Genesis 23 - Beginning To Hope In Death

Main Idea: Allow the reality of death to remind you of the certain hope of the resurrection.

• We will experience death.

  • Death is a result of sin’s ruinous effects in our world.

  • Death is the doorway to our eternal life with God.

  • Death is an appointment we will not miss.

• We will enjoy Heaven.

  • Jesus gave us access to Heaven.

  • Jesus is preparing a place for us in Heaven.

  • We will enjoy fellowship with Jesus and receive His rewards.

• We will emerge in resurrection.

  • The resurrection of our dying world has always been God’s plan.

  • We will be resurrected as God unites Heaven and Earth again.

  • We’ll be back in Eden, resurrected, redeemed, & restored forever.

Sermon Transcript (Auto-Transcribed by Apple Podcasts)

But today, we are in Genesis 23. And as we've been looking at the life of Abraham and his wife Sarah, over the past, this is message number 12, so over the last 13 weeks, because Anniversary Sunday was kind of stuck in the middle there.

What an incredible walk that it's been. What an encouragement I know that it's been to my heart to be able to see that God uses imperfect people, God uses treacherous people sometimes, as Abraham was.

God uses old people with a 99-year-old that gave birth to Isaac. And I don't think we have any 99-year-olds in the room. So if God can use a 99-year-old, whatever you are underneath that, He can still use you, amen?

But it's been really cool just to see how God, through human imperfection, He works His miracles so that, as we saw two messages ago in Genesis 21, God kept His promise to Abraham and to Sarah, and He gave them a son, Isaac.

And we saw through chapters 20, 21, and 22, how God was consistently calling Abraham to, even though He had given him amazing promises, He had given him lots of incredible people in his life, He consistently called him to remember, it's not about the

people, it's about his relationship with the Lord. And so He had to give up Hagar and Ishmael in chapter 21. He had to give up Isaac in Genesis 22.

Obviously, God had a superintending plan for that test, where He says even at the end of it, now I know that you love and worship the Lord because you haven't even withheld your only son from Him.

And then now in chapter 23, Abraham gives up one more thing in his life before he passes off the scene. And that would be his wife, Sarah. And Genesis 23 details Sarah's last days and her passing.

And Owen, my device is going a little wonky, so I'll entrust you with the slides for today. So thank you, brother. So Sarah is going to pass off the scene, and it is a moment of profound grief.

There's actually a whole chapter just dedicated to the mourning that Abraham did on behalf of Sarah. And then there's also a whole lot of detail on her burial plot, which we're going to deal with that very shortly, if you will.

The main thrust of today's sermon is not necessarily going to be on Sarah, that we will look at what the passage says in relation to that, but it's going to be, as we look at the topic of death itself, and heaven, and the eventual resurrection, and

what we as Christians are called to look at in relation to that. So today's message, I believe I might have the message title next. I'll go to the next slide real quick. Yeah, it's beginning to hope and death.

Beginning to hope and death. If you will, turn with me over to Genesis chapter 23. I believe I have the first four verses that we're going to read through, and this will kind of get us the picture of the story today that we're going to be looking at.

Verse number one in Genesis 23. Now Sarah lived 127 years. These were all the years of her life.

Sarah died in Kyriath-arbah, that is Hebron in the land of Canaan, and Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her. When Abraham got up from beside his dead wife, he spoke to the Hephites, I am an alien residing among you.

Give me burial property among you so that I can bury my dead. As Abraham now, he goes into a time of mourning and grief.

This would either be, depending on the time and location, seven days of mourning where you would grieve, or in some cases, 30 days of mourning that you would set aside.

And you would wear particular clothing, and you put ashes on your head so that everyone around you knew how much you loved this person. And so Abraham here, he goes into mourning for Sarah. And then he goes to obtain a burial plot.

I'm going to kind of summarize some of it as the chapter goes on. It's about 20 verses, but the story goes about like this. Abraham goes to the Hethites.

You might also know these as the Hittites. So Uriah the Hittite would be the one that we would most know of later in Scripture. He goes to them and he says, Hey, I need a place to bury my wife.

Obviously, during that time period, you weren't just randomly placing your dead loved ones places. You needed some place where they would be safe, that everyone knew that that location belonged to you.

So Abraham goes and he's like, Hey, I want to buy some land. And the people there in the city, this is all being done at the city gate.

This was where commerce and issues of justice happened, purchases, covenants, and trying to think of the other word. Dina, what's the thing that you write a lot of in being a realtor? Contracts.

Thank you. It's totally, totally spaced. So this is where your ancient day contracts happened.

And they say, listen, you're not just an immigrant as he says, like, hey, I don't have any property. They say, we know that you are a prince with God among us. So God views you as important.

And so whatever burial plot you want, just take it. None of us are gonna tell you, oh, no, that was mine. They say, take whatever you want.

And so then Abraham tells them, okay, I want you to go to the guy named, I believe his name is Efron. I have the abbreviated version in my head.

Yes, Efron, which basically in Hebrew, you might equate it to our English name Dusty, would kind of be the name. And he says, okay, go talk to Dusty, to Efron. And I want to buy the cave of Machpelah.

And actually, the cave of Machpelah, as we read on through the chapter, this would be right near the oaks of Mamre. So every time through Abraham's life, like every time he's walking with God, he is at this location by the oaks of Mamre.

It's, if you will, it's kind of a garden set on top of a mountain where Abraham goes and he has a relationship with God and he worships him.

It calls to mind Eden, that mountain garden where Adam and Eve walked with the Lord in the cool of the day, all of those things. So Abraham goes and he says, all right, Dusty, I want to buy your land.

And so Dusty goes, listen, my Lord, you know, my land for you, you take it. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, no. I'm going to buy it from you.

It calls to mind both back in the chapter where Abraham and all of his men rescued the people of Sodom and Gomorrah when they'd been taken captive by some of the Mediterranean kings. And then the king of Sodom is like, listen, take whatever you want.

And Abraham says, nope, I ain't doing that, because then you're going to say, I made Abraham rich. And so he says, I'm not playing that game. So Abraham does the same thing again.

He goes, no, I'm going to purchase this land from you. And so then Dusty says, OK, well, you know, 400 shekels of silver, what's that between me and you?

If you think about it, even throughout the rest of Genesis, this can kind of seem like a bit of a high price. I think Joseph was sold for about 30 or 40 shekels of silver himself. And so here there's 400 shekels for this particular cave.

Now, as I was looking through, I looked back at Genesis chapter 20, when Abimelek of Gerar gave Sarah back to Abraham once he figured out that they were married, and he gives Sarah and Abraham a thousand pieces of silver.

So, if you will, it's expensive, but it's not that expensive as you look at the rest of Scripture. And so Abraham gladly parcels all of that silver out, and he pays for the land. And it does a couple of things for us in Genesis.

Number one, it shows us that the Israelite later occupation of the land was not some like rogue people coming in.

They actually owned land that they had purchased within the land of Canaan, and other purchases would happen along the way in succeeding chapters. But that's one of the things that's being highlighted for us.

But one of the really important things that we can learn from this passage is that we can anticipate the hope of the resurrection even as we look at death. That for Abraham, he knew this was not going to be the end.

And so for us today, I don't know if the Lord is going to give you or I one more day, a thousand more days, 1,500 more days, or whatever it might be. But all of us one day are going to enter the grave.

All of us one day will either be in heaven or in hell. And all of us will one day rise for the judgment from God.

Either that judgment of joy and gladness and resurrection to eternal life, or a resurrection where God says, depart from me, I never knew you. So today, we need to allow the reality of death to remind us of the hope of the resurrection.

First off, I want us to see today, that we will experience death. We will experience death. This isn't really a surprise for you.

You can go to, you know, first grade biology, and you will learn everything dies. There are shockingly few immortal things that we ever come in contact with. So we know that death isn't optional for us, but the question is, why?

Why is death not an option? First today, I want us to notice that death is a result of sin's ruinous effects in our world. Death is a result of sin.

You see Adam and Eve all the way back in Genesis 3, they were given the good life. They were given all of the food that they could ever need. They were given companionship, both human companionship and companionship with God.

They were given mission and purpose to be able to tend to the garden, to name the animals and to work with them and to utilize them, to be able to make what God had given them to flourish. And yet, they were told one thing that they could not do.

One thing that would, as God told them, in the day that you eat of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will certainly die. And they, as we, decided, the one thing that I'm not going to do, that's what I'm after.

They rejected the source of life, and they invited death into their own lives and into our world, even after being warned. And scripture would tell us in Romans chapter 5, So death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned.

Not every death is a punishment from God, even as we think about some of our loved ones that have passed. It's not that God's saying, Okay, well, this person really did something bad, so now I'm going to kill him.

That's not, it's very rarely even how death is spoken of in scripture. It tends to just be in extreme circumstances that that occurs. Death comes for all of us.

And while not every death is a punishment from God, he does appoint how long our lives will be. This gives us comfort that whatever time that we do have right now is intentionally given to us by God.

God's not, it's not accidental how long you're living right now or that you're still here, but it is also sobering. Psalm 90, the psalmist would tell us, teach me to number my days so that I can apply my heart to wisdom.

When we recognize that my life is not forever and that one day I'm going to stand before the Lord, one day I'm not going to be able to do good for others any longer, one day I'm not going to have an opportunity to be able to apologize, it's going to

change how we act because we realize death is coming, it's not optional. It's a result of sins, ruin, its effects in our world.

But for those that believe in God and those that have accepted Jesus Christ, death is the doorway to our eternal life with God. Death is that doorway.

So for the child of God, though I'm certain none of us are like, yes, I just really want to die, frankly most of us, we look forward to heaven. We are not looking forward to however, whatever road we end up navigating to get to heaven.

But we need to realize that, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, it's like a seed that you plant in the ground, and unless it dies, it's not going to spring up.

And so Paul tells the Christian believers, hey, we are anticipating that day of resurrection. We're anticipating that day with the Lord. And so if we want to be in heaven with the Lord, then certainly we don't need to fear death.

This was how the apostles lived out the remainder of their lives. That 11 of the 12 died martyrs' deaths. The only one that didn't was the apostle John.

As you look throughout the course of history, you can see Christians over and over and over again who gave their life professing faith in Jesus Christ against those that wanted to compel them to worship other gods, those that wanted to compel them to

renounce Jesus and faith. And yet they did not love their lives even unto death. And as Revelation 12 would tell us, this is how they conquered the dragon.

This is how they conquer sin and Satan is because they bled, they held on to the word of their testimony, and they did not love their lives even unto death. So death is the doorway to our eternal life with God. So don't fear that.

If you today are here and you don't know Jesus as your savior, you have never turned in faith to him, to ask him to forgive your sins and to give you a home in heaven, you can do that today.

Scripture doesn't give you a timeline for okay, you gotta behave for this amount of time and then you can be forgiven by the Lord. Scripture doesn't give you a certain amount of money that you gotta invest and then you can get righteousness with God.

No, Scripture says that it is the gift of God, not from works so that no one will be able to boast.

And whether you accept the Lord when you're nine years old, like I did, or whether you accept the Lord at, you know, 85 or 88 years old or anything in between, God's free gift is available for you.

So death is a result of sin's ruinous effects in our world. It's not the way that God designed our world to work, and he will one day throw sin and death into hell forever that it will never again trouble us.

Death is the doorway to our eternal life with God, and death is an appointment that we will not miss. Today, are you prepared to die? I'm not saying right now at this immediate moment, but are you prepared to be able to stand before Jesus?

Do you know Christ is your Savior?

If there has never been a point in your life where you have done what Scripture says and called on the name of the Lord, professing faith in Jesus, asking him to redeem you, to be your Lord, that you would turn, repent from your sin, and instead turn

to Jesus as the one who guides and directs you, you can do that today. Don't let another day go by without preparing for your eternity. If you do know Jesus as your Savior, are you living today like you could be gone tomorrow?

If you only had a day to live, the truth is that you'd be a lot more forgiving. You wouldn't hold a grudge. You'd express your love for others so that they would know how you feel.

You wouldn't worry about building a big someday. You would want to spend that day with the people that matter to you. Death is coming one day for us all.

Are you ready? Secondly, today, and thankfully, that one's really heavy. Everything else is kind of on the up and up.

So just so we know, because I feel it. I know you guys feel it. Secondly, today, we will enjoy heaven.

Heaven is not a cloudy nothingness with just harps and robes, despite what Tom and Jerry might have shown you.

Heaven is God's spiritual home, where the spiritual beings praise him and do his work night and day, and where all Christians that have died go until Jesus bodily returns to the earth. But why heaven? Why don't we just sleep?

First answer is that Jesus gave us access to heaven.

In Hebrews chapter 10, we are told that Jesus, he inaugurated, he consecrated, he made a new way to God through his blood, through his flesh, the veil, that before we did not have access to God, not eternally, but through what Christ did for us, he

opened the door, so that all who want to be saved can be. Even as he told the thief on the cross that was dying beside him, when the thief tells him, Lord, when you enter into your kingdom, remember me.

And Jesus tells him, today you will be with me in paradise. Jesus gave us access to heaven.

And it was through giving his righteousness, his perfection, that as Paul would say in 2 Corinthians 5, God made Jesus, who did not know sin, to become sin for us so that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

And so none of us on our own are righteous enough to enter into heaven, to have that relationship with God.

But because Jesus has applied his perfection to our account, we have all the righteousness and more that we could ever need to be reconciled to God forever. I'm so thankful for that.

So we will enjoy heaven, first, that Jesus gave us access to heaven, and secondly, that Jesus is preparing a place for us in heaven.

This is what we read in John 14, where Jesus there in the upper room, he's telling his apostles kind of in the words that they would understand as Galileans of what weddings look like in that region of the world, that he says, I'm going back to my

father's house and I'm preparing an addition on to the house, and you guys, you're the bride, you are my people, and if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you on myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And can

I tell you, every one of Jesus' promises, every word that he has ever said to us is trustworthy and we can believe it entirely and wholeheartedly. And if Jesus said that he's preparing a place for us, then we know that he is good on his word.

Think even of Revelation 19, where as Jesus in all of his glory is looked at, one of the things that's mentioned is his bride being caught up to him and them enjoying that Passover feast, that Lord's Supper enjoying the marriage supper of the Lamb

together. And I think even today we're going to be eating some food downstairs. And so we get, if you will, a little tiny picture of what one day we will experience with Jesus forever.

And can I ask you, if we're going to be stuck together in heaven for eternity, we should probably start getting along with each other now. I'll be the first to say, I know that I can be a pain to deal with, and so I thank you for putting up with me.

But if we realize that Jesus has loved us, and He has forgiven us, and He has accepted us, and He has placed us into His body, and He calls us, the church, His bride, then let us love one another, even as He loves His bride.

Then we will enjoy fellowship with Jesus in heaven and receive His rewards.

This is something that Paul and James and other writers throughout the New Testament, they talk about kind of in terms of the Olympics, as you would have some of those games and sports feats that would happen back in ancient Greece and ancient Rome,

you would, once you won an event, be given like a twisted together leaf plant crown. So don't think when you hear the Bible talking about like a crown of life or the crown of righteousness or things like that, don't be thinking like medieval king

type crown. This is for the race that was run. This is the type of crown that is given.

And though we in and of ourselves have no righteousness that, as Isaiah tells us, all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags, yet God in his goodness says, for those of you that love the appearing of Jesus, for those of you that don't give up, for

those of you that are pursuing right relationship with God and with people, one day we're going to stand before the Father. And he will say, Well done, you good and faithful servant.

And though we ourselves are unworthy of such, because of the work of the Holy Spirit within us, as we allow ourselves to be just vessels, instruments that God uses to bless others and to declare the gospel, there will be rewards for us in the

presence of our God. Certainly that's why Revelation 4 and 5 say, Hey, everyone's taking their crowns off, and they're casting them at the feet of Jesus, saying, Worthy are you, Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you have created

all things, and for your pleasure they are and were created. But heaven is going to be a time of wonderful joy. I'm looking forward to seeing my grandparents again. Looking forward to seeing our child that we never got to meet.

I'm going to see them there. Looking forward to seeing those that have been such a blessing in my walk with the Lord. So yes, I know we don't look forward to death.

We don't like it. But man, it's just a door. And on the other side is the God who loved you, who came for you, who died for you, who rose for you, whoever lives to intercede for you.

And I'm so looking forward to being back with him. Is your life today preparing for the results of your life to be valuable or to be thrown away? As one preacher put it, only one life will soon be passed.

Only what's done for Christ will last. And lastly today, death is coming. We will enjoy heaven, but we will emerge in resurrection.

Some Christians don't necessarily know this fact. Heaven is not necessarily our final home. That one day we will rise again.

You see, the resurrection of our dying world has always been God's plan. And this was known even from the beginning of Scripture.

You can look at the Book of Job, where Job says, even though, you know, it's kind of graphic how he puts it, but basically, even though I know worms are going to eat my body away in the ground, he says, yet I know that in my flesh I will see God.

You can look at what the writer of Hebrews says about Abraham and the other patriarchs, where he says, they were looking for a city whose builder and maker is God.

You can look at John 11, even when Jesus gives the great declaration, I am the resurrection and the life. There you have Martha that realizes, yeah, I know that Lazarus will one day be raised, but can he be raised now?

There was always the understanding. One day, God's not just going to abandon earth. He's going to make it new.

And the goal from the beginning, you have heaven where God is, and you have earth where us physical beings are, and you had Eden as kind of that mountain top that is where you have heaven and earth interworking, that you have God walking there, and

there are spiritual beings that are there, but you also have physical beings. And when we fell from Eden, it's that separation. But what we read at the end of the book is that God is making all things new.

That tree of life that we left in Genesis 3 that we couldn't eat from, well, it shows up again in the New Jerusalem at the end of the book of Revelation, that it is there, and you have the river of life that flows out, where you have the city of God

and the New Jerusalem, and you can look at all of the Old Testament prophets, and as they talk about when God restores everything together, then you have not just like Jerusalem being a new place, but God's word and righteousness, it will go out to

all the nations of the world, and that what God intended from the beginning will happen, that yes, sin and Satan and the evil of humanity, we tried to throw a wrench in God's plans, but God is sovereign and he will not be foiled, and the good life

that he created for us will be what happens. We will be resurrected as God unites heaven and earth again. Heaven is a spiritual place, not a physical place, but God created us as incarnational physical beings, and that was by his good design. So we

will be physically resurrected with some upgrades. And you can even look at 1 Corinthians 15 that says, When we see him, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And you can look at Jesus once he was resurrected.

He ate food with the disciples. He ate fish. He ate some honey.

So he had a physical body, one that could be touched even as he invites doubting Thomas to say, Hey, I know you didn't really believe that I rose from the dead. Would you take a look at my hands, my side, my feet? Like, it's really me.

I'm not a ghost. He tells them that he's able to, if you will, I'll use the word transport from place to place, even as he walks for miles with the disciples on the road to Emmaus.

And as he sits down with them at a meal and he prays, and it says, all of a sudden their eyes were open and they recognized who he was. And it says, in that moment, he was caught away from their sight.

We don't know everything that God will do in and through us.

We don't know what all of it will look like, but we do know, actually, as Paul says, eye is not seen, nor is ear heard, nor has entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared for those that love him.

And at the end, we'll be back in Eden, resurrected, redeemed, and restored forever. As Scripture tells us, we'll have access to the tree of life that will heal all. We will have no more chaos there, spoken of as the sea.

There's no more sea. There's no more chaos from Satan and from sin. There will be no more death and no more disease.

And we will be able to physically see and be with our Creator.

So, as we reflect on Sarah's life, 127 years that she was given, I don't know if any of us will make it that long, as we recognize that even though we die and we pass away, that we leave a legacy behind us, both to those on earth to be able to say

something about us, what they will say about our walk with the Lord, what they will say about our walk with other people. May we be faithful to walk with the Lord in every area of our life.

May we recognize that because death is coming, I need to, number one, know Jesus, and number two, I need to live for Jesus.

Because that day is coming when I'm standing before Him face to face, and I want to be able to hear, well done, I want to be able to cast those crowns at Jesus' feet.

So I'm going to live my life in light of the fact that I'm going to stand before Jesus. But then I also know God's got some amazing things coming that I can't begin to understand or know.

But when He returns, what a day that will be when my Jesus I shall see. Let's go to the Lord in prayer. I encourage you one last time, allow the reality of death to remind you of the certain hope of the resurrection.

That just as Jesus rose, so we too will rise.