“An Unusual Start” – FBC Morning Light (1/8/2024)

What a good Monday morning to you, and here we are beginning the second week of January already.

I just want to remind you that our Bible reading plan for this year is a chronological plan.

We're going through the Bible chronologically, which means that we're not necessarily going to, we may jump back and forth.

Like today's reading is in Genesis 23 through 25, and then it jumps for a few verses to 1

Chronicles 1 and then jumps back to Genesis 25. It can sound a little confusing, but if you follow along in the process, it's easy to understand.

By the way, if you would like to have a copy of the schedule, the Bible reading schedule, you can go to our church's website, faithbaptisterling .com,

and there's a tab on the menu bar, Articles and Devotions, and underneath that there's the 2024

Bible reading plan, and you click on that, and then you can either follow the plan right from the website, or you can download the quarters for, the plan's divided into four quarters for the year, and you can download each quarter at a time if you wish to do it that way.

Well, anyway, as I mentioned, we're reading in Genesis 23 through 25 today, and I want to focus on the beginning of chapter 23 at an event that happens when

Abraham is, let me get this right, he is 137 years old, and it's talking about the death of Sarah when she was 127 years old, so remember, she's 10 years younger.

Well, what I want to point out is that about 62 years earlier, when

Abraham was 75 years old, in Genesis chapter 12, the

Lord told Abraham to leave his home country, and he said, I'm going to take you to a land, never been there before,

I'm going to give you that land, I'm going to make of you a great nation, and so on.

And so here it is, 62 years later, Abraham is much older, obviously, 137 years old, and he still does not own a blade of grass in that land that God promised to give him.

So I'm going to give you this whole land, all this land of Canaan. And he still doesn't have any part of the land at all, until today, until this passage.

And what happens is, he doesn't get this land by conquering, you know, several years down the road, generations down the road,

Israel is going to come into Canaan and occupy the land through conquering, overcoming the

Canaanites when their wickedness has come to the full. That's not how he gets the piece of property that he gets here today.

He doesn't fight for it. The way he gets it is, he buys it.

And the occasion is not one of great joy. You'd think, oh, yay, the promise of God is about to be fulfilled.

It's starting to be fulfilled. I can see the beginning of the fulfillment of the promise of God. So it's not a great joyous occasion.

It's the death of Sarah, and he's buying a burial plot. Now it's interesting, he appeals to the residents of the territory to provide for him a place to bury his wife.

And they all say, well, you just tell us what you want, and we'll give it to you. And you can read this in Genesis 23, the first 20 verses.

And Abraham said, no, I'm not going to take it as a gift. I'm going to buy it from you.

Tell me how much it's worth. Well, what do you want? And he tells them, I want this piece of property. It belongs to Ephraim, one of the

Hittites in the land of Heth, descendant of Heth. And he says, I want this cave that's in the corner of your field.

And Ephraim says, okay, I give it to you. And Abraham says, no, tell me how much it's worth, and I want to buy it from you.

And Ephraim says, I mean, you can kind of picture this, right? Ah, no, no, no, no. What is that? What does that tell us? I mean, it's only 400 shekels of silver, but what is that between us?

It's nothing. It's nothing. Well, of course, what he's basically saying is, I want you to pay me 400 shekels of silver.

And Abraham weighs out the cost of the price of the land, gives it to him before all these witnesses to testify to the fact that this parcel of land in the land of Canaan belongs to him, and it will remain in his family for generations to come.

It ends up becoming really a burial ground for not only Abraham, but also many of his descendants that come after him.

But more importantly, more importantly, this is like the first installment of the receiving of the bigger promise that God has given to Abraham and to his offspring, the land of Canaan.

Now, what I get from that is—several lessons you can learn from that—but one point

I get from that is that the promises that God makes do not always come immediately.

We're going to say more about this in the days ahead, but they don't always come immediately. He makes his promise today, and it can be a long, long, long, long time in seeing it fulfilled.

That doesn't mean he's unfaithful. It just means we need to be patient. We need to wait. And so here it is, 62 years after the promise was made.

Abraham gets a taste of the fulfillment of that promise, which is still hundreds of years from being fulfilled.

Well, let's thank the Lord for the faithfulness of our God to the promises that he makes.

And so, Father, we do thank you today that you are a faithful God. You make promises, and you keep that which you make.

We thank you for that. In Jesus' name, amen. All right, well, listen. You have a great start to your new week, and may the