The Hope of Glory

The Hope of Glory in the Death of Sarah

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. And in the land, 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 the 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 into 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.

She was a wife. 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 helpmate, 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?

And 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 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.

And 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 in 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 your 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. 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 we went to the next vendor. They'd go, $70? You're crazy. No, 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 a 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 received 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 and 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 gonna 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,.