraham’s seed; not only was he an Israelite; he also had been blessed with the same God-given faith. He was clear that “other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ” (1 Cor 3:11). He was stressing the fact that there is no other foundation which can bear the weight of a guilty soul; all other foundations will be swept away – whether of good works or religious ritual, indeed everything apart from the one Saviour whom God has appointed. Paul was conscious that the time he would remain in the body on earth was limited, but he looked beyond death with confidence. This was most certainly not presumption; by grace he had rested his guilty soul, indeed his whole being, on the one safe foundation. And so he could look forward to a place in the “city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God”. He could say, “We know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor 5:1).
David Dickson points out that even where someone has the “best right on earth [to the good things of this life], he ought to have a pilgrim’s mind”. This was true of Abraham; he had much of this world’s goods, but he did not set his heart on them; they did not make him feel at home here. On the other hand, Dickson reminds us that “when faith hath certainty of a heavenly inheritance, it can be content with a small portion of things earthly”. And believers realise that the God who has promised the heavenly inheritance is also in control of all things here below. As they make their way through this world as pilgrims and strangers, they can look to the God of providence to supply all that they really need, in things temporal and especially in things spiritual, “according to His riches in glory by Christ Jesus”.
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob could readily have built permanent homes – solid, substantial structures which could have lasted for generations. But they never lost sight of the fact that they were pilgrims and sojourners in this world. However, there was a period in his life when Abraham’s nephew Lot looked at his situation from a different perspective. Faith was not in exercise in his soul when he and Abraham had to part. As he looked around him, he focused on the fine pasture of the well-watered plain of Jordan. Soon he “pitched his tent toward Sodom” (Gen 13:12), and before long he was living in the city, in spite of the fact that “the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly”.
Gone were the tents of Abraham; he now lived in a house. He was no longer so conscious of the brevity of time; the world and the things of the world had much more influence over him than before. Yet, even if faith was no longer as active, he was “vexed with the filthy conversation of the wicked: (for that righteous man dwelling among them, in seeing and hearing, vexed his righteous soul from day to day with their unlawful deeds)” (2 Pet 2:7,8).
The impermanence of life must have been forcefully brought home to Lot when he had to flee from Sodom, when he lost his wife and presumably his possessions also. “Here”, he might well have told himself, “we have no continuing city”. It was a lesson he had no doubt previously learned; he now had to relearn it painfully. It is a lesson we too must learn again and again, as we study our providence and the Word of God. The latter further teaches us: “Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth” (Col 3:2). Like Abraham we may use the good things of this world, recognising them as God’s gifts to us. But we are not to abuse them (see 1 Cor 7:31); we are not to give our hearts to them and make idols of them. Rather we must remain conscious that if we do not lose them to moths or rust or thieves, we must inevitably leave them behind. How necessary to have treasure in heaven, to have a permanent home assured to us in the city which has secure foundations!
But Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and Paul are now, together with Lot, in that city of immoveable foundations where there is no sin, where everyone’s deeds and words and thoughts are entirely God-glorifying. The Apostle John was granted a vision of it and described it thus: “The city had no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it: for the glory of God did lighten it, and the Lamb is the light thereof. . . . And the gates of it shall not be shut at all by day: for there shall be no night there” (Rev 21:23,25).
Yet this life is not irrelevant. It is where sinners find Christ, where they begin to be conformed to the spirit and the ways of heaven, where they live to God’s glory in the presence of the world. While there is no necessity for us to live in tents – while we may live in permanent houses – we should do so in the spirit of Abraham, who rested by faith on God’s promises and “looked for a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God”.