Good evening, and welcome to EBible Fellowship’s Bible study in the book of Genesis.  Tonight is study #2 of Genesis, chapter 25, and we will be reading Genesis 25:7-10:

And these are the days of the years of Abraham's life which he lived, an hundred threescore and fifteen years. Then Abraham gave up the ghost, and died in a good old age, an old man, and full of years; and was gathered to his people. And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre; The field which Abraham purchased of the sons of Heth: there was Abraham buried, and Sarah his wife.

In our first study in this chapter, we saw that Abraham died at age 175 and “gave up the ghost,” and that means that when he died, his spirit went to be with the Lord, and he was “gathered to his people.”  We looked at that word “gather,” and we saw how it related to the bringing in of the fruit; all the people God saves are likened to fruit in the Bible.  We are like a harvest that God planted, reaped and gathered to Himself.  Of course, the harvest was made up of various times and seasons.

Then we read in Genesis 25:9:

And his sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron the son of Zohar the Hittite, which is before Mamre; The field which Abraham purchased of the sons of Heth…

We know from Galatians 4 that these two sons represent the children of two covenants.  Isaac was born of Sarah, and he was the promised son or the promised seed.  He was born in a miraculous way, as his mother was 90 years old and past childbearing age.  The New Testament refers to “the deadness of Sarah’s womb,” and, yet, Isaac was conceived and born out of that “dead womb.”  And we have talked about that at other times and how that is a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ at the foundation of the world.  God even uses those Greek words that are translated as “foundation” in Revelation 13:8 and Hebrews 4:3 to refer to Sarah’s womb.  It says Hebrews 11:11:

Through faith also Sara herself received strength to conceive seed…

The word “conceive” is “kat-ab-ol-ay,” and it is translated as “foundation” in those other two places and more.  So God calls her womb “dead,” referring to the deadness of Sarah’s womb, and He ties it into the “foundation,” so we are aware of the spiritual picture wherein the promised son Isaac is a great type of Christ.  Remember, the seed (singular) is Jesus, so Christ was “conceived” in death, the womb of hell, represented by the deadness of Sarah’s womb, at the foundation of the world.  That is why Hebrews 11:11 refers to that.  How did Jesus become the Son of God?  It was “through the resurrection from the dead.”  That is, He was dead at the foundation of the world (the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world), and then He was raised up and came to life, and as it were, He came out of the womb of death at that point, as God declared in the mini-parable when Jesus was baptized and came up out of the water, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”  There was the declaration of the Sonship because He was baptized in water, which points to His having gone through the wrath of God in the fires of hell and making payment for sin at the foundation of the world.  The wages of sin is death.  Coming up out of the water is that “washing away” of sin because all sin was removed, having been paid for, and He was declared to be the Son of God.  That is just an incredibly glorious picture that God had hidden in the Bible in the account of Sarah giving birth to Isaac.

We also know that Ishmael was born of Hagar, the Egyptian handmaid to Sarah, and we are told she was of the flesh.  I thought we could go without reading it because we have read it many times, but it never hurts to read it again.  It say sin Galatians 4:22-27:

For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman. But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise. Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar. For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children. But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.

There are the two covenants, the covenant of grace and the covenant of works.  Also, in Galatians 4 we see that the two sons are born of the covenant and now in Genesis 25, they were together once again.  Remember back several chapters in Genesis, Isaac was weaned, and Sarah saw Ishmael mocking at that time, so she went to Abraham and said, “Cast out the bondwoman and her son.”  It was a grievous thing to Abraham, but the Lord told him to hearken to her, and he did cast them out.  And now it is some seventy years later, as Ishmael was about 16 or 17 when he was cast out, and at the point of Abraham’s death at age 175, so we know exactly how old Ishmael was because Abraham was 86 when Ishmael was born.  So at the time of Abraham’s death at age 175, Ishmael was 89.  I do not think we can break down that number.  I tried.  No other numbers divide neatly into it, so the number 89 stands alone, and I do not know of any spiritual meaning for the number 89, so that is not too helpful.  Although from the point of Abraham’s death when Ishmael was 89, we know that he would die at age 137 because we are told that later on in this chapter.  So that would be 48 years, which is an interesting number.  It is “2 x 24” or “4 x 12,” and that would point to the furthest extent of the fulness of whatever is in view. (But that is jumping ahead a little bit.)

So we see that they buried Abraham “in the cave of Machpelah, in the field of Ephron.”  This is the same field that Sarah was buried in, so let us go back to Genesis 23 to remind us of this passage when we went through this chapter.  Some very interesting information came out of it.  It says in Genesis 23:15-20:

My lord, hearken unto me: the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver; what is that betwixt me and thee? bury therefore thy dead. And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; and Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver, which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant. And the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, and all the trees that were in the field, that were in all the borders round about, were made sure Unto Abraham for a possession in the presence of the children of Heth, before all that went in at the gate of his city. And after this, Abraham buried Sarah his wife in the cave of the field of Machpelah before Mamre: the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan. And the field, and the cave that is therein, were made sure unto Abraham for a possession of a buryingplace by the sons of Heth.

And that brought us to the end of that chapter.  Again, we spent some time going through this passage, and we saw that Abraham was a type of God the Father (Father Abraham), and he purchased the field and the cave that was in the field.  And, of course, the four hundred shekels of silver identifies with the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ as He purchased this world and the world to come at the point of His death at the foundation of the world.  In dying, He bought the “field.”  He bought the world.  He bought mankind – He purchased everything that would be created.  It became His.  So the field, we know, is defined in the parable in Matthew 13 as “the world,” so Abraham bought the world and in that world was the cave or buryingplace or grave, which identifies with “hell.” 

Remember, this was a significant thing for us to learn that God purchased “hell.”  He owns the right to “hell” or the “grave.”  Also, we saw that hell is not a place off by itself somewhere or some awful future creation.  We had that kind of idea previously, due to traditional church teachings of the doctrine of hell, wherein on the last day God would take (unsaved) mankind and throw them into a placed called Hell.  Where was that place?  Since He would destroy this world, He would have had to create a place for Hell itself.  But, no, that is incorrect, because this is telling us that the cave is the grave and the grave is “hell.”  In the Old Testament, the Hebrew word “sheh-ole” is equally translated as either “grave” or “hell.”  So the location of the grave is in the field or in the world.  And so it is that all those that have died throughout the history of the world have been buried in the earth, and their grave is “hell.”  Of course, there is also a spiritual condition of “hell” that also identifies with death, and since May 21, 2011, God has turned the nations into hell; He has turned the whole world into a graveyard.  And it is true that the cave is in the field because “hell” is in this present world.  Therefore, when God destroys the world and this whole creation, He will destroy “hell” along with it.  Is that not what we read in the book of Revelation?  Remember, it said in Revelation 20:14:

And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death.

We also know from 1Corinthians 15 that Christ is now reigning from the point He deposed Satan on May 21, 2011 until the very last day of the prolonged judgment period we are presently in, as it says in 1Corinthians 15:25-26:

For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.

Death or hell or the grave will be destroyed.  Yet, in the meantime, it exists.  There is a place of “hell” in the sense that there are people in the grave in our cemeteries, and in the sense of the “condition of hell,” as people are under the wrath of God.  And God has ended His salvation program, so the unsaved are guaranteed to remain under the wrath of God – they have entered into the “condition of death” because their eternal fate is sealed.  It is like what has always happened when someone died (either saved or unsaved), because their spiritual condition was sealed at the point of death and can never be changed.  So, now, a person’s spiritual condition cannot be changed or altered; it is established and fixed.  We are either like the beggar Lazarus in Abraham’s bosom or we are like the rich man that was in “hell.”  There is a great gulf fixed between us, and we can go not go from hence to them, and they cannot go from their location to us or into the kingdom of God.

I want to make just one other point here about Genesis 23 where it said that the field and the cave were made sure.  That is mentioned a couple of times.  It said in Genesis 23:17:

And the field of Ephron, which was in Machpelah, which was before Mamre, the field, and the cave which was therein, and all the trees that were in the field, that were in all the borders round about, were made sure

And it said in Genesis 23:20:

And the field, and the cave that is therein, were made sure unto Abraham for a possession of a buryingplace by the sons of Heth.

God owns the field and He owns the cave and, therefore, it is up to Him what He wants to do with the dead that are therein.  God is in control of the resurrection, and there will be the resurrection of the just and of the unjust; that is, God will raise up everyone out of the grave.  The just have been with the Lord in their spirit, just as Abraham gave up the ghost and was gathered to his people – those people are in heaven with God.  And, yet, Abraham’s body was put into the ground.  That has been the way things have worked for thousands of years and, yet, God has made the elect’s buryingplace sure.  They will receive the resurrection of the just, and He will make sure that their bodies are raised up and translated into new spiritual bodies and joined together with the souls that are already in heaven, and they will become one whole personality once more at the last day: “I will raise him up in the last day.”   Then they will live for evermore.

As for the resurrection of the unjust, they will rise up, but they will remain dead because God is not going to reconstitute them or restore the dead soul that perished.  In the day man dies, their thoughts perish, as we read in the Psalms.  God is not going to restore their souls or their dead bodies.  He is not going to raise them up to some kind of animated, physical life to stand for judgment.  There is no need for that.  He has already judged them in their souls in the day they died when their souls went to nothing, and the only thing that remains of them are their physical bodies.  They will be “brought up.”  How God will do this, I do not know, because in some cases there may be just ashes or dust and others may be only fragments of bones.  But God will raise them up and spread them on the earth as dung to be shamed in that last moment, and then He will destroy the whole earth and creation.  Of course, the elect that are living, as we are at this point in time, will be raptured after the elect that had died are resurrected.  They go first and we follow on their heels, so to speak.  They go first, but it will all be done as fast as possible and immediately, because God will have worked out everything He had to work out.  Then God’s plan for this world is complete – that is it.  Then He no longer has to suffer the cursed creation and the corrupt rebels that existed on that cursed creation.  He will burn it all up, and it will be gone for evermore, never to be remembered.  Then attention will turn to eternity future.

Lord willing, we will move on in our next Bible study here in Genesis 25, and we will see how God tells us just a little bit about Isaac’s situation, and then much more about Ishmael.  We will look at that in our next Bible study.