The word of our text is very inadequately rendered in our Authorised Version as merely a country.' Fully and etymologically rendered, it would be the fatherland.' Whether we choose to adopt that somewhat un-English expression or no, at all events, the idea conveyed is that these men, having come out from Mesopotamia, and being wanderers, in their goat's-hair tents, in the midst of the fenced cities of Canaan, were thereby seeking for a land which was their native land, their home, the place to which they felt that they belonged far more truly than to the land from which they came out, or to the land in which they were for the moment wandering. That is the idea that I would enforce as needful for all true and noble Christian living, the recognition that our true home, the country and the order with which we are connected by all our deepest and most real affinities, the land where, and where only, we shall feel at rest, and surrounded by familiar things and loved persons, is that land which lies beyond the flood.
We do not belong, and should feel that we do not belong, to the place and order where we happen to stand to-day. This present and the order of things here should be for us either like that Aram Naharaim, the Syria between the two rivers,' the dust of which Abraham had shaken from off his feet; or it should be like that rotten though splendid civilisation into the midst of which He came, and of which He sternly refused to enrol Himself as a citizen. Our home is where Jesus Christ is, and there is something profoundly wrong in us unless we feel that that, and not this, is our native soil, and that there, and not here, is the place to which we belong.
Our colonists on the other side of the world, though they have never seen England, talk about going home.' And so we, inhabitants of this outlying colony of the great city, ought to look across the flood, and sometimes catch a sight of those bright realms beyond, and always feel that they are really our native land. They that say such things declare plainly' that they are not citizens here, but belong yonder.
