This week we continue our look at biblical images that serve as windows into aspects of the Christian life by looking at the imagery of the Christian pilgrimage.
Psalmists of long ago looked upon a godly life in terms of a pilgrimage. For example, in Psalm 84:5, the writer declared, “Blessed is the man whose strength is in You, whose heart is set on pilgrimage.”
For ancient Jews, a highlight of life was one of the annual religious pilgrimages that took them to Jerusalem for special times of worship and celebration.
For those whose hearts were devoted to these observances, special blessings awaited them in the holy city. Psalm 119:54 records a religious pilgrim’s testimony of the glad devotion he felt to God’s law while in the temple: “Your statutes have been my songs in the house of my pilgrimage.”
Strangers in the land
Some of us spent our early years as members of Royal Ambassadors in our local church. That experience introduced us to the RA hymn, “The King’s Business,” which opens with the words, “I am a stranger here, within a foreign land;/ My home is far away, upon a golden strand.” Behind this imagery is the idea of being a pilgrim in a land not our own.
Similarly, the gospel song “This World is Not My Home” opens with the imagery of pilgrimage: “This world is not my home, I’m just a-passing through./ My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue./ The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door,/ And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore.”
Seeking the ‘city to come’
After listing the faithful saints of the past in Hebrews 11, the writer makes the summary declaration, “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off were assured of them, embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (v. 13). The next verse (v. 14) implies the Christian life is a pilgrimage, declaring, “For here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come.”
Two of the basic premises of this “spiritual pilgrims” imagery are the implications about what we are and how we are to live. By faith, we live with a firm grip on God’s promise of an eternal future of blessedness. At the same time, we keep a loose grip on the things of this world as we pass through on our way to “the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God” (Heb. 11:10).
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