'Get thee out from thy father's house, and from thy country, and from
thy kindred,' was the command to Abram. And he became the heir to God's
promises and the father of the faithful, because he did not hesitate a
moment to make the plunge and to leave behind him all his past, his
associations, his loves, much of his possessions, and, in a very
profound sense, his old self, and put a great impassable gulf between
him and them all.
Now I am not going to say anything so narrow or foolish as that the
Christian life must always begin with a conscious and sudden change;
but this I am quite sure of, that in the vast majority of cases of
thoroughly and out-and-out religious men, there must be a conscious
change, whether it has been diffused through months or years, or
concentrated in one burning moment. There has been a beginning; whether
it has been like the dawn, or whether it has been like the kindling of
a candle, the beginning of the flashing of the divine light into the
heart; and the men that are most really under the influence of
religious truth can, as a rule, looking back upon their past
experience, see that it divides itself into two halves, separated from
each other by a profound gulf--the time on the other side, and that on
this side, of the great river. We must take heed lest by insisting on
any one way of entrance into the kingdom we seem to narrow God's mercy,
or sadden true hearts, or make the method of approach a test of the
fact of entrance. God's city has more than twelve gates; they open to
all the thirty-two points of the compass, yet there is, in the
religious experience of the truest saints, always something analogous
to this change. And what I desire to press upon you is, that unless you
are only religious people after the popular superficial fashion of the
day, there will be something like it in your lives.
There will be a change in a man's deepest self, so that he will be a
'new creature,' with new tastes, new motives stirring to action, new
desires pressing for satisfaction, new loves sweetly filling his heart,
new insight into the meanings and true good of life and time guiding
his conduct, new aversions withdrawing him from old delights which have
become hateful now, new hopes pluming their growing wings, and new
powers bearing him along a new road. There will be a change in his
relations to God and to God's will. God in Christ will have become his
centre, instead of self, which was so before. He lives in a new world,
being himself a new man.
Our Lord uses this very illustration when He says, 'He that heareth My
Word, and believeth Him that sent Me, hath eternal life, and cometh not
into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life.' That is a great
migration, is it not, from the condition of a corpse to that of a
living man? Paul, too, gives the same idea with a somewhat different
turn of the illustration, when he gives 'thanks to the Father who
delivered us out of the power of darkness, and translated us into the
kingdom of,'--not, as we might expect to complete the antithesis, 'the
light,' but--the 'kingdom of the Son of His love,' which is the same
thing as the light. The illustration is probably drawn from the
practice of the ancient conquering monarchs, who, when they subjugated
a country, were wont to lead away captive long files of its inhabitants
as compulsory colonists, and set them down in another land. Thus the
conquering Christ comes, and those whom He conquers by His love, He
shifts by a great emigration out of the dominion of that darkness which
is at once tyranny and anarchy, and leads them into the happy kingdom
of the light.
Thus, then, all Christian men become such, because they turn their
backs upon their old selves, and crucify their affections and lusts;
and paste down the leaf, as it were, on which their blotted past is
writ, and turn over a new and a fairer one. And my question to you,
dear brethren, is, Are you men from the other side, who were not born
where you live now, and who have passed out of the native Chaldea into
the foreign--and yet to the new self home--land of union with God?
2. This designation may be taken as teaching that a Christian should be
known as a foreigner, a man from across the water.
Everybody in Canaan that knew Abram at all knew him as not one of
themselves. The Hebrew was the name he went by, because his unlikeness
to the others was the most conspicuous thing about him, even to the
shallowest eye. Abram found himself, when he had migrated into Canaan,
in no barbarous country, but plunged at once into the midst of an
organised and compact civilisation, that walled its cities, and had the
comforts and conveniences and regularities of a settled order; and in
the midst of it all, what did he do? He elected to live in a tent. 'He
dwelt in tabernacles, as the Epistle to the Hebrews comments upon his
history, 'because he looked for a city.' The more his expectations were
fixed upon a permanent abode, the more transitory did he make his abode
here. If there had been no other city to fill his eyes, he would have
gone and lived in some of those that were in the land. If there had
been no other order to which he felt himself to belong, he would have
had no objection to cast in his lot with the order and the people with
whom he lived on friendly terms. But although he bought and sold with
them, and fought for them and by their sides, and acquired from them
land in which to bury his dead, he was not one of them, but said, 'No!
I am not going into your city. I stay in my tent under this terebinth
tree; for I am here as a stranger and a sojourner.' No doubt there were
differences of language, dress, and a hundred other little things which
helped the impression made on the men of the land by this strange
visitor who lived in amity but in separation, and they are all
crystallised in the name which the popular voice gave him, 'The man
from the other side.'
That is the impression which Christian people ought to make in the
world. They should be recognised, by even unobservant eyes who know
nothing of the inner secret of their lives, as plainly belonging to
another order. If we seek to keep fresh in our own minds the
consciousness that we do so, it will make itself manifest in all our
bearing and actions. So that exhortation to cultivate the continual
sense that our true city--the mother city of our hearts and hopes--is
in heaven is ever to be reiterated, and as constantly obeyed, as the
necessary condition of a life worthy of our true affinities and of our
glorious hopes.
Nor less needful is the other exhortation--live by the laws of your own
land, not by those of the foreign country where you are for a time. If
you do that thoroughly, you will not need to say, 'I am from another
country.' Your conduct will say it for you. An English ship is a bit of
England, in whatever latitude it may be, and however far beyond the
three-mile limit of the King's authority upon the seas it may float.
And so, wherever there is a Christian man, there is a bit of God's
kingdom, and over that little speck in the midst of the ocean of the
world the flag with the Cross on it should fly, and the laws of the
Christ should be the only laws that have currency. If it could be said
of us as Haman said to his king about the Jews, that we were a people
with laws 'diverse from those of all people,' we should be doing more
than, alas! most of us do, to honour Him whom we profess to serve.
Follow Christ, and people will be quick enough to say of you 'The man
from the other side,' 'He does not belong to our city.' There is no
need for ostentation, nor for saying, 'Come and see my zeal for the
Lord,' nor for blowing trumpets before us at street corners or
elsewhere. The less of all that the better. The more we try to do the
common things done by the folk round us, but from another motive, the
more powerful will be our witness for our Master.
For instance, when John Knox was in the French galleys, he was fastened
to the same oar with some criminal, perhaps a murderer. The two men sat
on the same bench, did the same work, tugged at the same heavy sweep,
were fed with the same food, suffered the same sorrows. Do you think
there was any doubt as to the infinite gulf between them? We may be
working side by side, at the very same tasks, and under similar
circumstances, with men that have no share in our faith, and no
sympathy with our hopes and aspirations, and yet, though doing the same
thing, it will _not_ be the same thing. And if we keep Christ before
us, and follow His steps who has left us an example, depend upon it
people will very soon find out that we are men 'from across the water.'
Notice, further, how this dissimilarity and obvious aloofness from the
order of things in which we dwell is still perfectly compatible with
all sorts of helpful associations. The context shows us that. There had
come a flood of invasion, under kings with strange and barbarous names,
from the far East. They had swept down upon the fertile valley of
Siddim, and there had inflicted devastation. Amongst the captives had
been Lot, Abram's relative, and all his goods had been taken. One
fugitive, as it appears, had escaped, and the first thing he did was to
go straight to 'the man from the other side,' and tell him about it, as
if sure of sympathy and help. No doubt the relationship between Abram
and Lot was the main reason why the panting survivor made his way to
the hills where Abram's tent was pitched, but there was also confidence
in his willingness to help the Sodomites who had lost their goods. So
it was not to the sons of Heth in Mamre that the fugitive turned in his
extremity, but he 'told Abram the Hebrew.'
I need not narrate over again the familiar story of how, for once in
his peaceful life, the 'friend of God' girds on his sword and develops
military instincts in his prompt and well-planned pursuit, which show
that if he did not try to conquer some part of the land which he knew
to be his by the will of God, it was not for want of ability, but
because he 'believed God,' and could wait. We all know how he armed his
slaves, and made a swift march to the northern extremity of the land,
and then, by a nocturnal surprise, came down upon the marauders and
scattered them like chaff, before his onset, and recovered Lot and all
the spoil.
Let us learn that, if Christian men will live well apart from the
world, they will be able to sympathise with and help the world; and
that our religion should fit us for the prompt and heroic undertaking,
as it certainly does for the successful accomplishment, of all deeds of
brotherly kindness and sympathy, bringing help and solace to the weak
and the wearied, liberty to the captives, and hope to the despairing.
I do not believe that Christian men have any business to draw swords
now. Abram is in that respect the Old Testament type of a God-fearing
hero, with the actual sword in his hands. The New Testament type of a
Christian warrior without a sword is not one jot less, but more,
heroic. The form of sympathy, help, and 'public spirit' which the 'man
from the other side' displayed is worse than an anachronism now in the
light of Christ's law. It is a contradiction. But the spirit which
breathed through Abram's conduct should be ours. We are bound to 'seek
the peace of the city' where we dwell as strangers and pilgrims,
avoiding no duty of sympathy and help, but by prompt, heroic,
self-forgetting service to all the needy, sorrowful, and oppressed,
building up such characters for ourselves that fugitives and desperate
men shall instinctively turn to men from the other side for that help
which, they know full well, the men of the country are too selfish or
cowardly to give.
May I venture to suggest yet another and very different application of
this name? To the aboriginal inhabitants of heaven, the angels that
kept their first estate, redeemed men are possessors of a unique
experience; and are the 'men from the other side.' They who entered on
their pilgrimage through the Red Sea of conversion, pass out of it
through the Jordan of death. They who become Christ's, by the great
change of yielding their hearts to Him, and who live here as pilgrims
and sojourners, pass dryshod through the stream into His presence. And
there they who have always dwelt in the sunny highlands of the true
Canaan, gather round them, and call them, not unenvying, perhaps, their
experience, 'The men that have crossed.' The 'Hebrews of the Hebrews'
in the heavens are those who have known what it is to be pilgrims and
sojourners, and to whom the promise has been fulfilled in the last hour
of their journey, 'When thou passest through the river, I will be with
thee.' _They_ teach the angels a new song who sing, 'Thou hast led us
through fire and through water, and brought us into a wealthy place.'