A Stranger in the Land

I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me. Psa 119:19
This is the way of the Christian. They are strangers in a hostile world. The only path of safety,
is in God's Word. Some thoughts on this will guide our feet along the stony journey.
Treasury of David
Charles Haddon Spurgeon

​“I am a stranger in the earth.” This is meant for a plea. By divine command men are bound to be kind to strangers, and what God commands in others he will exemplify in himself. The Psalmist was a stranger for God's sake, else had he been as much at home as worldlings are; he was not a stranger to God, but a stranger to the world, a banished man so long as he was out of heaven. Therefore he pleads, “Hide not thy commandments from me.” If these are gone, what have I else? Since nothing around me is mine, what can I do if I lose thy word? Since none around me know or care to know the way to thyself, what shall I do if I fail to see thy commands, by which alone I can guide my steps to the land where thou dwellest? David implies that God's commands were his solace in his exile' they reminded him of home, and they showed him the way thither, and therefore he begged that they might never be hidden from him, by his being unable either to understand them or to obey them. If spiritual light be withdrawn the command is hidden, and this a gracious heart greatly deprecates. What would be the use of opened eyes if the best object of sight were hidden from their view? While we wander here we can endure all the ills of this foreign land with patience if the word of God is applied to our hearts by the Spirit of God; but if the heavenly things which make for our peace were hid from our eyes we should be in an evil case, - in fact, we should be at sea without a compass, in a desert without a guide, in an enemy's country without a friend.
This prayer is a supplement to “open thou mine eyes,” and, as the one prays to see, the other deprecates the negative of seeing, namely, the command being hidden, and so out of sight. We do well to look at both sides of the blessing we are seeking, and plead for it from every point of view. The prayers are appropriate to the characters mentioned' as he is a servant he asks for opened eves that his eyes may ever be towards his Lord, as the eyes of a servant should be; as a stranger he begs that he may not be strange to the way in which he is to walk towards his home. In each case his entire dependence is upon God alone.
Note how the third of the second octave (Psa_119:11) has the same keyword as this third of the third octave: “Thy word have I hid,” “Hide not thy commandments from me.” This invites a meditation upon the different senses of hiding in and hiding from.

No Permanent Dwelling Place

​"A wayfaring man; a pilgrim; a so-journer; a man whose permanent home is not in this world. The word is applicable to one who belongs to another country, and who is now merely passing through a foreign land, or sojourning there for a time. Heb_11:13.
Heb 11:13  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. 

The home of the child of God is heaven. Here he is in a strange - a foreign - land. He is to abide here but for a little time, and then to pass on to his eternal habitation.
Hide not thy commandments from me - Make me to know them; keep them continually before me. In this strange land, away from my home, let me have the comfort of feeling that thy commands are ever with me to guide me; thy promises to comfort me. The feeling is that of one in a strange land who would desire, if possible, to keep up constant communications with his home - his family, his friends, his kindred there. On earth, the place of our sojourning - of our pilgrimage - the friend of God desires to have constant contact with heaven, his final home; not to be left to the desolate feeling that he is cut off from all contact with that world where he is forever to dwell."  (Albert Barnes)
​Related- ​Mat 8:20  And Jesus saith unto him, The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head. 

Citizenship in Heaven

​A Christian man’s true affinities are with the things not seen, and with the persons there, however the surface relationships knit him to the earth. In the degree in which he is a Christian, he is a stranger here and a native of the heavens. That great city is, like some of the capitals of Europe, built on a broad river, with the mass of the metropolis on the one bank, but a wide-spreading suburb on the other. As the Trastevere is to Rome, as Southwark is to London, so is earth to heaven, the bit of the city on the other side the bridge.—A. Maclaren, D.D.
The City yet to come.—We do belong to another polity or order of things than that with which we are connected by the bonds of flesh and sense. Our true affinities are with the mother-city. True, we are here on earth, but far beyond the blue waters is another community of which we are truly members; and sometimes in calm weather we can see, if we climb to a height above the smoke of the valley where we dwell, the faint outline of the mountains of that other land, lying dreamlike on the opal waves and bathed in sunlight.—Ibid.