Abraham is sought by the Gentile. This is full of meaning. In the days of stress and famine, Abraham seeks the Gentile, whether in Egypt or in Philistia; but now, the Gentile seeks Abraham. This is a great change. Abraham's house, as we have seen, is now established in grace. Ishmael is dismissed, and Isaac is gloried in. In mystic sense, Israel has turned to the Lord, the veil is taken away, Jerusalem has said to Christ, "Blessed is He that cometh in the name of the Lord," her warfare is therefore accomplished, and she is receiving the double. The Gentile seeks Israel. Abimelech and Phichol, the king and his chief captain, come to Abraham.
This is a great dispensational change. Israel is the head now, and not the tail. The skirt of the Jew is now laid hold on by the nations; for the Jew has, by faith, laid hold on the Lord, and the nations say, God is with you. Chap. xxi. 22; Zech. viii. 23.
This is full of meaning; and Abraham on all this (led of the Spirit) is full of thoughts of glory or of the kingdom. And rightly so. Because, when the Jew is sought by the Gentile, instead of being trodden down or degraded by the Gentile, the kingdom is at hand. Accordingly, on the king of Gerar seeking him and suing him, our patriarch raises a new altar; not the altar of a heavenly stranger, as in chapter xii., but an altar to "the everlasting God;" not an altar in a wilderness-world, but an altar beside a grove and a well; the one being a witness that the solitary place had been made glad, and that the wilderness was rejoicing; the other, that the peoples of the earth were confederate with the seed of Abraham.11
All this bright intelligence of faith in Abraham is very beautiful. We have already seen other actings of it in him. He knew a time of peace and a time of war, and acted accordingly in the day of the battle of the five kings with four. So, again, he knew his heavenly place, and took it, when the fire of the Lord was judging the cities of the plain. So, again, as this chapter xxi. very remarkably shows us, he also knew when to suffer wrong and when to resent, when to be passive and when to assert his rights. For now, in the time of this chapter, when the Gentile seeks him, he reproves Abimelech for a well of water which Abimelech's servants had violently taken away. But he had not complained of this injury until now; for Abimelech said to him, "I wot not who has done this thing; neither didst thou tell me, neither yet heard I of it, but to-day." And this is exceedingly beautiful. It is perfect in its generation. Abraham had till now suffered, and taken it patiently, because till now he had been a heavenly stranger on the earth; and such patient suffering in such an one is acceptable with God. But now, times are changed. The heavenly stranger has become the head of the nations, sought by the Gentile; and rights and wrongs must now be settled, and the cry of the oppressed must be heard.
All this has great moral beauty in it. I know not how sufficiently to admire this workmanship of the Spirit in the mind of Abraham. He was an Israelite who knew the seasons of the year-when to be at the Passover, and when at the Feast of Tabernacles. He knew, in spirit, when to continue with Jesus in His temptations, and then again, when the day arrived, how to surround Him with hosannahs as He entered the city of the Son of David. All such various and blending lights shone in the spiritual intelligence of his soul. God, by the Spirit, communicated a beautiful mind to Abraham. In other days, he would not have so much of this earth as to set his foot on-he would surrender the choice of the land to Lot-he would leave the Canaanite where he found him-he would refuse to be enriched by the king of Sodom even in so little as a thread or a shoe-latchet-he would wander up and down in his tent here, a stranger from heaven-but now, in a day signified and marked by the hand of God, he can be another man, and know his millennial place, as father of the Israel of God, and their representative as head of the nations. He can keep the Feast of Tabernacles in its season. His rebuke of Abimelech-his entertaining him-his enriching him-his giving him covenant pledges-and all this in such easy, conscious dignity-and then his new altar or his calling on God in a new character, and his planting a grove, all bespeak another man, and that a transfiguration, if I may so speak, had taken place in him, according to God.
All this I judge to have a great character in it. But I will not any longer stay here; for there is still more in this fine life of faith which our father Abraham, through grace, tracked to the very end, holding still the beginning of his confidence.
And here let me say, this life of faith is, in other words, life spent in the power of resurrection. It is the life of a dead and risen man. It is a lesson, if one may speak for others, hard indeed to be learnt to any good effect, but still it is the lesson, the practical lesson of our lives, that we are a dead and risen people. At the outset Abraham, in spirit, took that character. He left behind him all that nature or the world had provided him with. He left what his birthintroduced him to, for that which faith introduced him to. And as he began, so he continued and ended, with failings by the way indeed, and that too again and again, but still to the end he was a man of faith, a dead and risen man.
As such an one he had received Isaac, some twenty years ago, not considering his own body now dead, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb; and as such an one he now offers him on the altar at the word of the Lord. The promise was God's-that was enough for him. For faith is never overcome. It has divine, infinite resources. The believer fails again and again; but faith is never overcome, or comes short of its expectation. xxii.
This is the way of faith, when Isaac was demanded.12And the same overcoming faith we trace in the very next scene, the burial of Sarah. This was the same faith, the faith of a dead and risen man, the faith which had already received Isaac, and offered Isaac, now buries Sarah. Abraham believed in resurrection, and in God as the God of resurrection, the God who quickens the dead, and calls those things that be not as though they were. The cave of Machpelah tells us this. "Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, in sure and certain hope," was the language of Abraham's heart there. His purchase of that place, with all his care to make it his own, to have it as his possession, while beyond it he cared not for a single acre of the whole land, tells us of his faith in resurrection. His treaty for it with the children of Heth is like his words to his servants at the foot of mount Moriah, "Abide ye here with the ass, while I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you." Each of these things bespoke beforehand what he knew about his Isaac and his Sarah. He committed each of them into the hands of Him who, as he knew, quickens the dead. The corn of wheat dying, as he knew, was to live again. The handful of sacred dust, as he knew, was to be gathered again. Death itself was eyed in like victory of faith, as had already been eyed the fire, and the wood, and the beloved victim on the altar. xxiii.
These were the victories of faith again. Faith in our patriarch, after this manner, talked calmly with all circumstances, and won the day over them all in their turn. Beautiful victories of "precious faith"! And they are gained still. Faith still disposes of one circumstance after another as it rises. It meets our own personal condition as "dead in trespasses and sins;" it meets the difficulties and temptations of the way; it meets the last great enemy. Let me not make a wonder of meeting things on the journey, or at the end of it, if I have already met what withstood me at the outset. Faith will go to mount Moriah, or to the cave of Machpelah, if it have already gone out in the starry night with the Lord at Hebron. If it have met death in my own person, it may meet it in my Isaac or my Sarah. One speaks, the Lord knows, of His grace, and not of one's own experience. But still, beloved, let each of us say, Am I not at peace with God? Do I not know that He is for me? Do I not know that my estate of sin, guilt, and condemnation has been met in His grace? Do I not know that I am washed, accepted, adopted? Have I not gone out with Abraham, as in the night of chap. xv., and found relief for my own state by nature, and shall I then tarry on my way, though the trial of mount Moriah await me, or the death and burial at Machpelah? If faith have already met sin, it is to know itself conqueror over even death. Let our souls be accustomed to the thought that the brightest victory of faith was achieved at the beginning-that if at peace with God in spite of sin, we may reckon on strength and comfort from Him in spite of the trials of the way, and on power and triumph in Him in spite of the end of it. Faith which has done its first work has done its greatest work. "If, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life." God is glorified in these reckonings of faith. "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?"
It is the power of life over death, life in victory, that faith uses. It was such power of victorious life that Abraham possessed himself of by faith. The sepulchre is empty, and the grave-clothes are lying there, as the spoils of war. The deadness of his own body, the altar of his Isaac, and the grave of his Sarah, were visited and inspected by a risen man, in the light of the faith of Him who is the Quickener of the dead, and calleth those things that be not as though they were.
These are the great things of faith in the souls of the elect. But further still, in this fruitful, shifting history. Abraham, at the end, is seen to hold his first ground, as well as to work his earlier victories. He maintains, through grace, erect and firm, that very attitude which he had at once and at the first assumed, when by faith he hearkened to the call of God.
That call of God had done these two things with Abraham, I might say for Abraham; it had separated him from Mesopotamia, and yet left him a stranger in Canaan. From country, kindred, and father's house he had been withdrawn; but still, in the midst of that land and people to which he had come, he was to be but a pilgrim, dwelling as on the surface of it, in a tent, whatever part of it he might pass through or visit.
This position was very holy. His separation was twofold-separation from pollution, such as he might meet in Canaan; separation from natural alliances, such as he had been born into in Mesopotamia. He was under the call of the God of glory; and such a call made no terms with either the flesh or the world. In somewhat of Levite holiness, he did not know his mother's children; in somewhat of church holiness, he knew no man after the flesh. Nay; beyond even all this, in somewhat of the virtue of his divine Lord, he did not know himself. He was the heir of the land where he was a pilgrim. The promise of God was his, as surely as the call. He knew himself to be destined of divine, unimpeachable purpose, to dignities of a very high order. But to the end he was willing to pass unknown, entirely unknown. He talked of himself to the children of the land only as a stranger and a sojourner. He would pay for the smallest plot of ground which he wanted. He would be nothing and nobody in the midst of them. He never talked of the dignities which he knew, all the time, really attached to him. David, in like spirit, in other days, had the oil of Samuel on him, the consecration of God to the throne of the tribes of Israel; and yet he would be hid, and thank a rich neighbour, in his need, for a piece of bread. These men of God knew not themselves. This was the way of our Abraham; and this was the virtue of Him who, in this same departed, evil world, made Himself of no reputation, though God of heaven and earth.
Blessed virtues of soul under the power of the call of God, through the Holy Ghost! Mesopotamia is left, Canaan is estranged, and self is forgotten and hid! The call of God purposes to do at this day with us what in that day it did with Abraham. It would fain conform us to itself. Its authority is supreme. It is not that country or kindred are, of necessity, defiling. Nature accredits them; and the law of God, in its season, owns and enforces them. But the call of God is supreme, and demands separation of a very high, and fine, and peculiar order. And this was what addressed Abraham when he dwelt in Mesopotamia, the place of his birth, of his kindred, and of his natural associations, and this was what still echoed in his heart all the time of his sojourn in Canaan.
It was not that he was called to assert the harm of such things. Not at all. But they were such things as the call of God left behind; and the harm, or the moral wrong, or the pollution of a thing was no longer his rule, but inconsistency with the call of God. He may allow the right and the claim of a thousand things; but it is the voice of the God of glory, to which in faith he had hearkened already, that must lead him and command him. "No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God."
He was very true to his call. According to it, at the beginning, he had gone forth, not knowing, as before him, whither he went, and leaving, as behind him, all that even nature itself must accredit, and all but the sovereign pleasure of God sanction. He continued in the power of it, sojourning in tents, unknown and unendowed, a stranger in the world, refusing to take one backward step. And at the end, we find the same power of his call as fresh in his soul as ever-as earnest and as simple in chap. xxiv. as it had been in chap. xii. He charges Eliezer to act upon it to the full, as he himself at the outset had done-that is, he was to keep Isaac in the place of separation at all cost. Let come what may, Isaac was neither to be taken back to Mesopotamia, nor to be allied with Canaan. He was, let circumstances make it difficult as they may, to be maintained in his true place under the call of God.
This has a great character in it. There is another mystery in this exquisite chapter (xxiv.), as we commonly know; but I do not notice it here. I rather design to trace the earnest, simple path, which faith trod from first to last, in our father Abraham. The voice of the God of glory was still heard by him. He was still the separated man. He declared plainly that he sought a heavenly country. He might have had opportunity to return. This very journey of Eliezer proved that he had not forgotten the road. But he did not, he would not.
This strangership of our patriarch in the earth has indeed a very fine character. He left Mesopotamia, he sojourned in Canaan, he hid or forgot himself! Abraham left Abraham behind, as well as country, kindred, and father's house. He made himself of no reputation. He spoke of himself as "a stranger and a sojourner," and as that only, in the audience of the children of Heth, though he was, all the while, the one "who had the promises." All this was real, true-hearted strangership in the world. And it was conscious citizenship in heaven that made him, after this manner, a willing stranger here. Because of possessions in prospect, he could do without them in hand. The land of promise was to him but a strange country, because it was but a land of promise and not of possession. He saw Christ's day, and was glad; but he saw it in the distance. Heb. xi. 9-14.
And Abraham was all this to the very end-as these closing chapters show us. The character which he took up at the beginning, under the call of God, that character he maintained to the end. He fails in the power of faith along the road, again and again, but he is the same heavenly stranger to the end of his journey.13
And strangership of this order is ours, I am deeply assured. Ours is to be strangership in the earth, because of conscious and well-known citizenship in heaven; separation from the world, because of oneness with an already risen Christ. Nothing can alter this while we are on the earth. We ought so to look in the face of a rejected Christ as to maintain this strangership in power. And so we do, as far as Christ is of more value to us than all our circumstances. It is for want of this that we take up with the world as we do. We have not learnt the lesson that Moses learnt-that the reproach of Christ was greater riches than the treasures of Egypt.
Hard but blessed. Abraham knew something of it in power. He was the stranger to the end. He might have returned to Mesopotamia. He had not forgotten the road, as we observed before; and the constant respect and friendliness of all his neighbours proved that there was no enemy to hinder the journey. But the call of God had fixed his heart, and he looked only where it led him.14
Would that the soul held these things in increased power! Little indeed does the heart know of this, if one may speak for others. But they are real-the prized fruit of divine energy in the elect of God.
After all this we find another and distinct matter in the history of Abraham. I mean his marriage with Keturah, and his family by her.
This family by Keturah is, we may surely judge, a distinct mystery. That is, Abraham is here presenting a new feature of the divine wisdom, or illustrating another secret in the ways of the divine dispensations. In these children of the second wife we get (typically) the millennial nations, the nations which shall people the earth in the days of the kingdom, branches of the great family of God in that day, and children of Abraham. They may lie far off, as in the ends of the earth; but they shall have their allotments, and be owned as of the one extended millennial family. "Rejoice, ye Gentiles, with His people," shall be said to them. The ends of the earth shall be Christ's inheritance then, as surely as the Church shall be glorified in Him and with Him in the heavens, and the throne of David, and the inheritance of Israel be His, as set up and revived in the land of their fathers. Abraham's children will be all the world over.
For in that day of glory, the King of Israel shall be the God of the whole earth. Christ is the Father of the everlasting age. If Israel be honoured by Him, all the nations shall be blest in Him. He is "the light to lighten the Gentiles," as He is "the glory of His people Israel." Keturah's children, parcelled off in other lands, bespeak this mystery. They will be second to Israel, it is true; but, nevertheless, they will be elect and beloved. As it is here written: And Abraham gave all that he had unto Isaac. But unto the sons of the concubines which Abraham had, Abraham gave gifts, and sent them away from Isaac his son, while he yet lived, eastward, unto the east country. xxv.15
This is, I believe, the mystic meaning of this new family of Abraham; and this strange and wondrous article is that which closes his history. But it is another witness of the large and varied testimony which God has borne to His own counsels and secrets in that history. And this is very remarkable. At times the Father is seen in Abraham-as, in his desire for children-his making a feast at the weaning of Isaac-his offering up of his son-his sending for a wife for his son; at other times the Christ is seen in him, as the one in whom all the families of the earth are to be blest-as the kinsman-redeemer of Israel-as the holder of the headship of the nations-father of the millennial or everlasting age-and then, at other times, the Church, or heavenly people, are traced or reflected in this wondrous story; and, at other times, we are on earth, or with Israel.
We have the Blessed One, unto whom all His works are known from the beginning of the world, in the details and changeful stories of this life of Abraham, thus showing forth parts of His ways. In the allegories of Sarah and her seed, of Hagar and her seed, of Keturah and her seed, we have the mystery of Jerusalem, "the mother of us all," Israel in bondage as she now is with her children, and the gathering of the nations all the world over, as branches of the one extended millennial family. Mystery after mystery is thus acted in the life of Abraham; and many and various parts of "the manifold wisdom of God" are taught us.
I am quite aware, that living or personal types may have been as unconscious of what they were, under God's hand, as material types. Hagar, no doubt, was as passive as the gold that overlaid the table of shew-bread, or as the water which filled the brazen laver. But the lesson to us is not affected by this. I have Christ's royal glory in the state of Solomon, and I have the deeply precious provisions of His grace in the golden plate on Aaron's forehead; and I no more think of enquiring about Solomon himself in that matter than I do about the gold. The sleeping Adam teaches me about the death of the Christ of God; the waking rapture of Adam, on receiving Eve, teaches me about the satisfaction and joy of the same Christ of God, when He shall see of the travail of His soul; but whether Adam knew what he was doing for me, I do not ask myself. I can learn about the first covenant from an unconscious Hagar, as I can learn about the cleansing of the blood of Christ from an unconscious altar. So, as to our Abraham, in taking his place in the midst of all these varied and wondrous mysteries, I enquire not curiously the measure of his mind in these things. The wisdom of God can say-the Christ who stood in the eternal counsels can say, "Behold, I and the children whom the Lord hath given me are for signs and for wonders;" but how far Abraham could speak so, in whatever measure he was himself in the secret he was made to utter, or whether he spoke mysteries as in an unknown tongue, we have not to enquire. "God is His own interpreter."
Our patriarch has now closed his actings and his exercises. We have now to close his eyes, as we read in chap. xxv. 7, 8, "And these are the days of the years of Abraham's life which he lived, an hundred threescore and fifteen years. Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people."
He had, we may say, seen the land, but he was not to go over and possess it. He was the Moses of an earlier generation; like him, a heavenly man, a man of the wilderness and not of the inheritance-a man of the tent-a child of resurrection. He was gathered to his people, ere the land was entered by the Israel of God according to promise. As in the glass of God's purpose, and by the light of faith, he sees the land; but he goes not over to possess it. He dies as on Mount Pisgah, on the wilderness-side of the Jordan, destined, with Enoch before him and with Moses after him, to shine on the top of the hill in the heavenly glory of the Son of man.
We have now closed the third section of the Book of Genesis; and, with it, the scenes and circumstances of the life of Abraham.
In the midst of these fragments, thus gathered and treasured up for us by the Holy Ghost, we have seen faith getting its victories, knowing its rights and pleading its titles, practising its generosity, enjoying its fellowships, making its surrenders, and obtaining its consolations and promises. But we have seen also its intelligence, and learnt it to be such a thing as walks in the light, or according to the judgment, of the mind of Christ.
There is something very beautiful in such a sight as this. We do not commonly witness this fine combination-the intelligence of faith, and the moral powerof faith. In some saints, there is the earnest, urgent power of faith, which goes on right truthfully and honestly, but with many a mistake as to the dispensational wisdom of God. In others, there is a mind nicely taught, endowed with much priestly, spiritual skill, in following the wisdom of God in ages and dispensations, but with lack of power in all that service which a simpler and more earnest faith would be constantly pursuing. But in Abraham we see these things combined.
In our walk with God, the light of the knowledge of His mind should be seen, as well as our hearts be ever found open to His presence and joy, and our consciences alive to His claims and His will. The life of faith is a very incomplete thing, if we know not, as Abraham knew, the times as signified of God, when to fight, as it were, and when to be still; when to be silent under the wrongs of an Abimelech, and when to resent them; when to raise the altar of a sojourning stranger, and when to call on the name of the everlasting God. In other words, we ought to know what the Lord is about, according to His own eternal purpose, and what He is leading onward to its consummation, in His varied and fruitful wisdom.
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 separatedstranger, 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-
"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."