Dying in Faith

Photo by Einar Storsul on Unsplash
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How are you faithful to God when it seems like God is not being faithful to you? All the back in chapter 12, Abraham was promised by God to have a land, seed, and a blessing. Despite Abraham's foibles, God consistently worked out His promises, even though they were often at the last minute! There was, however, one promise that hadn't been fulfilled yet: the land. All of the other promises were fulfilled with Abraham and Sarah together, and I could imagine that he might have thought that the land would come through while she was still alive. 

Do we not do the same thing? Do you have ideas of not only what God has promised you but how He is going to fulfill them? Do we not sometimes feel betrayed when things don't go exactly as we imagine them? 

I can only imagine the despair that such a seeming betrayal contains, yet in this passage, we get to see Abraham reach this point. This chapter is about burying his wife, Sarah, the matriarch of Israel. She was the only woman who could bring in the promised son. Abraham's seed could be delivered only from her womb, a woman blessed with favor from God even if she did laugh at Him! She has been at Abraham's side ever since he left the homeland of Ur. She has seen the delivery of the promise of blessing and of a descendant, but she has not seen a land to call her own. She dies a sojourner. 

How does Abraham react to this new test of faith in God, and what can we learn from it? That will be our focus as we look at our two points today: Death comes for all in the end, but death isn’t always the end.

Death comes for all in the end

The first two verses of this chapter are very matter of a fact. Sarah dies. Sarah is said to have lived 127 years in her life, and interestingly, she is the only woman who's age is recorded (Waltke, 317). Since she had Isaac when she was 90, that makes him 37 years old, and Abraham will soldier on for another 38 years after her death (Waltke, 317). After this Abraham goes in to mourn for her. They have likely been together for nearly a hundred years. 

While we all know that death comes to us all, it isn't like we think about that every day. If I could do a little sanctified speculation here, I could imagine that Abraham might not have been expecting this to happen in just this way. After all, God has granted every promise to them right when it seemed like it wasn't going to happen. All those miles walked before finally even showing them the land. All those decades of waiting for a son to arrive and only when it seems totally impossible does God send them Isaac. All those close calls of kings stealing his wife only for God to intervene and rescue her. Everything has happened at the last minute! 

There is one promise that is still outstanding: a land. Yes, they have seen the land. Yes, Abraham has permission to journey around in it, but there isn't any parcel of land that is well and truly his. I could imagine that he was likely assuming that since the other two promises have been achieved together, that this one would as well. But it isn't. Sarah dies 62 years after they first arrived at Canaan (Matthews, 314). 

Death never comes at the perfect time, does it? We wish for one more conversation, one more project. Just another moment. That deathbed realization can be so painful. It is a cold comfort that we should expect this. It seems heartless to tell someone in that position that death is a part of life, and it is out of our hands now. 

So what are we supposed to do? How do we respond to a death not just in our family, but when that death takes the dreams for our family, when death takes from us not just who should have been but what should have been?  

But death isn't always the end 

Here we witness Abraham's reaction. First, I think we should just take a moment to see Abraham's grief. A right response to death isn't the absence of tears or emotion. See Jesus' reaction to Lazarus. Crying when someone dies isn't a lack of faith. It is a recognition of the horrible consequences of sin in our world and our longing for a world without it. But, secondly, godly grief doesn't stay there in despair. 

Abraham rises to speak with the Hittites, whom verse 7 calls, the people of the land. Abraham, a non-landowner in the Land that God Himself promised him, has to approach the people of the land for a place to bury Sarah.  

The beginning of negotiations goes very well. He is looking for a burial place, and the people seem very willing to let him have basically whatever tomb he would like! He is given great titles and treated very respectfully. However, without tone and vision, it is hard to know what their motivations are. Do they genuinely respect Abraham and are truly honored to give him a piece of their property? Or are they merely offering him something that isn't in writing? In other words, without payment, there would be nothing official about Abraham's claim to the grave, and it could be taken from him at any time, much less future generations (Matthews, 318). 

In either case, Abraham has already found the specific tomb he would like, and he asks to speak with the owner in order to buy it for full price. Once again, the owner is gracious and offers him not only the cave for a tomb, but he even offers the field that goes with it! Once again, scholars differ on possible motivations for this, but the bottom line is that those motivations don't matter much. What matters is Abraham's reaction to the offer. He insists on buying it for full price. Ephron offers it to him for 400 shekels of silver. Again, we don't know for sure if this is a reasonable price or inflated. They didn't have Zillow back then. What actually is surprising is the lack of back and forth. Haggling would have been expected in that culture, and the fact that Abraham doesn't even put forward a counter offer would be surprising. What that does, however, is guarantee that Abraham has that land (Waltke, 321). After all, Abraham accepted the very first offer! He came in at asking price. No one would be able to say that Abraham cheated Ephron or wore him down to sell it below market value. He bought that land fair and square. 

Now, he is a land owner. A wanderer no more. He buries his wife in the promised land. 

Now, to us that might not seem like a huge exercise in faith. We are a very mobile and practical people. We can live hundreds or even thousands of miles from where we are born, and only the more sentimental ones might have preferences on where our body is buried after we die. It is more likely that we will determine where we are buried in terms of costs and convenience. That is not so with Abraham or people like him in this age. As one scholar mentioned, Abraham burying outside of his native land was to cut ties with ancestors (Belcher, 163). This is honestly the final step in leaving the country of his fathers all the way back in chapter 12. He is now saying that the future of his family, his descendants, is right in this place. 

By the time we get to the end of Genesis, we will find that two more generations of Abraham's descendants will be buried there. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and finally Leah and Jacob. One source interestingly points out that Jacob died in Egypt, and Joseph had his father embalmed (Gen. 50:2), so Jacob's body could actually still be there in this cave these many thousands of years later (Easton Bible Dictionary)! 

So what does all that mean for us? What Abraham is doing in this practical way is not turning his back on God. He could have said that God didn't come through on this promise and go back to the homeland (Ross, 409). Do we not feel that pull sometimes when something really hard strikes us? Maybe God isn't worth following after all? This kind of despair often does come around a death, but it doesn't have to. Some can feel this way after a ministry implodes or a child walks away from Jesus. Abraham holds on even tighter. He places, in a very literal sense, his money where his faith is. He buys this land because he actually believes that there is a future here (Waltke, 320). 

Abraham believes that God works beyond his lifetime. My seminary prof Dr. Ross put it this way, "The point for biblical theology is that Abraham and Sarah had not exhausted God's promises in their lifetime. ... God would do far more for them than he had done in this life —which is the hope of all who die in the faith" (411). Did you notice what he said there? "God would do more for *them.*" Whose them? Abraham and Sarah! Wait a minute, those people are dead! How is God going to do more for them? Don't you mean, "God will do more for their descendants"? No. God brings Abraham and Sarah to a heavenly dwelling. A place to call their own is beyond a piece of real estate, though it is not less than that, as we can see here. 

God promises to give them Himself in heaven. And there is not promise greater than that. Death can't touch that promise. There is no plan that you can make, no hope that you can have for your life that is greater than that. 

However, that is only true if you are in Christ. That is why I put in the outline that death isn't *always* the end. If you are not in Christ this morning, then death truly is the end. This is as good as life will ever be. But if you are in Christ, then this is as bad as it will ever get. Heaven will be more than adequate compensation. 

What about family who died without Christ as near as we can tell? This is one of the blessings of the Lord knowing the heart and not us. My father heard a story in the hospital of a man who didn't know Jesus who went from cursing out his mom to repenting of his sins, trusting in Christ, reconciling with his mother, and then died all in the space of 20 minutes. You never know what goes through a person's mind. Let me be clear, no one goes to heaven without trusting in Christ. Jesus said quite clearly that He is the only way. You can't trust in some other god our yourself, but you never know for sure if God didn't get a hold of their heart in the final moments of life. Trust that the Judge of all the earth will do right. 

And, as a side note, this grave that Abraham purchased is still there. There's a Muslim mosque there now, so visiting of the grave site is heavily restricted. I came across one article that asked the question of why God allows a mosque, a monument to a false religion, to remain on a place as sacred as the location of the Temple mount? Why allow such a thing to rest on this grave, this symbol of hope and faith that endures beyond death? 

The article answers that perhaps God allows these things to happen to keep us from going back to them. Instead, He wants us to focus not on Abraham's grave, but Christ's. His grave is empty! And that gives us far more hope than Abraham's grave could ever dream of giving us! 

So what do we take away from this passage? Continue to cling to God's program. You have a hope that exists beyond the literal grave. God isn't done with you just because you're dead. Honestly, He's just getting started.