Psalms 146: 9 … The Lord watches over the sojourner…
From God’s perspective, we are all aliens or sojourners. Our permanent dwelling place is heaven, where Jesus is now building a room/mansion/place for us to dwell forever with Him.
On this basis, we are urged in 1 Peter 2:11 “Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul.” It is the same basis for the Psalmist praying in Psalms 119:19 “I am a sojourner on earth, hide not Thy commandments from me!”
From the very beginning of Israel, when the Jews made their exodus from Egypt into the Promised Land, God gave specific instructions regarding the treatment of aliens, exiles or ‘non-Jews’. In Deut 23:7,8 “You shall not abhor an Edomite, for he is your brother. You shall not abhor an Egyptian, because you were an alien in his land.”
He is reminding the Jews: “You lived in Egypt once, for many, many generations. You ‘sojourned’ there. Now, that you have your ‘own’ land, you are to treat any ‘non-Jews’ with dignity and respect. You are not to ‘abhor’ them, for ‘he is your brother’.” God even grants ‘citizenship’ to the offspring of the aliens in Deut 23:8, “The children of the third generation born to them may enter the assembly of the Lord.”
In the bigger scope, God goes even further. You think that the land is yours, but it is not. The land is Mine. Lev 25:23 ‘The land shall not be sold permanently, for the land is Mine; for you are strangers and sojourners with Me.” Also, in Psalms 24:2, “The earth is the Lord and the fullness thereof…” We are to never lose our ‘sojourner’ mentality. We belong to a different land, a different kingdom, a heavenly, permanent, eternal kingdom.
I think about this when Obama says that he will not deport 800,000 ‘aliens’, ‘sojourners’ and offspring of ‘aliens’ who have lived in this land for 15-20 years. I think about this when the UN claims ‘human rights violations’ against America when the ‘white’ sojourners infiltrated from Europe and took over the land from ‘native’ Americans. I think about this when one Indian tribe! would massacre another tribe to take over their land. Where does it stop? Who really ‘owns’ the land? Nobody. God owns the land. We are all ‘sojourners’. We just don’t all recognize it.
