The Legacy of Machpelah
Abraham the Believer: Part 15
Genesis 23:1-2
By Dave Redick

Author and lecturer Leo Buscaglia once talked about a contest he had been asked to judge. The purpose of the contest was to find the most caring child. The winner was a four-year-old boy whose next door neighbor was an elderly man who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman's yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When the little boy's mother asked him what he had said to the neighbor, he replied, "Nothing, I just helped him cry."

Though I have yet to reach that age where I buy the local newspaper for the sole purpose of reading the obituaries, I nonetheless want to read a death notice to you this morning as I begin the next message in our series on the life of Abraham.

It is taken from the imaginary archives of the HEBRON GAZETTE, from the land of Canaan:

HEBRON -- Sarah, wife of the Patriarch, Abraham, died in her home in Hebron this past Thursday of undisclosed causes. She was 127. She is survived by her husband, Abraham, a son, Isaac, and a stepson, Ishmael.

The long-time Canaan resident moved to our region from Mesopotamia, home of her relatives, at age 65. She is best known in Canaanite society for her steadfast claims of a promise given to her husband by his God that her numberless descendants would someday own the entire land of Canaan. Often the object of ridicule and scorn due to her childlessness well into old age, Mrs. Abraham nevertheless surprised young and old with the announcement of the birth of a baby boy at age 90. She is the oldest woman known to have given birth since the Great Flood. Mrs. Abraham proved to be a model citizen to all who knew her. Her husband is best known to residents of Canaan as the powerful prince who delivered the land from the scourge of the Chedorleomer invasions. His reputation of honesty in life and business is well known across the region.

Funeral arrangements are being handled by the family. Internment will be at Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the Hittite, facing Mamre. Time of services to be announced.

Though the lens of scripture has most often focused on Abraham in the part of Genesis we have been studying, the Holy Spirit saw fit to dedicate the entire 23^rd chapter of the Book of Beginnings to events surrounding the death and burial of Sarah. I invite you to go there with me where we will work our way through the entire chapter. I have broken it up into manageable pieces which I have called, (1) The Dying, (2) The Mourning, and (3) The Burying.

The announcement of Sarah’s death comes rather suddenly to the pages of the Genesis record. The closing verses of chapter 22 described Abraham, fresh off the slopes of Mount Moriah with his son, Isaac, after the boy was spared that awful human sacrifice that God had proposed as a test. The text says simply, "and they arose and went together to Beersheba; and Abraham lived at Beersheba." (1)

Those words represent the next 25 years in the life of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac. I think it reasonable to believe that they were busy but uneventful years, filled with the everyday matters of the nomadic life of Abraham’s clan. There would be the coming and going of the seasons, the constant moving of the flocks and herds to insure fresh pasture, the lambing times and sheering times, along with the births and deaths among the servants of Abraham’s household. Isaac would grow to manhood, most likely doted on by Sarah as much as any mother ever could. Abraham, caught up in the responsibilities of his livelihood, might pause and gaze off into the distance on occasion, toward the east, (2) and wonder about the whereabouts and doings of his older son, Ishmael. There is, by the way, no indication that Ishmael ever returned to the tents of his father until after Abraham’s death. (3) God’s prediction that "His hand [would be] against everyone, and everyone's hand [would be] against him," (4) probably precluded any family visits from Ishmael.

Of course, during this time, Abraham and Sarah, "up there" in years even before Isaac was born, were becoming older still. Abraham, vigorous, even in his old age, would take another wife after Sarah died. Yet his 137 years at the time of her death surely must have taken their toll, if not in vigor, certainly in outliving loved ones.

One of the difficulties of longevity lies in outliving the rest of your generation, so that few, if any, remember the world in which you grew up. In losing Sarah, Abraham was losing the last human being within his clan who remembered life back in Mesopotamia. When she died, he said goodbye to the last human who could understand his struggles as he had wrestled with the will of God in coming to Canaan.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. In our text, let’s look first at:

1. The Dying

Not many words are given to describe Sarah’s death. The brevity of the account leaves a number of very human questions unanswered, like:

That none of these questions is answered might give us the mistaken idea that Sarah’s life was unimportant to the scheme of Scripture. Yet nothing could be further from the truth.

Sometimes the only way to account for the Bible’s brevity in its descriptions is to recognize that its true intention is not to highlight the lives of its support characters as much as it is to describe the origins and life of the One who was to come – that is, Jesus. Jesus instructed those of His generation that the Scriptures spoke primarily of Him. (9)

So the death we find described here was not that of a saint of little account. Rather, it was the death of one of God’s "Greats" – a woman who lived the life of faith who should be remembered for her contribution to all of our lives.

If the description of Sarah’s death was brief, even more so was the description of Abraham’s grief. We come now to:

2. The Mourning

This is the only verse in Genesis that describes Abraham as weeping.

Yet here we find him weeping.

Grief is like that. It comes in like a flood and engulfs, for awhile, everything in its path.

Edgar Jackson poignantly describes grief in the following very human terms:

"Grief is a young widow trying to raise her three children, alone. Grief is a man so filled with shocked uncertainty and confusion that he strikes out at the nearest person. Grief is a mother, walking daily to a nearby cemetery to stand quietly and alone a few minutes before going about the tasks of the day. She knows that a part of her is in that cemetery, just as part of her is in her daily work. Grief is silent, knife-like terror and sadness that comes a hundred times a day, when you start to speak to someone who is no longer there. Grief is the emptiness that comes when you eat alone after eating with another for many years. Grief is teaching yourself to go to bed without saying good night to the one who has died. Grief is the helpless wishing that things were different when you know they are not and never will be again. Grief is a whole cluster of adjustments, apprehensions, and uncertainties that strike life in its forward progress and make it difficult to redirect the energies of life." (10)

I venture to say - though I cannot speak from first-hand experience - that there is no loneliness quite like that of losing your life’s partner in death. I say that with all the trepidation of knowledge that either my wife or I, sometime in the future, will probably experience it. I say it out of deep respect for those of you who have already have.

Though I readily admit my human fear of the loneliness of such a time, I also want to say that I fully expect my faith in God to get me through it, come-what-may. I may falter. I may even fail. But I know that my God will not, and I will trust in Him.

I hope too, that whether or not such comes upon you or me personally, that we are sensitive and sympathetic to those who are grieving the loss of their loved ones.

The Bible doesn’t condemn grief. There is no rebuke here of Abraham’s grief at the loss of Sarah. It does speak of a different kind of grief than that experienced by the world, though. Paul said in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, "But we do not want you to be uninformed, brethren, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve, as do the rest who have no hope."

There is a difference in the grief of a Christian and that of a person of the world. Our grief is that of those who, while momentarily bereft of loved ones, look forward with hope – a hope that no unbeliever has.

We need to be sensitive to those who are grieving.

"But what am I suppose to say or do in such situations?" is an often-asked question.

Many, not knowing what to say, just stay away entirely from those who are grieving. Such a "non-approach" to the problem does no one any good.

Perhaps a child can lead us in this area.

Author and lecturer Leo Buscaglia once talked about a contest he had been asked to judge. The purpose of the contest was to find the most caring child. The winner was a four-year-old boy whose next door neighbor was an elderly man who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman's yard, climbed onto his lap, and just sat there. When the little boy's mother asked him what he had said to the neighbor, he replied, "Nothing, I just helped him cry."

Perhaps it’s no more complicated than that. Just be there to help them cry.

Let’s move on now in our text to:

You would think that the burial of Sarah would be the easiest and therefore the least mentioned part of Abraham’s loss. Yet while Sarah’s death is described in a verse and a half and Abraham’s grief in a half verse, the burial arrangements take up the next 17 verses. Why was it so complicated?

Remember, Abraham lived as an alien in a land that did not belong to him (even though God had promised it to his descendants.) It is ironic, isn’t it, that though Abraham had been in the land of Canaan for over sixty years at this point, promised again and again that this land would belong to his descendants, he still did not own a single square inch of it! You and I should remember that the next time the road of faith seems like it is becoming too long. In fact, the Hebrew writer tells us that Abraham would go all the way to the end of his life without seeing the fulfillment of God’s promises to give him the land. After describing the faith of quite a list of people, including Abraham, the writer of Hebrews says, "All these died in faith, without receiving the promises…." (11) This lack of possession of any land in which to even bury his dead wife was Abraham’s first concern once he mustered the strength to brush away his tears.

His appeal was to the sons of Heth, a family with whom he was on good terms.

Abraham already had a place in mind where he wanted to bury Sarah. It belonged to a Hittite man named Ephron. But since the land didn’t belong to him, it would have to be purchased.

I’m told by those that have studied the trading customs of the Hittites, that while this sounds like a generous offer from Ephron to simply give Abraham the land, it was rather, just a polite gesture that was a part of their dickering not to be taken seriously.

Making a purchase in the presence of the people at the gate, where the elders of the city met, was to them the same binding agreement as when we sign a contract.

Notice that Ephron brings up his asking price. This is what indicates that this back-and-forth process was simply a custom that wasn’t taken seriously.

So the purchase was made.

So why would the Holy Spirit spend so little time on the human elements of Sarah’s death and Abraham’s grief, yet so much time on the burial arrangements? What is the significance? Let me suggest an answer.

I believe that the decision to bury Sarah in Canaan was another great step of faith for Abraham. It seems to me that it is nearly universal for people to want their dead buried in their homeland, among their own people, among their relatives, when they die. They don’t want their loved ones buried in a foreign land.

During the great foreign wars of this country - World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War - it has always been that we do all we can to return the remains of our servicemen killed in action to the shores of this country. We do not abandon their remains to strange lands and strange people. As I speak, there is an effort being made by the Pentagon to recover the body of the first pilot who was shot down over Iraq during Desert Storm. These efforts are made because the idea of dying and being buried in a foreign country among strangers brings a certain dread to all of us.

For Abraham, the desire to take Sarah "back home" could have been no less compelling. For him, in this context, "home" could still mean Haran, where his father, Terah, was buried, (12) or Ur, where his brother, Haran, was laid to rest. (13) Abraham surely realized that he would one day be laid beside Sarah, wherever the grave might be, and the desire to be among his kin must have been a part of his consideration of her final arrangements.

Yes, I know he had been in Canaan for 60 years now. But by his own admission to the sons of Heth in verse 4 of this chapter, after all those years, he still said, "I am a stranger and a sojourner among you…." As mentioned earlier, he didn’t own a single square inch of this country in which he had lived for six decades. The only thing he could leave behind to his children in Canaan as an inheritance was a promise that someday this land would belong to their descendants. Had he returned to his relatives at this point, who knows? Perhaps he could claim a piece of ground for which he actually had a deed!

Now, with Sarah dead, and the need to settle her burial place pressing upon him ever more each hour, what would it be? Where would he lay her to rest? In this land where he was still a stranger and an alien, or in the homeland of his relatives?

I believe that in devoting so much space in this chapter to the burial arrangements of Sarah, God is commending Abraham for his choice. The Patriarch would not return to Mesopotamia to bury his dead and ultimately to be buried there himself. He had begun this walk of faith with God’s command to leave his relatives and come to this land and now, with the help of God, he would finish it in Canaan where God had called him. Sarah’s tomb, and ultimately the tomb of Abraham himself, would forever tie their descendants to this land. Abraham saw that by faith in God’s promise. He would continue his stand in Canaan right up until the end.

It is amazing to me that the descendants of Abraham are still tied to that land, even today, a fact that is probably largely due to the steadfast faith of this man whose life we have been studying. He had lived in Canaan because of God’s call on his life. He would bury his dead there, and ultimately, when he lay down in death himself, it would be there also.

Before the bargaining for a sepulcher of chapter 23, Abraham had owned nothing in Canaan. Now he owned a burial plot, paid for in full, in the presence of witnesses, so that none would question his ownership of it.

Abraham buried Sarah at Machpelah. Later Isaac and Ishmael would return to this same place to bury Abraham. (14) In time, this would also be the burial site of Isaac and Rebekah. (15) Jacob would bury Leah here, and one day Joseph would return to Machpelah to bury Jacob. (16)

So you see, this decision to bury Sarah in the land of promise was an important one. It tied the descendants of Abraham to this land for many years to come.

Let me leave you with a couple of lessons that speak to us from this chapter.

Let us not forget Abraham and his faithful wife, Sarah, and their contribution to all of like faith. They served God in their lives and they continue serving Him, even today, in their deaths.

Footnotes: Use your "back" button to return to your place.

1. Genesis 22:19
2. Genesis 16:12
3. Genesis 25:9
4. Genesis 16:12
5. Article on Sarah from Nelson's Illustrated Bible Dictionary, Copyright (c)1986, Thomas Nelson Publishers.
6. Isaiah 51:2
7. 1 Peter 3:6
8. Hebrews 11:11
9. John 5:39; Luke 24:27
10. Robert Slater, Moscow, Idaho. Leadership, Vol. 5, no. 1.
11. Hebrews 11:13
12. Genesis 11:32
13. Genesis 11:28
14. Genesis 25:8-9
15. Genesis 49:29-32
16. Acts 7:15-16
17. 1 Peter 2:11
18. John 14:1-3; Revelation 21:1-8
19. Hebrews 11:16

Dave Redick is Minister of the Hwy 20 Church of Christ in Sweet Home, Oregon and Editor of The Preacher's Study. He may be reached at pstudysupport@comcast.net.

Copyright © 1996-2008 by The Preacher's Study. Permission is granted to subscribers to use this document in total or in sermon preparation in the context of the local congregation only. Publishing it in a book, on the Internet, or anyplace beyond the local congregation is prohibited.

All Scripture quotations and references are from the New American Standard Version unless otherwise stated.

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