Looking for another country

I'm still half-way through Calvin's Institutes, having been reading it now for several years. That's not as atypical of my reading habits as I'd like to believe.

I was struck by Calvin's comments on the hopes of the patriarchs, and have been contemplating them for several years:

If these holy Patriarchs expected a happy life from the hand of God (and it is indubitable that they did), they viewed and contemplated a different happiness from that of a terrestrial life. This is admirably shown by an Apostle, “By faith he [Abraham] sojourned in the land of promise, as in a strange country, dwelling in tabernacles with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise: for he looked for a city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them, and embraced them, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, an heavenly: wherefore God is not ashamed to be called their God: for he has prepared for them a city,” (Heb. 11:9, 10, 13–16). They had been duller than blocks in so pertinaciously pursuing promises, no hope of which appeared upon the earth, if they had not expected their completion elsewhere. (Institutes, Book 2, Chapter 10)

That caught my eye, because I have heard some well-known Dispensationalists claim that the hopes of the Old Testament saints were for this life, while the hopes of the Christian are for the next. "Israel's blessings were physical, ours are spiritual." But it's not that simple, is it?  Hebrews 11:9–16 explicitly and specifically contradicts it. Hebrews claims that Abraham and Sarah were both looking for blessings beyond the physical.

Now, I realize there is a lot of nuance I'm ignoring here. Maybe the case could be made that Abraham isn't Israel per se. Perhaps we might want to distinguish between the patriarchs and the nation that came from them.  But even that seems problematic in the light of Hebrews 11:32–40.

Those verses intrigue me, because there is a shift in tone right at the start of v. 35. In that verse, the tone pivots from miraculous deliverance (by faith),  to faith under persecution. Suddenly we go from those whose faith was vindicated in this life to those who still await vindication. And we're told, "these all... did not receive the promise... that they should not be made perfect without us" (Hebrews 11:39–40). 

So no, we can't just say that their hope was for this life, while ours is for the next. By that reasoning, virtually all the prophets were faithless: "which of the prophets have not your fathers persecuted?" (Acts 7:52).  Either all the prophets were wicked sinners, or blessing in this life wasn't a measure of faith, even in the Old Testament.

Now, I'm not trying to kick at Dispensationalists here. I think Dispensationalism is essentially correct. I am merely pointing out that scripture doesn't support some of the conclusions we draw from it.

When I started reading Darby, one of the immediate effects was that I became much less of a Dispensationalist. I had so thoroughly bought into Dispensationalism, I was determined to see as many differences between the Old Testament and the New as I could. But reading Darby forced me to see there is a great deal of continuity between the Old Testament and the New: it's not all contrasts! The central figure is that same in both, and He doesn't change.

There are genuine differences between the Old Testament saints and us today. We are united to Christ in His death, burial, and resurrection; they were not. The Holy Spirit has been given by the risen, ascended, glorified Christ to us in an entirely new way from His dealings with them in the Old. 

Those differences are there, and they are real.

But we have to return to this point again and again: the Word of God is perfect, my understanding of it is not.