Encounter the Truth

Jonathan Griffiths: Are we willing to live as sojourners and as foreigners in this world when it comes to our values, our ethic, and our worldview? I'll tell you, it's going to mean some discomfort. It is going to mean a real sense of being an outsider, as one whose home is in another land.

Steve Hiller: You're listening to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths. Jonathan, I think it can be very easy to allow the voice of culture, all these messages of what your life ought to look like, to crowd out and to cause us to forget that this home is not ultimately our home. We're just here for a little while. How do we make sure that we keep that right and proper perspective?

Jonathan Griffiths: We do need to keep that pilgrim perspective in all of life. It's very hard, because we live in this material world. We have material needs, and those can be a real focus for us. There are material experiences and pleasures that we enjoy, and we can become wrapped up in those all too easily.

But we are called to be a pilgrim people who are setting our hearts and minds on the world that is to come. In order to do that, I think we need to keep our minds immersed in Scripture. We need to be among the Lord's people and involved in Christian fellowship so that we can encourage each other and remind one another of who we are and where we're going. That's a regular thing. It's about the rhythm of life where day by day we're in the Scriptures and week by week we're among the Lord's people. Those are the things that help us and keep our eyes fixed on heaven above.

Steve Hiller: We're going to be reminded of that today as we open our Bibles and join Jonathan in Genesis 23. We’re beginning a message called Waiting for a Homeland. Here is Jonathan.

Jonathan Griffiths: Abraham and Sarah looked as though they had drunk from a fountain of eternal youth. When we met them at the beginning of their great story back in Genesis 12, they were already elderly—too elderly, we might think, to begin a new adventure, far too early to start a family. But God met them.

God made promises to them: promises of blessing in a place of curse, promises of salvation in a world that is under judgment for sin. Abraham and Sarah represented a new start and a new story in this sin-stricken, fallen world. They would be channels of light, and they would be channels of hope. As living and breathing symbols of that hope, God gave to this elderly and childless couple the gift of a son in their extreme old age.

There is something about Abraham and Sarah, something about them as recipients and as channels of the blessing of God, something which seems to defy gravity when it comes to age and decline and when it comes to that awful pull of the grave. But here in Genesis 23, the pull of that mortal gravity wins out, and the grave claims Sarah.

Although we knew it was coming, we find it all a bit jarring, a bit unsettling, and we find it sad. The image of Abraham in verse two, mourning with tears for his wife of so many decades, is a moving scene. It is a tragic scene. This is a moving scene, and at the same time, it is here to instruct us and to encourage us.

As we've said so often in this series on the life of Abraham, Abraham's life and Sarah's life have a wider meaning and a wider significance beyond their own immediate story. They are recipients and conduits of the salvation promises and the salvation blessings of God—promises that counteract the judgment of the fall, promises that constitute the nation of Israel, promises that point to Christ and our salvation that is found in him.

As we consider the death of Sarah today, we need to consider her passing within the bigger picture of these grand promises of God. What do we learn here, and what do we see? In a sense, Abraham's next words, his famous words, give us something of a keynote. Notice what he does. Notice what he says in verse three.

And Abraham rose up from before his dead and said to the Hittites, "I am a sojourner and a foreigner among you; give me property among you for a burying place, that I may bury my dead out of my sight." As a semi-nomadic person, Abraham has got no land on which to bury his dead, and so he must go to the local landowners and ask.

As he does so, he summarizes his situation. He is a sojourner, he says, and a foreigner. A sojourner is not a word we use very much, but it is somewhat technical. It is a person who is passing through—one on a journey who may spend some time in a given place but doesn't have a permanent home there. That's what Abraham is, and it is what Sarah has been, and it is what she was when she departed this life: sojourners and foreigners.

To us, as we consider that, it may look as though something along the way has gone wrong here. Some element of God's plan has failed and fallen short. There's something in this that feels a little bit unsatisfactory, something a bit disappointing. Surely, they could have had more as servants of God. Surely, they might have expected more.

But the rest of Scripture doesn't see it that way. The New Testament would point to Abraham and Sarah's status as sojourners and foreigners in the land. It would point to that, actually, as a model for the rest of us. The New Testament would tell us that every true believer must actually live as they lived in that key respect.

As they were sojourners and foreigners in their day, so too must we be in ours. What then do we learn here about living as sojourners and foreigners in the world? What do Abraham and Sarah model for us in this? What are the lessons to note and to take away?

We see from Abraham and Sarah that sojourners and foreigners first hold lightly to their earthly home. Abraham and Sarah had left their homeland many decades before. Back in Genesis 12, God had called them to leave their family and their familiar territory and go to the place that he would send them—a land that he would give to them and to their descendants. Abraham and Sarah duly pack up their things, and they go.

At that point, they begin this lifestyle of wandering. They became semi-nomads going to the land of promise but not settling in any city, not buying land, and not building a homestead. They moved around from place to place, as so many keepers of herds and flocks of animals would have done.

That lifestyle certainly left them vulnerable in some key ways. We saw that vulnerability in their interactions with King Abimelech back in chapter 20, and we'd seen it before with Pharaoh. The land was theirs by divine promise, but it was not yet theirs by geopolitical reality.

I don't know what your life experience has been thus far, whether you've always lived in the same house or perhaps you've moved around a lot. I don't know if you've always rented or if you've ever owned your own home. Some have moved around a lot because of work, because of a profession that you have chosen or the profession of a spouse or a parent.

I know we have a number of military families in our church, and families with a parent in the armed forces tend to know something about moving around. Ministry families often know that, too. Pastors and missionaries often have different assignments at different stages of life.

Looking back on our own story, I think we had five different homes in our first ten years of marriage. I remember the conversations and the questions we turned over in our own minds: when would the Lord have us stop moving and maybe settle down in one place? Maybe you've had an experience of that kind. Maybe you are a wanderer and a pilgrim even in that sense now.

As the years have gone by, Abraham and Sarah have continued their pilgrimage. We might have imagined that the Lord would have given them some space and some opportunity, some freedom and some provision just to settle down, to build a homestead, to establish a community, and to put down roots. But that's not what happened.

Steve Hiller: You're listening to Encounter the Truth with Jonathan Griffiths, a message called Waiting for a Homeland. It's part of a larger series called The Blessing, where we're taking a look at the life and the story of Abraham. Jonathan's also written about this in his brand-new book called Strangers and Exiles.

Looking at Abraham, we see how he’s not just a foundational figure of the early church, but he was this guy who was profoundly human. He sinned a lot. He was isolated in this unbelievable world. But as we look at his story, we see what it means for God to take hold of a sinner like Abraham, to privilege him with promises, and then to use him in God's service and sustain him to the end.

Given what's going on in culture and in the world today, the central thread of Abraham's life is increasingly relevant. Ultimately, it speaks of a believer looking to a city with eternal foundations and speaks to us as strangers and aliens in our world. We'd love to send you a copy of Jonathan's new book, Strangers and Exiles, as our way of saying thank you for your financial support this month.

You can give online at encounterthetruth.org or when you call us at 1-833-99-TRUTH. That might be easier to remember as 833-998-7884. Again, our website is encounterthetruth.org. Let's get back to the message. Again, here is Jonathan.

Jonathan Griffiths: There is deep challenge for us if we are those who are making this world too much our home. There are all kinds of ways in which we might do that if we're not careful. We do it in terms of our values. The society around us doesn't know our Lord and it doesn't esteem his Word.

The way in which the people of God think and the way in which the people of God live is foreign to them, and it should be a little bit foreign to them. We need to stick out like sore thumbs from those around us in some key ways. We need to be recognizably different in the way in which we view the world, in our ethic, and in our values.

But we need to recognize as well that we are under huge pressure, and our children are under huge pressure to absorb and to adopt the world's values. In the world into which I was born, it was probably seen as quaint to hold Christian values and a Christian ethic.

Now, in many quarters, it is seen as something more sinister and subversive to hold to the teaching of Jesus Christ, to hold to what is seen now as a repressive set of values that actually probably need to be dismantled and set aside. We have to ask ourselves with some urgency: are we willing to live as sojourners and as foreigners in this world when it comes to our values, our ethic, and our worldview?

If we're going to do that, I'll tell you, it's going to mean some discomfort. It is going to mean a real sense of being an outsider, as one whose home is in another land. We need to live as sojourners as well when it comes to our home and our possessions. There's something very important to all of us about having a home, about having our things around us.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think there's anything wrong with having a home and belongings. Abraham and Sarah weren't poor. Even within this chapter, Abraham is able to produce what appears to be quite a substantial amount of money to buy land as needed. Back in chapter 13, he and his nephew Lot had clearly become so prosperous that they needed to separate so that they had enough land for their flocks and herds and growing households.

It's not that Abraham and Sarah had nothing or lived in poverty or refused all earthly comfort. I don't think that's the particular picture here. But as they walked with the Lord and lived before him by faith, they did not place their security in putting down roots in this world, in establishing their homestead, in securing their position within the community. That wasn't their outlook. That wasn't their priority.

In that sense, they were somewhat otherworldly. We all love to build earthly security and we love to find earthly comfort. But there is a sense for the people of God that our roots only ever go so deep here on earth. Our danger is simply that in seeking security and seeking comfort in this world, we place our hope in our home, in our possessions, in our wealth, in our savings, in our pensions, in the life we have created for ourselves within our communities.

Our danger is that in a material sense, we will settle too much into our earthly home and so stop looking to our heavenly home. The Lord calls his people to be sojourners—those who are just passing through.

Let me ask you, as I ask myself, if you and I really believed ourselves to be sojourners in the world in our communities, if we saw ourselves really to be tenants, temporary tenants in our homes, not eternal residents as we sometimes imagine—if we had that outlook consistently, what might change in our attitude to our possessions?

Would we perhaps accumulate less? Would we perhaps be concerned less about saving and accumulating wealth and more ready to be generous and spend what we have? Would we be less concerned about making everything perfect in our houses, keeping the decor 100% up to date, buying the very nicest gadgets and furnishings, and so on?

Not that any one of those things is bad in and of itself, necessarily, but maybe our desire and our drive and our instinct to make our homes just so speaks to a heart issue for us, to a faith issue that forgets that this world is not our home. Sojourners and foreigners hold lightly to their earthly home.

Steve Hiller: Jonathan Griffiths here on Encounter the Truth and a message called Waiting for a Homeland. We have to pause here, but we'll get back to the message next time, so I hope you'll join us. If you ever miss the broadcast on the radio, you can catch up online. Just come to encounterthetruth.org. There you can stream the program or download an MP3 for free. You can also listen through the Encounter the Truth app, which you'll find at your app store.

Jonathan, we're currently on the radio in a series on the life of Abraham. You've also written about this in your book Strangers and Exiles. As you studied Abraham and as you sat down and wrote this book, what are you hoping that we'll take away from the life of Abraham?

Jonathan Griffiths: There's so much to take away. It's such a rich study. The story of Abraham and the person of Abraham occupy such an important place in the salvation plan of God. The more I studied that section of Genesis, the more I studied Abraham's life, the more I found there for our Christian discipleship, which was so key.

A few things: I think there is a real emphasis within the story of Abraham on the faithfulness of God through all the ups and downs of history and through all the ups and downs of the life of his people. We see God's steady faithfulness and his determination to work out his purposes, no matter what's happening in the story of his people. I think that's so important for us to take hold of, that the unchanging God is faithful and will fulfill his plans and his purposes.

But then on the level of discipleship, Abraham is far from perfect. We see his sin and his failure and sometimes his slowness to believe and his slowness to obey. That's all there in 3D, and the Bible doesn't hold back in telling us the truth about that. But we see that the Lord is willing to use him and work in his life nonetheless. The Lord's grace just permeates the story.

Then the third thing we see is that the story of Abraham and the promises made to Abraham by God point us forward well beyond Abraham himself to the Lord Jesus Christ and to the fullness of the gospel. It's so wonderful to see how the salvation plan of God is traced through the storyline of the Bible. Studying that and seeing that actually increases our confidence in the coherence of the wider plan of God and the whole Word of God. I think that's immensely enriching for us to see.

Steve Hiller: Well, you're going to see that as you receive a copy of Jonathan's book Strangers and Exiles. It is our thank-you gift to you as you financially support Encounter the Truth this month. You can give a gift online at encounterthetruth.org or call us at 1-833-99-TRUTH. That's 1-833-998-7884. Again, the website is encounterthetruth.org.

You can also write us at Encounter the Truth, 2176 Prince of Wales Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, K2E 0A1 or in the US at Encounter the Truth, 215 North Arlington Heights Road, number 102, Arlington Heights, Illinois, 60004. For Jonathan Griffiths and our producer Mark Breta, I'm Steve Hiller. Thanks for listening and I hope you'll join us next time.