The sort of life that follows the venture of faith. The hindrances to
his joining Moses were plainly put by himself. He said in effect, 'I
will not come; I will depart to mine own land and to my kindred. Why
should I attach myself to a horde of strangers, and go wandering about
the desert for the rest of my life, looking out for encampments for
them, when I can return to where I have been all my days; and be
surrounded by the familiar atmosphere of friends and relatives?' But he
bethought himself that there was a nobler life to live than that, and
because he was stirred by the impulse of reliance on Moses and his
promise, and perhaps by some germ of reliance on Moses' God, he finally
said, 'The die is cast. I choose my side. I will break with the past. I
turn my back on kindred and home. Here I draw a broad line across the
page, and begin over again in an altogether new kind of life. I
identify myself with these wanderers; sharing their fortunes, hoping to
share their prosperity, and taking their God for my God.' He had
perhaps not been a nomad before, for there still are permanent
settlements as well as nomad encampments in Arabia, as there were in
those days, and he and his relatives, from the few facts that we know
of them, seem to have had a fixed home, with a very narrow zone of
wandering round it. So Hobab, an old man probably, if he was anything
like the age of his connection by marriage, Moses, who was eighty at
this time, makes up his mind to begin a new career.
Now that is what we have to do. If we have faith in Christ and His
promise, we shall not say, 'I am going back to my kindred and to my
home.' We shall be prepared to accept the conditions of a wanderer's
life. We shall recognise and feel, far more than we ever have done,
that we are indeed 'pilgrims and sojourners' here. Dear Christian
friends, we have no business to call ourselves Christ's men, unless the
very characteristic of our lives is that we are drawn ever forward by
the prospect of future good, and unless that future is a great deal
more solid and more operative upon us, and tells more on our lives,
than this intrusive, solid-seeming present that thrusts itself between
us and our true home. That is a sure saying. The Christian obligation
to live a life of detachment, even while diligent in duty, is not to be
brushed aside as pulpit rhetoric and exaggeration, but it is the
plainest teaching of the New Testament. I wish it was a little more
exemplified in the daily life of the people who call themselves
Christians.
If I am not living for the unseen and the future, what right have I to
say that I am Christ's at all? If the shadows are more than the
substance to me; if this condensed vapour and fog that we call reality
has not been to our apprehension thinned away into the unsubstantial
mist that it is, what have the principles of Christianity done for us,
and what worth is Christ's word to us? If I believe Him, the world
is--I do not say, as the sentimental poet put it, 'but a fleeting show,
for man's illusion given';--but as Paul puts it, a glass which may
either reveal or obscure the realities beyond; and according as we look
at, or look through, 'the things seen and temporal,' do we see, or
miss, 'the things unseen and eternal.' So, then, the life of faith has
for its essential characteristic--because it is a life of reliance on
Christ's bare word--that future good is consciously its supreme aim.
That will detach us, as it did Hobab, from home and kindred, and make
us feel that we are 'pilgrims and sojourners.'