Dwelling in Tents

By faith he sojourned in the land of the promise, as in a strange country, taking up his abode in tents together with Isaac, and Jacob, the joint-heirs with him of the same promise. Heb. 11:9

It is not the act of dwelling that is emphatic here, but the fact that this dwelling was "in tents". If expressed in the ordinary way it would mean "DWELLING in tents with Isaac and Jacob." But said this way, it means "dwelling IN TENTS with Isaac and Jacob."

The first symbol we find in the patriarch’s life is his moving tent. He left the wealth and earthly prospects of his native home and committed himself to the vicissitudes of a pilgrim life. Although an heir of the world, he was himself to have no certain dwelling place, but was to wander as a stranger on earth looking for a better country and “a city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” …

We shall never have our hearts or our interests so invested in the things of life as not to be able, like Abraham, to emigrate at God’s call to some altered circumstances, or even to fold our tent altogether and enter upon our eternal existence. …

Wherever the patriarch rested his tent, there he also erected an altar to his God.