This, I may say, outshines all. It was this that made God not _ashamed_ to be called his God. God can _morally_ own the soul that advisedly refuses citizenship in this revolted, corrupted world. This was the highest point in moral dignity in Abraham. God loveth the stranger. Deut. x. 18. He loves the _poor_, _unfriended_ stranger, with the love of pity and of grace, and provides for him. But with the _separated_ stranger, who has turned his back on this polluted scene, God links His name and His honour, and morally owns such without shame. Heb. xi. 13-16. How finely he started on his journey at the beginning! The Lord and His promises were all he had. He left, as we have seen, his _natural_ home behind him, but he did not expect to find _another_ home in the place he was going to. He knew that he was to be a stranger and sojourner with God in the earth. Mesopotamia was left, but Canaan was not taken up in the stead of it. Accordingly, from all the people there, he was a separated man all his days, or during his sojourn among them of about one hundred years. Canaan was the _world_ to that heavenly man, and he had as little to do with it or to say to it as he might, though all the while in it. When circumstances demanded it, or as far as business involved him, he dealt with it. He would traffic with the people of the land, if need were (to be sure he would), but his sympathies were not with them. He needed a burying-place, and he purchased it of the children of Heth. He would not think of hesitating to treat with them about a necessary matter of bargain and sale; but he would rather _buy_ than _receive_. He was loth to be debtor to them, or to be enriched by them--nor were they his _companions_. This we observe throughout. If Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre--it may be morally attracted by what they saw in him--seek confederacy with him, he will not refuse their alliance on a given occasion of the common interest, when such interest the God who had called him would sanction or commend. But still the Canaanites were not his company. His wife was his company, his household, his flocks and his herds, and his fellow-saint, Lot, his brother’s son, who had come out of Mesopotamia with him--as long, at least, as such an one walked as a separated man in Canaan. But even _he_, when undistinguished from the people of the land, is a stranger to him as well and as fully as they. All this has surely a voice in our ears. Angels were Abraham’s company at times, and so the Lord of angels--and at all times, his altar and his tent were with him, and the mysteries or truths of God, as they were made known to him. But the people of the land, the men of the world, did not acquire his tastes or sympathies, or share his confidence. He was _among_ them but not _of_ them--and rather would he have had his house unbuilt, and Isaac be without a wife, than that such wife should be a daughter of Canaan.