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"A
Christian Life" Text Comment v.1 The fact that this information is given here seems to imply that Abraham married Keturah after Sarah's death. Most commentators don't think so, however, believing that all of this information is placed here as a summary so as not to have disrupted the flow of the narrative. This makes Keturah not a true wife, but a concubine, as she is called in 1 Chronicles 1:32 and, apparently, here also in v. 6. Calvin thought Abraham added her after Hagar had to be sent away, but it is impossible to tell. Her sons, of course, are a witness that Abraham did, even in his own lifetime, become a father of many nations. This disappoints us, of course. We want Abraham, the father of the faithful, to have seen the righteousness of a completely monogamous life, but he didn't and neither will many of the other heroes of OT history. These were the sins of their times, I cannot accept it as really permissible even in those early days -- though, I heard recently a spokeswoman for NOW say that it was time to accept that bigamy might not be all that bad, even a positive virtue for those who wanted reliable child care, etc. But, it reminds us of the fact that other ages of the church, including our own, have been blind to sins of their age: the early church's far too easy acceptance of an ascetic spirituality that denigrated the body and marriage; the 19th century church's far too easy acceptance of the ideals of colonialism; the 18th and 19th century American Protestant church's facile justification of chattel slavery; and the modern church's rampant materialism, so much a part of our culture we are largely unaware of its effect upon us. So, in regard to Abraham's concubines. v.2 These are the names not only of individuals, but of the tribes that came from them and, in some cases, cities of those tribes. Bildad, one of Job's comforters, for example, came from Shuah. v.4 Moses would later marry a Midianite and some of his father-in-law's advice was eventually worked into the Law. Gideon would later drive the Midianites back across the Jordan. v.6 The Lord's command and promise, "through Isaac that your offspring shall be reckoned" (21:12) governed Abraham's actions to the last. Sons of concubines in the ANE were not rightful heirs; they depended solely on their father's goodwill. But Abraham is generous to them and gives them more than he has to. v.7 His age at death means that he lived 100 years in the Promised Land. v.8 Clearly more than just burial -- he wasn't buried with his fathers; an intimation of life after death, but it does suggest to me that we will know our loved ones as loved ones in heaven! v.9 What does this suggest about the reunion between Isaac and Ishmael and the continuing relations between Abraham's two sons? That would be interesting to know! It was a year ago, last Monday, September 29th, that my sister died. Her life in the world was completed a year ago and from the vantage point of this distance, I can begin to see it more clearly as a whole: its beginning and end, its ups and downs, its adventures, its crises, its periods of calm, its joys and sorrows, its climax, and, now, something of its fruit and importance. And so it is with Christian people, who think about life this way and who care about what a life becomes and how it will be viewed when it is finished. This is one of the great virtues of reading Christian biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and the like. They teach us to see our lives as wholes and to consider what lessons we might draw from them when seen more clearly from a vantage point above and beyond them. Some of those lessons, I am convinced, can only be clearly grasped from such a vantage point and are likely to be missed altogether when one is in the middle of life and the days and weeks and months are hurtling past and we can see only the present. Well so it was with Abraham, the father of the faithful. His long and intensely interesting and important life came to an end. And the Genesis narrative goes on, just as does life itself and Abraham's life recedes ever further into the past and those who stop at his tomb to ponder that life become fewer and fewer as the generations multiply. But, now, with the life over, the story written, it is possible to see certain things and say certain things about Abraham's life that bear mightily on our own if we are his sons and daughters through the same faith in Jesus Christ that he had. What a life this was! His early life was lived in Ur as an idolater like the rest of his family. And then, suddenly, the call of the Almighty came to him, summoning him, of all people in the world, to leave his homeland and to go to a land the Lord would show him, from which land he would make of Abraham the father of many nations. And then the pilgrimage itself: the famine so soon after he arrived in Canaan; the fated trip to Egypt and his betrayal of Sarah and rescue by the Lord; his separation from his nephew Lot; and then his rescuing Lot in a daring adventure, chasing far to the north the Kings that had attacked Sodom and Gomorrah and the other cities of the plain, defeating them in battle and rescuing their captives and the plunder they had taken; then, the promise of a son to be born in his old age; the long and confusing years that passed before that promise was fulfilled; the sad and difficult episode with Hagar and the birth of Ishmael; the appearance of the three "men" who announced that Sarah would have a son and that God was about to destroy the cities of the plain; his sojourn with Abimilech when, from cowardice once more he placed the purity of his wife in jeopardy and had to be rescued by the intervention of the Lord; then the birth of Isaac, the terrible test at Mount Moriah that Abraham passed with such a magnificent faith; and now, finally, the faithfulness with which he arranged for the settlement of his family, his heirs in the land the Lord had promised him: the purchase of a burial site, the bringing of a wife for Isaac to Canaan from Abraham's clan, and the settlement of his estate upon Isaac his son. One hundred seventy five years worth of life. And what are the lessons of that life in its entirety? No doubt there are many, but there are two that have struck me as particularly important. They are the lessons that older writers of Christian devotion and spirituality used to press home to their readers but which, I think, have largely disappeared from Christian thinking and reflection today.
You see this in Abraham's life very clearly. Consider those 175 years. We know the events of only some months or perhaps a few years out of that long, nearly two-century-long life. Compress the entire narrative of Abraham's life, the events that are described in Holy Scripture, and we have only a tiny portion of the whole. We really have only the crises that punctuated his life. No doubt, most of his years were calm and uneventful, he went about his business year in, year out and nothing much of earthshaking importance happened, but from time to time his years were punctuated with these great events and crises that revealed Abraham either in his weakness or in the strength of his faith, the crises that molded his faith and his character and are the measure of his life in the Bible. And the same is true for the other great heroes of the Bible and, for that matter, of Christian history. We tend to think of sanctification or the Christian life as a gradual ascent toward holiness and heaven. Our Shorter Catechism's definition of sanctification encourages this way of thinking: "Sanctification is the work of God's free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man, after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin and live unto righteousness." And that is a true enough definition of sanctification as a generality. But, it is mistaken if one understands it to mean that progress in the grace of God and righteousness of life is, as a rule, gradual and steady. It is not. The Bible never says that it is and, in fact, shows us a different expectation altogether. A Christian life in the Bible, just like Abraham's life as we have read it, is a matter of fits and starts, of peaks and valleys, of periods of intense activity and virtual calm, of advance and retreat. There are times of the Spirit's presence and forceful activity in the soul and there are times when the believer feels that God is at a great distance from him or her. The older writers used to preach and write at length about what they called "divine desertion," those times in a Christian's life when the Lord does not seem near, his Spirit is not stirring the soul, when spiritual progress is plodding or when there seems to be more slippage than advance in the life of faith. The psalms are full of this "divine desertion," and we have many examples of it in the Bible, we also find a number of prominent believers whose lives end with a sigh or a moan and who are in worse shape spiritually at the end of their lives than they were years before: David, Solomon, Asa, and Hezekiah among them. In other words, a Christian life is very much like the life of Christ's church in the world: advancing mightily during times of the Spirit's power, what is typically called a "revival," and either holding its own or actually declining in spiritual graces and power in the long years between those short, sharp periods of revival. Jonathan Edwards pointed out that out of the entire history of the Christian church since Pentecost, all 1700 years of it in his day, the real advance of the gospel and the church could be compressed into a small fraction of that time. The rest of it was waiting, holding on, remaining faithful during a long day of small things and building the church more by the faithful raising of her children than by the winning of the world. (Not that there are not conversions all along -- there are, of course, but in large numbers sometimes and in small numbers other times.) God is sovereign and he proves that sovereignty in the life of his children, coming powerfully to them at one moment, leaving them to labor on with less visible manifestations of his presence for long periods of time, and then, suddenly, returning to them with power and wonderful effect. Bonnie Payne handed me recently an anecdote from David Brown's biography of John Duncan, the famous Rabbi Duncan of the 19th century Scottish Presbyterians. Those men in that day had lived through both revival and its end and the resumption of the ordinary life of the Kingdom of God and knew exactly the difference between the two states in both the life of the individual believer and the church as a whole. This experience left its mark on them. It seems that on one occasion, Duncan opened his OT or Hebrew class with prayer and the prayer grew longer and longer until it took up the entire class hour and it was only the ringing of the bell at the end of the hour that brought him up out of his communion with God. A friend chided him afterward for having taken his entire class hour for the prayer, and he replied, "Ah, when one thinks he has got in, he is not so ready to come out." [p. 372]. There is a man who knows the difference between the ordinary times and the extraordinary times of the Christian life. And there is a perfect statement of the lesson of this fact about believing life being, in general, long periods of spiritual quiet punctuated by short crises. The lesson is this: if that is what a Christian life is made of, then our duty becomes traveling as far as we can when the wind is blowing and then, when it is calm again, rowing hard so as to be sure that we continue to advance, even if at a slower pace, and do not lose the ground we have so far taken. I think that is the Bible's impression of Abraham's life, as opposed, say, to David or Solomon's. He set his full complement of sails when the wind of the Spirit began to blow in his life and traveled very far, and then was diligent to keep and preserve and build upon that progress, if slowly and unspectacularly, when the wind died down and it became calm again, sometimes for many years at a time. It is this that explains the glorious fact about Abraham's life -- that we see him at his best, his highest at the end of his life, wearing the rich, beautiful maturity of Christian faith. Is that not what you long for yourself, what any true Christian must long for? That he gets the full good of his pilgrimage and honors the Lord still more at the end of his life than at its beginning or in the middle? And, if you will think about it, this is what that will require of you; nothing less. To go as far forward as you can when the Spirit is astir in your life -- bringing ecstasy, or conviction, or illumination, or when God demonstrates himself to you in the midst of trial -- and then, when that stirring is over, to protect and to guard that progress and build on it with the harder work of rowing the boat against a current than the wind drove with the current before. Look at your life as a whole, brothers and sisters. Here is the key. Here is the secret. Here is the explanation. This will determine how far you travel. Whether you make the most of the times of the Spirit's power and whether or not you allow the calm to deflect you from the hard work of preserving what you have so far gained. There, I think, is the story of Abraham's life.
This is the way Abraham's life is measured in the Bible, this is what interests Holy Scripture about Abraham's life. Whether in the periods of spiritual crisis or in the much longer periods of stasis and calm, here is a man who takes it all very seriously! The Lordship of his God, the sanctity of his law, the summons of his covenant, the certainty of God's promise, the death and dying of the world around him, the necessity of living and judging by faith in the Word, the presence, and the faithfulness of God, the abomination of sin and the beauty of righteousness. This is all, of course, harder for us to measure. We compare ourselves to others like ourselves and comfort ourselves in the comparison. We live in a spiritually decadent age and imagine so easily that we are devout because it seems as though we are as devout, if not more so, than some other Christians we know. But all the while, supernatural Christianity rests far too lightly upon us. Hardly a sick night for sin, too little feeling for the damned around us, too little reckoning with what our Savior was always saying about his true disciples taking up their crosses, sacrificing family, homes and fields for his sake, gouging out right eyes and cutting off right arms or with what Paul said about beating his body and making it his slave lest having preached to others he himself should be disqualified for the prize. Too little thought too much of the time about those who, on the last day, say "Lord, Lord" only to have him say to them "Depart from me I never knew you." Too little thought for God's law and too little thought for Christ's telling us that as he has loved us so we are to love one another, about laying up treasure in heaven, and about seeking first the kingdom of God. Too little attention altogether to the fact that we are to live by faith and not by sight and to live as if we really believed that all of God's promises, every one, are Yea and Amen in Jesus Christ! Abraham took it all so seriously, so wonderfully and manfully and thoughtfully seriously -- with all his failures, he never sought to shift the weight of that reality and that summons and that divine grace and that future prospect from his shoulders. That is my greatest worry for the evangelical church in American today, for you, and, perhaps most of all, for myself. That we can continue to use all these Christian words and biblical concepts and continue even to fight for these biblical doctrines and for this historic concept of Christian faith and devotion and obedience -- and, at last, produce nothing but a pale shadow of those marvelous realities in ourselves because the weight of them rests far too lightly upon our souls deep down within where the difference is made. [The death of the Sabbath Day in the church of our day is an indication of this. Oh, yes, we believe. But believe so much as to keep Sunday holy to God? That seems extreme to us, as if the Christian faith would not require that of us, surely!] This is, by the way, what I have always so much loved about Alexander Whyte. He was a cheerful, happy man, with many friends and much joy in his life -- along with some sharp sorrows to be sure. But, what he did so well, I believe, is that he never allowed the seemingly endless run of the days, months, and years to dull his mind and heart to the terrible seriousness of our Christian faith -- he was one who heard the thunder and saw the lightning in so many passages of God's Word. Bunyan has a character in The Holy War named Mr. Meditation. He appears but briefly as the father of another character. But Whyte's treatment of Mr. Meditation in his Bunyan Characters has all of the genius and the insight and the power of Alexander Whyte's so serious preaching. Mr. Meditation, so Alexander Whyte supposed, had a secret plan for himself that he told no one else, a plan as to what he would read about and think about each day of the week and reflect upon at certain hours of the day or night. "...in the old man's tattered pocket-book [and written in his own hand] there were things like this found by his minister after his death. 'Monday, death; Tuesday, judgment; Wednesday, heaven; Thursday, hell; Friday, my past life back to my youth; Saturday, the passion of my Savior; [the] Lord's day, creation, salvation, my own.' And then, on another slip of paper, this: 'Jesus, Thy life and Thy words are a perpetual sermon to me. I meditate on Thee all the day. Make my memory a vessel of election. Let all my thoughts be plain, honest, pious, simple, prudent, and charitable, till Thou art pleased to draw the curtain and let me see Thyself, O Eternal Jesus.'" Well, Abraham was like that. Hebrews tells us that all his life long he was looking for the better country, the city that has foundations, whose builder and maker is God. And he lived his life knowing all along and full well that his life was a pilgrimage and that he must therefore be a faithful pilgrim. Such is the measure of a believing man's life -- just how heavily the reality of our supernatural faith and our living God rests upon the soul. That was the measure of Abraham's life and that will be the measure of yours and mine as well. That and nothing else. And what then will they judge your life and mine to have been when we have been gone a year? Ponder that and act before the night comes when no man can work! |
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