Such is the nature of all obedience; for the conduct of the saint is ever to be according to the dispensed wisdom of God at the time, or in the given age.
But, let me add, the highest point of moral dignity in Abraham was this: that he was a stranger in the earth.
This, I may say, outshines all. It was this that made God not ashamed to be called his God. God can morally own the soul that advisedly refuses citizenship in this revolted, corrupted world.
This was the highest point in moral dignity in Abraham.
God loveth the stranger. Deut. x. 18. He loves the poor, unfriended stranger, with the love of pity and of grace, and provides for him. But with the separated stranger, who has turned his back on this polluted scene, God links His name and His honour, and morally owns such without shame. Heb. xi. 13-16.
How finely he started on his journey at the beginning! The Lord and His promises were all he had. He left, as we have seen, his natural home behind him, but he did not expect to find another home in the place he was going to. He knew that he was to be a stranger and sojourner with God in the earth. Mesopotamia was left, but Canaan was not taken up in the stead of it. Accordingly, from all the people there, he was a separated man all his days, or during his sojourn among them of about one hundred years. Canaan was the world to that heavenly man, and he had as little to do with it or to say to it as he might, though all the while in it. When circumstances demanded it, or as far as business involved him, he dealt with it. He would traffic with the people of the land, if need were (to be sure he would), but his sympathies were not with them. He needed a burying-place, and he purchased it of the children of Heth. He would not think of hesitating to treat with them about a necessary matter of bargain and sale; but he would rather buy than receive. He was loth to be debtor to them, or to be enriched by them--nor were they his companions. This we observe throughout. If Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre--it may be morally attracted by what they saw in him--seek confederacy with him, he will not refuse their alliance on a given occasion of the common interest, when such interest the God who had called him would sanction or commend. But still the Canaanites were not his company. His wife was his company, his household, his flocks and his herds, and his fellow-saint, Lot, his brother's son, who had come out of Mesopotamia with him--as long, at least, as such an one walked as a separated man in Canaan. But even he, when undistinguished from the people of the land, is a stranger to him as well and as fully as they.
All this has surely a voice in our ears. Angels were Abraham's company at times, and so the Lord of angels--and at all times, his altar and his tent were with him, and the mysteries or truths of God, as they were made known to him. But the people of the land, the men of the world, did not acquire his tastes or sympathies, or share his confidence. He was among them but not of them--and rather would he have had his house unbuilt, and Isaac be without a wife, than that such wife should be a daughter of Canaan.
To some of us, beloved, this breaking up of natural things is terrible. But if Jesus were loved more, all this would be the easier reckoned on. If His value for us within the veil were more pondered in our hearts and treasured up there, we should go to Him without the camp with firmer, surer step. "I have learnt," said one of the martyrs, "that there is no freedom like that of the heart that has given up all for Christ--no wisdom like that learnt at His feet--no poetry like the calm foreseeing of the glory that shall be."
Of our Abraham and his companions in this life of faith, confessing that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth, it is written, "They that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country--and truly if they had been mindful of that from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned, but now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly, wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for He hath prepared for them a city."
Beloved, we are called to be these strangers--strangers such as God can thus morally own. If the world were not Abraham's object, we ought to feel, even on higher sanctions, that it cannot be ours. The call of the God of glory made Abraham a stranger here--the cross of Christ, in addition to that, may still more make us strangers. As we sometimes sing--