Recently, I have given some thought to the reality of death and grief. I am preaching through the life and faith of Abraham from Genesis 12-25 expositionally on Sunday mornings. It is my belief that expositional preaching is the best overall diet for the gathering of believers on the Lord’s Day. Preaching through books of the Bible forces me to deal with doctrines, topics, and issues that I would otherwise avoid. Plus, no one can say the preacher was on another “soap box” after jumping around to different passages every week since the next sermon in the study is the next series of verses in the text. Expositional preaching provides the preacher and the listener the comfort of knowing where they are going week to week. Lastly, it always amazes me how God takes a sermon series from a book of the Bible planned months before to minister to the needs of His people at the time a particular passage is preached.
From Moriah to Machpelah.
So, after preaching on the dramatic and redemptive events on Mount Moriah in Genesis 22:1-19, the narrative shifts in Genesis 22:20-23:20 with the simple and ordinary events of a genealogy listing the future wife of Isaac, the death of Sarah, and Abraham’s purchasing of the burial place for Sarah from Ephron the Hittite. That’s quite a change of scenery, isn’t it? We leave the heights of Mount Moriah to descend into the valley of Macpelah. We move away from the extraordinary drama of Abraham on Mount Moriah, Isaac bound on the wood, the knife raised in obedience to God’s command, the angel of the LORD stopping Abraham’s hand, and a ram caught in the thicket to the rather ordinary description of a genealogy, a funeral, and a real estate agreement. Genesis 22 reads like a well-written novel. Genesis 23, on the other hand, reads like the small-print at the bottom of the paperwork you tend to overlook.
Yet, this seemingly ordinary narrative is anything but unimportant or irrelevant. God wants us to see that His promises are not only worked out in the extraordinary. They are advanced in the quiet, ordinary moments of life – where things seem small, insignificant, and sometimes even boring. You know, the quiet ordinary moments of life like daily Bible reading and prayer, dropping off and picking up our kids at school, going to work and punching the clock, cooking dinner and eating it with our family, helping our children with homework, paying bills, gathering with the people of God in worship, and every other rather simple, routine, and mundane activity you can think of in life.
Much of the Christian life is not lived on the mountain but in the mundane. Truthfully, we live more in the valley of Machpelah than we do on the mount of Moriah. Sure, extraordinary mountaintop moments like Moriah are memorable, but they are also abnormal. We are more likely to walk the valley of Machpelah than to scale the heights of Moriah. God does the bulk of His sovereign work in our lives through the mundane, ordinary events of life. He chooses to work in the slow, quiet, routine moments of our lives – including our grief. He confirms His promises in ways that rarely make headlines, but in ways that always shape our lives deeply. If Genesis 23 says anything to us, it is this – do not despise the ordinary. Because it is in the ordinary – grief, negotiation, waiting, walking the routine paths of life – that God cements His extraordinary promises.
God’s people do and will grieve.
Genesis 23:1 says, “Sarah lived 127 years; these were the years of the life of Sarah.” Sarah dies, and Abraham mourns. The sting of death bites again, serving as another reminder of the consequence of Adam’s sin in the garden. “The wages of sin is death,” the Apostle Paul said in Romans 3:23. So, Genesis 23:1 emphasizes the reality of human death because of sin. Genesis 23:2 emphasizes the reality of human grief over death by stacking verbal activity for us to sense the weight of emotion Abraham went through when Sarah died. “Abraham went in to mourn for Sarah and to weep for her.”
Notice the two verbal infinitives in the test: “to mourn and to weep.” The Hebrew uses two words for grief. One is the ritual expression of sorrow – the public mourning – and the other is the private breaking of the heart. Abraham mourned for Sarah in both ways – both public and private, both sorrow and grief. And notice the place where Sarah died: “Kiriath-arba (that is, Hebron) in the land of Canaan.” Sarah died in the very land that God has promised, yet Abraham owned none of it. Here is the tension: the promises of God are real, but the reality of death is painful. Faith does not remove grief. Faith mourns honestly. Faith sorrows painfully. But faith does not sorrow and grieve hopelessly. The Apostle Paul urged the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14, “But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep.”
Think of it like holding a deed to a house you cannot yet occupy. The house is yours on paper, you have rights to it, but you cannot yet enter it. That is Abraham. And it is where many of us live today. We have God’s promises. We have hope. But we still grieve. We still cry. We still weep and mourn. We still feel the sting of death, and some are feeling death’s sting more painfully and recently than others.
Take heart. Father Abraham is proof that you can grieve honestly and still hold on to God’s promise by faith. Friend, your tears are not a failure of faith. Your grief is not a sign of weakness. Abraham’s tears over the death of Sarah were painful and faithful tears. And yours can be too. The Bible does not say Christians do not grieve. It says Christians do not grieve as those without hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13).
Grief is a shared reality.
None of God’s people are immune from grief, sorrow, and pain. It is a common and shared experience among all of Adam’s race, including the redeemed community. Consider how the patriarch Jacob tore his clothes, put on sackcloth, and mourned for many days when he thought Joseph was dead. The people of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab for thirty days after his death. David was grieved by the deaths of Jonathan, Saul, Abner, and Absalom. After losing his children and possessions, Job tore his robe, shaved his head, and fell to the ground in grief – yet also in worship. The psalms are replete with themes of grief and sorrow. Known as the “weeping prophet,” Jeremiah longed for “a fountain of tears” to weep for his people. He even wrote the book of Lamentations, which means “the passionate expression of grief or sorrow.”
We dare not forget how Mary and Martha wept at Lazarus’ tomb, grieving the loss of their brother. Jesus, too, wept at Lazarus’ grave! Jesus told His disciples they would weep and lament at His death, though their sorrow would turn into joy at His resurrection. Devout men in the early church buried Stephen and made loud lamentation over him. The Apostle Paul grieved with tears over those who lived as enemies of the cross and wept with the Ephesian elders at their parting. The entire created order groans in grief under the weight of sin and brokenness, awaiting the final redemption Christ will bring at His consummation. Even so, the people of God are to mourn, weep, and grieve over their sin, offering regular confession and repentance.
Make no mistake about it. The Bible never sidesteps the hard realities of life. The Bible does not hide grief. It presents it as a natural, God-given response to loss, sin, and brokenness. Yet it also shows that in Christ, grief is not hopeless or wasted. So, please be mindful of the Bible’s honesty about human grief as you come alongside those who are broken and hurting and in need of comfort. Please never say to or about a brother or sister in Christ that they need to get over their grief. That is not only emotionally insensitive, but also spiritually immature. We know by our own individual experience that grief is not something we “get over” in time, but rather something that we “get through” by God’s grace.
God does not remove the valley of the shadow of death from our path, no matter how painful it may be, but He does promise to be with us and to comfort us.
God can soothe and use your grief.
By His Holy Spirit and Holy Word, our Father in heaven soothes the ache of our hearts with the sweet assurance of heaven. But God also employs His body, His hands, His feet – His people – to be a source of comfort when someone in the family grieves. The Apostle Paul said in 2 Corinthians 1:3-5, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too.”
God comforts us in our affliction for the expressed purpose that we would comfort those who are in affliction. Your hurt, then, is not really about you, but about how God can use you to help others. God can soothe and use your grief to help others walking the same hard path you are.
C. S. Lewis wrote “…pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” (The Problem of Pain)
God may be using your pain to rouse those who are spiritually deaf to the gospel and dead in sin. Rather than viewing your pain as an obstacle to get over or around, why not begin to view it as an opportunity to help others?
Grieve with gospel hope.
We will most assuredly bury people we love. We may already have. We will face the grief of death and the ache of promises not yet fully seen as we live below in this old sinful world. But like Abraham, we grieve with gospel hope. Every Christian burial is an act of faith – a confession that though “we sow the body in weakness, it will be raised in power; though it is sown perishable, it will be raised imperishable” (1 Corinthians 15:42–43).
So, when you stand at the grave of your loved ones, remember Machpelah. Remember that God’s promises are so sure they are worth staking everything on – even when all you see is a casket in the ground. And remember Christ’s empty tomb, the final purchase, the ultimate guarantee that what God promised, He will surely perform. For in Jesus, every promise of God is “Yes and Amen.”
One day, we will no longer buy graves and bury our loved ones. Tears will be wiped away. Pain and sorrow will be no more. Every promise will be fulfilled in the city whose builder and maker is God. What a day, glorious day, that will be!
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