I was made aware today of two verses that I've never seen before that add, for me, an additional background to Abraham and the rest of us sojourners. Leviticus 25:23 which has the phrase, "for you are strangers and sojourners with Me." And then David in Psalm 39:12 "Do not be silent at my tears, for I am a stranger with You, a sojourner. . ." I don't know what you hear in these words, but for me, they spoke a new kind of understanding for all the alienation and "not belonging" that I have felt. It is not merely that we walk as strangers in a realm that cannot be our true home, but that He--along with us--is a stranger as well.
These verses seem to say, to me at least, that God is a transient in His own creation as much as we, that we are two of a kind--sojourners on our alone trek. What a new impetus to embrace that foreign soil! I guess if you think of it rightly, then we know that Calvary was not the only experience of forsakenness known to the heart of God, but actually expressed at a certain point in history what God had always been from eternity--self-sacrificial love: "the lamb slain from before the foundation of the world." Perhaps there is always something inherently alienating (as we look forsakenness in the eye) about True Uncreated Love (which is what we carry within us) as it crosses in the night its holy abyss. If that is true, as I'm coming to believe it is, then our "alienation" is a deeper fellowship into the heart of God than any previously known. He, as God, has dared to share even this . . . with us. |
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August 2021
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