"Before His cross we now are left,
As strangers in the land."
"Ye are dead," says the apostle, "and your life is hid with Christ in God." That is strangership of the highest order--the strangership of the Son of God Himself. "The world knoweth us not, because it knew Him not."
In the strength of this strangership in the world, may we have grace to "abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul"! and in the strength of our conscious citizenship in heaven may "we look for the Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself."
ISAAC.
GENESIS XXV.-XXVII.
In the former papers, entitled Enoch, Noah, and Abraham, I have followed the course of the Book of Genesis, down to the end of chapter xxiv. I now propose to take it up from thence, and follow it on through chapters xxv.-xxvii.; Isaac, after Abraham, being the principal person there.
There is, however, but little in his history, and little in his character. In some respects this is no matter; for, whether much or little, his name is in the recollection of us all who have learnt the ways of the God of grace, "the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," which is His name for ever, His memorial unto all generations. Exod. iii.
Isaac was a stranger in the earth, a heavenly stranger, as his father had been, and we see him with his tent and his altar, as we saw Abraham; and we hear the Lord giving him the promises, as He had given them to Abraham.
"By faith Abraham sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise."
This tent-life of the patriarchs had a great character in it. Hebrews xi. 9, 10 teaches us this. It tells us that the fathers were content to live upon the surface of this world. A tent has no foundations. It is pitched or struck at a moment's warning. And such a slight and passing connection with this earth, and life upon it, these patriarchs were satisfied to have and seek only. They did not look for a city or for foundations, till God became a Builder. Till His building was manifested they were sojourners here, just crossing the plain, or surface of the earth, without striking their roots into it.