AP

Genesis 23:1-4   Sarah lived to be a hundred and twenty-seven years old. She died at Kiriath Arba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan, and Abraham went to mourn for Sarah and to weep over her.  Then Abraham rose from beside his dead wife and spoke to the Hittites.  He said, “I am a foreigner and stranger among you.  Sell me some property for a burial site here so I can bury my dead.”

There are tensions in this chapter of Genesis that remind us only too clearly of the Judgement and the faithfulness of God.

Abraham’s genuine, heartfelt mourning for the loss of his beautiful and loyal wife-and-soul-mate for over 60 years is a stark reminder that death is a terrible and hurtful enemy.  In Genesis 3 God informed us that it is the necessary consequence of our rebellion against him, a consequence we all inherit as descendants of Adam and Eve.  In Genesis 2 he told us that we were designed to have an eternal bond of fellowship with him, and that a man and a woman were intended to be united in this bond as ‘ONE flesh’.  So we can understand how godly Abraham would have felt when this one-flesh bond was ripped apart by this intruding enemy, death.  His deep mourning was a very understandable reaction, and we could not have expected otherwise.

But in Genesis 12-15 we see faithful Abraham taking firm hold of God’s clear promise to give him and his descendants the land of the Hittites and nine other nations in an everlasting Covenant.  So this exemplary man of God was simultaneously feeling the great pain of his earthly loss as well as expressing his unwavering faith in the promises of God by acquiring a burial site in the land for his dear Sarah.

At the same time he was hinting at an underlying truth that we are only ever ‘foreigners and strangers’ in this world.  All this tension was taken up and explained two millennia later by a New Testament author:  “By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going.  By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise.  For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.  And by faith even Sarah, who was past childbearing age, was enabled to bear children because she considered him faithful who had made the promise.  And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.  All these people [listed in Hebrews 11] were still living by faith when they died.  They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance, admitting that they were foreigners and strangers on earth.  People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own.  If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return.  Instead, they were longing for a better country – a heavenly one.  Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them”  (Hebrews 11:8-16).

We also live with these tensions in our lives (and deaths), even though we now have the extra confirmation that “[Jesus] must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet.  The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” (1 Corinthians 15:25-26).  Abraham gives us permission to mourn deeply for loved ones who die in the Lord, even though we know for certain they have gone to that ‘better place’ for which they were designed.

– Bruce Christian