Plant Your Flag in Heaven
Notes
Transcript
1. Attention:
Bland or Beautiful?
Bland or Beautiful?
Let’s be honest—on first reading, Genesis 23 doesn’t particularly grab you.
No miracles. No battles. No grand appearances of God.
A man’s wife dies, but most the chapter is just about a him negotiating with his estate agents about buying some land as he needs somewhere to bury her.
It feels bland, and sad.
This is not the Lion King West end musical, or Your Team winning the League, James Bond saving the world, getting striaght 9’s at school, making it to directorship.
This is watching someone input numbers on a data collection spreadsheet.
But underneath the surface lies something profoundly beautiful.
Here in Genesis 23, in the midst of grief and mundane human dealings,
we find an amazing portrait of faith.
Abraham, in this bland chapter, shows us what it means to live—and die
—clinging to God’s promises, trusting that God’s word stretches even beyond the grave.
2. Empathy: A Shared Reality
We all live with the reality of death.
We attend funerals. We walk through grief.
We lose loved ones. And might feel, deep down, that life isn’t supposed to end this way.
And it’s not just the event of death.
It’s the everyday ordinariness of life that wears us down.
School runs. Office politics.
School stress,
Friendship issues,
Worries,
Broken washing machines.
Negotiating a house purchase
Seemingly Unanswered prayers.
It’s easy to wonder:
Where is God in all this normality?
Is this really where faith lives? In the bland, normality of life which ends in death?
Shouldn’t we be saving the world with the gospel at huge rallies - a spiritual James Bond,
Declaring their testimonies before a huge church family - like lifting our young above pride rock - singing ‘the cricle of life’
Winning victory over every sin every moment - like our team winning the league,
Genesis 23 reassures us. Faith, is not euphoric mountian top experinces day in day out.
Faith lives in the bland, often sad, realities of normal life - even in death!
BEcasue God’s pormises go beyond.
Abraham’s story in this chapter is not dramatic, but it is deeply human.
This chapter helps us ask: When life is bland or even hard and death is real, will I still live by faith?
And even more amazingly,
Will I trust God’s promises—even if I never see them fulfilled in this life?
That’s the kind of faith that changes how we grieve, how we live, and how we die.
3. Inform: Exposition of Genesis 23 – A Christ-Centered Faith in Action
1. Grief with Hope in God’s Promises (Genesis 23:1–2)
1. Grief with Hope in God’s Promises (Genesis 23:1–2)
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.
Abraham mourns. He weeps. He grieves deeply.
This isn’t the reaction of a man immune to loss. he is not so absorbed in God, he doesn’t feel earthly pain.
He feels the full weight of his wife’s death.
And so now he faces a hard decison. Where does he bury his beloved wife.
Those of you who have emigrated across countries
will have a sense of the hard decision that lies before him.
He’s in a foreign country,
he doesn’t know all their pracices and formalities for burial.
He doesn’t even own a plat of land to use.
Added to that, his ancestors, his people, his culture is back in another land.
UNlike most of our cultures, burial location isn’t too important,
for those times, where you are buried means a great deal.
It lays claim to your heritage, and your future as a people.
Humanly, we, Abraham,
would want to bury his wife in the place he considers home.
The place where she can be remembered by him and his ancestors to come.
You would think, Abraham would take her body then,
back to Haran, in what is today, Turkey. In fact the town is still there.
And yet, in his grief, Abraham doesn't retreat to his old homeland.
Instead, he prepares to bury her in Canaan—the land of promise.
Modern day Israel.
Why? Because his faith in God’s promises extends beyond even death.
Here is God’s original promise to Abraham:
The Lord had said to Abram, ‘Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. ‘I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.’
What is incredible about Abrahms’ faith is that he is not actually relying on being that ‘great nation’,
or even having a great name in his physical lifetime.
His wife, to whom pormises were also made, has died, and Abrahm will die in less than 40 years from now.
So quite incredible that he will bury his wife in a foreign land,
where even after this chapter he will only own a field and cave,
trusting soley on the promise of God,
that this will be HIs descendants long-term home!
BUt more than that,
the NT book of Hebrews tells us Abraham had trust in not just an earthly temporary fulfilment of promises,
but an eternal heavenly one:
All these people 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.
and then..
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.
So incredible where God’s promises to Abraham,
blessings to all nations - the whole world,
an eternal home, and so forth,
that clearly he reasoned that God had grander plans than he could ever imagine.
Plans that were not thwarted by death of his lived ones or himself.
And so even Jesus says of Abraham
Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.’
Abraham trusted God would bring about his promises one way or another,
And so Jesus says - he knew I was coming!
Someone was coming to full fulfill all the pormises made!
It’a Amazing, that God gave Abraham such faith before seeing Jesus
The fulfilled of all promises!
,
Compared Him to so many today, with the benifit of this sort of hindsight in-the word of God,
and the tetsimonies of Jesus’ life,
and the evenidence of all these OT fulfiments, that so many don’t have any faith!
Yets, Here is a man,
who trust God’s promises beyond even death.
As he has learnt and grown in faith,
is now prepared,
to give everything to God - based on God’s Word alone.
In the last chapter he offers the life of his only son,
in this chapter the death of his wife.
in the greif and normality of life,
Abraham lives in faith, on the Word of God even beyond death.
SO now let us see how his faith and hope
affects directly how he lives his life:
2. Life with Hope in God’s Promises (Genesis 23:3–16)
2. Life with Hope in God’s Promises (Genesis 23:3–16)
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 that I can bury my dead.’
Abraham acknowledges he is a “foreigner and stranger” in the land.
Though God promised him the entire region, he presently owns nothing.
He has no rights here—humanly speaking.
How like he, we are.
Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.
Surely Abrahams exmaple here, is gold for us.
We belong, through faith in Christ Jesus,
whom Abraham saw and was glad,
to a heavenly city,
The same one Abraham longed for in death.
Not this earthly world.
We will one day enjoy the return and glory of Christ,
as he establishes a new creation for his poeple to enjoy eternally.
That is where we belong.
If we are in Christ through repentant faith,.
And for now, we live in this foreign land.
A land that is overcome by evil and sin, death, Satan the prince of this world is every present and active.
Do we surcomb to him, to sin, to our own fallen nature and desires?
Do we mix in and compromises?
No, we live by the promises of God.
See how Abraham lives in this moment of greif, in a way that trusts the future promises of God:
6 ‘Sir, listen to us. You are a mighty prince among us. Bury your dead in the choicest of our tombs. None of us will refuse you his tomb for burying your dead.’
There is plenty of debate around whether this offer is genuine or simply ancient but savvy negotiating techniques,
It seems the final agreed price is very, and the respect shown Abraham could be flattery, or genuine.
but it’s not too significant.
What is significant is that Abraham is insitent, that he will pay the full price.
He will not accept help from the world, he will act and love only according to God’s promises:
Then Abraham rose and bowed down before the people of the land, the Hittites. He said to them, ‘If you are willing to let me bury my dead, then listen to me and intercede with Ephron son of Zohar on my behalf so that he will sell me the cave of Machpelah, which belongs to him and is at the end of his field. Ask him to sell it to me for the full price as a burial site among you.’
Abraham is making a theological statement: “This land is mine by divine promise. I will not possess it by favour, but by faith.”
He is insistent:
and he said to Ephron in their hearing, ‘Listen to me, if you will. I will pay the price of the field. Accept it from me so that I can bury my dead there.’
Eventually, Ephron agrees. Verse 16 says:
Abraham agreed to Ephron’s terms and weighed out for him the price he had named in the hearing of the Hittites: four hundred shekels of silver, according to the weight current among the merchants.
There are witnesses,
there is no doubt,
no favours have been done,
Maybe he overpaid,
But as the commentator
Bruce Waltke observes: “This is not about real estate. It is a declaration of trust. Abraham is planting a flag of faith in the promised land.”
What a great phrase to remember.
IN our everyday, negotiations, actions, decisions,
are we planting a flag of faith in the promised land (in heaven)?
Or are we laying down worldy roots that deny God’s pormises?
We’ll thank more about what this looks like shortly.
but let’s finish the chapetr:
So Ephron’s field in Machpelah near Mamre—both the field and the cave in it, and all the trees within the borders of the field—was legally made over to Abraham as his property in the presence of all the Hittites who had come to the gate of the city. Afterwards Abraham buried his wife Sarah in the cave in the field of Machpelah near Mamre (which is at Hebron) in the land of Canaan.
The deal is sealed. The field becomes Abraham’s.
It seems so little though - just a field with a cave for a grave.
The seller thinks he’s got a great deal,
no one has seen what Abraham sees.
They all see 400 sheckels of silver for a grave site,
But in God’s plan, it’s huge.
This tomb becomes the first footprint of Israel’s inheritance in Canaan.
Later, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Leah will be buried there.
Even Joseph will ask to have his bones carried back from Egypt there in (Genesis 50:25).
This grave isn’t just a burial plot—it’s a sermon declaring
“We believe this land is ours, not because of what we see, but because of what God has said.”
And as Abraham, and his descendants start filling the tomb one body at a time,
they all do so anticipating that in that same land,
someone will not fill a tomb, but leave a tomb empty.
Jesus whom Abrham had faith in,
would not have his own tomb like Abraham,
he had a borrowed tomb,
Becasue he didn’t need it long:
he rose again to secure our eternal inheritance.
Abraham’s tomb in Canaan anticipates Jesus’ empty tomb in Jerusalem.
Paul, in Romans, links Abrahams ‘as good as dead body’ to Jesus’ resurected Body:
Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah’s womb was also dead. Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised. This is why ‘it was credited to him as righteousness.’ The words ‘it was credited to him’ were written not for him alone, but also for us, to whom God will credit righteousness—for us who believe in him who raised Jesus our Lord from the dead. He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.
He buried his wife believing in resurrection—not because he understood it fully,
but because he trusted the God who gives life to the dead is faithful to His Word.
THis is how we must live.
Not compormising with the world,
not fearful of death,
but in the every day normality and sadness of life,
living by the promise of eternal life through the resurection of Jesus - according to the Word of God.
We cannot save ourselevs before a holy God - Abraham knew that,
But if we turn to him and his mercy, trusting in his promises
- we have a better home than this one.
So,
Will we live as the world does, by sight? Or as Jesus calls us - by faith?
Option A: Live by Sight—Without Christ
Option A: Live by Sight—Without Christ
Life becomes about preservation and self-comfort.
Death is terrifying and to be avoided at all costs.
Grief becomes hopeless, and joy is tied to circumstances.
Priorities center on now—possessions, experiences, control.
Option B: Live by Faith—In Christ
Option B: Live by Faith—In Christ
We can grieve deeply but with eternal hope.
We make decisions not just for today, but for eternity. Planting our flag in paradise.
We invest your time, energy, and resources in kingdom work.
We live with open hands—because your inheritance is secure in Christ.
A retiree chooses to mentor young believers, using their time for gospel impact.
A Christian chooses not to panic in a cost-of-living crisis, remembering God’s eternal provision.
A single believer pursues contentment in Christ, not marriage at all costs.
A parent teaches their children to prioritise church, not just academics or sport.
A pupil or student casts of crippling worry about exams, choosing to study hard to glorfiy Jesus, becasue our future is secure whatever our result.
A home extention is foregone, to support mission work,
The gospel is shared even at the cost of popularity, Because eternity matters more than image.
We are longing for a better country—the city with foundations built by God.
Let us allow God’s promises our our heavenly citizenship cause us to live the normality and sadnesses of life in faith, not by sight and sin.
Dear friends, I urge you, as foreigners and exiles, to abstain from sinful desires, which wage war against your soul.
Abraham trusted in the coming Christ. We trust in the crucified, risen and returning Christ.
He is our righteousness. He is our inheritance. He is the one who went into the grave—and came out.
So, trust Him. Live by His promises. And let your life—and your death—declare: “God keeps His word.”
As we keep planting our flags in heaven, not on earth.
PRAY
19 ‘Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moths and vermin destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moths and vermin do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. 21 For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
