Elect Exiles

Fireworks exploding in an over-stuffed garage caused a housefire one summer.

Soon after the fire, I saw a sad procession as I was driving: a boy pushing a lawnmower, his younger brother wearing a garden hose wrapped around his shoulders, little sister with a black garbage bag slung over her back, and baby sister carrying a 2 liter of pop and a doll.

They walked slowly in single file, and I wondered where they would go. Their home had burned, and the parents had burned a lot of bridges. They were exiles. 

The ancient Israelites were led away captive, like stringers of emaciated fish, during the Babylonian exile. They spent seventy years learning what it meant to be exiles. 

Their ancestors had wandered forty years as exiles in the tractless wilderness because they refused the homeland God had planned for them.

Even before that, their original patriarch had been called to exile by the Lord. Abraham left everything, though he didn’t know precisely where his new home would be, and followed God. He lived in tents, a stranger and an exile everywhere he went, seeking the homeland that God would show him. 

Even as far back as the dawn of time, the Israelites could have seen that the first man, Adam, was himself an exile when he was banished from the garden of Eden because of his sin. Adam and Eve lived as the original exiles who had no way to return to the home they belonged to and longed for. 

The exiles I saw walking on the side of the road carried all the centuries of homeless heaviness on their shoulders. Their picture is burned in my mind as the definition of those who are seeking a home. One of them lived with my family for several years, and we had many piercing conversations about exiles and home.

The Apostle Peter wrote to Christians who were having those same conversations. They’d been expelled from their homes and countries because of their faith in Christ, but he wanted them to remember the centuries of exiled history that had preceded their plight. He also wanted them to know the God who welcomes exiles.

His letter is addressed to them, and he tells them that their exile is “according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, in the sanctification of the Spirit, for obedience to Jesus Christ and for sprinkling with His blood.”

What roots these elect exiles had! God knew about the house fire, the Babylonians, the wilderness, and the sin. Hardship and distress were the greenhouses where God’s refining, growing work of sanctification could take place. The outcome of their exile was to help them find citizenship in a heavenly kingdom- even before they moved there.

When the Psalmist wrote “The Lord records as He registers the peoples, ‘This one was born here,” he did not mean that some of us were chosen at birth to escape exile altogether.

Oh, no. He meant that there are some exiles seeking a homeland who find it and are born again as children of the King of that great city that they now call home. These are the elect exiles who live each day with the expectant hope of going home. 

Are you one of them? Do the lights of that far city illuminate your eyes, even as you trudge through your exile? How can you help a fellow wanderer who knows that not all those who wander are lost?