Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Are You Living for the Moment? | Torah | Genesis 23

Episode Date: February 28, 2022

Is your current life all there is? Are you trying to find ultimate happiness in this life? Do you invest your time, energy and treasures into making this life the best life? In today's episode, Keith looks at Genesis 23 to discuss why we should be living for our eternal life. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Genesis 23 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. Right now, we're going through the first book of the Bible, Genesis. Gravestones always tell us when a person died. Sometimes they tell us how a person lived. Maybe you've seen a gravestone that had the word mom or dad or a soldier on it. That tells us something about the life of the person who's buried there. occasionally a gravestone will tell you what a person believed. Mel Blank was 81 years old when he died. He was known as the man of a thousand voices because he was the famous voice behind

cartoon characters like Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny, Tweedy Bird, Yosemitey Sam. The list goes on and on. He was also the voice behind the phrase at the end of every Looney Tune cartoon. It said, that's all folks. Now it turns out that that's all folks is not just a way to to cartoon, but it's also a perspective on life, because that phrase, that's all folks, was on the gravestone of Mel Blank. Contrast that to a gravestone of an unknown woman named Margaret. When she died, she was not yet 50 years old. And on her gravestone, it simply read,

waiting. Waiting? Waiting for what? Well, waiting for the glorious resurrection of her body. That's all, folks, represents a certain approach to life. But so does Waiting. That's all, folks, says, this is your life, and therefore you must go for it before your story ends. You've got to get every bit of happiness, every bit of pleasure, everything you want out of this life before you die. So create your bucket list and then check off everything you're able to do in this life. Waiting says your life extends beyond the grave. Waiting represents a worldview that says that your life here is,

is only a chapter, maybe even only a paragraph, in a much larger story of God. Waiting invites you to invest your life here, not in the paragraph, but in the greater story that God is telling. We've been following Abraham and Sarah through our series through the book of Genesis. We follow their life, their faith, their struggles. In Genesis 23, we find out that Sarah has died. Here's how the chapter starts. Sarah lived to be 127 years old. She died at Hebrun in the land of Canaan. Abraham went to mourn for Sarah and weep over her.

Abraham had faced all kinds of challenges in his life, but this is the only time that Genesis tells us he weeps. This challenge was unlike any other challenge he faced, because it touched his heart in a deep way. And you can understand why he wept. His wife of 65 years had died. They had been through a lot together. They had trusted God together.

together and they doubted God together. They obeyed God together and they laughed at God together. But this chapter's emphasis is not on Abraham's personal grief, but on the purchase of the land on which he will bury Sarah. Verse 3. Then Abraham rose up from the bedside of 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 I can bury my dead. God had repeatedly promised Abraham and Sarah that he would bless them with descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and with land. At this point, they had one child, Isaac, but no land. It's kind of weird because they were living in the land that would eventually become the promised land, but right now it belonged to other people.

They were living as strangers in a land that one day would belong to their descendants. When Sarah dies, Abraham would have been expected to return to his homeland, to where his family lived, and bury her there. But he doesn't do that. Instead, he wants to bury her in the land that God has promised them. It's a sign that he believes God's promise to give him and his descendants this land, even though that promise has not been fulfilled. Abraham was so sure that his descendants would one day own the promised land that he wanted Sarah's bones to be there. And, by owning a part of that land, he was prophesying its ultimate ownership. His beloved wife's body would be buried in Hebron, the center of the promised land. It was as if Abraham was

publicly putting his stake down, saying, I believe God's promise against all present appearances. Abraham saw beyond the present. By faith, he saw into the future. Hebrews 11 says of Abraham, By faith he made his home in the promised land, like a stranger in a foreign country. He lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise, for he was looking to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. When Abraham told the Hittites he wanted to buy some of their land to bury his wife, they told them that he could use any of their tombs for free. But Abraham refused the offer for free land and insisted on buying it,

because he was surely concerned that if land were to be given to him, it could just as easily be taken away from him. He wanted the protections and the permanence that came with ownership. Sarah's grave was a sign that together they believed that God was going to give them this land, that God was faithful to his promises. So the Hittites agreed to sell it to Abraham for 400 shekels of silver. Now, a shekel is not an amount of money. It is instead a measurement, a weight. When Abraham paid 400 shekels of silver, that was approximately 10 pounds. In other words, the Hittites charged Abraham a premium price.

They charged Abraham a lot of money for the land on which he was going to bury Sarah. Abraham doesn't negotiate with him. He just pays full price. And the chapter ends with Abraham burying Sarah in the promised land. One reason I'm attracted to this story is because Abraham identifies himself as a stranger and a foreigner. In the New Testament, Christians are called aliens, strangers, pilgrims. We've got a lot in common with Abraham. There's a sense in which we are strangers in this world, that it is not our home, and yet

one day it will be. Just like one day the promised land would belong to Abraham's descendants, so one day Jesus will return and establish his kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, and we will live with him in our forever home. But for now, we are, like Abraham, strangers. So that makes us wrestle with the question. Which gravestone do we identify with? The one that reads, that's all folks, or the one that reads waiting? Are we trying to find our happiness in this life or the next one? Are we laying up treasures on earth or in heaven? Is this life all there is?

are we waiting on a better life? Imagine that you're on a weekend trip and you go to check into the hotel room. When you walk in, you look around and you say, this carpet is ugly and those curtains will never do. The bathroom is not the way I want my bathroom laid out. So you get to the phone and you call a construction company and you say, I need this whole place remodeled. Could you come in here and redesign it?

Could you come in and knock out this wall and add a balcony onto this room? By the way, call in an interior designer. I want this whole thing redone. Now, no one would do that. I mean, even if you could afford to do it financially, you would never actually do it. It just doesn't make sense to invest that much time and that much treasure into a room that you're only going to be in for a couple of days. If you're only going to be there a few days, you can live with a lumpy mattress and ugly curtains. So while none of us would treat a hotel room that we're going to be in for a weekend like that,

we do treat her life like that. Here's what I mean. Our life here is going to be what, 70, 80 years, maybe less, maybe a little bit more. Compared to eternity, our life here is here and gone. James says that it is a mist. It is a vapor. It goes away quickly. So why would we invest all over time, all of our treasure, all of our energy, and trying to make this life, the best life. It just doesn't make sense if you understand how long eternity is. You wouldn't want to invest your time and your treasure and your energy and your emotional effort trying to lay up treasures in this life. No, if you really understood it from God's perspective, you'd want to use all of your time,

talent, treasure, energy in the next life. if you want to lay up treasures there. Don't live for the weekend. Live for the bigger story. It turns out that Margaret, the unknown woman who died before she was 50, who had wading on her tombstone, well, she's the one who got it right. We live here with our eyes fixed on the future.

Like Abraham, we live here with our eyes fixed on the promised land, believing God's promises that this life isn't all that. there is, that God is faithful. Jesus will return. He will raise us from the dead, and we will live with him forever. At that moment, we will be glad for all the sacrifices that we made in this life. At that moment, we will be glad that we laid up treasures in heaven and not on earth. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. It'll challenge you to grow in your faith,

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