|
The UK Bible Students Website Christian Biblical Studies |
COMING HOME
All Scripture citations are to the New
International Version UK print edition of 1984, unless noted
otherwise.
Keep the Home-fires burning,
While your hearts are yearning,
Though your lads are far away
They dream of Home.
There's a silver lining
Through the dark cloud shining;
Turn the dark cloud inside out,
Till the boys come Home
— Lena Guilbert Ford; Ivor Novello
_____________________________________________
THE WORDS OF this popular British song, composed in 1914,
the first year of the Great War, expressed the yearnings of wives and mothers
waiting for husbands and sons to return from the front, and the longings of the
soldiers themselves to get back home to the way things used to
be.
But the conflict would rumble on for another four heart-wrenching years. By the time the Armistice was signed at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, millions of soldiers and civilians would be dead or dreadfully wounded, and a new and revolutionary phase of history would begin. The pre-war notions of home and hearth had gone up in the smoke of the battlefield.
A Weighty
Word
The lament of the expatriate or the homeless
wanderer has been the poignant theme of literature over the ages. In his short
tale of fiction, The Man Without a Country, Edward Everett Hale portrays
the fate of a treasonous American army lieutenant, banished from his country,
doomed to sail the oceans for the rest of his life, deprived of any contact with
or knowledge of his homeland. Written in 1863, in the midst of the American
Civil War, the aim of the story was to promote familial feelings in the South
for the people of the North, encouraging them to return ʻhomeʼ to a union with
their brethren.
What Is Home? Where Is
It?
The real estate business may actually trade in
buildings structures of cold brick and mortar but it prefers to sell them
through appeals to emotion under the warmer description, ʻhomesʼ. In any
language or culture the word evokes sentiments of security and contentment. A
favourite song of 1956, ʻA House With Love In Itʼ, extols such a transformation:
A house with love in it is rich indeed,
Although there are a
thousand things that house may need.
The carpet may be old, the room so plain
and bare,
And yet it's
beautiful somehow when love is living there.
A house with love in it just
seems to bloom,
As though the month
of May were filling every room.
So darling, through the years with all my
heart I'll pray
A house with love in it is where we'll stay.
– Sydney Lippman and Sylvia Dee
In his allegory, Pilgrim's Progress, published in 1684, John Bunyan traces the perilous and tiresome journey of the wayfarer ʻChristianʼ, whose destination is the Celestial City, his prospective heavenly home. Along the way he meets characters of varying degrees of integrity and faithfulness. Into the mouth of one character, a Mr. Stand-fast, Bunyan puts his own sentiments:
I see myself now at the end of my journey, my toilsome days are ended. I am going now to see that head that was crowned with thorns, and that face that was spit upon for me. I have formerly lived by hearsay and faith; but now I go where I shall live by sight, and shall be with him in whose company I delight myself.
Jesus and His
Disciples
Shortly before His dramatic departure from them, Jesus consoled His disciples with the prospect of their being welcomed into a heavenly home (John 14: 2):
In my Father's house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you.
Reading this in reverse, the thought is that of a spot in a room in a house. At the time the disciples could have had no concept of a heavenly existence, but it was sufficient for them to know that they would be with Him. For having already taken the counter-intuitive step of leaving their native homes, families and religion to wander the hills of Judaea with Him, they had become spiritual expats, committing their all to the service of Christ. They had, in the words of Peter, ʻleft everything to followʼ Him. In reply, Jesus assured them that no-one who has left home or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age . . . and in the age to come, eternal life. – Mark 10: 28-30
Along with such a high privilege, however, would come persecutions, a feature of the Christian's experiences in this life, even to the present day.
Jesus Homesick
As to Jesus Himself, He was looking forward to returning home, to be with His Father. He had previously expressed such a yearning in the words recorded in John 17: 5
And now, Father, glorify me in your presence with the glory I had with you before the world began.
Here Jesus alludes to His pre-human existence as the Word (logos; John 1: 1). As the Word of God, He was second only to Jehovah Himself, having been granted a near-almighty power to administer the plans and purposes of God, even to the extent of creating the universe (Heb. 1: 10). But Jesus was not merely reinstated into this office at His ascension. Because of His faithfulness unto death God promoted Him to an even greater authority, as shown in Phil. 2: 9-11:
9 Therefore God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, 11 and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
Compare these verses with those of Colossians 1: 15-20:
15. He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. 16. For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him. 17. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy. 19. For God was pleased to have all his fulness dwell in him, 20. and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.
The underlying implication of these passages is that God the
Father and Jesus the Son are separate and distinct. God is always and
ever above all and will not give His supremacy to another. [For a more-detailed
treatment of the relationship between the Son and the Father, consult the
series, The Stoning of Christ, elsewhere on this
site.]
_________________________________
The earth is all the home I have,
The heavens my wide roof-tree.
— W.E. Aytoun, The Wandering Jew (1867) —
The Scriptures say of Abraham that he left his own country and ʻby faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country . . . for he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is Godʼ (Heb. 11: 9, 10).
Here we see the essence of faith in motion. Put another way, a self-denying faith requires a migration from one point of view (ours), to another (Christ's). In short, it is necessary that the woman or man of faith transport a natural, primary notion of ʻhomeʼ to the higher, exalted meaning of the term, one over which Christ is Lord.
Jesus gives us the clue when He says that the ʻSon of Man has nowhere to lay his headʼ (Matt. 8: 20). He did not mean that He couldn't find a lay-by in which to sleep, but rather that He would not be satisfied until His mission was accomplished which was nothing less than the redemption of humanity from sin and death, to be achieved through His own death. We can be eternally grateful that Christ put others before Himself. Where would we be without His self-denial?
And as it was to Abraham, the father of the faithful, this world is to the Christian little more than a pied-a-terre a place to plant our feet until the permanent home comes along. This does not mean that we neglect our family, nor love them any less. To the contrary, in loving Christ more than our closest family and friends we gain a hundred-fold increase in our appreciation of them, if we allow a Christ-like love to permeate all we say and do.
Although we spurn the tawdry and squalid things of earth, we should continue to appreciate what is good and noble about it and the people around us. After all, every person is a putative daughter or son of Christ, because He died for everyone (1 Tim. 2: 5, 6 ʻransom for allʼ; 1 John 2: 1, 2; ʻHe is the atoning sacrifice for . . . sins of the whole worldʼ).
The Kingdom the Key
But salvation for the world can come only during the Kingdom of Christ on earth a real, concrete kingdom, under which truth and righteousness will prevail. This will see the beginning of a permanent, everlasting home for the human family, who have suffered much under the Permission of Evil. They have learned much, too, and will eventually come to understand and value the bitter experiences of the present life, and will enter enthusiastically into the benefits of mental and physical health then on offer, accepting Christ as their Redeemer. Then the promise to Abraham will begin to come into action: ʻall nations of the earth will be blessedʼ (Gen. 22: 18).
The Kingdom of Christ is a time of resurrection of the non-elect dead and of thorough restoration, returning the human family to a paradise, like man's original home. Humanity will be knit into a global family in an eternal Eden. In one sense, this uncountable, surging mass will be returning to a home they have never known and yet have unconsciously anticipated. The unfamiliar will be oddly familiar. For God, having planned their salvation through Christ from before the establishment of earth, has built into the human constitution a yearning for deliverance from the trials and tribulations of life under the curse of sin and death (Rom. 8: 20, 21):
20. The creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one [God] who subjected it, in hope 21. that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.
The proclamation of such a prospect is the essence of the Gospel – that Christ died and rose and is coming to offer an opportunity for life to all. He left His home to prepare a new and magnificent one for the entire human family, and gave His life to guarantee it.
Quite through the streets with silver sound
The flood of life doth flow,
Upon whose banks on every side
The wood of life doth grow:
There trees for evermore bear fruit,
And evermore do spring.
— G.W. Fink, Jerusalem My Home
_______________________
March 2014. Author rights asserted, except that you may reproduce this article without express permission, but please acknowledge its source.