Hebrews 11:16 Commentary and Bible Study

Why was Abraham not settled in Canaan to which God had called him? Was it because he still regarded Ur as his true fatherland? No. That should be obvious, says the writer of Hebrews, because if he had thought like that he could easily have gone back to where he came from. If his heart was yearning for the security and sophistication of Ur, it was still there waiting for him at the end of a journey he had already completed once. No, this language showed that Abraham was not just a foreigner and a sojourner in Canaan, but he was a foreigner anywhere on earth – in Canaan, or in Mesopotamia, or in Egypt. There was nowhere on earth that he could call his permanent home. He aspired to something much more enduring and more wonderful than any earthly country.He was not just a pilgrim in the land of Canaan but in the whole of his earthly life. This was a matter of Abraham seeing that life in this world is viewed by every believer as a temporary posting. The heart of every believer yearns to see God face to face, but in this world he remains the invisible God. The believer longs to be free from sin, but in this life, even after conversion, sin continues to be a source of daily consternation. The believer groans within himself under the sentence of death, waiting for the redemption of the body. Nobody can rest completely while they know there much ground still to cover to reach their destination.‘Wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God.’ Do we see the depths and the significance of that? If we look to the future and we reflect on heaven, and we fix our eyes on that and that shapes our perspective the way we look at everything, then God is not ashamed of us, indeed God is especially delighted to bless us and to hold us on course and to prepare for us a heavenly hereafter. If we exercising that gift then God is not embarrassed by us, not ashamed that we bear his name.God has constructed a city for his people, to be our eternal home. It is more wonderful than any city on earth. It is of vast dimensions, a place from which all wickedness is excluded, and where all sorrow, crying, pain and tears are kept out; even death itself is shut out of that city: it is the New Jerusalem. There, God will be their God and they shall be his people.