The True and Better Promised Land

So my hope today with this passage is to point the eyes of our heart past this present evil age to the world that is to come for the people of God.

A little bit of context for where we're going to be today. Many of you are familiar with Hebrews chapter 11 and its recounting of the great faith of the saints of old. But a little bit of context for it. These are Christians that are tempted to go back to Judaism. Evidently, this is a Christian church made up of Jewish people. They all would have been a part of Judaism in the past, and they've become Christians, and they're tempted to go back to Judaism because of persecution, because of trials, because of all the difficult things that they've faced in the Christian life.

And the author gives his sort of thesis statement about how they need to endure and they need to have faith back in chapter 10, verses 36 and 39, where he says, for you, Hebrew church,

you have need of endurance. so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what is promised. For yet a little while, and the coming one will come and will not delay, but my righteous one shall live by faith. And if he shrinks back, my soul has no pleasure in him. But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith. and preserve their souls.

So the argument being made here is true faith will endure the Christian life all the way to the end. And so this Hebrew church that's tempted to go back to their old ways, they need to strengthen their faith. And he gives them a whole chapter of examples to follow to be able to strengthen their faith.

And so today we're gonna be focusing on a section of this chapter dealing mostly with Abraham. and how Abraham, by faith, he endured this present life because he was hoping and trusting in what was offered to him in the age to come.

Little roadmap for where we're going today, we're just gonna be looking at our passage in two points. First point, verses eight through 13, is you're not home yet. Point one, you're not home yet, and point two, desiring a heavenly country. That's gonna be verses 14 through 16.

You're not home yet

So let's dive in to point one, you're not home yet. And in this section, what we're gonna see is we're gonna see an example from Abraham and then an example from Sarah. And what we're gonna see in this example is that both of them only received in this life, a shadowy, temporary fulfillment of God's promises to them because they understood and they believed the ultimate fulfillment of these promises was going to be given to them in the age to come. So look with me at verse eight.

By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going.

So this is alluding back to Genesis 12. In Genesis 12, we see God call Abraham to take everything he had and leave his homeland and go to the land that God would show him.

And we need to understand a little bit of the cost of this. We need to sort of put ourselves in Abraham's shoes to understand the cost of this. Imagine a world back then, no police force, no social security, no retirement accounts. How do you protect yourself? How do you protect your family from danger? And even when you get past the age of being able to work and provide, how do you get provided for? Well, back in Abraham's day, it was through the extended family. These extended families would all live together. They would create these clans. The men would sort of be the police force. They would sort of be the protectors of these people And then all these extended families would also provide stability for you in your old age. Your entire security and stability was wrapped up in your extended family.

And so for God to call Abraham to leave all of this, to uproot himself from his family, and to go to a land that God would show him was at great cost. And yet Abraham believed God, he depended on God, and he went.

Look with me now in verses nine and 10.

By faith, he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.

Now I want us to sort of pick up on the contrast that's going on here. The contrast here is key to understand this passage. He says that Abraham went to live in the land of promise, and yet he did so as in a foreign land, living in tents. So this is again alluding back to Genesis 12. God leads Abraham to the land of Canaan, there in the Middle East. which we find is that land that God promised to send him to. And as he begins living in this land, the writer of Hebrews wants to make abundantly clear, he wants to make abundantly clear that when Abraham arrived in the promised land, it was nowhere near as glorious as we would expect.

this land of promise, the grand promises that God gave Abraham to give him this land, this huge land, abundant land as an inheritance, Abraham arrives and it's not anywhere near as glorious as we would think. Abraham arrives and he has to live in a tent. That's significant. I mean, even back in those times, people, not everybody lived in tents. People lived in solid house structures. But Abraham, who's really been given right to this land by God, he lived from place to place in Canaan, moving around in a tent.

So do you see the point of the contrast here? The promise of the land, the promise implies stability, it implies permanence, inheritance, ownership. And yet, what does a tent imply? Temporary. Traveling through, not at home.

You know, it makes me think as Shauna and I were preparing to move here. We didn't come and tour apartments or look around at places in person. We sort of just went online, found somewhere, really just sort of trusted that what we saw online is what we were going to get. And so we signed for a place. We knew it had square footage. It had appliances, utility bills, all of that. But what if we had showed up to the address when we moved here and there's just a tent? What would we have been thinking in that moment? We'd be thinking, this can't be it. This can't be it. There has to be, our home has to be somewhere else beyond. This can't be our home. It has to be something more, somewhere else.

And that's what Abraham experienced as he was settling down in the land of Canaan. He knew, he knew this couldn't be it. This couldn't be all that was promised to him. There had to be a place better than that. Look with me at verse 10.

He was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God.

So how did Abraham, when he arrives, he's living in tents, his Canaanite neighbors are living it up, they're having a wonderful life there at home, and he has this strange sojourning life. They're in tents. How does Abraham not come to the conclusion that God's promise was all a scam? He's been scammed. How did Abraham not come to that conclusion when he was there? Well, it was because he understood. and he trusted that God still had a better homeland for him. He just wasn't there yet.

And this is what the author of Hebrews has really been driving towards in this section. Abraham, he obviously believed in sort of a temporary, shadowy fashion, yes, his physical descendants one day would live in this land of Canaan. Abraham understood that, yes, that's true. But there is and there always has been a deeper, more Christ-centered, more ultimate fulfillment of these promises. And the author of Hebrews is pointing out that Abraham understood these things. Even if not fully, he understood. There was another homeland for him.

And it's here that I think just to gain a little bit of understanding of why this land promise. I think we need to just understand how this was not just a random gift given to Abraham. What do I mean by that? That it was not just a random gift given to Abraham. Maybe recently some of you guys were at a white elephant gift exchange over Christmas. And you know what typically happens at those. There's a cost limit. You need to sort of bring something cheap. And what a lot of people do is they sort of look around their house, find something that they really don't need, that they really don't want anymore. There's really not much thought ahead of time as to what the other person could use it for. They sort of just grab something and bring it. And so what do you end up with? You end up with really a gift that is random, sort of useless, not really any thought put towards it.

This gift of land to Abraham was not a random gift. It was not God looking around saying, I like this guy Abraham, what can I give him? Well, I have this piece of land in the Middle East to spare. That was not what God was doing with this promise. In fact, this land promise, we need to realize this was fulfilling. This was pointing towards the fulfillment of humanity's greatest need. It's pointing to the fulfillment of humanity's greatest need.

Why? Let me give two reasons. The first is this land promise is looking back to the Garden of Eden. It's reminiscent of a place where God dwelt with man, a place that God gave by his own creation, by his own determination, he gave a people to dwell with him. That's what this land promise is looking back at. And then in Abraham's day, and throughout the Old Testament, this land promise is foreshadowing. It's foreshadowing the fulfillment of humanity's greatest need because it's foreshadowing a second Eden. It's foreshadowing a remaking of Eden, a resurrection of Eden where one day God's people will dwell with him in perfect communion once again.

This was not a gift that didn't have any forethought to it. Adam and Eve, they were exiled from the Garden of Eden And where does scripture say they went when they were exiled? They went east. And Abraham, as God makes a covenant with Abraham, and God is promising Abraham a land where he could dwell with God, where does he call Abraham to go? Back west. He goes from Ur of the Chaldeans and he has to go west to Canaan. It's as if God, through all of this providential working, God is sort of saying to us, look, through this man, Abraham, I'm going to start a remaking of my people dwelling with me in a renewed Eden. And throughout the Old Testament, the land of Canaan is a sort of temporary shadowy way to fulfill a remaking of Canaan in the future. And Abraham, we find here, said to us, Abraham understood this by faith.

Now in verses 11 through 12, we switch to Sarah. It says,

by faith, Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore, from one man and him, as good as dead, were born descendants, as many of the stars of heaven, and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.

If you wanna find a place back in the Old Testament where this is specifically alluding to, you can go to Genesis 17, verse 16, where God says, referring to Sarah,

I will bless her, and moreover, I will give you a son by her. I will bless her and she shall become nations. Kings of peoples shall come from her.

Those are some grand promises given to her. And Abraham and Sarah, they believe. Just as Abraham believed, Sarah believes. And they're enabled to conceive Isaac.

But what I want to point out here is that Sarah does not end up seeing the fulfillment of this grand promise of nations coming from her, of offspring as numeral as the grains of sand on the seashore. Sarah dies without seeing any of that. She dies and only has Isaac. She only has one child by the time she dies. She died never seeing anything close to something as numerous as the stars of heaven. And this is why we hear, if you look down in verse 13,

these all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.

So Sarah would not see more than Isaac before she died. Only one child to account for this grand, glorious promise of loads of offspring. But here's the thing. In glory, what does she see? In glory, she sees not only tons and tons and tons of people like us who are children of Abraham and Sarah by faith. She sees that in glory. but she also in glory is beholding the true offspring, the one true offspring that all of this glorious promise of many offspring was pointing to. All of these many offsprings that Sarah was promised to have were for the purpose of bearing this one offspring promised to her and promised to Eve. Back in Genesis 3.15, one offspring, one man coming from Eve, coming from Sarah, coming from Sarah's offspring, One man that would undo everything Satan had done, who would crush the head of the serpent. Sarah only saw Isaac by the time she died, but look at what she's seeing now. Look at what she's beholding now, and what she'll behold forever. She will behold the Lord Jesus, that one offspring that it all pointed towards. And so though the land of Canaan was right in front of Abraham, and though little baby Isaac was right in front of Sarah, both Abraham and Sarah looked beyond to a further fulfillment in the age to come.

Endure right now with joy

So what does this mean for us? What does this mean for our lives? Well, I think there's a few applications that seem to jump off the page.

The first one Maybe you've been a Christian for a while, maybe you're a newer Christian, but maybe as you started the Christian life, you heard all these grand promises of you're gonna be joyful, you're gonna have peace that surpasses understanding, you're just gonna have such wonderful fellowship with God. Maybe you heard all these promises and you were looking forward in the Christian life to just always being happy. and always being joyful, always having peace, and yet your lived reality is that really doesn't happen as much as you want it to. And maybe you feel disappointed with your experience in the Christian life.

Friend, I just want to encourage you to keep believing because you're not home yet. You're not home yet. Yes, you will have perfect joy, As a Christian, you will have peace that perfectly surpasses all understanding forever, but you'll receive that when you finally make it home. So press on now. Endure now. You're not home yet, but all of those promises that you experience, definitely a foretaste of here, but not completely, press on and you will fully experience all of those promises when you finally make it home.

The second thing that we learned from this is that we can endure right now with joy by hoping in what we'll receive for the future. Just to illustrate this a little bit, I've heard one preacher make this point one time that say you gave me a cruise ticket, all expense paid cruise, you know, for 2032. maybe five years from now, you give me this amazing VIP pass to this wonderful cruise. The question is, would I be happy right now? Would I be joyful today? The answer is yes. All of us, I think, would be, but also the question is why? I still have to wait five more years for this cruise, so why am I happy today? The answer is because the hope of what I have coming makes me joyful right now. And friends, the greatest way to be filled with joy as a Christian is not to look at what you have right now, it is to look at what you have coming for you in the age to come. That inheritance that is perfectly safe for the saints, kept for you in heaven, You will have that one day, and the more you let that become a reality in your heart, the more you hope for that day, the more you can endure with joy anything right now.

Desiring a heavenly country

That leads us to point two, desiring a heavenly country. Look with me in verse 14.

for people who speak thus, make it clear that they are seeking a homeland.

So the author here, what he's saying is people like Abraham, like Isaac, like Jacob and Sarah, apparently at some point, they have clearly even spoken that they were strangers and they were exiles on this earth. We see a great example of this in Genesis 23, four. where Abraham, while he is in Canaan, while he is in this land that God promised to him, he says,

I am a sojourner and a foreigner.

He's in the land of Canaan and he calls himself a sojourner and a foreigner. And the author of Hebrews is thinking back to statements like this. And he's thinking, if Abraham, while he's in the promised land, while he's in Canaan, if even there he calls himself a stranger, a sojourner, a foreigner, how much more is that true for him in all the earth? How much more must that mean that in all the earth there is no real, full, eternal homeland for him? It must be in the age to come.

We see then further proof of Abraham's mindset as a sojourner in verses 15 and 16. Verses 15 and 16 of Hebrews 11.

If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country that is a heavenly one.

So his point is with all the trials and famines and wars and all of these crazy things that Abraham experienced while he was in Canaan, Abraham fully had the opportunity to go back to Ur of the Chaldeans where he was from. Just to give up on all of it, go back to his extended family and all of those connections he had back in Ur of the Chaldeans. Abraham had the opportunity to do that. And yet he didn't. Because he no longer considered that his homeland. He gave up on his old ways of life. And he was seeking for a homeland that this world could not offer.

And so I must ask, dear Christian, are you looking for a better homeland? For those of you who are believers in this room and maybe have experienced some of the deepest, darkest, trauma that you could experience in this life, are you consistently longing and looking for that homeland where all of the pain caused will be gone? For those of you who feel like maybe your life just seems like a continuous dark winter of depression, are you consistently longing for that eternal day of spring. For those of you who feel maybe endlessly exhausted by just fighting your own sin and your own corruption day by day and it's exhausting, are you enduring by consistently longing and looking for that day when we will be like him perfectly because we'll see him as he is? And for all of us who are just groaning, wanting to be with the Lord, are you reminding yourself daily that will happen? I'll be with him one day. Do everything, brothers and sisters, do everything you can to set your gaze towards that great day.

God is not ashamed

Our passage ends with some of the sweetest words that could ever be given to saints here on earth. Look at the last half of verse 16.

Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God.

Isn't that wonderful?

Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city.

What comfort to weary saints.

You read through the lives of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, And they, honestly, they were messed up. They were sinners. Their faith was often so weak, they did unspeakable things that were inconsistent with what they believed. And yet, even in their failures, God is not ashamed to be called their God. Despite all of their issues, how did God deal with them? as they're sojourning to another land.

Well, we know how God thought about them, because all throughout the rest of the Old Testament, there's times when God wants to refer to himself, and how does he refer to himself? He refers to himself as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. How wonderful is that? These sinners, these corrupted men who had so much failure in their lives, Like a father who is so proud of his children, he says, look, you want to know who I am? I am the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob. He was not ashamed. God was not ashamed to identify himself, even with his imperfect people.

Brothers and sisters, even through all of your failures, all of your failures on your way to heaven, God is not ashamed to be called your God. And he will prove that one day by giving you a city. He is preparing for you a city right now. And he is so unashamed to be your God and for you to be his people. And one day he'll open the gates wide and he'll usher all of us in. How wonderful is that?

What hinders us from desiring this country?

Well, I just want to end with some application and just consider what hinders us from desiring this country? What hinders us from desiring this heavenly land? I want to go through four things. Four things that hinder us from desiring this heavenly country.

And the first one is a lack of understanding. We don't desire the age to come as we ought to, because we don't understand it. We don't understand what the Bible teaches about it. Obviously, we'll never fully understand until we get there what it'll be like, but the Bible does give us some things to understand what it will be like. And I wanna address specifically one, what I think is one of the main misunderstandings about heaven, about eternity. And that misunderstanding is that eternity will not be physical. That eternity will not be physical.

Many of us have this picture in our mind of eternity where we're just gonna be these souls floating around, you know, maybe on the clouds for eternity. And to be honest, we struggle to relate to that. And so we don't long for it. Many of us sort of just have this ethereal picture of eternity that we really don't know what it's gonna be like. It's probably gonna be nothing like this, because we're just gonna be sort of souls floating around forever. Friends, that is not what eternity is gonna be like. And I think what we've misunderstood here, we've misunderstood to distinguish between what scripture teaches about what we call the intermediate state and the eternal state.

So what is the intermediate state? The intermediate state is right now, before the Lord Jesus returns. In this age, when believers die, their souls go to be with the Lord, while their bodies are still here. And this intermediate state, don't get me wrong, it's glorious. Paul, when he writes about it, he says,

I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.

Meaning it's far better than this earth. The intermediate state is glorious. All the saints who have died are there right now and they're rejoicing. It is a glorious place. And notice Paul said,

I desire to depart and be with Christ.

So you can be assured you will be with Jesus immediately, believer, at your death in the intermediate state.

But we need to understand this intermediate state is temporary. And it's temporary because it's unnatural. we were meant to be body and soul, united together. And so this eternal state begins when our Lord Jesus gloriously returns and he raises the dead, and he remakes the earth. In a sense, he resurrects the earth, gets rid of all the corruption. And we will have resurrected glorified bodies, just as physical as his glorified body. We will be in a place just as physical as the Garden of Eden. A real, physical, tangible experience in our glorified bodies of wonder and awe. That is the eternal state. That is what we can look forward to.

So many of us don't look forward to eternity because we think it's not going to be physical. It's not really something we can even imagine right now, but friends, In a very limited way, we can imagine it. Because we are physical beings right now, and just picture a physical life without sin or any corruption whatsoever. That will be eternity. That is the ultimate hope of the people of God, and that is the heavenly city that's being discussed here in this passage. It's referred to as a heavenly city because on that day, heaven will come down to earth. and the two will be united together.

The second thing that hinders us from desiring that country is overestimating the world's pleasures. We are tempted to trust way too much in what the world promises us. And that is a huge, huge danger in us not being able to long for heaven. Picture a traveler on his way home, on his way to his glorious city, back home, and he gets so distracted with things on the side of the road that he never makes it home. He never arrives. Brothers and sisters, there is a great danger of being pulled in by the pleasures of the world. and not longing for our heavenly home. Beware of that.

The third thing that hinders us from desiring that country is a lack of trials. Many of us are under very, very severe trials, but some of us go through seasons where life is pretty comfortable. Life is actually going pretty great. We have all the necessities and even tons of creature comforts. And we need to recognize that there's a danger there as well. There's a danger that we will start being so comfortable in this world that any longing for another world is gone. And it can paralyze our faith. Young people in this room, children, teens, maybe you're in this situation. Maybe you're in a wonderful home, you're provided for everything you need, and really you have a very comfortable life. I plead with you, do not let that hinder you from desiring that heavenly country. Trials will come to you. They will come. As you get older, you will experience some of the deepest trials this world can offer. And will you be ready on that day when trials come to long for that heavenly place you've been longing for your whole life?

Finally, the last thing that hinders us from desiring the age to come is maybe you don't long for the age to come because you don't love the king that is there. Maybe you don't love the Lord Jesus. Maybe you don't know the Lord Jesus. And so you don't care about eternity to come because you don't want him. All of this glorious world, friend, if you are not a Christian, all of this glorious world that's been discussed, it's not for you unless you turn and come to the Lord. In fact, unless you turn to the Lord Jesus and accept his offer of this heavenly land, what's left for you is a world of judgment that's described as eternal fire and torment. That's what will be given to you because You and your sin would rather have that than have this heavenly city. Friend, don't let that happen to yourself. And don't wait to receive the free offer that the God of the universe and the king of this heavenly city is offering to you today. And friend, you never know when that offer will expire, when the Lord Jesus returns and there's no more time. The offer is open, the gates are open for all who would repent. and believe and trust in the Lord Jesus and his work to take away your sin. Take that offer today, friend, if you do not know the Lord.

Well, as I conclude, let me just leave us with a question to discuss maybe later today when you're at lunch this week. What are you most looking forward to? We're looking forward to all sorts of things in this life that are good. There's nothing wrong with looking forward to things in this life, but the key is what are you most looking forward to?

Friend, as we're on our way, to this heavenly city. Let us help each other to never lose sight of where we're going. Let us help each other to never be drawn aside by what's on the side of the road alluring us. Let us keep on the path and encourage each other to that great city.

Let's pray. Lord God, again, just how marvelous it is that your people, you are not ashamed to be their God. And you show you are not ashamed to be their God by preparing a city that together, all of us believers in this room, we will walk into together rejoicing one day. Lord, that land where you are will heal everything in this world and everything within us, and we thank you for that.

And Lord, make us people who are not just focused on what our eyes can see, but on your return and on the age to come. In Jesus' name, amen.