All those who really have faith in Jesus Christ are 'strangers of the
Dispersion'; scattered throughout the world, and dwelling dispersedly in
an order of things to which they do not belong, 'seeking a city which
hath foundations.' The word 'strangers' means, originally, persons for a
time living in an alien city. And that is the idea that the Apostle
would impress upon us as true for each of us, in the measure in which
our Christianity is real. For, remember, although all men may be truly
spoken of as being 'pilgrims and sojourners upon the earth' by reason of
both the shortness of the duration of their earthly course and the
disproportion between their immortal part and the material things
amongst which they dwell, Peter is thinking of something very different
from either the brevity of earthly life or the infinite necessities of
an immortal spirit when he calls his Christian brethren strangers. Not
because we are men, not because we are to die soon, and the world is to
outlast us; not because other people will one day live in our houses and
read our books and sit upon our chairs, and we shall be forgotten, but
because we are Christ's people are we here sojourners, and must regard
this as not our rest. Not because our immortal soul cannot satisfy
itself, however it tries, upon the trivialities of earth any more than a
human appetite can on the husks that the swine do eat, but because new
desires, tastes, aspirations, affinities, have been kindled in us by the
new life that has flowed into us; therefore the connection that other
men have with the world, which makes some of them altogether 'men of the
world, whose portion is in this life,' is for us broken, and we are
strangers, scattered abroad, solitary, not by reason of the inevitable
loneliness in which, after all love and companionship, every soul lives;
not by reason of losses or deaths, but by reason of the contrariety
between the foundation of our lives, and the foundation of the lives of
the men round us; therefore we stand lonely in the midst of crowds;
strangers in the ordered communities of the world.
Ah, there is no solitude so utter as the solitude of being the only man
in a crowd that has a faith in his heart, and there is no isolating
power like the power of rending all ties that true attachment with Jesus
Christ has. 'Think not that I am come to bring peace on earth, but a
sword'--to set a man against his own household, if they be not of the
household of faith. These things are the inevitable issues of
religion--to make us strangers, isolated in the midst of this world.