FBC Daily Devotional – Feb. 18, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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00:07

What a good Thursday to you. I hope your week is going well, continues to go well, we're heading, wrapping up this week pretty quickly and heading toward the weekend.

00:17

Well, I'm wondering, when was the last time you attended a funeral? There haven't been too many of those that we've been able to attend in the last year, that's for sure.

00:30

There have been some pretty severe limitations on funeral gatherings, even visitations and so forth.

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But I just wonder, what was it like? What was the experience in that last funeral that you attended?

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If it was somebody, a loved one, you know, I'm sorry for your loss and I sympathize with you in that.

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But what was that, what was that funeral like? And compare that with what we've read today in our reading in Genesis chapter 15.

01:02

Isn't the funeral that Jacob, it was held for Jacob, doesn't that stand in some pretty significant contrast to our modern practices, a lot of our modern practices?

01:14

In the first place, in Jacob's funeral, there was a burial and not a cremation.

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A burial. Now, the Bible does not prohibit cremation, and it doesn't demand or command burials.

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And I don't want to fall into the trap of the Pharisees in the New Testament who elevated the traditions of men to the command of God.

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I don't want to do that. But what I do find fascinating is that in the accounts in Scripture of people who pass away, who die, we're talking

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Abraham, Isaac, Rebekah, Rachel, and now we come to Jacob.

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What we see is that these folks are buried. And that's in pretty stark contrast to a lot of the practices of the pagan cultures around them.

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There would be no thought given to a cremation.

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Now again, I don't want to make too much of this, but I think that the reason for the predominance of burial, the burial of the body with believers who are deceased, is, one thing, it recognizes even the sacredness of the body.

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Is this something that God has created? And we don't treat it lightly.

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We don't want to fall into the trap of the dualists who assume that anything physical is, you know, it's just trash, and only the spiritual is important.

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No, our Savior took a physical body and his physical body was buried and he was raised, again, a physical body.

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So there is some importance in that, and I think also the burial recognizes the hope that we have as believers.

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The hope of that body being resurrected. And yes, I fully believe and know that God, in his power and authority, can pull together the ashes scattered all over the world, if that's where they've gone, of someone who's been cremated.

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I understand that. But there is nevertheless this message of hope that is communicated in a

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Christian burial, that this body that is placed in the ground is asleep, and it will awake at the coming of Christ.

03:58

Well, we could go on discussing that contrast, but I do find it interesting that in the first place, the distinction, as contrast between a lot of modern practices and the burial or the funeral of Jacob, is it was a burial.

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And then another thing is that there was this elaborate process of time. There were seven days of mourning itself, following the 40 days that were used for embalming.

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And then, after the embalming, there was the travel, the journeying from Egypt all the way back to Canaan, to the burial plot in Canaan, where Jacob was going to be buried.

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And once they arrived in Canaan, there were these seven days of mourning. Seven days of mourning.

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This is quite a process of time. And again, contrast that to our modern practices.

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If you work for a company that grants leave, funeral leave, how much time do you get paid funeral leave?

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Now, I don't criticize companies for not giving more time for paid funeral leave.

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That's not the point. The point is that there's almost this unstated expectation that, you know, you're gonna take these few days, two or three days, depending on the nature of the relationship to the one who's passed away, maybe three days.

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You're gonna take these three days, and you're gonna make the funeral arrangements on one day, and a couple days later you're gonna have the funeral, and then hopefully there's gonna be a weekend involved in there.

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But you know, you get right back to work. And there's almost the expectation that mourning is something that you get over quickly, that the whole funeral process is something you get over quickly and then get back to work.

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And then that brings up a third contrast, that this time of this funeral for Jacob was a time of mourning, of mourning.

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There was great mourning. It was so, the mourning was so intense, so great, that the

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Canaanites, who are witnessing what's going on with the Egyptians who've come up in this long journey, at least they think they're

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Egyptians and they're primarily Hebrews, but anyway, what they experience here, what they witness, is such a degree of mourning that they're struck by the profundity of it.

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Well, again, I contrast that with what's becoming quite a common fad in our own day and in our culture, and that's to brush away.

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We don't have funeral services. More and more people are just not even having a funeral service at all. No time of mourning, no miserable experience of sitting before a casket and having, you know, music play and somebody say something that's, you know, somber and sobering and causing us to feel bad.

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We don't want any of that. What we want to do is, we have a little bit of a party kind of an atmosphere and have it all, you know, happy and fun and, maybe not fun, but you get the point.

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What we're doing, what we're doing in our culture, is we're closing our eyes to the reality of the grievousness of death.

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And there's a good reason why the writer of Ecclesiastes says it's better to go to a house of mourning than to a house of mirth, a party, because you go to a house of mourning and you can take to heart some pretty serious issues of life.

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Well, for Jacob, when he died, he came to the end of his journey on this earth.

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There was another long process for his body until it was buried, and that time was a time of mourning.

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So I think we can take some lessons from this and learn from this and maybe think through our own plans and expectations for those final arrangements, if you will, and what we're going to ask of our family.

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Let's ask our families to have a Christian burial, have a

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Christian funeral, one where the hope of the Christian life is going to be expressed, that the seriousness of eternity is expressed, the grievousness of death is expressed.

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Death is even a grievous thing for believers. It's something to sorrow over.

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It is the ultimate expression of the curse of sin, and thankfully for those of us who are believers in Christ, that curse is reversed by the cross.

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Nevertheless, we die. We die, and that effect of sin is a grievous thing.

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Let's not forget that. Let's mourn appropriately. So thankful for that little challenge from Jacob's burial.

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So our Father and our God, I pray that we would not take lightly the reality of death. We wouldn't try to ignore it, we wouldn't try to party our way out of its sober reality.

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I pray, Father, that even thinking about the subject of death, we would think about it in the framework of a

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Christian worldview, a Christian view of eternity, a Christian view of the body.

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I pray, give us that wisdom. We ask in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen.

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Alright, well have a good rest of your Thursday, and I trust that God will bless you in the remainder of the day.