ABRAM THE HEBREW
by Alexander Maclaren
'And there came one that had escaped, and told
Abram the Hebrew.' -- GENESIS xiv. 13.
This is a singular designation of Abram as 'The
Hebrew.' Probably we
have in its use here a trace of the customary
epithet which he bore
among the inhabitants of Canaan, and perhaps the
presence of the
name in this narrative may indicate the influence of
some older
account, traditional or written, which owed its
authorship to some
of them. At all events, this is the first appearance
of the name in
Scripture. As we all know, it has become that of the
nation, but a
Jew did not call himself a 'Hebrew' except in
intercourse with
foreigners. As in many other cases, the national
name used by other
nations was not that by which the people called
themselves. Here,
obviously, it is not a national name, for the very
good reason that
there was no nation then. It is a personal epithet,
or, in plain
English, a nickname, and it means, probably, as the
ancient Greek
translation of Genesis gives it, neither more nor
less than 'The man
from the other side,' the man that had come across
the water. Just
as a mediaeval prince bore the _sobriquet_ Outremere-the
'man
from beyond the sea'--so Abram, to the aboriginal,
or, at least,
long-settled, inhabitants of the country, was known
simply as the
foreigner, the 'man from the other side' (of the
Jordan, or more
probably of the great river Euphrates), the man from
across the
water.
Now that name may suggest, with a permissible, and,
I hope, not
misleading play of fancy, just two things, which I
seek now to press
upon our hearts and consciences. The one is as to
how men become
Christians, and the other is as to how they look to
other people
when they are.
1. Men become Christians by a great emigration.
'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.'
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