Exiles. . .

“To those who are elect exiles of the Dispersion” 1 Peter 1:1

Every so often I can’t step over some word as I read. This time, on a rerun of Apostle Peter’s letters, it was exile. I know what the Dispersion is, but felt I just must look further into it. Ponder it.

According to Pastor Alexander Maclaren, Scotch minister in that latter half of the 19th Century, the letter was written to “sojourners of the Dispersion,” and was meant “not to the Jew, but to the whole body of Christian people, who, whatever may be their outward circumstances, are, in the deepest sense, in the foundations of their life, if they be Christ’s, ‘strangers of the Dispersion.’

For me, the take away from Pastor Maclaren’s Expository is that we, like those to whom the Apostle wrote, are sojourners on Earth. As such, We don’t fit well on Earth, “by reason of the contrariety between the foundation of our lives, and the foundation of the lives of the men round us; therefore, we stand lonely in the midst of crowds, and as strangers in the ordered communities of the world.”

Let us ever so remain as those sojourners: set apart, which is holy, and righteous in our Savior Jesus.

The photo was taken while on a camping trip along the Oregon Coast, 2018.
The sun setting into the Pacific Ocean reminds me just how many years I lived on the Pacific Coast of California and how going there always felt like home.
But that isn’t my real home, is it?

LORD Bless, Keep, Shine