4. Fellow citizens

4. Fellow citizens

Here, from 9 to 15 December 1838, where they every time now call themselves “fellow citizens”on the threshold of the evening, beneath the bare heaven, in a carefully fortified wagon laager, they are much more as the case in the Cape Colony, literally exact examples of the basic meaning of the word, distress, that is “out of land,” landlessness, homelessness, alienism, without justice, delivered to alien brutal powers.
They are in their alienism one another’s landless fellows, much more than their fellow citizens.

That they call themselves “fellow citizens,” without anybody finding it absurd or even ludicrous, is evident of what lives in their hearts. That is the unchokable longing for an own land, now here in Natal, after the suffering of the year 1838, much more urgent than ever before.

There, along the path of persistent vow consideration, it is their pious wish to become God’s People, with the face of a Vow People, in every facet of their lives as people, in other words also in their state dispensation.

Nevertheless, justly so they show - amid their common landlessness, in their Vow Union as one another’s fellow citizens, there-above hence - to the Home (capital letter) of God himself on the “new earth,” where the covenant people from every people and tribe and tongue and nation will meet their eternal Home as “his peoples.” (Revelations 21:3)

Our Vow making ancestors, also in their urge for own people ground, are for us a worthy addition to the “great cloud of witnesses” on which the beginning of Hebrews 12 directs our attention.