Verse 19
Taken together, these words set forth our condition as strangers and pilgrims on the earth, and God's bountiful provision for meeting that condition in Christ.
I. The fact that we are strangers is forced upon us by our ignorance. Apart from revelation, we know almost nothing of the world we live in, and absolutely nothing of its Lord. In every age and to every thinking soul arise the great questions, Who sent me into this earth? Why am I here? Whither am I going? A yearning for replies to these questions springs up in every heart. "O unknown Maker, I am a stranger on the earth; hide not Thy laws from me." The Gospel is God's answer to this cry. It is the revelation of the light which is behind sun and stars. Christ puts that great word "Father" into all our thoughts. He lifts the light of it over the whole universe. And the knowledge and glory of a living, loving, personal Father stream in upon us from every side.
II. Our sins still more than our ignorance have put the sense of strangeness into our hearts and the marks of it upon our countenance. When the soul awakens to spiritual consciousness and finds itself in the presence of this great truth of the Fatherhood of God, the first fact which confronts it is a sense of farness from the Father. It is God's mercy that He has not left us to rest in this depth of strangeness. He has made a way for us in Christ the new and living way by the blood. God's own Son has died to put our estrangement away. "We are no more strangers and foreigners." The blood has brought us near.
III. Another proof that we are strangers is the estrangement we find among men. Of this problem also the solution is provided in the Gospel. Christ comes as the great Uniter and Binder together. He comes sowing over all the waste of estrangement and alienation this healing word: "One is your Father." He comes with the grand purpose of binding those who receive that word into a holy and abiding fellowship.
IV. The last and saddest mark of the stranger upon us is death. If there had been no light for this shadow, how great our misery should be. But, blessed be God, He has not hidden the future from His child. This also is laid bare to our hungering hearts in Christ. A home awaits us beyond the grave. A new life blooms for us in the very presence of God. Our torn and suffering earthly existence is to be crowned with: glory and immortality in the world of the risen dead. Christ the Resurrection! Christ the Life! that is our song in the home on which the shadows have begun to fall.
A. Macleod, Days of Heaven upon Earth, p. 291.
References: Psalms 119:20 . Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xxvii., No. 1586. Psalms 119:24 . J. R. Macduff, Good Words, 1861, p. 525.
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