May 30 Sermon: Gathered to His People

Consider these questions as we look at Genesis 25:1-18:

1. What role does the theme of redemption play in the passage about Abraham and his descendants?

2. How does Abraham's decision to take another wife impact the larger narrative of Genesis?

3. In what ways does the mention of Ishmael's descendants emphasize God's faithfulness to his promises?

4. How does the concept of going "east" symbolize moving away from God's presence and covenant in the passage?

Transcript:

From the time I was a child one of my favorite movies has been The Empire Strikes Back. This middle film in the original Star Wars trilogy is unique in that it’s plot line really leads to the bad guys winning the film. It starts with the good guys running for their lives from the attacks of the oppressive Empire’s army. Our favorite heroes are chased all over the galaxy and captured. The new hope we met in the first film is being trained by Jedi master Yoda but he leaves without completing the training to attempt to rescue his friends. And the conclusion of the movie leaves us hanging wondering if it is really true that the hero is the son of the most evil man in the galaxy. How many movies do you know of where the bad guys win? I won’t give you too much time to mentally answer that question because there aren’t too many. In fact, you might not be able to think of any other than the one I have just described.

‌But the film does not end in complete despair. So much is up in the air. Will they be able to rescue Han Solo, is Luke really Darth Vader’s son, and will the rebel army that is perpetually on the run ever be able to formulate a significant attack on the Empire? The final scene of the movie has some of the heroes watching as their friends leave to rescue their captured friend and the camera pans out for us to see that they are not alone. The rebel fleet has gathered. There is, once again, hope.

‌As we return to the story of Abraham from our break for the Ascension and Pentecost we see that even Abraham is not immune from the curse that came into the world when Adam and Eve fell into sin. He has had a long life. He has trusted God to bring him the child of the promise. He has great material wealth and has become a small king in the region. He has not fully possessed the promised land but he believes the promise of God so much that when his wife died he legally acquired a piece of land to bury her in so that her remains would be in the promised land. He is a picture of faith and blessing but he is still subject to the sad end that all humans must face but yet, when we look at the end of Abraham’s life we see hope. As we read in 1 Thessalonians we do not grieve as those who have no hope. We are not coming here to the ending of a biography of an unbeliever but of one who believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness. We know that his death is not the end but instead he has eternal life and he looked forward to the hope of resurrection.

‌As we come to the end of the story of Abraham this morning we find ourselves in an interesting passage. I labored over this passage this week and I came to the conclusion that this is another passage where we need to look at the big picture. We can’t really break it down into three points and go through it verse by verse. It just doesn’t lend itself to that but it is a really important passage because it brings us to the close of Abraham’s story and moves us on to the story of Isaac and Jacob. It reminds us that even though Abraham is the most significant figure we’ve come across thus far his story isn’t the ultimate story. There is something bigger we are moving towards. The story of redemption hasn’t completed with Abraham. The promise of the one who will crush the head of the serpent is not yet fulfilled. We are still waiting for the Messiah. Even though Isaac is the child of the promise he isn’t THE child of the promise and God’s story for his covenant people isn’t over yet. The messiah is still going to come.

‌And so we find ourselves here in this transitional passage and is similar to other parts of Genesis that we have observed. When there is a transition from one significant phase of the story to the next we find ourselves with a lot of names. This does a lot of things for us in the story. These aren’t space filling details. Moses wasn’t in a back and forth email discussion with his publisher when he was trying to sell the book of Genesis and the publisher insisted on a higher word count to get the book of Genesis to 50 chapters. While it all seems unnecessary for us and the names don’t mean much because we don’t know them they actually would have meant a lot to the original audience of Genesis.

And it starts out by telling us that Abraham took another wife. Now, you read this and you probably thought that this was strange for Abraham to do at his age. Well, this passage does not suggest in any way that this is chronological. This is the story of Abraham’s family apart from the line of the promise. And we know from the story of Hagar and Ishmael that Abraham failed to trust God to fully provide the child of the promise. With the number of sons that he fathered here it is unlikely that all of them were born after the death of Sarah. We don’t know for sure but in the multiple sources I consulted the conclusion is that it is implied that Keturah was a concubine. While this was sinful and not God’s plan for Abraham, it was common at the time for these little kings to expand their kingdom and influence by having concubines and having as many children as possible.

‌The reason that it is assumed that this occurred in this way is because of the greater story that comes out of this passage. In order to grasp what the passage is doing for us here we have to think back to the other genealogies we have been through in Genesis. The times where we read about the phrase so and so begat so and so and then they begat such and such were mapping out for us the family lines and specifically the line to the child of the promise. We followed the family of Seth and after the flood the family of Shem and they were the godly line and the heirs of the promise. But, we have also seen ungodly lines. We followed the line of Cain right. They were not in the line of the messiah but instead they were the children of the serpent and the story behind the story is that there is this struggle. Which will prevail? Will the serpent continue to prevail after the garden or is God at work to accomplish his purposes through the godly line.

‌And you can see this in the way the family lines are presented and we catch some of the significance here because one of the names in this section kind of jumps out at us: Midian. The Midianites are going to be a problem for the Israelites. And so we are meant to understand that these people are outside the godly line. They are continuing the struggling between the line of the serpent and the godly line. The chosen people of God who are in covenant with him will be in a struggle with the serpent and his agents until the Messiah comes to crush the serpents head.

‌And so while you and I don’t really understand who these family names are the original audience of Genesis would have known them and understood them as being in opposition to the redemptive work of God.

‌The best way I can help us grasp this is by associating it with the towns that are our rivals in sports. I have sat in the bleachers several times and because I’m still relatively new to the area I get educated by my fellow spectators. A certain team had a player that caused us trouble and now the same last name is in the program. I wonder if that young lady is a sister of the previous girl who tormented us in years past and then you find out that maybe there is another one in the pipeline in that family. Just recently at a Jr. High baseball game I was told that one of the young players was the brother of someone. It meant nothing to me, but other people knew who they were. While the stakes were a bit higher in these struggles against these different families than our sports contests, you get the idea.

‌And we see some familiar language as this first section we are looking at closes up. Abraham gave all these sons gifts and sent them away from Isaac and they were sent east. I’m sure you remember this theme continually coming up in Genesis. To go east is not a good thing. When Adam and Eve are banished from the garden for their rebellion against God they go east. Cain goes further east after the murder of Abel. More recently we saw that Sodom and Gomorrah were east. To go east is to go away from the presence of God. To go east is to not be a part of the covenant promise and plan of God.

‌And so as we look at the next block of verses here we see that Abraham is memorialized. He lived to a good old age and he was gathered to his people. That is a rather interesting phrase because it implies that there is something beyond this life. In the Old Testament we don’t see a fully formed doctrine of the resurrection but what we do see is that they did not believe that death was the ultimate end. And we see this fleshed out even further when we see what they do with his remains.

‌Remember back to when Sarah died. Abraham sought out a cave in Machpelah to bury her in. The cave was in the promised land and we saw that Abraham believed the promise of God even though it was in the future and he would not obtain it himself. He bought that land legally at a high price because he trusted that one day his people would possess it and he buried her there in faith. And now we see that his sons are doing the same thing. They are doing what Abraham asked and putting his remains with Sarah.

‌Again, it is so important that we don’t miss what a picture of faith this is for us. Abraham was promised so many things by God and he had to be patient. He was promised a child and it didn’t come and didn’t come. But God was good to his promise. Isaac was born to old barren couple long after Sarah could have conceived on her own. God brought her womb to life and the promise was fulfilled in his timing by his mighty hand, not by the human effort of Abraham. In fact, the constant remind we see is that when Abraham goes off on his own and tries to fulfill the promise on his own it messes things up. Despite all the conflict that comes God works all things together for good and fulfills his covenant promise to his people. Humans will fail and, in fact, our efforts make things worse but God’s promise is fulfilled and he rescues his people.

‌That is the big story at work in this passage. We are once again resetting the story. Abraham is gone but God’s faithfulness is going to continue and it is going to come through Isaac. Regardless of what the children of the promise do, God will keep his promise. We are going to see that just like Abraham, Isaac is going to fail and mess things up but the promise is going to continue as God ordains it.

‌And we see that this is how the story is going to go as the passage tells us that God blessed Isaac. His hand is upon him and this is a reminder that the covenant promise is on Isaac. It is not on Ishmael but as the passage closes up we read about the success that Ishmael has.

‌Remember God promised Abraham that Ishmael would be a great nation. This wasn’t a promise that he would be in the covenant that would bring the messiah but that he would have lots of family and have earthly success. And we see the reminder of this before we move on to Isaac’s family because the story really picks up next week with the birth of Jacob and Esau. We’ve not seen much about Isaac since Abraham was willing to offer him as a sacrifice as God commanded. For being the child of the promise, we don’t know much about him, but now that Abraham is gone the story is shifting to Isaac and so we also see a reminder of God’s faithfulness to Ishmael.

‌But this short passage that seems relatively insignificant is actually tying up loose ends. The life of Abraham has been complicated. We could follow story threads and arcs all over the place but this passage pulls us back in. Genesis is about the promise. It is about the story of redemption. It is about God fulfilling his promise to destroy the work of the serpent.

‌And so as we wrap up today there are two important applications I want us to walk away with.

‌The first thing we need to remember is to follow the commands of God. The conflict in the life of Abraham and the conflict that is to come in the life of his descendents comes from stepping outside of the clear commands of God and Abraham going off on his own. God made a promise to Abraham and God kept it but the unfaithfulness of Abraham is what causes the story to go off the rails.

‌God has made a covenant promise with his people. We have been saved by grace through faith and he keeps that promise but, just like Abraham, we can go off the rails. There is forgiveness and there is mercy but when we remain faithful to the commands of God we avoid the conflicts that come from our disobedience. And so, may we, as the covenant people of God, seek him out in holiness and in faith as we trust in his promise of salvation.

‌And a second application from this passage is to remember the story of our redemption. As I mentioned a few moments ago the book of Genesis could go off on an assortment of rabbit trails. It could follow all kinds of interesting stories that surely developed out of the family tensions created by the failures of Abraham to trust God but Genesis continues to narrow the story back down and return us to the story of redemption and the child of the promise.

‌This is an important reminder for us. We can easily run off in different directions but God keeps calling us back to himself through the message of the gospel. Our redemption comes through the one he promised in Genesis and that is what truly matters. It is the story of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension that gathers us to himself. When we hear and believe that gospel the Holy Spirit brings us to life and into the covenant people of God. That same message is used by the Holy Spirit to convict us of our sin and call us to repentance. Through it the Spirit works to make us holy and conform us to the image of Christ. So may we be a people of God continually called back to the story of redemption and may we not only hear and believe it but may we repeat the message to a lost and dying world that God may continue to use this message to gather his people to himself.