The following discourse is taken from a volume of sermons by Joseph Addison Alexander DD entitled “The Gospel of Jesus Christ”. We quote from the biographical notice: ‘In addressing the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in 1860’, Dr Hodge thus spoke: “I regard Dr Joseph Addison Alexander as incomparably the greatest man I ever knew — as incomparably the greatest man our Church has ever produced . . . Princeton is not what it was, and can never expect to be what it has been. You cannot fill his place. The only compensation for such a loss is the presence of the Spirit of God.” And, in a critical notice of the Discourses of this volume (which had been left by the lamented author ready for the press, and were printed at New York shortly after his death) the same distinguished man uses these words: “His sermons are of very different kinds, but all have certain characteristics which belong to all the productions of his pen. We find everywhere the same exquisite felicity of expression; the same freedom from redundancy; the same perspicuity and order; the same refined taste; the same weight of thought, soundness of doctrine, and devotional spirit. He rarely, if ever, preached a doctrinal sermon; that is, he was wont to take up a theological subject, such as justification, regeneration, or the like and give it a formal discussion. His discourses were all Biblical in form, and truth was always presented as he found it in the Bible. In everything he showed the hand of a master; and we doubt not that these sermons will go wherever the English language is known, and be read as long as that language is understood.'”
“He looked for a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” Heb. 11: 10.
These words refer to the patriarch Abraham, one of the most extraordinary characters of any age. Without going into his biography at large, let me call your attention to two circumstances, which especially distinguished this great man from others. In the first place, he was the Friend of God. I mean not merely that his history entitles him to this honourable appellation; not merely that God treated him and looked upon him as his friend; but that he is expressly called the Friend of God in Scripture. By the mouth of the prophet Isaiah, the Lord said to Israel: “Thou art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of Abraham my friend.”
And why was he thus honoured? Was not Abraham a child of wrath even as others? Yes. He could not therefore be entitled meritoriously to
the distinction which his name implies. No, he himself well knew that it was not for any merit of his own, that he was allowed to be the friend of God. On the contrary, it was by renouncing all dependence on himself that he acquired this honour. Faith was his grand distinction; simple reliance on the word of God; belief in his promises, and acquiescence in his method of salvation. It was thus that Abraham became the Friend of God. But was not this a meritorious faith? Did not this very self-renunciation and reliance upon God entitle Abraham to claim his favour? It would have done so, but for this simple reason, that his faith was the gift of God, and that the same glorious Being who rewarded him, bestowed upon him that which was rewarded. Where is boasting then? It is excluded. By what law? The law of works? Nay, but by the law of faith. It was faith, my brethren, faith that rendered Abraham pre-eminently great, so great as to be called the Friend of God, and the Father of the Faithful.
This is the second honourable title which I propose to mention. Abraham, the Friend of God, was also the Father of the Faithful. Not, as the Jews supposed, the father of their nation merely. This mistaken notion made them cry out, in reply to our Lord’s severe reproofs, “We have Abraham to our father.” And what was his answer? “God is able even of these stones to raise up children unto Abraham.” That is to say, though all Israel should fail, Abraham might still have a numerous spiritual seed; and God can give him such even from the most unexpected quarters, the most unpromising materials. While the unbelieving natural descendants of Abraham are cast out, the degraded heathen can be put into their place by the power and grace of God. He is able, even of these stones, to raise up children unto Abraham. It was not of Jews then, but of true believers, that Abraham was the spiritual father; the Father of the Faithful.
He was their father, first, as being their exemplar. He is held up as a model of strong faith to all believers, and they who follow the example of his faith, are in that respect his children. In this sense he is the Father of the Faithful. But he is also the Father of the Faithful, because the promise made to him embraced all believers who came after him. The condition of this promise was not obedience to the law, but faith in the gratuitous mercy of God, and in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. And this was the condition, not to Abraham only, but to his spiritual seed, that is, to all who should believe as he believed. “For the promise that he should be the heir of the world, was not to Abraham, or to his seed, through the law, but through the righteousness of faith.” As one of the contracting parties in this gracious covenant, or rather as the representative of those to whom these promises were given, Abraham was the Father of the
Faithful.
Passing over all his other claims to high distinction your memory will readily suggest, I desire you to fix your eyes on these two titles of nobility bestowed upon Abraham in the word of God, and measuring his rank by these, to take into consideration the remarkable fact in his history to which I now invite your attention. This fact is, that Abraham, the Friend of God and the Father of the Faithful, was a homeless man, a wanderer, who sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tents like an Arab or a Tartar. This fact, though not inexplicable, is so far singular as to deserve our particular attention.
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Why, then, was Abraham a wanderer, a homeless man, a sojourner in the land of promise? I remark that it was not on account of poverty. In the East, indeed, the wandering mode of life is not in any case a sign of poverty. Powerful chieftains and whole tribes of warriors lead such a life from choice, or because it is necessary for the subsistence of their flocks and herds. But even if it were in general a criterion of poverty, it could not be so in this case. Abraham was rich — rich by inheritance — rich by acquisition — rich by the blessing of God on the increase of his possessions — and rich through the favour of the kings and chiefs whose friendship he enjoyed. His history is that of one who lived in ease and affluence, practising the characteristic hospitality of an Eastern chief.
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Was it then because he had no real estate, no landed property, to which he could lay claim, and on which he might reside? The whole land of Canaan was in one sense his own. It was his by express grant from Jehovah — made sure to him and to his heirs for ever. It is true that when he needed a possession of a burial-place he bought it with his money of the children of Heth. But this was a part of that same course of self-denial and forbearance which is now in question. The same motive that made him a sojourner and wanderer, led him to forego his rights as the legitimate owner of the soil, and the question still arises what these motives were.
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We read that when Abraham first crossed the Jordan from the East, “the Canaanite was in the land.” The Hivite, the Hittite, the Jebusite, the Amorite, and other sons of Canaan, had possession of the country. And so thickly were they settled, in the central part at least, that there was not room for Abraham and Lot to live together. May it not be, therefore, that these actual possessors of the country would not suffer him to dwell among them? Had they known his pretensions, or, to speak more properly, his rights, they might have hated him and driven him away. But as he made no efforts to enforce those rights, nor even to assert them; and as he came among them from the East with flocks and herds, and
as an independent chieftain, they received him with respect, and this respect increased.
It is, indeed, an interesting feature in the history of Abraham’s expatriation, that in Egypt, in Philistia, and in Canaan, he was treated by the natives, not only as a man respectable for wealth and power, but as a prince, a “prince of God”, and as a prophet, one who held immediate intercourse with God, and was an interpreter of the divine will. In these characters he was known and reverenced by the heathen who surrounded him; and except in the case of the attack on Sodom and Gomorrah by the “confederated kings,” all his relations with the Canaanites were amicable. And in the only case where he applied for land, it was granted by the Hittites in a manner most courteous and cordial. It was not, therefore, on account of any enmity between him and the Canaanites, that, instead of founding or accepting a great city, he preferred to live a wandering and what we would call a homeless life. There must be other reasons for his course.
- Since then it was neither poverty, nor the want of land, nor opposition on the part of its possessors, that deterred him from inhabiting a city, or, at least, from leading a more settled life, it may be suggested, that his perseverance in a wandering course, shows him to have been a mere barbarian, one who was unable to appreciate the comforts of a settled life, or rather, who had never had experience of them. Thus we find that in Arabia there are tribes of Bedouins who regard their wandering life as the most honourable possible, and laugh to scorn those pleasures and advantages of civilised society about which they know nothing by experience. But let it be observed that these tribes inhabit the Arabian desert, where cultivation exists only in detached spots, and where the herdsman is obliged to change his pasture-ground and home continually.
Abraham, on the other hand, was in a fertile, cultivated, thickly settled country, full of proud cities, walled towns of inferior size, and villages innumerable. There is strong reason to believe that the Canaanites who were then in the land, had reached a pretty high degree of civilisation. Scanty as our information is about them, there are incidental indications of improvement which are not to be mistaken. But even supposing that they were barbarians, it does not follow that Abraham was also one. Coming as he did from that part of the globe which seems to have been first settled after the flood — from a country which in later times claimed, and was allowed to be, the cradle of knowledge by the heathen world, it is not to be supposed that he was a barbarian. The mere possession of the true religion would have had, in this as well as other cases, a refining
influence. No, he was no barbarian. It was not because he knew no better that he chose to sojourn as a stranger in the land of promise — to dwell in tents instead of houses — and to govern an encampment, not a city or a kingdom.
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Was it then because he thought it wrong to lead a settled life in towns and cities, that he dwelt in tents? There is no trace of such a doctrine in the word of God, and Abraham was too well grounded in the divine will to hold it as a superstition. He was no ascetic. His mode of life, as I have said already, was a generous one, without fanatical antipathies — without the practice of monastic austerities or the will-worship of self-inflicted mortifications. It was not because he looked upon a settled life and civilisation as sinful, that he was willing to relinquish them. What then was his motive?
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To some the thought may here occur, that we are searching for the explanation of a fact which needs none. Why should Abraham’s wandering be considered stranger than the wandering of any other Eastern chief? And as those of the highest rank lead such a life to this day, it need not be regarded as below the dignity even of the Father of the Faithful and the Friend of God. He came into the country with his flocks and herds; and as the land was densely peopled, he was under the necessity of frequently changing his encampment and his pasture. This would be wholly satisfactory, but for the apostle’s mention of the patriarch’s unsettled life as a remarkable evidence of faith. If it arose merely from the nature of his property, and in fact contributed to his convenience and increase in wealth, it would hardly have been said of him, that “by faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise.” We are, therefore, forced to the conclusion that his motive for pursuing such a course was very different from that which leads the ordinary herdsmen of the East to shift from place to place, and to live and die beneath a roof of camel’s hair or goatskins.
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Having thus determined negatively, that it was neither poverty, nor want of title to the land, nor opposition on the part of the inhabitants, nor ignorance, nor mere ascetic self-denial, nor a regard to temporal convenience that induced him to reside in tents, rather than in a palace and a city worthy of so great a prince, we are ready to receive the explanation of the text, which is this, “he looked” or was looking “for
a city”. There is an ambiguity in the English version which is not in the original. “To look for,” in modern English, means to search for or to seek. In the English of our Bible, where the phrase is not uncommon, it means simply to expect. The sense, then, is not that Abraham was wandering in search of a city upon earth, but that he lived in quiet expectation of a city. “If we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.” It was this “patience of hope” that rendered Abraham indifferent to the walled cities of the Canaanites around him, whose antiquity was of ancient days, and whose defence was the munition of rocks. Nothing so effectually breeds indifference to present objects, as the hope of better things to come. The traveller pressing homewards after a long absence, can pass, with a contemptuous smile, or absolute unconsciousness, those very objects which the homeless traveller dwells upon with rapture. As the venerable patriarch journeyed from Dan to Beersheba, passing among the cities and domains of the Canaanites, we may imagine that we saw him looking ever and anon beyond these objects to one more remote, and losing sight of Kirjath-Arba and Jebus, since called Hebron and Jerusalem, with their tall towers and heaven-scaling walls, amidst the loftier battlements and turrets of that real yet ideal city, towards which he was journeying. “He looked for a city.”
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And what sort of a city did he look for, in contempt of those around him? How did the city of his expectations differ from the cities of the Canaanites and the Philistines, from old Damascus, and from Ur of the Chaldees? It had foundations. “He looked for a city which hath foundations.” And had not they foundations? In one sense they had none. They were liable to change. In the same sense, Abraham’s city, which he looked for, had foundations, has them now; for observe the present form of the expression. It was a city, therefore, not of this world; for in this world there are no foundations time-proof. And whence had the city of his hopes these firm foundations? From the Architect.
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Whose builder and maker is God? God does not build like man. The foundations of his structures are laid deep in his decrees, and the cement has been growing hard from all eternity. His power over the materials he uses is not merely the disposing power of a builder, but the absolute power of a maker. What he builds he creates. The city of which he is the maker and builder, is eternal; it has foundations which decay can never weaken, and which laugh at the violence of storm and earthquake. Abraham lived in expectation of a city which was not of this world. It
was what we call heaven, in the highest sense, the residence prepared by God for his true followers after death — a faithful city in which dwelleth righteousness, the new Jerusalem which John beheld in vision. It is a city which has no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it; for the glory of God lightens it, and the Lamb is the light thereof.
(To be continued in next issue.)