-I called my grandma yesterday to catch up with her for a bit because her last remaining sister just died last week. Dolly Flaten (birth name of Solvig, you can’t get more Norwegian than that!). This means my grandma is the last living Koppang of her siblings, the generations have shifted.

-What’s amazing to me is how grateful my grandma was for the years they had together. My grandma has been a widow since 1987, and as she joked with one of my cousins one year, all her friends are dead! 

-And I hate to be a downer, but today’s text is about death, which should cause us to reflect and ponder our own mortality. How do you want the end of your life to be described? After months learning from the life of Abraham, today we’ll look at the conclusion of his life 

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1. The Rest of Abraham’s Descendants (1-11)

-Keturah – timing may not be as we would think. Biblical writers are more concerned with themes and topics than chronology, so this could have been a woman who was one of Abraham’s concubines that traveled with him, then after Sarah died she becomes his wife. Speculating, not sure exactly the timing on all this.

-We know this isn’t chronological, because in the next section (vs. 19-26), we learn that Isaac is 60 when he has his kids, Abraham had Isaac at 100, meaning Abraham was still alive when Jacob & Esau were born, but we have no account of them interacting at all. I think this is intentional, we’ve been focused on Abraham, the next section shifts the focus to Isaac and gives us the highlights of his life, but not until Abraham is off the scene.

-Think of all the years where Abraham didn’t have a son, the decades of infertility, then in the later years of his life, all these children come. 6 listed here. I think what we’re seeing is exactly what God had promised Abraham: you will be blessed. From you will come people and nations that are too numerous to count. At this point, you can count them (we’ve seen 8), but they all move on to lead entire groups of people. 

-Midian would be the most well-known son from this list, they’ll come up throughout the OT and serve as an enemy to Israel after their return from Egypt.

-Just as I did last week, I found a list of who was related to whom in this story.

-But the rest of these sons are just a footnote, because the story is going to continue following Isaac, the chosen son. Look at the difference in how Abraham provides for them. 

-What does he give to Isaac? Everything. What does he give to the rest of his sons? Gifts. All of his priority and focus was directed toward Isaac, and I do think there’s a lesson here for us to note.

-I always struggled with what to do with some of these patriarchs – why did they have multiple wives, and why is that not disqualifying for them to be chosen by God?

-One key to this is to begin with the understanding that God always accommodates Himself to us. I love the way John Calvin describes the Bible: as God’s baby talk. So everything in here is God lowering Himself to our standards to speak to us in ways we can understand, but He doesn’t reveal everything to us – we talked about that a bit last week, God has hidden ideas that He doesn’t share with us. 

-So when we read about accounts of someone like Abraham having concubines, we need to keep in mind that it’s a completely different time and culture than we have AND most importantly, nowhere does God encourage this. God’s standards never change from the dawn of creation to the end of time: God’s design is one man and one woman in covenant partnership until the end, BUT sin corrupts that, and one of the ways that was corrupted in this time period was through the idea of concubines. And this is one of the things I love about the Bible: it doesn’t sugarcoat any of this stuff. It’s recounting exactly what happened in Abraham’s life: the good, bad, and anything in between. Sometimes he’s held up as a positive example for us, and other times the example is what we should avoid. A large part of what we’ve seen from Abraham taking matters into his own hand has been negative, hasn’t it? Think of the fighting between his wife Sarah and his concubine Hagar, or the fighting between Isaac and Ishmael. It reveals all the negative things that happen when people live and operate outside of God’s design, and it doesn’t pretend everything’s ok. 

-Why send them eastward? Do you remember where we’ve seen people going East throughout this book? The first place is in Gen. 3, which direction are Adam and Eve sent due to their sin? East. Then the sin that begins vertically toward the Lord moves to become sin horizontally toward other humans, and which direction does Cain move? East and notice the way Moses describes it: out from the Lord’s presence. Finally, sin becomes prevalent once again and in Gen. 11 with the tower of Babel, we see the people continuing to move East. So East is connected to leaving the presence of the Lord. 

-Essentially what Abraham is doing is disowning the entire rest of his family. Again, don’t miss that the Bible recounts true events! This would be demoralizing to everyone except Isaac. And I think we see this again in his death: which sons are involved in his burial? Isaac and Ishmael, none of the others. 

-And all of this eastward movement changes with the arrival of Jesus. There are 2 passages that point out this reality. 

-First is a prophecy in Isa. 60 that has a list of nations that will bring praises to the Lord. A light will shine, drawing the nations to Himself, and look at the nations listed: Midian, Ephah, and Sheba. And do you see what this says they will be bringing? Gold and frankincense. Can you think of a story where someone comes FROM the East to deliver gold and frankincense?

-Yeah! The Christmas story! When the wise men come to fulfill and complete all of God’s plans that began with Abraham. Don’t we serve an incredible God?

-But friends, it gets even better! After Jesus heals a centurion’s servant with just a word, notice who Jesus says will share in the banquet at the kingdom of heaven: 

-And who will they be sharing the table with? Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is where we see that all God’s promises to Abraham include us, but I’m getting slightly ahead of myself, we’ll get there at the end of this sermon! 

-Now, let’s go back and look at the description of Abraham’s death: good old age, contented.

-Do you ever think about your death? The Bible actually tells us to contemplate our end on a regular basis. Ecc. 7:2 “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, since that is the end of all mankind, and the living should take it to heart.” When I first got into ministry, my senior pastor told me he’d rather preach at a funeral than a wedding, and I thought he was crazy! But as I’ve gotten older I’ve realized just how right he was: at weddings no one listens to you. The husband and wife are too excited about the day, the rest of the people there are paying attention to the couple, I can have the most impactful message of my life and it won’t matter. But at a funeral it’s a completely different story: people are ready to listen and are looking for what God says to bring comfort to this situation. 

–Psalm 90:12 says something similar: “Teach us to number our days carefully
so that we may develop wisdom in our hearts.” None of us know how long our lives will be, what are we doing to make the most of every day? Have you ever considered what it would take to have this description of Abraham be true of you?  

Friends, what do you want people to say after you die? The mortality rate has never changed in human history, even when we read of people living for hundreds of years in Genesis, the ending is still the same – they breathe their last and die. What do you hope people say about you when that day comes?

-He was buried in the same place as his first wife, Sarah, the one little piece of land that actually belongs to him from the giant territory the Lord has promised him.

-And then the blessing moves from Abraham to Isaac, who lives where we saw him last week, but God is continuing to bless the line of Abraham. 

-But Isaac isn’t the only son, and Moses goes on to tell us about Ishmael’s family:

• The Family of Ishmael (12-18)

-The other son, the non-chosen son. Now, before we walk through this, I want to remind you of something I emphasized a number of weeks ago now as we were comparing Isaac to Ishmael:

-What’s the difference between them? 1 thing: one is the promised son and the other is not. Both are sons of Abraham, both are circumcised, both are blessed from the Lord, both will become a great nation, BUT only 1 of them is THE child promised from God. That’s it! God had a plan, and nothing Abraham did could change that plan. It all begins and ends with God – not Abraham. Abraham’s not the point of this story, Isaac’s not the point of this story, and Ishamel’s DEFINITELY not the point of this story, this whole thing is about God’s plans to point all of history to Himself.

-How many sons does he have? Think back to what God promised to Abraham when he was asking the Lord to provide through Ishmael instead of Isaac in Gen. 17, and what does God promise to do? To make him a great nation with 12 tribal leaders. And how many sons does this tell us Ishmael had? Yep, 12. Isn’t our God amazing? 

-Where was he buried? Not near Abraham, he’s becoming a different nation near Egypt.

-Now, there’s some debate about the land that his descendants move to, but here’s 1 map someone proposed as the tribal leaders move around the Arabian desert. And even as he goes to death, he doesn’t want to be a part of Abraham’s family, he stays with all his mother’s relatives.

-So that’s the lineage of Father Abraham! At least as far as Genesis tells us. The rest of the OT follows the family Abraham began, and things take a surprising turn when we get into the NT. I alluded to this earlier with the promise that the dispersion that we’ve seen in Genesis “to the East” suddenly returns to the praise the one true God after Jesus comes.

• I am one of them, and so are you, so let’s just praise the Lord (Galatians 3)

-It would be better to say “I am one of them, and so can you” if you’re not yet a believer, become a part of this family today!
-All of God’s promises come to fruition and a new light with the arrival of Jesus, and pretty much the entire book of Galatians is Paul dealing with debates about how we interpret God’s covenant to Abraham. Could also think of this as “how to become sons of Abraham”

-I’ve been chatting with a friend about this book and topic for the last few months. How do we live as Christians today with an understanding of the Old Testament? What do we do with something like the story of Abraham, because it’s not just “be like Abraham” he made some really dumb decisions, and that’s the way I was always taught these stories growing up – purely moral examples. But there’s ONLY 1 main character in this book, and His name is Jesus, not Abraham. Everyone else is secondary in this story.

-And not just the life of Abraham, but what about all the laws in the OT? Like I was always told growing up that tattoos are sinful, and then I read that in context, and realized that was right next to a command I broke regularly: cutting off the hair on the side of my head. I love what my friend said in one of his sermons: Jesus obeyed the law completely in order the be the fulfilment of that law so that we could live a new life in Him. Jesus summarized the whole law as 2 things: love God and love others, that’s His summary of all 613 Old Testament laws. And just I shared earlier with the comparison between Isaac and Ishmael, it’s the same thing for us: it begins and ends with the work of God.

-I texted my friend this week because he’s currently preaching through the book of Galatians, and I asked him how I could summarize chpt. 3 in 10 minutes, his reply was: read vs. 2. The rest of the chapter is at outworking of vs. 2 – how do we receive the Spirit? Is it by strictly obeying all 613 laws, or is it through belief?

-And not just receiving the Spirit, how do we continue on in the Christian faith, it is through our own works or is it through the sustaining power of the Holy Spirit?

-Friends, this is where the idea of Isaac vs. Ishmael is so important! How does God work in people, is it through us working really hard, or through His Spirit making us alive? One professor I had in seminary summarized this really well when he said do we need a ladder or a hand? If it’s a ladder, then it’s up to us to climb to the top and reach God, but if it’s a hand that has come down from above then there’s nothing we can do to reach it, it’s God’s righteous credited to us through nothing we can ever do, but through what Jesus has already done.

-And Paul doubles down on this in vs. 3: do we only begin by the Spirit?

-Friends, this has become one of my burdens for us as a church: to realize the freedom that we have when we walk “in step” with the HS. So often we view our faith as needing to do something that God views as already done. For those of you who are believers in Jesus, what can you do to be more saved than you are right now? NOTHING. Isn’t that amazing? 

-I shared last week that one of the things I’m going to be praying about this summer is spiritual formation, or a rule of life. We don’t live under the OT law, which was given to a specific people who lived in a specific time and place (in the middle of the Arabian desert), what should we do in 2025 in Apple Valley, MN to grow closer to God?

-There was an old song that was taught to children where the words were “read your Bible and pray everyday, and you’ll grow, grow, grow” And while that’s true, how does that actually change us? On top of that, how do we go about these practices and habits in our lives so that it doesn’t become what Paul describes as “finishing by the flesh”? And what does this have to do with Father Abraham?

-First, notice in vs. 7 – who are Abraham’s sons? “Those who have faith.” That’s it! Not just that, but Paul goes on to say that if we have faith, we get the same blessings as Abraham! Isn’t that crazy? God literally takes us out from the nations of the earth (from the east) and adopts us into a new family in the same lineage as Isaac. We can call God our Father! 

-And that’s where the spirituals practices come in, because we’re now a part of a new family with a different set of rules and expectations than we used to have. Every family has certain rules and rhythms that determine how they operate. It’s different for each family! But for the family of God, it’s going to be focused on getting God’s Word deeply into our hearts and minds to make us daily more like Jesus. 

-It’s really easy for us to slip into the old way of pursuing these practices to “earn” God’s favor instead of viewing them as our way of living in our new family. It doesn’t make us any more or less the children of God, but it demonstrates the family we’re a part of and helps us identify more with that family.

-Many of you have commented that you can’t tell my twins apart – they look so similar, even though they’re not identical they’re still brothers, coming from the same parents, so they look alike! It’s the same thing with the family of God. We’re supposed to look “alike” to the world, people are supposed to see us pursuing the same things together, slowly becoming more like Jesus in our daily lives. 

-It’s not legalism, and it’s not losing your individuality, it’s finding out who you were truly created to be.

-Friends, over this summer, spend some time praying about how you can continue walking by the flesh to become even more identified with the family of Father Abraham.