For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
Hebrews 11:10 (NIV)
Tents Inside the Promised Land
A tent has no foundations. That is most of what a tent is, a thing made to come down and go up again somewhere else, and the man in this passage went on living in one after he got there.
Abraham was called to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, and he obeyed and went without knowing where he was going. Then he arrived, and put up a tent. He made his home in the promised land the way a person makes a home in a foreign country, and Isaac did the same, and Jacob after him. Three generations were heirs of the one promise and went on living in tents on the ground it covered.
For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. Abraham pitched his tent on land he had been promised, and he looked past it at something with a floor under it that somebody else had built.
How he felt about any of that goes unreported. What he did is on the page, and so is what he was looking at, and nobody in the passage explains himself. Whether the tents got easier is not recorded either.
A person can live a long time inside an arrangement that was meant to be short. Rentals taken for one year run to a fourth. Schedules get built around somebody else’s treatment and stay built that way after everyone has stopped calling it temporary. Faith in this passage looks like staying put in something provisional for years and holding the promise good, with no date given for when it ends.
He did not receive the things promised. He saw them from a distance and welcomed them, and he admitted to being a foreigner in the country he had been promised. People who admit that much, this chapter says, are looking for a country of their own.
Abraham lived in tents on land he had been promised, looking at a city whose builder was God.
A Prayer to Remember
There is someone I am not going to name, and you know what her year has been. People have stopped asking her about it. Keep her looking further out than this year, and send her somebody this week who does not need the story explained again. Thank you for what you have already done where she cannot see it.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
