It used to not be this way. But, now, every time I go for my yearly physical, the nurse asks, “Do you have an Advanced Health Care Directive?” I always answer the same, “Is there something I don’t know? I only came for a wellness visit.”
Aside from making me hate my yearly physical exam, this question reminds me of the temporary nature of our lives.
Genesis 23-25:18 is a transitional section of text. The narrator skillfully shows us the transition of the promise from generation to generation. In terms of the matriarch, the writer is moving us from 23:2, “And Sarah died,” to 24:67, “Then Isaac brought her into the tent of Sarah his mother and took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.” No need to panic. There is still a mother to bear the snake crushing seed. In terms of the patriarch, the writer moves us from 24:1, “And the Lord had blessed Abraham in all things,” to 25:11, “After the death of Abraham, God blessed Isaac his son.” No need to panic. The blessing is still intact and marching through history to fulfillment in Christ.
The purpose of this section of text is to show that God is faithful to keep his promise across the generations and will bring the promise to completion on the last day. We get a small glimpse in this text of the prophetic nature of the Pentateuch. The end is in the beginning.
These three chapters are rooted in the promise, the covenant faithfulness of God, that transcends the generations.
So the transitions of life are to be firmly planted in the covenant faithfulness of God. We need power and perspective and discernment to move through life directed by the promise of God. Here is our danger. We have so personalized the promise that we have made ourselves the center of God’s grand narrative. No. No. The promise is something very specific.
The promise is the gospel and all of its implications. God was at work in the family of Abraham to bring His sin bearing, satan crushing, death defeating Son into the world, God the Son incarnate. By His sinless life and substitutionary death, He destroyed sin, death, and satan that He might bring many sons to glory through faith in His Name, his life and work in our behalf. The Son of God is at work in the world through His church to bring about the consummation of the age in a new heaven and a new earth. This is what Genesis 23-25 points to, and this is the promise that is the guiding star to help us navigate the bends and banks of life.
More important than our birth is our death. We spend our time preparing to live when we need to prepare to die. The one is self-focused; the other is others focused. What we leave behind is more important than our present comfort. You have to think about the church in this light as well. This is where we woefully miss the mark at times. If I think about the church of today with no regard for the church of tomorrow, I consign the church to the menu of my preferences. All my consideration of the church must be guided by God’s redemptive purpose in history.
We have watched Abraham grow in his faith from a self-centered, small-minded, fellow-struggler to a mature believer thinking through life and acting in life in accord with the guiding light of God’s promise.
I want us to see from this section of text that God made a big promise and casted a vision grand enough to capture our hearts, consume our thoughts, guide our lives, build the church, and bring all things to completion. We need the perspective, power, and purpose that comes from evaluating life in light of God’s promise. Because…
It’s a good thing chapter 23 is in the Bible, because if you have to negotiate with a Hittite for a burial site, you have a window, here, on their cultural mores of negotiation. In Genesis 23-25, we have 3 funerals, Sarah, Abraham, and Ishmael’s. I think this idea of the promise of God transcending death is a theme in all three chapters, I will focus most fully on the point while looking at chapter 23.
I do, however, want to point out that the accounts of the deaths of Sarah and Abraham are saturated with references to the promise, while the death of Ishmael has no allusion to promise. For, example Sarah’s death is framed by the phrase “in the land of Canaan” (23:2,19). In Abraham’s death, the promise is referenced by Abraham giving all he had to Isaac and sending his other sons away (25:5-6). We are also assured that the blessing passed on to Isaac (25:11). Regarding Ishmael, any reference to promise is conspicuously absent (25:12-18).
The obvious point in the text then is to show that the blessing and the promise transcend death. When we come to the end of Abraham and Sarah’s lives, the question arises, “What about the promise?” Again Abraham’s faith soars to new heights. The death of Sarah provided another situation in which faith could operate. Her barrenness was an opportunity to believe God. Her death became another reason for hope.
Notice how this point is developed in the text. I’ve pointed out how the framework for the narrative is the repeated phrase, “in the land of Canaan” (23:2,19). This is a clear reference to the call of Abraham. He is in the land of Canaan in obedience to the call of God (12:1-3). God promised Abraham “to your offspring I will give this land” (12:7). Abraham recognized he is a sojourner and foreigner in the land (the promise was yet unfilled), yet he asked for property (‘ahuzza) for a burying place (23:3).
Normally, the dead were taken back to their homeland to be buried in ancestral tombs. Not so Sarah. To do so would be to abandon the promise of God. It was the promise of God that gave Abraham courage to negotiate for a burial site. Notice the repetition of the word property (vv4, 9,17, 20). The words property and possession are the same word. It is the technical word for God’s promise of land (17:8, 48:4; Deut 32:49). To secure property and bury Sarah in the cave of Machpelah in Hebron was to stake the flag of the Kingdom of God over the land of Canaan.
Realizing the promise would not be fulfilled in his lifetime, Abraham prepared for the future in a way that directed his descendant to hope in the promise. Abraham, himself, would be buried at Machpelah, so would Isaac, Rebekah, Jacob, and Leah. They all realized that their lives’ and deaths’ did not exhaust the promise of God. In death, they speak prophetically to us—the promise of God transcends death. The promise did not terminate on them. Their passing off the scene before the promise was fulfilled meant to them that God would bless the nations. The writer of Hebrews affirms this point when He said, And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect (Heb 11:39-40). Machpelah says, “There is more to come.”
It is interesting when you come to Psalm 2:8, God says to His Son, Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. There is that word again. Canaan was the new Eden, a microcosm of the new heaven and the new earth. This is why Paul says Abraham was “heir of the world” (Romans 4:13).
God made a big promise. How can the promise transcend death? It calls for the resurrection of the dead. The Sadducees asked Jesus about the resurrection of the dead. Jesus said, As for the resurrection of the dead, have you not read what was said to you by God: ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living” (Matt 22:31-32). In other words, the promise of God cannot fail. God’s promise is not exhausted in life but extends to the life to come and calls for the resurrection of the dead to fulfill.
When you die, God is not finished with you. God intends to do far more for us than He will ever do in this life. I tend to think of this life only in considering what God will do for me, but this life is not large enough to exhaust the promise of God. In Genesis, the promise is a theme, but so is death. The promise answers death with resurrection!
Do this not give you hope? Does this not give you a purpose that extends beyond you and this present age? We cannot live as if this life exhausts all meaning and purpose as an end in itself. It is a small vision and small purpose that kills the soul. For example, when a person indulges in sexual sin, he or she is living as if the summation of existence is human sexuality. When a person is consumed by the desire for wealth and fame, he or she is living as if the totality of being is for self-indulgence. Yet, every pursuit other than God’s Kingdom is too small for the human soul, and it shrinks the soul into some distortion of what God made it to be.
The promise of God is grand enough and big enough to expand the soul and thrill the mind to the point that we will gladly spend and be spent for it. We need the perspective and power of a proper vision of God that captures our hearts and minds and energy with the magnitude of His mission.
Genesis presents God not only as the Sovereign Creator of all that exists, but also as the Personal God who made Himself and His promise known to Abraham and works in the details of life to bring about His purpose. While we can see God providentially working throughout the Abrahamic narratives, chapter 24 gives us a front row seat to watch God secure the promise for the coming generation.
If you read the text, you realized the story is twice told, once from the perspective of the narrator (24:1-28), and retold from the perspective of Abraham’s servant (24:34-49). The themes of the narrative are that Abraham was blessed (24:1) and the blessing has passed to Isaac (24:35,36); the steadfast love and faithfulness of Yahweh (24:12,14,27,49); the appointing of Rebekah as a wife for Isaac (24:14, 44); and the providential prospering of the servants journey (24:21,40,42, 48 right way, 56).
The text is grounded in the promise of God (24:7). These are the last recorded words of Abraham, and so function literarily as his final words. The text moves from these final words of Abraham to all his possessions being passed to Isaac (24:36), and from Abraham being the servant’s master (24:2,34) to Isaac being the servant’s master (24:65) with the conspicuous absence of Abraham. Chapter 25:1-11 actually gives the death notice of Abraham. We know, however, according to the genealogy, Abraham died at 175 years of age. He was 100 when Isaac was born, 140 when Isaac was married (25:20), 160 when Jacob and Esau were born (25:26), so Jacob and Esau were 15 years old when Abraham died.
This helps us see the writer has arranged his material theologically rather than chronologically. The point the writer is making is that God providentially upholds His promise from generation to generation. Abraham’s final words are a recounting of the promise of God.
In 24:1-9, Abraham commissioned his servant to take a wife for Isaac from his country and kindred (24:4). Abraham has two concerns: that Isaac not marry a Canaanite (24:3), and that Isaac not leave Canaan (24:6,8). The servant’s concern is what to do if the woman will not return with him (24:5)? Abraham appealed to the promise of God (24:7) and assured the servant he would be free from the oath if the woman would not return with him (24:8) (in other words, if God’s promise fails you are free from the oath).
God upholding His promise is the tension throughout Genesis. The promise is constantly in jeopardy but God works personally and powerfully through the means of human agency to uphold His promise. This story begins with faith in the promise of God (24:7) and is framed by echoes of God’s call into that promise. For example, in 24:4 Abraham told his servant “go…and take.” That is answered in by Laban and Bethuel in 24:51, “take her and go,” and Rebekah’s, “I will go” (24:58), and the servant “took Rebekah and went” (24:61).
Abraham’s insistence that Isaac not go there but the girl come to Canaan is a reflection of His own call. Rebekah’s call, “Will you go?” (24:58), and her answer, “I will go” (24:58), echo the call of Abraham. Abraham was insisting that the wife of Isaac be a woman of faith. The importance of Isaac’s wife being a woman of faith cannot be overemphasized. The call of God came to her through a strange man identified as Abraham’s servant that came to the well one day and asked for water. That call through Abraham’s servant was as much the call of God as was Abraham’s call when God spoke to him in Ur. Without Rebekah the promise fails, the seed dies, and the world is lost.
It is odd and strange how and when God calls people to faith. Rebekah at a well by a road worn traveler. Perhaps you, today, are being called to faith as we look at this ancient story of God’s intervention in the lives of ordinary people to carry out his grand plan of redemption.
So there is the overall tension of the narrative, “What if she will not return to the land?” Then there is the tension of how the servant will know the one God had appointed (24:12-14)? The servant prayed. The narrator tells us that before he finished speaking Rebekah came out (24:15). When Rebekah has passed his test, verse 21 says, “He gazed at her in silence to learn whether the LORD has prospered his journey or not.” Asking for signs never allays our doubts, so when in doubt do the next best thing, ask her who she is (24:23).
A third tension arises. The servant has to convince Rebekah and her family she is the one God has appointed for Isaac. So he recounts the whole situation from the beginning (24:34-48). At last he, asked Rebekah’s father and brother, basically, if they were going to behave in a godly way (24:49). They answered, “Take her and go” (24:51).
A fourth tension arises when Laban and Rebekah’s mother asked for more time (24:55). We are introduced to the character of Laban in this text and will meet him again, but even here his greed begins to show (c.f. 24:30). The servant insisted they leave based on the obvious work of God in the circumstances (24:56). So Laban and his mother suggested Rebekah decide (24:57-58a). She answered, “I will go” (24:58).
In 24:61-67, the servant takes Rebekah back to Canaan to marry Isaac. The story ends in verse 67 with Isaac bringing Rebekah into Sarah’s tent. The verse is really weird from our cultural perspective. What it means, however, is the promise is secure. There is a matriarch among the people of God. There is a woman of faith of God’s own choice who will bear the snake crushing seed. Rebekah is not just any wife. The marriage was essential to the advance of redemptive history.
God providentially upholds his promise. This truth should give us courage to join him is his work. It’s not that He has his part, and we have our part. God providentially works through human agents to bring his work to completion. He lets us participate with Him. Some areas of fulfillment are God’s singular work, like the raising of the dead. However, by His grace he allows us to join Him in His redemptive work in history.
If you move this story forward through redemptive history, Israel, God’s son, grew to nation status. Then in God’s own time, He called a young virgin in Galilee to be the last in the line of those woman of old to advance the seed of the woman. Through a miraculous creative act God implanted in her body his own Son to be born of a woman. He lived a perfect life and died for our sin and was raised the third day to fulfill all God promised to Abraham. Now it stands that anyone who repents of his or her sin and places faith in Christ will receive forgiveness of sins and the promise of God.
God’s purpose to bless the nations extends beyond us and pushes us out on mission for the next generation (25:1-18)
25:1-6 shows us that we don’t know everything about Abraham. It’s useless to try to argue that Abraham married Keturah after Sarah died. If you want to read the text that way, fine, but verse 6 is a punch in the gut with the mention of concubines. Counting Isaac and Ishamel and Keturah’s children, Abraham had 8 sons. Ishmael had 12 sons (25-12-18). We also know that Abraham’s brother, Nahor, had 12 sons (22:20-24). Abraham sent all the sons of his concubines away to secure Isaac’s status as his heir, the son of promise. As the nations were blessed in relation to Abraham, these nations, families, and peoples would be blessed in relation to Isaac. The promise to bless the nations was in motion.
On one hand, we look at how the nations were multiplying and compare that to Isaac, the son of promise, and it seems we’re losing ground. On the other hand, God can accomplish all of His purpose with the people He has. One thing the genealogies in Genesis teach us is that God’s people are always proportional to the nations. We can’t look at the world and be overwhelmed by the greatness of the task compared to our limited resources. God will always supply everything we need to do His will.
Abraham saw that to secure blessing for the next generation, he must establish an ancestral burial ground as a testimony to future generations of the promise of God yet to be fulfilled. He must also find a woman of like faith for Isaac to bring the next son of promise into the world—a son who would point to and anticipate the Son of God coming into the world by means of a miraculous birth.
Abraham’s activity teaches us that we cannot live life and do church in a way that gives no thought for the next generation. We must pass the faith on to the next generation. To do so we will have to train and prepare and take the faith to the watering places of the world and call out from among the nations a people that God has appointed for His own possession.
When we leave this world, we must leave a church in better shape than when we found it. No one is indispensable in God’s program of redemption. His work continues from generation to generation. We must give ourselves to the prayerful consideration of how we are to advance the purpose of God in the world in a way that prospers and produces a generation more equipped and more able than we are.