The Burial of Sarah by Gustave Dore
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. supposedly once said, “Some people are so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good.” I’ve learned to be skeptical of unsourced online quote attributions, so I’m not absolutely certain he said it, but I have no reason to think he didn’t. What I am sure of is that a paraphrase of this saying shows up in the Johnny Cash song No Earthly Good. “But you’re so heavenly minded,” Johnny sings, “you’re no earthly good.”
Another thing I’m sure of is that, unlike Johnny Cash or Oliver Wendell Holmes, the author of Hebrews considered heavenly-mindedness to be an entirely praiseworthy quality. He commended Abraham and Sarah, who we discussed in the previous piece on the people of Hebrews 11, for a lifetime focus on their future home in heaven. Their longing for heaven, he wrote, is the reason, “God is not ashamed to be called their God” (Hebrews 11:16 NIV).
“These all,” he said, referring to Abraham, Sarah, their son Isaac, and grandson Jacob, who were all mentioned in the preceding paragraph of this chapter—
died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. For people who speak thus make it clear that they are seeking a homeland. If they had been thinking of that land from which they had gone out, they would have had opportunity to return. But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared for them a city. (Hebrews 11:13-16 ESV).
The last piece in this series highlighted God’s fulfillment of a promise to Abraham and Sarah. He promised, if you remember, to give them a son, and though they waited many years, in the end, he gave them Isaac (Hebrews 11:11).
But as the author points out in the paragraph from Hebrews quoted above, there were other promises to Abraham and Sarah—and to Isaac and Jacob, too—that remained unfulfilled. For instance, while God promised to give Abraham a countless number of descendants (Genesis 15:5), when he died, only his son Isaac and his grandson Jacob counted as his promised heirs (Hebrews 11:9, 18). When Abraham’s grandson Jacob died, he had 70 descendants (Genesis 45:27). They were a large family by then, but not a nation, and certainly not the many nations God said would descend from Abraham (Genesis 17:5).
God also promised to give Abraham’s descendants the land of Canaan (Genesis 12:5-7), which was the land Abraham lived in after God called him out of Haran. But he and his family never had permanent homes there. After Sarah died, Abraham purchased a small piece of land for a family burial plot, and this is the only soil in the promised land that he ever owned (Genesis 23:17-20). He was always “a sojourner and foreigner ” in Canaan (Genesis 23:4). And his grandson Jacob thought of both his own life and his fathers’ lives as sojourns (Genesis 47:9). These men lived their entire lives as pilgrims in the land God promised to their descendants.
You might think Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob were disappointed with how their lives turned out, but they weren’t. They demonstrated a key principle of faith as explained in the first verse of Hebrews 11: With eyes of faith, they saw the as-yet-unseen fulfillments of God’s promises “from afar.” They were confident that what God promised them—the things they hoped for—would still become reality. They died anticipating what he would do in the future and rejoicing in what was to come.
But what they ultimately hoped for, what they anticipated most, was not the earthly fulfillments of God’s promises. Yes, they wanted a country of their own—that they referred to themselves as “foreigners and strangers” is evidence of this—but if what they had in mind was a bit of land to settle down on, they could have gone back to Haran, the land Abraham came from. But they didn’t go back. In fact, Abraham made his servant promise to never take Isaac there (Genesis 24:6-9). And although Jacob lived in Haran while he worked for his father-in-law Laban, he didn’t stay, but eventually brought all his family and everything he owned back to Canaan (Genesis 31:17). He preferred sojourning in the promised land to settling down in Haran. Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob demonstrated by their words and actions that they were looking for something better than a homeland here on earth.
So if what they longed for most was not an earthly country, what did they want? What was their ultimate hope? They wanted something greater than Haran, or even the land of Canaan. What they truly desired was a home in the heavenly country the earthly land of Canaan only foreshadowed.
They were, more than anything else, heavenly-minded people, which doesn’t mean, by the way, that they were “of no earthly good.” After all, Abraham went to battle to rescue his nephew Lot from the bandit kings who carried him off (Genesis 14:6-18). And Jacob was a skilled herdsman and excellent provider for his large family. But even as these men worked to provide safety and security for themselves and those around them, they had their hearts set on one day being with God in the city he built for them.
And because what they hoped for most was to be with him, God “is not ashamed to be called their God” —which, if you think about it, must be the highest honour God can give a human being. These Old Testament believers desired God himself above anything else (another key principle of faith, according to Hebrews 11:6), and that’s exactly what he will give them when they inherit a home with him in his heavenly country.
The author of Hebrews hoped those he wrote to would see parallels between their own lives and the lives of Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob, and that they would be encouraged by their faithfulness. These first century Christians were once again facing possible persecution, imprisonment, and the confiscation of their property because of their faith (Hebrews 10:32-34; 13:3). God had promised to always be with them (Hebrews 13:5), but it may have seemed as if he was not keeping this promise. Perhaps a few of were thinking of giving up on Christianity and going back to Judaism, which was a legal religion, in order to avoid more suffering.
The lives of these four Old Testament believers reminded faltering early Christians that while God always fulfills his promises, sometimes it takes a long time, and sometimes it doesn’t happen in this life at all. But the way of faith is always forward to the heavenly country, not back to comfort and security in this life. Abraham, Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob knew that being in God’s presence for eternity—a treasure more precious than anything in this world—is the ultimate fulfillment of all God’s promises. If the first readers persevered in the faith, if they refused to give up and go back, if they kept on trusting God even when trials came and they were tempted to think God had forsaken them, God had a place in his country for them, too. Like Abraham and the others, if they endured they would one day see the glorious future God prepared for them.
These four Old Testament believers are examples for us too. Does your life parallel the lives of Abraham and the others? Are you someone who knows, deep down, that you don’t really belong anywhere in this world? Do you feel like a stranger and exile?
Or perhaps you identify more with the Hebrew believers because you are facing difficult trials that tempt you to doubt God’s care. Maybe you wonder why you should keep on believing if believing doesn’t make your life easier, and sometimes makes it more difficult.
But it may be that your life so far has been comfortable and safe. You may live in what you hope is your forever home, or at least in a place you hope is a step on the way to your forever home. You are invested in life, and all your hard work seems to be paying off.
The key to enduring faith is the same for all of us, regardless of our circumstances. We must play the long game, like Abraham and the others did. We must claim our true identity as pilgrims on earth, and keep our focus on the heavenly country that is to come. It’s the only place any of us truly belong, whether we feel it or not. As Jesus said, we are all only sojourners here—in this world, but not of it (John 17:14). If you don’t feel like a stranger yet, when trouble comes (and it will), you will know that’s what you are. Thankfully, our glorious heavenly inheritance is the “joy set before us” (Hebrews 12:2) to give us strength to endure when difficult circumstances come. It’s the prize that keeps us believing and keeps us doing earthly good when it would be easier to give up.
Or to put it another way, lifelong faithfulness comes from heavenly-mindedness. And if, more than anything else, we long to be with God in the country he has prepared for those who love him, he will give us what we long for, and it will be worth the wait.
Previous posts in this series:
Sunday, May 21, 2023 at 8:35AM 