Sojourners in TentsStrangers on earth, citizens of heaven, on the way home

The tent outlasts the house

Ask a builder which will stand longer, a house or a tent, and he will not need time to think. A house has foundations, walls, and a door that locks. A tent is cloth and rope, and a strong wind can carry it off.

Solomon’s proverb gives the opposite result. The house is destroyed and the tent flourishes. The Hebrew word for the tent is אֹהֶל (ohel), the ordinary word for the shelter of a shepherd or a traveler, and the word for flourish is the one used of a plant that buds and blossoms. The proverb pictures a tent that grows like a living thing while the solid house beside it comes down.

The difference is in who lives inside, not in the materials. The house belongs to the wicked and the tent to the upright, and God decides what becomes of each. So what looks permanent in this world may not be, and what looks temporary may be the thing that lasts.

The rest of the Bible takes up that picture. From Abraham to the apostles, God’s people are described as sojourners, people staying for a time in a land that is not their own. They live in tents because they are strangers in the place where they are staying. They are citizens of another country, their wealth is kept there, and their home is still ahead of them. The New Testament says this of every believer, and Paul returns to it in letter after letter. This article follows what it says: who we are in this world, where we belong, where our treasure is, what kind of house we live in, how such people live, and where the road ends.

Aliens and strangers

The apostle Peter wrote his first letter to Christians scattered across five regions of what is now Turkey. He begins by saying what they are: “those who reside as aliens” (1 Peter 1:1). In the second chapter he says it again and builds a command on it.

¹¹Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul.

1 Peter 2:11 · NASB95

He uses two Greek words, and each has its own picture. The first is πάροικος (paroikos), translated alien. The second is παρεπίδημος (parepidemos), translated stranger.

Together they say that a Christian lives in a place without belonging to it, and that he will not be there long. Peter has a third expression for the same thing when he tells his readers how to conduct themselves “during the time of your stay on earth” (1 Peter 1:17).

Peter is not talking about immigration. A man could have lived all his life in the town where he was born and still be, in Peter’s sense, an alien there. What had changed was not his address but his birth: God “has caused us to be born again to a living hope” (1 Peter 1:3). A person born a second time has a second homeland, and from that day he is a foreigner in the first.

Abraham never unpacked

The book of Hebrews goes back to the first man who lived this way. God called Abraham out of the city of Ur, promised him a land, and brought him into it. Then for a hundred years Abraham lived in that land as a visitor.

⁹By faith he lived as an alien in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, fellow heirs of the same promise; ¹⁰for he was looking for the city which has foundations, whose architect and builder is God.

Hebrews 11:9-10 · NASB95

He was not poor. Genesis says he “was very rich in livestock, in silver and in gold” (Genesis 13:2), and he could have built a house in any town he liked. He stayed in a tent because he understood what the land was to him for the present: promised, and not yet given. Stephen put it in one line: God “gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot of ground” (Acts 7:5). The only piece of Canaan Abraham ever owned was a field with a burial cave in it, and when he went to buy it he introduced himself to the sellers with the words, “I am a stranger and a sojourner among you” (Genesis 23:4).

Hebrews notices one more thing. A tent has no foundations, only pegs, and Abraham was looking for the city that has them. He lived in something temporary because he was waiting for something permanent, and he would not mistake the one for the other.

He was not the only one to say it. The same confession comes from people who had every reason to feel at home.

Hebrews sums them up: they “confessed that they were strangers and exiles on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13). Then it adds that they could have gone back. Ur was still there, and nothing stopped Abraham from returning to it. “But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God; for He has prepared a city for them” (Hebrews 11:16).

In the world, not of it

The night before the cross, Jesus prayed for His disciples in their hearing. Part of that prayer is about their place in the world, and He says the same sentence twice.

¹⁴I have given them Your word; and the world has hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world. ¹⁵I do not ask You to take them out of the world, but to keep them from the evil one. ¹⁶They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.

John 17:14-16 · NASB95

“The world” in these verses does not mean the planet, and it does not mean people. God loves the people of the world and gave His Son for them (John 3:16). It means human life organized without God: what it values, what it runs after, and the ruler behind it, for “the whole world lies in the power of the evil one” (1 John 5:19).

How far believers stand from that system is measured by the words said twice: “even as I am not of the world.” Jesus had said of Himself, “You are from below, I am from above; you are of this world, I am not of this world” (John 8:23). Now He says the same of everyone who belongs to Him. They are as He is, which is also why the world treats them as it treated Him (John 15:18-19).

There were three things He could have asked for them, and He asked for one.

So He asked for their protection and left them where they were. For Paul the matter was settled at the cross, and he could put it in one line: “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14). He still walked its roads, sailed on its ships, and wrote to its cities. He no longer belonged to it, and it no longer had a claim on him.

Our citizenship is in heaven

A stranger in one country is a citizen of another. Paul names the country in a letter he wrote from prison to the church at Philippi.

²⁰For our citizenship is in heaven, from which also we eagerly wait for a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ; ²¹who will transform the body of our humble state into conformity with the body of His glory, by the exertion of the power that He has even to subject all things to Himself.

Philippians 3:20-21 · NASB95

He chose his words for those readers. Philippi was not an ordinary Greek town. Luke calls it “a Roman colony” (Acts 16:12): a settlement of Roman citizens, many of them retired soldiers, planted in Macedonia far from Italy. It was governed by Roman law and did its public business in Latin, and its people were proud of both. When a crowd there accused Paul, the charge was that he taught customs “which it is not lawful for us to accept or to observe, being Romans” (Acts 16:21).

So the Philippians knew from daily life what it is to live in one place and belong to another. A citizen of that colony did not need to have seen Rome to be a Roman. His name was on its register, its law protected him, and its emperor was his ruler.

The word Paul uses for citizenship, πολίτευμα (politeuma), appears only here in the New Testament. It means the state a person belongs to, the place where he is registered as a citizen, and it was also used of a colony of foreigners living abroad under the laws of their homeland. Earlier in the letter he had used the verb from the same root. Our translation reads, “conduct yourselves in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ” (Philippians 1:27), and the Greek verb means to live as a citizen.

Paul knew how citizenship was obtained. His own once saved him from a flogging in Jerusalem, and the Roman commander who had ordered it told him, “I acquired this citizenship with a large sum of money.” Paul answered, “But I was actually born a citizen” (Acts 22:28). Those were the two ways, purchase and birth, and heaven’s citizenship comes by both.

Paul describes the same change from the other side when he writes to Gentile believers at Ephesus. Before they came to Christ they were “strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12). Now, he says, “you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints, and are of God’s household” (Ephesians 2:19). The word translated aliens there is paroikos, the word Peter uses of believers in the world.

A citizen’s papers

A citizen abroad carries papers that say who he is and where he belongs. The New Testament supplies every line of the believer’s. Each entry below is something Scripture says is true of a Christian now.

Look at what is missing: nationality, income, education, age. Those belong to the country we are passing through. Then look at the last two lines. This citizen has a present address and work to do there, so his papers are no excuse for keeping apart from the people around him.

Paul states the work in one sentence: “Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:20). An ambassador lives in a foreign capital, learns its language, and keeps its laws. He is there for one reason, to say what his own king has given him to say.

Where the heart goes

A person keeps his savings in the country he means to live in. Jesus applied that to His followers in the Sermon on the Mount.

¹⁹Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. ²⁰But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; ²¹for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

Matthew 6:19-21 · NASB95

In the ancient world wealth was kept in three forms, and He names an enemy for each. Fine clothing was wealth, and moths ate it. Grain was wealth, and the word translated rust means simply “eating,” which covers the mice and insects in a barn as well as the corrosion of metal. Coins were buried in the floor or hidden in a wall, and the word for break in means “dig through,” which is how a thief entered a house built of mud brick.

He is not forbidding ownership. The same Bible says God “richly supplies us with all things to enjoy” (1 Timothy 6:17), and it commends working, saving, and providing for a family. The weight falls on the words “store up” and “for yourselves.” What He forbids is piling up wealth here as though this were where we will need it.

Verse 21 gives the reason for the command, and it runs in a direction we do not expect. We know that money follows the heart, because people spend on what they love. Jesus says the heart also follows the money. Put your treasure into this world and your heart will settle here. Send it ahead and your heart will go after it.

Paul gives Timothy the same teaching for the church at Ephesus. He starts from a fact nobody disputes: “we have brought nothing into the world, so we cannot take anything out of it either” (1 Timothy 6:7). Then he says what the wealthy are to do with what they have: “to do good, to be rich in good works, to be generous and ready to share, storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future” (1 Timothy 6:18-19).

What will cross with you?

Every traveler learns at a border that some things may be carried across and some may not. Death is that border for all of us, and Scripture is specific about what passes it. Below are eight things a person may have. Before you open each one, decide what you think happens to it.

The world’s own proverb is “you can’t take it with you,” and the proverb is right. Jesus adds what it leaves out. You can send it on ahead.

The body is a tent

Paul earned his living with his hands. When he first came to Corinth he met a Jewish couple, Aquila and Priscilla, “and because he was of the same trade, he stayed with them and they were working, for by trade they were tent-makers” (Acts 18:3). A few years later he wrote to that same church, and when he needed a word for the human body he took one from his workbench.

¹For we know that if the earthly tent which is our house is torn down, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. ²For indeed in this house we groan, longing to be clothed with our dwelling from heaven, ³inasmuch as we, having put it on, will not be found naked. ⁴For indeed while we are in this tent, we groan, being burdened, because we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed, so that what is mortal will be swallowed up by life.

2 Corinthians 5:1-4 · NASB95

The word is σκῆνος (skenos), a tent. A man who had cut and stitched them for years knew what he was saying. A tent is light enough to carry and keeps out some of the weather. It also wears thin and tears, and nobody expects it to stand in one place for long. It is the house of someone who is on the way to somewhere else.

Israel’s history has the same two stages. In the wilderness God’s dwelling among His people was a tent, the tabernacle, taken down and carried each time the camp moved. Only when they were settled in the land did the tent give way to a building of stone, the temple. Paul says the believer’s life has that shape: a tent for the journey, and a building at home.

Two things in these verses are easy to miss. The first is the expression “torn down.” The Greek verb is the ordinary one for taking a tent down. Paul does not picture death as a house falling on the person inside it. He pictures a traveler striking his tent because the journey is over.

The second is what Paul wants. He does not want to be rid of a body. Much Greek thought of his day treated the body as a prison to escape from. Paul says the opposite: “we do not want to be unclothed but to be clothed.” The Christian hope is a permanent body, given at the resurrection when Christ returns. Until then the groaning is real. It comes from weakness and pain, and still more from sin, which every believer is tired of carrying (Romans 7:24). God has given a guarantee that it will end: He “gave to us the Spirit as a pledge” (2 Corinthians 5:5).

Taking the tent down

Peter uses the same picture for his own death, in a letter written shortly before it.

¹³I consider it right, as long as I am in this earthly dwelling, to stir you up by way of reminder, ¹⁴knowing that the laying aside of my earthly dwelling is imminent, as also our Lord Jesus Christ has made clear to me.

2 Peter 1:13-14 · NASB95

“Earthly dwelling” translates σκήνωμα (skenoma), a tent. Years before, on the shore of Galilee, the risen Jesus had told Peter how he would die (John 21:18-19). Now an old man, Peter speaks of it calmly, as a tent about to be put away.

In the next verse he calls his death “my departure” (2 Peter 1:15), and the Greek word is ἔξοδος (exodos), a going out, as Israel went out of Egypt toward the land God had promised. He then goes straight on to describe the day he saw Jesus transfigured on the mountain, and the same two words belong to that day. Moses and Elijah had spoken with Jesus “of His departure,” His exodos, “which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem” (Luke 9:31). And Peter, not knowing what to say, had offered to put up tents and stay: “Master, it is good for us to be here; let us make three tabernacles” (Luke 9:33).

Paul’s last letter uses a different word: “the time of my departure has come” (2 Timothy 4:6). Here it is ἀνάλυσις (analysis), a loosing, and Greek speakers used it for more than one kind of release.

Paul had been all three: a soldier of Christ, a traveler by sea, and a prisoner. He uses the verb of the same word when he tells the Philippians, from prison, what he would choose for himself: “having the desire to depart and be with Christ, for that is very much better” (Philippians 1:23).

Neither apostle treats this as a reason to do less. Peter says that as long as he is in the tent he will keep stirring his readers up. Paul says that to stay “is more necessary for your sake” (Philippians 1:24), and he stays. Knowing that the tent was temporary made them use the time they had in it.

Living away from home

None of this is meant to stay in the head. Peter builds a command on it, and Paul does the same whenever he raises it. Put their instructions side by side and they describe one way of living.

1. 1

   Set your mind where your life is

   “Set your mind on the things above, not on the things that are on earth. For you have died and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:2-3). This is a command, so it is something we do on purpose. What you read, what you pray about, and what you look forward to all turn the mind one way or the other, every day.

2. 2

   Fight the war inside

   Peter’s first instruction to aliens and strangers concerns nobody else: “abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul” (1 Peter 2:11). His word for waging war describes a long campaign, not one battle. The desires of the old life are the part of this world that a believer still carries inside him, and Paul says how the war is won: “walk by the Spirit, and you will not carry out the desire of the flesh” (Galatians 5:16).

3. 3

   Be the best neighbor on the street

   A foreigner is watched. “Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that… they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:12). So pay what you owe (Romans 13:7), obey the law (1 Peter 2:13), work with your hands, and “behave properly toward outsiders” (1 Thessalonians 4:12). God told the exiles in Babylon to build houses and plant gardens, and added, “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf” (Jeremiah 29:7). A citizen of heaven should be the easiest person in town to live next to.

4. 4

   Speak for your King

   “Conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the opportunity. Let your speech always be with grace, as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how you should respond to each person” (Colossians 4:5-6). An ambassador who never delivers his message has forgotten why he was sent. Most of the people around you will never open a Bible. They will watch you, and sooner or later one of them will ask.

5. 5

   Hold everything loosely

   Paul’s rule for all that a Christian has in this life is in 1 Corinthians 7:29-31: those who have wives should be “as though they had none,” those who weep “as though they did not weep,” those who rejoice “as though they did not rejoice,” and those who buy “as though they did not possess… for the form of this world is passing away.”

   He is not telling husbands to neglect their wives or mourners to hide their tears. Elsewhere he commands the opposite. He is saying that marriage, sorrow, joy, and property all belong to an arrangement that is passing, and none of them is to be held as though it were the last thing we will ever have.

6. 6

   Expect to be treated as a foreigner

   “Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you… as though some strange thing were happening to you” (1 Peter 4:12). To be misunderstood, passed over, or mocked for following Christ does not mean that something has gone wrong. A foreigner should expect it, and John gives the reason: “the world does not know us, because it did not know Him” (1 John 3:1).

7. 7

   Travel together

   Hebrews tells believers to keep meeting, “not forsaking our own assembling together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another; and all the more as you see the day drawing near” (Hebrews 10:25). The church is the one place on earth where a citizen of heaven is among his own people, speaks his own language, and hears news from home.

The man who moved into a house

Abraham had a nephew who began the journey with him. Lot left Ur, came into Canaan, and lived in tents beside his uncle. Genesis follows the two men side by side, and their story is the proverb at the top of this article, lived out.

Lot was not an unbeliever. The New Testament calls him “righteous Lot” and says he “felt his righteous soul tormented day after day by their lawless deeds” (2 Peter 2:7-8). He hated what Sodom did, and still he moved toward it, then into it, then into a seat at its gate. In one morning he lost everything he had built there. Paul describes that outcome for a believer whose life’s work does not survive: “he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire” (1 Corinthians 3:15).

Jesus, speaking of His own return, pointed back to that morning in three words: “Remember Lot’s wife” (Luke 17:32). She was out of the city and on the road to safety, and she looked back, because everything she loved was still behind her.

Home is where He is

A traveler who talks about home is usually thinking of people, not of a building. The New Testament speaks of heaven in the same way. It says little about what the place looks like and a great deal about who is there. Paul does so a few lines after his verses about the tent.

⁶Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord— ⁷for we walk by faith, not by sight— ⁸we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord.

2 Corinthians 5:6-8 · NASB95

Paul’s two verbs come from the same root as Peter’s word for a stranger. To be “at home” is ἐνδημέω (endemeo), to be among one’s own people. To be “absent” is ἐκδημέω (ekdemeo), to be away from them, abroad. Paul is saying that as long as he lives in this body he is living abroad, and that when he leaves it he will be home. What makes it home is three words: “with the Lord.”

Jesus described it the same way. He told the disciples very little about the Father’s house. He told them who would come for them and where they would be: “I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:3).

And He prayed for it. In the prayer of John 17, where He said He was not asking the Father to take His people out of the world, He goes on a few sentences later to ask for exactly that, in its time: “Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory” (John 17:24). He leaves them in the world for the work. He does not mean to leave them there.

So the believer’s hope has a face. Paul’s summary of everything that follows Christ’s return is one short clause: “and so we shall always be with the Lord” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). That is also what he means by “we eagerly wait for a Savior” (Philippians 3:20). A citizen abroad is waiting for his King, not for an event.

The song that keeps growing

What will the citizens of heaven do when they are home? The fullest answer is in two chapters of Revelation, where the apostle John is shown the throne of God. What he hears begins with four voices and does not stop growing until everything God has made has joined in.

1. Four living creatures

   Day and night they do not stop saying that the Lord God, the Almighty, is holy.

   Revelation 4:8

2. Twenty-four elders

   “Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things, and because of Your will they existed, and were created.”

   Revelation 4:11

3. Both, with harps: a new song

   “Worthy are You to take the book and to break its seals; for You were slain, and purchased for God with Your blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation.”

   Revelation 5:9

4. Myriads of myriads of angels

   “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.”

   Revelation 5:12

5. Every created thing

   “To Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and dominion forever and ever.”

   Revelation 5:13

6. The four living creatures

   “Amen.” And the elders fell down and worshiped.

   Revelation 5:14

The song has two reasons, one in each chapter. In chapter 4 God is worshiped because He made us: “for You created all things.” In chapter 5 the Lamb is worshiped because He bought us: “for You were slain, and purchased for God with Your blood.” Those are the two claims God has on every person in that crowd, and they are two subjects of praise that will never be used up.

The new song is about people. It says where they came from, “every tribe and tongue and people and nation,” so the citizens of heaven are drawn from every country on earth. And it says what they were purchased for: “You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth” (Revelation 5:10). The strangers and exiles of this age will reign over the earth they once passed through as foreigners.

The angels join at verse 11 and call the Lamb worthy. But Peter says the gospel holds “things into which angels long to look” (1 Peter 1:12). An angel has never been lost and brought back. Every believer has, and so has a reason to sing that an angel does not have.

Put that beside the last chapter of the Bible, and there are four things God’s people will do.

None of this has to wait entirely. Paul tells the church to sing now, “with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16), and every Lord’s Day a congregation of strangers and exiles joins a song that is already being sung in the place they are going. Worship on earth is practice for home.