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Preacher: Ross Macdonald
Scripture: Genesis 23:1-20
I'll know it's time to stop preaching when I hear stomachs growling, a chorus of stomachs as we anticipate this covenant feast. And certainly that is something very exciting. I don't know why I'm so loud here.
I need to turn this off. That may come in handy later. We'll see. Well, we are here in Genesis chapter 23, and we're here really at a conclusion at this point in the narrative of Genesis. This is, for all intents and purposes, the conclusion of what we might call the Abrahamic cycle within Genesis.
And though Abraham survives well beyond chapter 23, the focus shifts toward Isaac already in chapter 24. So, as far as the storyline of Abraham being the central figure, it really ends here in Genesis 23.
Last week we considered Abraham. We considered his climactic trial upon Mount Moriah. We considered why the Scriptures call him the model, the father of all those who have faith. We saw how he is the father of faith par excellence, the man of faith according to Paul in Romans, who in Romans 4, verse 20, said Abraham was strengthened in his faith, and he gave glory to God, and he was fully convinced that God was able to do all that he had promised.
And there we saw, at the end of chapter 22, perhaps more than ever before, Abraham's faith, when it was trialed in that call to give up his son, his only son, the son whom he loved, Isaac. And we read in Hebrews 11, beginning in verse 17, by faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son, of whom it was said, in Isaac your seed shall be called.
And he concluded that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense. And so we're exhorted earlier in the same letter to imitate those who by patience and faith inherit the promises.
Now this morning we come to the death of Sarah. And we're going to look at that in three parts. First, the first two verses, the actual death of Sarah. Secondly, the burial of Sarah. We'll begin to develop that a little bit more.
And then lastly, more moving toward application, the hope of glory. So the death of Sarah, the burial of Sarah, and the hope of glory. We read, beginning in verse 1, Sarah lived 127 years. These were the years of the life of Sarah.
And so Sarah died in Kiriath Arba, that is Hebron, in the land of Canaan. Notice how significant that is. It's just these little reminders. Sarah is mentioned three times by name.
Sarah, Sarah, Sarah.
In the land of Canaan. In the land that a long time ago, God had called her and her husband out of Ur, to enter into according to promise. And Abraham came in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. We have no details between the end of chapter 22 and the beginning of chapter 23.
It's not recorded, it's not given to us to know what family life was like for the next 25 years or so, approximately. We know that Abraham passed that trial. We know that Abraham understood more about God's grace in his life.
Perhaps now he has more of a sense of the revelation that there is going to be a way in which this seed of promise factors into all that God has promised, not just to me, but even to those who came before me.
The promise that God would give a seed that would crush the head of the serpent, that would undo all of the effects of the curse from the fall. And having passed that trial, having received more of the fruit of faithfulness that God had cultivated in his heart, Abraham must have been resolved.
And as the years pressed on, and even as those years led to the decline of his wife, those years also saw Isaac become a man. And this little boy, perhaps this young lad, this adolescent maybe when he was on Mount Moriah, is now a man my age.
And at the same time that his boy is becoming a man and going from strength to strength, looming over his elderly parents, Sarah's declining. Those little early signs of decline, the forgetfulness, the weakness.
Maybe she's scared now to be in a crowded tent. She's not able to do the things she used to do. And the day comes, as it must come, when the wages of sins entrance into the world, when the rain that now exists through Adam's fall reaches even Sarah.
And she dies. And we stop and we pause and we consider all that she's been through. We consider the works of God that she beheld. The calling of God, the mercy of God, the divine protection of God. God was protecting Sarah so many times throughout the Genesis narrative.
We consider decades of her patient trust and her trials, trials that were put before her when Abraham was willing to throw her into the harem of some local warlord or king. We consider the trials that she brought upon herself and her bitterness toward Hagar and her distrust of God and how this seed would come given that she was in her old age.
We consider her graces, her manner, her disposition, her faith that had grown and become sanctified. God had begun a good work and now He had completed this work in Sarah's life. Only now can she enter in to the joy of her Master.
The Master that she had learned to follow so many years ago when she was called out of Ur. In times of failure and regret, but living by faith through grace that God supplied and it was sufficient for all of her needs.
And it was sufficient as she lay in her tent unable to leave it. It was sufficient when she was on the last throes on her deathbed. That grace was sufficient as Sarah died. And precious in the eyes of the Lord is the death of this princess, the mother of the faith.
It's been a while in the narrative of Genesis since we've encountered the death of God's chosen. We've seen death in the Abrahamic cycle, but we haven't actually seen it in those genealogical refrains.
And He died, and He died, and He died with almost no detail whatsoever about the life of these faithful within the line of God's promise. Just the repeated emphasis, and He died, and He died, and He died.
And we finally come to chapter 23, and she died. But the narrative slows down, and it zooms in. And we're not just given the fact that she died, but we're given the impact of her death. And so there's nothing clinical here, but rather there's this sympathetic portrayal of the effect of Sarah's life.
She was a wife.
We get a sense of just how virtuous a wife she was from 1 Peter 3. Peter uses her as the example of how the godly women of old adorned themselves. And so he looks at the bossy young wives and the gossipy widows, and he says to them, don't let your adornment be merely outward, arranging the hair, wearing gold, putting on fine apparel.
Rather let it be that hidden person of the heart with the incorruptible beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit which is very precious in the sight of God. For in this manner... So here's divine commentary.
In this way, in this hidden person, in this quiet and gentle spirit precious in God's sight, the holy women who trusted in God adorned themselves, being submissive to their own husbands, as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord, whose daughters you are if you do good and are not afraid of any terror.
So Sarah becomes an example. This is how she adorned herself. Peter says Sarah had a gentle and a quiet spirit within her, and she was precious in the sight of God. How blessed Abraham was to have a wife with that kind of virtue.
How blessed Abraham was to have a holy marriage. Not a perfect marriage as we've seen, but a holy marriage nonetheless, not by virtue of their own holiness, but by virtue of God's presence and God's supply of grace to them.
Consider the impact of this wife. Consider the impact of her faithfulness. How utterly impossible would it have been for Abraham to do anything that God called him to do if Sarah had not been by his side.
His support, his comfort, his help. If Sarah had not been the co-laborer and the heiress according to promise, then Abraham could not have even taken so much of a step out of her. And so God's faithfulness to Abraham is in part demonstrated by his faithfulness through Sarah.
And as Christian husbands, we know this is always true. That we're not able to do anything that God has called us to do if our wife is not that faithful helpmeet. Our support, our confidence, our encouragement.
One of the precious few who knows all of our words and still loves us.
All of our shortcomings.
And still is that warm embrace, that smile. And so no wonder Abraham came to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. This is the great patriarch, the man of faith, mourning for the wife of his youth. She was this beautiful princess, renowned even among the empire of Egypt for her beauty.
And that beauty may have wilted in the twelfth decade of life physically, but it became so much more beautiful in the eyes of Abraham as he reflected on this life they've lived together and all that God has done between them and through them and for them.
And so we have this picture, this blessed marriage. What a blessing it is to endure to the sunset of life in a Christian marriage.
What a blessing.
To be in a believing marriage with God's presence. And when physical health and physical beauty give way, the memories and the experiences and the trials and the tempests, they become more endearing, more beautifying to that marriage.
May we never be tempted to think otherwise or be neglectful of our marriages. May we strive to have this kind of impact on each other, to model this out to a world that knows nothing of this. It used to be commonplace to grow up and have to go to a 50th wedding anniversary.
That's a rarity nowadays. How much more rare is it going to be in the next 30 to 40 years? It's a good thing for us to model out this singular devotion, this willing support, this tender delight. And we see it when Abraham comes to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.
There's a lot of discussion in the commentaries about how to understand that.
Is there a differentiation.
Between the ritual mourning that would have been culturally appropriate but also the personal, subjective weeping? Perhaps that is something. It's enough to say Abraham came to mourn, but it says more than that.
He wept for her. Jesus wept for Lazarus, and that was not ritual weeping.
He wept.
Peter wept when he betrayed Jesus. The Ephesian elders, they wept upon the neck of Paul when they knew he was to be taken from them. We don't read of Abraham weeping for Isaac when he's under the impression that he must sacrifice him, but here he's mourning for Sarah.
Abraham knows God's desire is not to raise Sarah yet, not in Abraham's earthly lifetime.
And so he mourns, and he weeps.
If he followed the customs of the time,.
He would have torn his garment.
You can picture Isaac, all of the servants, all the retinue around him. We see in a few verses, you're a mighty prince, meaning like you're a very formidable warlord among us. You've got a lot of servants, and your reputation precedes you, and yeah, we're not going to mess with you.
You can imagine this whole retinue hovering around the door of that tent. Sarah is in that bed, and Abraham approaches her, torn garment, disheveled hair,.
And he weeps.
He scoops up dust and puts it over his head. He's wearing sackcloth. He fasts. He's looking God. He's mourning the death of his wife. Sarah had been by Abraham's side for a century, and so it's not surprising that this man of God wept, and he mourned over the loss of his wife.
And I think perhaps more than ever, Abraham is able to see in the passing of Sarah just how far God has taken him. Just how amazing this call of grace has been over the course of the life of Sarah. Who would have thought, back when I was a young man in Ur of the Chaldeans, that my infertile wife, my barren wife, would be in this land with these promises, with Isaac, our boy, knowing that the day will come when we'll be heirs.
Who would have thought?
I remember when my grandmother on my dad's side passed, and my grandfather... She had been declining for a long period of time, and it was not so much a question of if, but when. And so I think emotionally, my grandfather was able to prepare for that, kind of brace for the impact of that loss, put things in order.
And throughout all of the arrangements and arriving early at the funeral home, and he kind of assembled the family and we all sat around. The whole time he never really showed any emotion at all, as is typical with the loss of a loved one.
Often everyone else is at a place where they can mourn, and those who are the most impacted by that loss are not able yet to truly mourn. So they're in the position of actually comforting, saying, it's okay, we're okay.
And then the mourning really begins after the fact. But I remember being impressed by how comforted my grandfather seemed. And then he stood in front of us at the room, and the first thing he said was, she was my best friend, and he just broke down.
And just captured in those words, I think, were the summary of all that she had been to him throughout all of their life together. She was my best friend. I've lost my best friend. And that must have been how Abraham felt.
She was my best friend. I never had anyone in this life like Sarah. Who else could I turn to?
Who else could I weep with?
Who else could I show the things that I'm wrestling and struggling, those things that are consuming me or filling me with anxiety? Who else would straighten me out? Who else had the kind of clout in my life to come to me and rebuke me?
No servant would dare look me in the eye, but Sarah would march right up to me and straighten me out.
She was my best friend.
And Sarah was not just a wife, she was a mother. We can almost imagine just how close this relationship was. She had the best world of being the age of a grandmother and the position of a mother. That's like the best.
She actually appreciated every single moment that she had Isaac. Even in the midst of that decline, how often would she have been on her bed,.
Grasping her hand, saying,.
Here, boy, come here, boy. Come here, my boy. Lay next to your mother.
Let me smell your hair.
Let me embrace you. I love you, Isaac. And we get a sense of that intimate bond that Isaac had with his mother. In fact, in the next chapter we read when Isaac brings Rebekah home, he brings her into Sarah's tent, and we read he took Rebekah and she became his wife and he loved her.
And so Isaac was comforted after his mother's death. This is three years later. Isaac still needs to be comforted for the loss of Sarah. Doesn't that tell you something of the impact this woman made upon Isaac?
That he needed to wait all these years and pursue Rebekah just to have some comfort, some solace, to fill something of the void that this mother had left in his life.
She was a wife. She was a mother.
Doesn't that speak to the impact this woman of faith had? Doesn't that tell us something about the power of that quiet, gentle spirit, that hidden person in the heart that is so precious in the sight of God?
How powerful that is to family members and friends. It's interesting that so often we want to emulate and we read biographies of and we admire the great heroes of the faith and they tend to be the stout, lion-hearted, bold heroes, whether men or women.
But something tells me that if you went into that family circle, there'd be more stories told about Susanna Spurgeon than Charles. More about the wives of Adoniram Judson than Judson himself. This is something about the impact, the impact of a virtuous woman, a virtuous wife, a virtuous mother.
It's a sad thing when children have little regard for their parents, maybe even no regard for their parents. I have a neighbor who despises his parents. He's an adult. He has boys of his own. It breaks my heart.
He has such a negative stance toward his own parents that he can't relate even with his in-laws. He has a hatred really toward any parental authority. We were exchanging things to listen to, so he recommends atheist podcasts to me and I return the favor.
And one of the thinkers that he enjoys listening to published a whole book about how we owe our parents nothing and society can never change for the good until we break the illusion that somehow we owe obeisance to our parents.
This is the kind of thing he fills his mind with. You know, an unbeliever can have the worst childhood, the worst upbringing, and in Christ, by his grace, find something redeemable about it, something to be thankful for, some way to respect parents who failed them at almost every turn.
That's what a believer can do in Christ. For an unbeliever, they can have the very best childhood and have nothing but ungratefulness, nothing but hatred.
I deserved more.
It's the difference that Christ makes. It is a sad thing, a tragic thing. It's an evil thing when children have little regard for their parents or no regard at all. But here we get a sense of Sarah's conduct and Abraham's love for her and Isaac's love for her and the impact this woman of faith made.
And so that's our eulogy for Sarah. She died, and we're having this sort of sermon eulogy for her. She's a mother of the faithful. When Scripture points to Abraham, she's not far behind. She's always by his side.
Listen to me, Isaiah says, you who pursue righteousness and seek the Lord, look to the rock from which you were cut, the quarry from which you were hewn. Look to Abraham, your father, and to Sarah who gave you birth.
She's the mother of those who have faith, Hebrews 11, 11, by faith. Sarah herself received power to conceive even when she was past the age because she considered him faithful who had promised. And so she too is the mother of all those who believe.
And now we look at the burial, and I won't take the time to read through the verses again, but I do want to highlight this exchange, which takes up most of chapter 23. We read at the beginning about the death of Sarah.
We understand that Abraham wants to secure a place of burial, and at the end, he does so, and there's a conclusion to that. But the bulk of chapter 23 is in this negotiating, this transaction between Ephron and Abraham.
Now, of course, in the Ancient Near East, and this is still somewhat the case in Middle Eastern culture generally, you're expected to haggle over prices. And this is just a textbook setup for haggling.
We don't do that very typically in the West. The sticker price is the sticker price. If you go to a yard sale, maybe there's a little room, a little leeway given to negotiate. But for the most part, you don't walk into a store and say, yeah, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, cashier at Walmart.
$3 .99 for beef jerky is not going to happen. Listen, $2, right? You can't haggle. But in most marketplaces in most parts of the world, you could. In fact, you were expected to. I remember being a teenager, and we went down to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, and I had my mission to get a Folex, a fake Rolex.
And I knew that it was expected to haggle, and so I'd find the street vendors. You always hope you get a real one that was stolen off some businessman. No. I don't think the real ones were out in the street vendor cart.
But I remember how empowering it was to haggle. My dad would kind of be giving me tips. He'd say, let's try another one. You were a little too easy on that one. Let's try this one. So the next vendor.
They'd go, 70, you're crazy.
See you later.
Hold on, my friend, my friend, wait. Listen, 40, 40 tops. So the haggling would commence. And this has all the ear markings of that.
It's exactly what you would expect.
The first thing is you sort of offer to give it away. I'm so generous here, I could just give it to you. And you never take that up. That would be the most shameful thing you could do. No, no, no, no, I'm going to give you full price.
Essentially, now you name your price, and he does. Well, the land is clearly worth 400 shekels of silver, and now the haggling is supposed to begin. Oh, you know, certainly it is, my lord, but please, will you not consider 50, and then maybe 300, and then 100.
Eventually, you kind of find the middle ground. But Abraham just says, he's kind of like the worst negotiator of all time.
400 shekels sold.
You didn't even haggle.
What are you doing?
If anything, there's almost shame now on the other side. Now Ephron's in this position of,.
I really robbed this guy.
I started out with something astronomical. 400 shekels is all sorts of money. I mean, every scholar agrees, even 1 ,000 years later, 400 shekels would have been exorbitant. I don't know how inflation works at this point in time.
We don't have Reaganomics. But 400 shekels is a lot of money.
For instance, David,.
When he negotiates for the land on which the temple is built,.
He only pays 50 shekels for it.
And he says, you know, I'm going to pay something. And the price is paid. And so the king pays this somewhat hefty sum, not for a king like David, but a decent sum of 50 shekels for the land upon which the temple is built.
400 shekels.
And you don't even need the field. You're paying that just for the cave. And the field's kind of thrown in there. I don't really actually need the land. I just want this cave. And so what's going on here?
Is it that Abraham is just a clueless negotiator, that he's really a poor steward and lousy with money? No. Not only is gaining a parcel of land a step forward in what God has promised Abraham, but remember that also part of the promise was Abraham would bless the nations.
And so in this almost foolish display of generosity, just kind of name it, it's yours. I'm going to lavish this upon you. Abraham's also taking a step forward in blessing the nations. Remember that Moses is writing this for Israelites who are about to enter the land.
How instructive this would be for them. For those upon which you'll dwell as neighbors, you must have this generous instinct. This is how you must regard them. You must show them honor and treat them generously.
And in so doing, you will be a light to the nations. They will say, who is the God that these Israelites serve? Verse 4 shows us, of course, the most important part. Give me property for a burial place among you that I may bury my dead out of my sight, which would have been an idiom.
He's not saying get it out of my sight. It's just an idiom. It's an appropriate way to speak of burial. What Abraham asks for literally is a holding for a grave, or you could translate it, give me a possession for a burial place.
And that's really a significant term. Because it's used later in Genesis as the holding or the possession of the promised land. We see it in chapter 17 and chapter 48. And later on, it's always connected to the possession of the land by the Israelites according to the promise.
So Abraham's already connecting the purchase of this cave at Machpelah to the promise of God's inheritance within the land. And not only does Abraham recognize that, but Isaac does. And Jacob does. And even at the end of Genesis, Joseph gives instructions for his bones to be brought back to the land.
Why burial? Why burial? This passage, Genesis 23, singularly begins the entire biblical theology of burial that will become the most significant factor for Jewish funerary practice through the rest of Scripture still today.
Here in chapter 23, we have a theology of burial. Why burial? Why go to such a great length and such a great cost to bury the body of Sarah? Abraham is sowing the seed of the body, as it were, by faith in the hope of the promise.
In the recognition that there's going to not only be an inheritance, but a resurrection. This is a major step towards resurrection theology in Scripture. We could even paraphrase it this way. By faith, Abraham, when he was tested,.
Offered up Sarah,.
Concluding that God was able to raise her up even from the dead. And so this is why her body must be buried in the land. If there's no resurrection, what use is it? It doesn't really matter what you do with the body and where you put it.
But if you're expecting the inheritance to be true, then it must be that she will not be in this state of death indefinitely. God will be able to raise her up, even from the dead. And so his promise will be true.
Abraham, in other words, goes through this process in an understanding of the way that God's promise will lead to new life. Life from the dead. An undoing of the curse of death from the fall. And so begins the theology of burial.
We read, for instance, Jacob in Genesis 49 saying, I'm to be gathered to My people. Bury Me with My fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite.
We have to just say real quick.
That what we know as the biblical Hittites which are part of Anatolia,.
This is different.
This is correctly translated Hittite, but Hittite because it's the gentilic form of Heth, the sons of Heth. So just keep that in mind. This is not Hittites proper. Ephron the Hittite in the cave that is in the field at Machpelah to the east of Mamre in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field from Ephron the Hittite to possess as a burying place.
There they buried Abraham and Sarah, his wife. There they buried Isaac and Rebekah, his wife. And there I buried Leah. The field and the cave that is in it were bought from the Hittites. So he too keeps emphasizing this is our land, this is our cave, this is our burial place.
This was bought, this was bought,.
This was bought by Abraham from Ephron. So he's repeating the same emphasis about the significance of this place which is significant because of the burial. Which is significant because of the promise.
The promise that Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob will be heirs. God's promise of the land was not just a promise to them, but a promise to their descendants. And so not only is the immediate family all buried there, Sarah, Abraham, Isaac, Rebekah, Leah, Jacob, all buried in this cave.
But beyond them there's this memorial, this token, this stake. That what the land ultimately points to we'll be sure. And in this way they all are looking afar off to see the day of Christ. And we see again when we come to Christ the significance of burial, don't we?
1 Corinthians 15 where Paul gives an account of his gospel. I deliver to you first of all that which I also receive, that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures. Please just notice that that's the first thing that Paul says.
About his gospel, his testimony of the gospel. Is that the first thing your average evangelical would say about the gospel? What's the first thing to say about the gospel? If you only had one sentence to give about the gospel, what should that sentence contain?
That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.
That would be Paul's answer.
But notice what follows this. And that he was buried. It's striking to me that Paul doesn't say Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures and he rose again on the third day. It's significant enough to take the time to say.
And he was buried.
He already said he died.
For us the next step is the resurrection. As evangelicals we typically ignore the significance of burial and the significance of the ascension. As typical evangelicals we ignore these. We slight these.
What matters to us is that he died on the cross and he was resurrected. But equally important to these.
Are the fact that he was buried.
And that he ascended when he was resurrected. Now I say it's significant that he is buried in part because there's this Gnostic tendency that Western Christians have in the way they think of final things.
In the way that we think of heaven in the eternal state. By Gnostic I mean we have a dualistic way of looking at our lives and death and the life to come. That there's something physical about this life that must pass away and we enter into something ethereal.
Quasi-spiritual. Something apart from creation. And that that is the great hope of the Christian when that is in fact a Gnostic lie. The theology could be reduced to the sentiment and I don't mean to take a shot at it because I understand what it's meaning to imply.
But how it's stated is not helpful, not correct. And perhaps you've heard it. It's from a hymn in 1919. This world is not my home. I'm just a passing through. That would be your typical evangelical view of death and the last things.
This world's not my home.
I'm just a passing through. Jesus died on the cross and then he was resurrected. And we're going to die someday but we'll be in heaven. Won't that be great? And we'll be on puffy cumulonimbus clouds, stringing harps, and just won't that be wonderful to be some quasi-angelic being of light in a vapor-y world of glory.
That's a typical understanding of these last things. But when you say he was buried,.
He was buried in this world,.
In this tomb, in the same way that Sarah was buried and Abraham was buried and Isaac was buried in this place, in this tomb, because of this promise, then you see how Genesis 23 is presenting a much larger understanding of the significance of Christ's burial.
If Isaac is just pointing to the seat of promise and he must be buried in the land of the promise for the sake of being heir of it, then how significant is it that the ultimate seat of promise, the true Isaac, Jesus the Son of David, is buried in this earth,.
In this soil,.
So that according to the promise, he can be the heir of all? A fundamental misunderstanding that has often attempted to be corrected. One of the great Reformed theologians, Hermann Bavink, he has a very famous maxim, Grace restores nature.
Grace restores nature.
That's loaded.
From that maxim, he writes thousands of pages. Grace is not separate or distinct from nature. Grace is not an alternative to nature, which would be Gnostic dualism, right? Grace restores nature. This is why Christians bury bodies.
Because grace restores nature. If Christ is the first fruits of our glory, then we ought to pay a lot more attention to the significance of Christ's burial. The consequence of having a different view of grace, a different understanding of the things to come, essentially leads you to separate creation from the Gospel.
That God created this world,.
Created this earth,.
Created our bodies as human beings, created a whole cascading symphony of purpose in this life and in this world and in all the created matter. But then, grace comes as an alternative and that will just sweep us away into some vague spiritual afterlife that has nothing to do with this created order.
And when you disconnect creation from the Gospel, you don't actually preserve God's grace. You begin to lose it. And so all of our emphasis on the cross begins to become equally Gnostic. It becomes escapist.
Our calling then as soldiers of the cross,.
As cross-bearers,.
Equally becomes something relatively disconnected from this life and this world and this earth and our labors upon it. And so evangelicals are content to only begin with 1 Corinthians 15. Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures.
Now if that's all you have,.
That's what you must have. But so often we reduce the Gospel to just being justified. He died on the cross to forgive my sins and now I can be taken away, away from creation, away from this world to some vague heavenly existence for all of eternity.
That's not the Christian hope. That's never been the Christian hope. The Gospel's more than being justified. Christ is our Redeemer. His grace restores our nature. Jesus became that which He would save.
Jesus was truly man and truly God. To deny creation in terms of the Gospel would be akin to denying the incarnation in terms of Christ. Jesus redeems what was marred by the fall. He restores what was lost and ruined by man's rebellion.
He renews what was disfigured by sin. In other words, in the incarnation we understand something, something about what it means to be human as God intended. And that then leads to the significance of Christ being buried in this earth as the first fruits of our hope.
Our hope of glory.
Let me just,.
I just want to show you just from two Psalms. This is something I've been reflecting on ever since we've been in Mark, to be honest. See if you can detect what I'm trying to pick up on the language of the Psalms.
We opened with Psalm 96, I think. Or do we open with Psalm 115?
Either way, I'll read them both.
Psalm 96, beginning in verse 10. Say among the nations,.
The Lord reigns.
The world also is firmly established.
It shall not be moved.
He shall judge the peoples righteously. Where does the judgment take place? On whom does it take place? What will not be moved?
Let the heavens rejoice. And let the earth be glad.
Why is the earth going to be glad?
Why should the earth be glad.
If it's just going to be dissolved up? Everything's going to be some vague cloud of bliss, right? So why does the earth rejoice? Heavens rejoice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
We get that.
But when God judges on that day all of the nations, why is the earth rejoicing? Let the sea roar and all its fullness. Let the field be joyful and all that is in it. Let all the trees of the woods rejoice before the Lord, for He's coming.
He's coming to judge the earth. He shall judge the world.
With righteousness.
And the peoples with truth. Why is the world rejoicing? Why are the fields singing? Why is the sea roaring with delight? Is it that the King is finally coming and all of the created order is in glory rejoicing?
Finally He's come to bring righteousness upon the earth? No longer will all of creation groan under the burden of the curse,.
But will now be delivered.
And oh no, we're being burnt up. Oh yeah, that's right. We were never part of the equation. The earth rejoices because it was always the intention of God for redemption to include all that He had created.
Psalm 115, beginning in verse 12. The Lord has been mindful of us. He will bless us. He will bless the house of Israel. He will bless the house of Aaron.
He will bless those who fear the Lord,.
Both small and great. May the Lord give you increase, more and more, you and your children. May you be blessed by the Lord who made heaven and earth. The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord's, but the earth He has given to the children of men.
The dead do not praise the Lord, nor any who go down into silence,.
But we will bless the Lord.
From this time forth and forevermore. Praise the Lord. So God's people forever rejoice in the Lord, and the earth is given to them forever. Abraham is a nobody. You're a mighty prince among us.
That's a form of flattery.
He's like a used car salesman. You're a mighty prince among us. 400 shekels. He's really, for all intents and purposes, he's a nobody. He's been in the land for decades, and he's buried in the edge of a field that he didn't even own, and he's in a cave.
But the meek inherit the earth. The meek inherit the earth. The belief that we will spend eternity in heaven, that that is the true home, and that is an alternative to what God has created. That is something already in play, distinct from some final redemption yet to be revealed.
It's to say that Christ is not really the first fruits of what we shall be, and that He's not the deposit, the guarantee of what will happen and what God has created. It also denigrates the physical. It removes the Christian hope of the body to some vague Greek idea of the soul.
Some undefined spirituality. But this world is our home. Though we are obscure and meek within it, we bury in the hope of what God has promised. And so from Genesis to Revelation, the hope of believers is a bodily resurrection.
On the earth.
Though we must be, as it were,.
Unclothed,.
We're, according to Revelation, tenting in heaven. Tenting is not a permanent abode. We tent in heaven waiting to be further clothed. And we do so when that new Jerusalem descends upon the earth. When there's a new heavens and a new earth.
Then we are further clothed. In other words, then we have a body like unto the Lord's. And it's this new heavens, this new earth, which is a way of saying a completely redeemed, created order. That was God's desire from the beginning.
And that is why Christians bury their dead. Now this doesn't mean that someone who was in an attic fire or the veterans of World War I that were disintegrated into the soil in Flanders are somehow absent from this promise.
God's able to reconstitute from the very particles that He made human beings from. From dust we're made to dust we return. God gathers as He sees fit. But I'm saying there's a theology of burial that's very significant.
And if possible, when possible, Christians bury their dead. Because while we grieve, we do not grieve as those without hope. And when we bury, we bury in hope. So let's lastly talk about the hope of glory, briefly.
We're living in a world of despair. Our inability to have a clearer understanding of what the gospel entails about redemption is part of our failure to give a witness, to give a light to this despair.
People honestly think you just take the proverbial.
Dirt nap, and that's all there is.
It's interesting to me that only really since the Enlightenment has that become something even conceivable to any human culture in the history of the world. Every human culture that we know of throughout history has had some understanding of the afterlife.
Until you get to the monument of man's arrogance and pride in the Enlightenment, and now it's just a dirt nap. So take what you can while you can. People don't know why they're here, what they're here for.
If you don't know what life is, how are you going to know what death is? If you're not able to cope with life, how are you going to.
Cope with death?
Living well means dying well, being prepared to die well. Martin Lloyd-Jones says, What is life? What is living? What does it mean to us? What is it all about? Is it not one of the major tragedies of life?
Indeed, is it not the greatest of all tragedies? That amid all of our concerns about life, all of our intellectual activity, all of our discussions, the one thing which men and women are never concerned to face is the first and most obvious thing of all.
Namely, life itself. You know that we distinguish life from living, right?
We can.
Talk about living as that state of being, that existential state that means our hearts are bumping and our neurons are firing. But then we also talk about life as if it's something above that state of existence.
A greater purpose, a greater energy. Get out and live a little. Get a life. We make a distinction between living and having a.
Real life. And people.
Are living today with no understanding and utter despair about the prospect of life. And I think it's in part because Christians have fumbled on death. We've fumbled on death.
More.
Than ever in the history of the world, we've insulated ourselves from death.
If you.
Read any Reformation biography, they tend to only read as though people went from their nicely heated homes and insulated walls to church and back. There was the funeral parlor that you went to once every three years.
That would be typical.
For us. You were surrounded.
By death. Death was staring at you all day long. If you weren't thinking about death, death was thinking about you. It was inescapable. Christians wouldn't fumble.
On that. It gave.
Us a witness. People would look at that confidence and that joy and perhaps you've been a Christian long enough to see the difference between a believer's funeral and an unbeliever's funeral. Where it's like, get me out of here.
Get me to the little after lunch so I can take some shots. I need to dull myself and get away from this a few days and I'll never have to think about this again. Where Christians are singing hymns and rejoicing.
Grieving. Certainly grieving. Talking about the memories and the loves and the virtues and the graces and all the things they'll miss. And they still grieve. But what a difference it is to grieve with hope.
And because we've fumbled on things of death, Christians nod and agree with the most vacuous errors that are sprung out at funerals and calling hours. Oh well, you know, angel now, in the glory now forever.
It's like, no. That's not the vision. That's not the hope. It's not some ethereal.
Existence. I want my.
Body. But I don't want my body back as it is, prone to what it's prone to. I want my body back glorified. I want to see the Lord and be made like unto Him. I want to live in Eden. I want Eden to extend the very corners of the cosmos.
I want God's glory to suffuse it so that the light is not from the sun, but the light is the glory of the Lamb. And I want to experience that bodily. The Christian has the answers to the reality of death.
Christians alone are in a place.
That they can be wisely prepared for.
And even hopeful and joyous about the prospect.
Of death. And so, Abraham.
Is mourning, but he's also teaching us, all the way back in Genesis 23, to have a faith toward the promise. Not the promise of a detached eternity in some quasi mystical existence, but the hope that Sarah is going to wake up from her sleep and walk out of that tomb and dwell in a renewed, new heavens and new earth.
Just like the early Christians would come out of their bunks under the catacombs of the cities as if they were sleeping, which is why, early on in the New Testament, the verb for death was.
Sleep, because.
That's all you're doing. You're sleeping until you awake. And the King has come in His glory. And you look and you see Him, and you're made like Him, and you watch as the trees and the.
Fields and the seas roar. It's just.
Like any great dramatic moment when, you know, you think of Lord of the Rings or something, and you know, all the powers of evil and darkness seem to have the upper hand, and everything's looking so dismayed, and then the light breaks, and the triumphant tubas start blasting, and you get that rush of adrenaline in the theater seat.
The King has come. You know, the good is going to prevail, and it's almost like everything there is rejoicing. And that's just a crayon scribbling of a shadow, of a glimpse of what's going to happen on that day.
To be an angel on a cloud would be about the worst afterlife I could ever think of. But to be like Christ and to dwell in a world as it was made to be by God who designed it to be good,.
Very good.
To live in a land where God is dwelling with His people, and I behold Him when I look upon the face of my Savior, and to be among all the redeemed, and even to meet this mother of the faithful, Sarah, and say, you know, we talked a lot about you, and we were looking forward.
To this.
That's the hope of glory. Whether you want to or not, you must settle your view of your life so that you can settle your position in death. And you must prepare for the grief and the guilt and this whole way of life of living before God.
Look to.
Abraham and Sarah.
They are your mother and father in the faith even here. You cannot avoid these issues. They will not go away. It shows why we must begin the gospel with the forgiveness that comes from the blood of Christ.
Because if we've worked out the issue of our guilt before God, then we can trust God will work out the issues of our life and death, and we can be buried in the hope of glory. Brothers and sisters, we don't want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, Paul says in 1 Thessalonians 4.
We don't want you to grieve like the rest of the men.
Who have no hope.
No, we have a hope of glory. Hebrews 11, 8 through 10 was picking up on the fact that Abraham referred to himself as a stranger. By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out of the place which he would receive as an inheritance, and he went out, not knowing where he was going.
By faith, he dwelt in the land of promise, as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise.
For he waited for the city which has foundations, whose.
Builder and maker is God. He was not waiting for a city that would be above the clouds, out of physical sight. He was waiting for a city that would be in the very place where the field of Machpelah bordered the tomb of his wife's body.
That's where God's going to build His city. And that city like Eden's going to expand all of the cosmos. And so my sons, my boys, when your time comes to die like mine, bury yourselves in the hope of this promise.
God will.
Do it. The promises of God,.
The death and burial of Sarah, how we deal with death as Christians shows everything about our understanding of the Gospel, about the promise, about the whole storyline of Scripture. It shows us everything we believe about why Christ came, and why He was truly human, why He came and dwelt among us, as us, and then on the cross in our place.
The hope of the resurrection is not for some new mode of being, but for the same body to be renewed and restored in glory. And so the human body does not lose its significance at death. In fact, perhaps we realize for the first time just how much significance it has.
We should never be a believer that says, just put me in the oven.
It doesn't really matter. It matters.
The human body does not lose its significance in death because the promise of God does not lose its significance in death. The human body does not somehow break the promise and purpose of God for this world.
Rather, it's sown in hope. I eagerly expect, Paul says in Philippians 1, and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but I will have courage so that now, as always, Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death, for to me to live is Christ and to die is gain.
Philippians 3, our citizenship is in heaven and we eagerly await a Savior from there, from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control will transform.
Our lowly bodies so.
They will be like his glorious body. Spurgeon says, and I close with this, death in its substance has been removed. Only the shadow of it remains.
Nobody is afraid of a shadow.
A shadow cannot block a man's path, not even for a moment. The shadow of a dog cannot bite. The shadow of a sword cannot kill. Death has been made a shadow by the power of him who's broken the power of death.
And this is why Christians are buried in the hope of glory.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you for the truth of your Word and the awe of your purpose, Lord. May we be more eternally minded in the right ways. Not in a way that takes us out of this world, but rather a way that energizes us and fills us with the hope and the faith and the delight of your purpose for this world.
Help us to reflect more deeply upon the language of your Word, whether it be in the Psalms, in the mission and ministry of your Son. Help us, Lord, to not fall into those easy errors.
Of dualism, of gnostic.
Thought, of making grace an alternative rather than the restoration of our nature. Help us, Lord, to have our hope in the right place. As we ourselves are prepared to die, as we continue to bear the emotional wounds, the heaviness of spirit that comes with those we have.
Buried, Lord, let us remember that.
We are those who grieve with hope and not like the rest. And let us remember where that hope comes from, Lord. These things we ask in your Son's name. Amen.