This was said by the exiles of Jerusalem, when they were in the land of their captivity in Babylon.  There is no reason to suppose that their condition was one of bondage, as it had been in Egypt:  the nations removed by conquest, under the Persian kings, from their own country to another land, were no otherwise ill-treated; they had new homes given them in which they lived unmolested; only they were torn away from their own land, and were as sojourners in a land of strangers.  But the peculiar evil of this state was, that they were torn away from the proper seat of their worship.  The Jew in Babylon might have his own home, and his own land to cultivate, as he had in Judaea; but nothing could replace to him the loss of the temple at Jerusalem:  there alone could the morning and evening sacrifices be offered; there alone could the sin-offering for the people be duly made.  Banished from the temple, therefore, he was deprived also of the most solemn part of his religion; he was, as it were, exiled from God; and the worship of God, as it was now left to him,—­that is, the offering up of prayers and praises,—­was almost painful to him, as it reminded him so forcibly of his changed condition.

Such also, in some respects, was to be the state of the Christian Church after our Lord’s ascension.  The only acceptable sacrifice was now that of their great High Priest interceding for them in the presence of the Father:  heaven was their temple, and they were far removed from it upon earth:  they, too, like the Jews in Babylon, were a little society by themselves living in the midst of strangers.  “Our citizenship,” says St. Paul to the Philippians, “is in heaven:”  here they were not citizens, but sojourners.  Why, then, should not the early Christians have joined altogether in the feeling of the Jews at Babylon? why should not they, too, have felt and said, “How can we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land?”

The answer is contained in what I said last Sunday; because Christ had not left them comfortless or forsaken, but was come again to them by his Holy Spirit; because God was dwelling in the midst of them; because they were not exiles from the temple of God, but were themselves become God’s temple; because through the virtue of the one offering for sin once made, but for ever presented before God by their High Priest in heaven, they, in God’s temple on earth, were presenting also their daily and acceptable sacrifice, the sacrifice of themselves; because also, though as yet they were a small society in a land of strangers, yet the stone formed without hands was to become a mighty mountain, and cover the whole earth:  what was now the land of strangers was to become theirs; the whole earth should be full of the knowledge of the Lord; the kingdoms of the world were to become his kingdom; and thus earth, redeemed from the curse of sin, was again to be so blessed that God’s servants living upon it should find it no place of exile.