We Are Not Here To Be Here

In Genesis 12:1-3, God said unto a young Abram, “Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee: and I will make of thee a great nation.” It almost seems that God is trying to make this choice as hard as possible on Abram. First, leave your country. To go where? How many of us could, would, just pack up and leave at such a call without even knowing where we’re going?

But it gets worse. Leave your kinfolk. Can you imagine giving up your family ties to move . . . somewhere? But God makes it worse. Leave your family, not just your extended family. Leave your father’s house. God says, “Get thee out” of it. I want you to leave everything that you have any connection with, anything that ties you to this place. Just leave it. Get out.

But look at the first word in verse 4. “So.” The Bible tells us, “So Abram went.” It’s like saying “It rained, so the grass was wet.” What would you expect? If it rains the grass will be wet. If God calls, Abram will go. There is no mention of Abram wavering, doubting, even asking questions or making excuses. God called, SO Abram went. Abram was not on this earth to be in his country, to be with his family, or with his father’s house. He was on this earth to follow where God would lead him (and he had no idea where that would be!)

Many of us could possibly leave our hometown, the area where we grew into adulthood. Actually, that is a quite common situation for many Americans. It’s hard to do in one way, but it’s easy for us in another way, because we have cell phones with which we can maintain almost instant contact at all times, and even see each other as we converse. But wait! There’s more.

In Genesis 22:1-3, Abraham faced a similar situation. Having waited until he was 100 years old, Abraham was finally blessed with the birth of his promised son, Isaac. Not many years after Isaac was born God came to Abraham with another request. “Take now thy son, thine only son, whom thou lovest, even Isaac, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee.”

God once again seems to be intent on making this as hard on Abraham as possible. First He says, “Take thy son.” It would be hard to make that worse, but God points out that this is Abraham’s only son. He has no one else to receive the inheritance, to carry on the family name, and God calls that out, “Thine only son.” And then He digs a little deeper into Abraham’s heart and says, “Whom thou lovest,” before He names him, “even Isaac.” God said, “take your only, beloved, son,” and offer him as a sacrifice. And then look at verse 3. “And Abraham rose early in the morning . . . [and after making necessary preparations] . . . and went unto the place of which God had told him,” where he set about the task of offering Isaac. He didn’t waver, he didn’t doubt, he didn’t stutter or make excuses. He went.

Abraham was not on this earth to be on this earth. He was on this earth to get to Heaven. The words of the writer of Hebrews in Heb. 11:8-10, “By faith Abraham, when he was called, obeyed to go out unto a place which he was to receive for an inheritance; and he went out, not knowing whither he went. By faith he became a sojourner in the land of promise, as in a land not his own, dwelling in tents . . . for he looked for the city which hath the foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”

Focus on the last sentence, even the last phrase, of verses 8-10. Abraham was a sojourner. He dwelled in tents, not a house. He was just passing through the place where he lived. He was temporary. He was there but he was not part of there. He was a visitor who had no intention of taking up residence.

He was looking for something else. When he got to go somewhere else, he gladly would leave his current situation to go to that place. That place was a “city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” That place was Heaven. It’s magnetic pull on Abraham was so great, his trust in God was so great, that not only would he totally cut himself off from everything he knew, but he would also offer his only beloved son as a sacrifice “accounting that God is able to raise up even from the dead; from whence he did also in a figure receive him back,” Heb. 11:19.

It is my belief that God initiated this episode in the life of Abraham, not to prove to God what Abraham would do, because God already knew what Abraham would do. This “testing” of Abraham was done to show you and me what Abraham would do, maybe even to prove to Abraham what he was capable of. Hebrews tells us that Abraham’s trust in God was so great that he proceeded to carry out God’s instructions satisfied that God would raise Isaac back from the dead to carry out the promise He had made. Hebrews indicates that in the mind of Abraham, and figuratively, Isaac was already dead. Of course, God never intended for Abraham to kill or offer Isaac, but Abraham didn’t know that.

Paul said, “For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,” Phil. 1:21. While I am alive, every facet of my life is all about Christ, His will, His word. But if I should die, I would be with Christ and that is even better. In verse 23 he said, “having the desire to depart and be with Christ; for it is very far better.” He didn’t say “it is better.” He said, “it is very far better.”

Paul also said in 2 Cor. 4:18, “we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal,” and then in 5:6,8, “while we are at home in the body, we are absent from the Lord . . . and are willing rather to be absent from the body, and to be at home with the Lord.” Paul looked for a city which has the foundations whose builder and maker is God.

The question is, what about me? What about you? Peter referred to the Christians he was writing to in 1 Peter 1 as “sojourners and pilgrims.” If we are Christians we don’t belong here; we belong in Heaven. We are just passing through, like pilgrims heading toward the promised land. We need to echo the sentiments of Paul, Peter, and Abraham, searching for that city, longing to be with Christ.

Paul was whipped with cords, beaten with rods, stoned and left for dead. Peter was beaten and imprisoned. The sojourners to whom Peter wrote were on the verge of persecution that would take the lives of many. I fear that we have it too easy. There is nothing about my life that makes me want to leave this world. I have no persecution, no punishment, not even a difficult circumstance. I suspect that many readers could say the same. That doesn’t excuse us from thinking correctly concerning this matter.

I would say that Abraham, for the time in which he lived, had a rather good life. He was not persecuted for following God. But he never forgot what mattered and what didn’t. He never let himself get bogged down and stuck in the situations of this life. He wasn’t bound to the physical. He was seeking the spiritual. We must be the same. We must never forget. We are not here to be here. We are here to get there.