Timothy to Hebrews - The Preterist Archive

546 Hebrews XI. 8-19.
fulness nnd power of the Lord tlian on what was visible;
he shewed,
therefore, that he had that state of mind which the author in the
foregoing section had required of his readers, and which, in respect
of its main substance, he had called faith.—It was a demonstration
of the same state of mind when Abraham, as well as Isaac and
Jacob (ver. 9), went into the laud which was promised to him as
into a strange land, so that he had to dwell in tents (wander through
it nomad-like), just where he found sufferance. He (as well as
Isaac and Jacob) might have gone back, and dwelt in Mesopotamia
as a settled home (as is shewn at length ver. 15). From what
other motive did the patriarchs prefer wandering in a strange land
to dwelling in their native land, than that, beUeving in the promise
of God, they obeyed the command of God ? Their eye was directed
(ver. 10) not to the present and momentary, but to the future
and heavenly, to the Messing which God had promised to the
seed of Abraham, and through him to man, to the promised restoration
of the relation of God to man which sin had disturbed.
This promised blessing our author now designates as " the city
having settled foundations whose builder and maker is God." The
expression must, first of all, be explained from the antithesis to the
teids in which Abraham lived. That which gave him strength to
renounce a present and earthly home, and to pass his life in light
unfixed tents, was the expectation of a future settled city. Many
erroneously explain this city of the heavenly blessedness which
Abraham (for his own person) hoped to find after his death. Tliis
is altogether unhistorical ; Abraham expected after his death to be
gathered to his fathers in Sheol. Grotius, Clcricus, and others
somewhat better refer the rroAi^- to the (earthly) city of Jerusalem.
This, doubtless, is the idea of ver. 10, that Abraham—on account of
the glory promised to his seed (for t^edtx^ro yap is cpexegctical of rr/f
trrayyeAta^, ver. 9), not, however, on account of the individual blessedness
subjectively hoped for by him—underwent the inconveniences
of a life-long pilgrimage. But Grotius and Clericus err, when they
limit this objective promise to the earthly building of the earthly
Jerusalem. Our author, even for the salce of his readers^ who clung
with a talse tenacity to the earthly Jerusalem, would certainly
not have said that the earthly Jerusalem was that, pn account of
which Abraham renounced a settled dwelling-place. He rather denotes
by that " settled city founded by God himself," which he
places in opposition to Abraham's transitory tents, the entire and
total inqjort tf t/ie thcocratical promise, and he does tliis, so as that in
the form of the designation, he docs not confine
himself to the nndcreloped
intuition which Abraham had in his lifetime of the future
blessing and salvation (for Abraham had as yet, in general, heard
nothing of a "city," of the earthly Jerusalem, as little as of the