FBC Daily Devotional – January 19, 2021

Faith Baptist Church

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Well, a good Tuesday to you. Here we are, second day of the week already, and moving forward through what the

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Lord has us to do in our different areas of responsibility. I trust you're taking some time daily to look into God's Word and meditate on it, think on it.

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If you're following the reading plan, then today you read in Genesis 23 and 24, kind of a sad chapter if you think about it.

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The first bit of this chapter is Abraham's wife of many years has now died, has passed away, and he goes through the process of negotiating a burial plot for Sarah.

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He's working with the Hittites and he finally weighs out those 400 pieces of silver and buys this burial ground in the land of Canaan.

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Earlier in the book of Genesis, all the way back in Genesis 13, verses 14 and 15, the

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Lord promised Abraham all of the land of Canaan, the land in which the

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Hittites are dwelling. This is what the Lord said. He said, the Lord said to Abraham after Lot had separated from him, lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land that you see

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I will give to you and to your offspring forever. The Lord tells

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Abraham to do a 360 and look around. Everywhere he sees is the land of Canaan.

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The Lord is promising him that he will have all of this land, his descendants.

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Yet, here we are, decades later, and that promise is just beginning to be fulfilled in a very, very, very small way.

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Abraham buys a cemetery plot. He buys a burial cave.

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To be more specific or more precise, I guess, this isn't just a six by four piece of ground that's six feet deep.

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This would be a sizable piece of land. It would have a cave -like area where Sarah would be buried, and it could serve as a burial property for Abraham as well and other offspring in the future.

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Now, here we are. Remember the promise. Abraham, I'm giving you all of the land of Canaan, and Abraham has to go to these

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Hittites and negotiate this burial ground. The interesting thing is those

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Hittites want to give him the land, but he says, nope, nope, nope, I'm going to pay for it. I'm going to buy it so that he can actually claim deed to the land.

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As I said, that bigger promise that he's to have all of Canaan is now just, in a most insignificant way, beginning to be fulfilled.

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He now owns a burial cave. It's a small parcel of land in Canaan, but it's his.

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It's kind of like a down payment of what's to come in future generations.

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It's going to be quite a few generations before that land of promise is actually all of Israel's.

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But I want you to note some things that we can glean from this account of Abraham buying a burial plot.

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One of them is that the Lord doesn't often fulfill a promise immediately.

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That's not profound. If you've been walking with the Lord for any length of time, you know that that's the case, that the

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Word of God is replete with promises, and some of them you don't experience the fulfillment of those promises right away.

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He doesn't fulfill a promise immediately. This account also shows us that the

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Lord may not fulfill it all at once. The Lord promised Abraham all of the land of Canaan, and yet when

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Abraham dies, when Sarah's died, and of course she's the mother of the ultimate heir,

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Isaac, and so forth, she dies, and what of the land does he have? None, until he buys a burial plot.

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And the significant thing is when Abraham himself dies years later, he's going to go to the same burial plot, and that's still all the land that's going to be his.

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So the Lord may not fulfill that promise all at once. And then a third point to note is that the beginning of this fulfillment may be in a most unspectacular way, really quite in an ordinary way.

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What could be more ordinary and unspectacular than negotiating a place to bury the dead?

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And yet it is in this process that the Lord is beginning to fulfill the promise that he's made to Abraham.

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And that brings up a fourth observation, and that is that the fulfillment, the promise fulfillment, may actually occur in the context of great heartache and sorrow, rather than great fanfare and celebration.

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There's no blowing up of balloons and cutting of cake and all of the rest of that stuff for this land that Abraham has just purchased.

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This is a time of sorrow, this is a time of grief, and yet it is in this time of heartache that the

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Lord is beginning to fulfill this ultimate promise. So much of this is true for us as New Testament believers as well.

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Isn't this what Paul brings out in Ephesians chapter 1 when he tells us in verses 11 to 14, he says,

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Now in Christ Jesus we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.

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You think about that in relation to Abraham receiving all of the land of Canaan, but he's working it out according to the counsel of his will.

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He gets a burial plot in his lifetime. Anyway, he does so, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory.

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Paul's talking about Jewish believers there. Then he goes on to say, In whom you also, you Gentiles also, when you heard the word of the truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, you were sealed with the promised

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Holy Spirit, now listen, who is the guarantee or the down payment of our inheritance until we acquire the possession of it to the praise of his glory.

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So you can think about it like this in the context of this passage. So far, in terms of our ultimate inheritance, we have a burial plot.

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I don't mean any, don't misunderstand, I'm just using that as an analogy. We have a down payment.

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That burial plot for Abraham was a down payment of the ultimate inheritance that his descendants were to receive.

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The Holy Spirit is dwelling within you as a believer and me as a believer.

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He is the down payment of the ultimate inheritance that we will one day possess.

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Let's rejoice in that today, that we at least have that down payment and that we have the promise of a possession that is yet to come.

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I trust you have that promise. I trust you have that possession. I trust you have the down payment.

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Our Father and our God, thank you so much for your Spirit who dwells within us, who is himself a down payment of the promised possession.

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I pray that we would rejoice in the possession of the Spirit and the promise of the ultimate possession of our inheritance in Christ Jesus.

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We pray these things now in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen. Alright, have a good rest of your