Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Genesis 25:1-11

Genesis 25:1-11. Please turn there and please stand for the scripture reading. Player with further two, I might add. Very good. Genesis 25:1-11. We’ll be talking about Abraham and Keturah. And along the way, we’ll touch on ordinary life and dominion.

Genesis 25:1-11. Abraham again took a wife and her name was Keturah and she bore him Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah. Jokshan begat Sheba and Dedan.

And the sons of Dedan were Asshurim, Letushim, and Leummim. And the sons of Midian were Ephah, Epher, Hanoch, Abidah, and Eldaah. All these were the children of Keturah. And Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac. But Abraham gave gifts to the sons of the concubines which Abraham had. And while he was still living, he sent them eastward away from Isaac his son to the country of the east. This is the sum of the years of Abraham’s life which he lived, 175 years.

Then Abraham breathed his last 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, which is before Mamre, in the field of Ephron, the son of Zohar the Hittite, the field which Abraham purchased from the sons of Heth. There Abraham was buried, and Sarah his wife. And it came to pass after the death of Abraham that God blessed his son Isaac.

And Isaac dwelt at Beer Lahai Roi.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your word. We thank you, Father, for the Holy Spirit given to us in the basis of the Savior’s work. We thank you that the Holy Spirit intends to write this word upon our hearts. And we pray that we might have circumcised ears open to your word. That you might take our uncircumcised hearts and open them up to your word and not allow us, Lord God, to close them up in your presence.

May your word do its work of transformation, maturation, and glorification of your people to the end that we would go out as that fiery stream that waters the earth and brings peace, God’s blessings to it. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

In computers these days, things called archived files or compressed files. Bill Wade has done some work taking sermon tapes and other tapes, turning them into digital media and then running compression routines on them to shrink the size of the file down. And yet in that shrunken form, they have all the data required to reproduce what they were originally. See, so it’s a way to kind of it’s like dehydration maybe. You add water, you add the right decompressing utility and the thing works its way and does its thing beautifully.

Well, the scriptures of course containing the revelation of God to us are probably should always be seen in terms of an archive or compressed file. And this text before us reminded me of that illustration which I’ve used before because it as I thought about this when I planned out the next few months of sermons a month or two ago. I thought that this sermon would be very little to say, really be a short sermon. I’m not saying it’s going to be long but as you unpack it there is a lot of things here, a lot of very important things. I want to at least touch on some of these lessons that are in this compacted file.

So what I’ve given you here are seven lessons from this section of Genesis. And I think the overarching theme I really wanted to touch on primarily was the marriage of Abraham and Keturah, but that sort of bleeds over into the rest of the text and addresses as I put on the outlines ordinary life and dominion as well. So we’ll just go through the text and look at these seven lessons and talk about them a bit and try to make some application.

First of all, we find in the first verse here the legitimacy of marriage and the ordinary life. Okay, verse one says that Abraham again took a wife and her name was Keturah. Now, that’s a simple enough statement. Seems that unless there’s reasons to doubt the chronology, the chronological revealing of the life of Abraham, we should assume that it’s mostly chronological. Now, there are portions of Abraham’s life that are told differently.

The Bible doesn’t always present a narrative account from one end, one the beginning of someone’s life to the end that is chronological. God has theological presentations of truth as well in narrative style in narrative structures of the Bible. But you know, we have this account, chapter 23, the end of it, Sarah dies and is buried. Chapter 24, after Sarah dies, he gets a wife for Isaac. Isaac is comforted after the death of his mother.

And then we have Abraham took another wife, got married again. Simple enough statement. And yet, it’s a controversial text. Believe it or not, Augustine wrote a section of his City of God on why, what does this mean, this marriage of Abraham to Keturah. And you know, it says explicitly here. Let’s not I’ll get to the word concubine in a couple of minutes, but this tells us clearly that she was his wife. Yeah, they weren’t just living together or that kind of stuff.

He took a wife. Not only did he take a wife, but he had six sons by her, maybe other children as well. Six that are recounted for us. We don’t know about daughters. And I think that one thing that obviously this tells us is that remarriage after the death of a spouse or we would say after the covenantal death divorce remarriage is allowable. Now to some people that really bothers them particularly with the life of Abraham.

Now one of the things they don’t like about this is that after he marries he has six children but we’re told that his body was basically dead and God opened up his productivity and Sarah’s as well to conceive Isaac. Well The Bible tells us that, but it also tells us that Terah had Abraham when he was 130 years old, first of all. So remember the ages are a little different then. And we shouldn’t assume just because Abraham is now 100 years old uh that he can’t have kids.

Various explanations for Abraham’s productivity have been offered. One for instance is that the miracle God did in bringing his dead body back to life in terms of generation of Isaac. That miracle continued so that he had generative powers after that as well. Others have suggested that well, you know, it’s a little different if you’ve got a 100-year-old guy with a very old wife trying to have a child.

If you’ve got a very old guy and a young wife, then, you know, maybe that makes for a more productive arrangement. We don’t know exactly. But what we do know is that Abraham remarried and the Bible then clearly here in the life of the great saint of the Old Testament, the one who is given to us as an example, his wife has given to us as an example were children of Abraham by faith in Christ. this man remarried after the death of his wife and saw nothing bad in that.

Let me read a couple of quotes here from commentators that still are bothered by this. This is from John Calvin. Calvin says this. He says then again Abraham took a wife. It seems very absurd that Abraham who is said to have been dead in his own body 38 years before the decease of Sarah should after her death marry another wife. Such an act was certainly unworthy of his gravity. Going on to speak of Abraham’s fertility or the lack there for, Calvin says, “Therefore, Abraham acted most foolishly if after the loss of his wife, he is in the decrepitude of old age contracted another marriage.”

Therefore, nearly four years intervened between the death of his mother and his nuptials. This is talking now about the death of Sarah and Isaac’s remarriage. There were four years apparently from the chronologies that we can see that took time. So, or four years after Sarah has died. If Abraham took a wife after this, what was he thinking of? Seeing that he had been during so many years accustomed to a single life. Well, if he got married after, if we take the text at face value and he gets married after four years of singleness, what was he thinking of?

And why would he do something that was certainly below the gravity of the kind of fella he was?

Again, as I said, St. Augustine in the City of God book 16 chapter 34 rather as a chapter titled what is meant by Abraham’s marrying Keturah after Sarah’s death and Augustine starts out this way what did Abraham mean by marrying Keturah after Sarah’s death far be it from us to suspect him of incontinence especially when he had reached such an age and such sanctity of faith so he’s saying a lot of people will say Abraham just couldn’t control his body anymore so he had to take a wife and he says now that’s obviously can’t be the case and he says Then he says, “For what if we, what if even this,” this example of Abraham, marrying Keturah was provided against the heretics who were to be the opponents of second marriages, so that it might be shown that it was no sin in the case of the father of many nations himself, when after his wife’s death, he married again, and Abraham died when he was 175 years old, so that he left his son Isaac, 75 years old, having begotten him when he was 100 years old.

So what Augustine says is maybe in the providence of God. Why this marriage occurs is to give us a solid argument against the heretics who condemn second marriages after death or after a legitimate divorce. You see, well, that’s pretty good thinking on Augustine’s part. And we’ll just leave it at that with this first point that this gives us solid apologetical evidence for the legitimacy of remarriage. Okay, certainly after the death of a spouse.

But I want to go a little bit more than that in terms of the significance of this because as I said, “People don’t like this account. They just they troubled.” Calvin’s comments are not untypical. They’re troubled by it., and I think that I think there’s a reason for this that lies in what we’ve talked about in this church for several years, many years. The mixture of Greek thinking with Christian thinking that took part in the early church kind of took became in there and sort of became part of our way of thinking as well.

Particularly when we’ve got Western civilization bounded not or based not just on the scriptures but upon Greek and Roman philosophy. James B. Jordan in an article in one of his newsletters talks about the relationship of Abraham and Keturah to Mary and those who espouse the perpetual virginity of Mary. You know the Roman Catholic Church holds the doctrine that Mary stayed virgin even after Jesus was born.

So those people that are identified as his brothers in the in the Bible really weren’t brothers. They were like cousins or something. They didn’t come from Mary. Mary was always virgin., why do they think this? Let me read a quote here from an Eastern Orthodox, not a Roman Catholic, but nonetheless a man who holds the same position. This fellow is named Peter Gilquist., for those of you this Peter Gilquist was used to be with Campus Crusade a long time ago, part of that whole group of ex-campus crusaders who joined the Eastern Orthodox Church.

So disgusted with parachurch ministries. Need to find the church. They did that. They went and ended up in Eastern Orthodoxy. A mistake. But In any event, this is from Peter Gilquist’s book called Becoming or it’s a tract actually becoming Orthodox, a journey to the ancient Christian faith. And he’s going to talk here about the perpetual virginity of Mary and why he believes in it. He says, “I must say in all candor that had my betrothed been the woman chosen by the father to bear his eternal son in the flesh, my view of her would have been utterly transformed and my honor for her infinitely heightened.”

Well, we can agree with that, right? You know, you would have, I’m sure. Joseph had a renewed sense of honor and respect and a higher view of Mary. He goes on to say, however, imagine being engaged to the mother of God. It was so with Joseph, his betrothed was ever virgin. So, Gilquist says that the reason why she’s ever virgin is a proper Christian husband would have recognized the honor of status that she had and wouldn’t have done anything against her honor.

And by implication then he wouldn’t have had sexual relationships with her. You see? Well, that tells us some of the root of this idea of Mary and her perpetual virginity. It is a improper or an unbiblical view of human sexuality. Abraham enters into not just marriage but consummated marriage, human sexuality in his old age. And from it many nations flow which are to be a blessing to the earth. We’ll see that in a couple of minutes.

Nothing condemning this action. Things by implication at least and the actual text itself ending by saying he lived this good old age. He was a great guy blessed by God. It clearly implies this was a good thing for him to do. People like those who now maybe we’re reading Mr. Gilquist wrong. I don’t know. But to have an opinion that somehow it is dishonoring to Mary for Joseph to approach her sexually. You see those are the same kind of people that don’t like this story of Abraham and Keturah because Abraham had Isaac, you know, why would you want to go and kind of debase the thing go into an ordinary marriage?

What does it say if you have that view first about what honoring a wife is? You know, Dr. Laura, I don’t listen to her a lot, but I listen to her enough to hear her say several times that, you know, she’s a Jewish convert on the radio., and she said several times that one of the nice things about Judaism is that men have to have sexual relationships with their wives. Well, that’s Christian, too. The case law of the Old Testament says that if a husband if Joseph would have refused relations would not have approached his wife sexually that would have been grounds for divorce on Mary’s part that would not have been honoring her and dishonoring to her and what does it say if a person has that kind of view about Abraham or about Mary about their own sexuality Mr.

Gilquist is married I hope he understands that you know the marriage bed is undefiled it’s to be seen as a place of honor It’s not a dishonorable thing. So, I want us to see here that the text clearly gives us not just the legitimacy of remarriage, but the appropriateness of sexual relations in the context of marriage. They’re not somehow some inconvenience that God never intended for man. No, no, no, no, no.

They’re a good thing given by God.

Another problem that people have with Abraham and Keturah here is that they think somehow that once Mary bears Christ and once Abraham does the thing with Isaac, they’re sort of not quite ordinary people anymore. They’ve they’re kind of on this scale of being where they’ve kind of moved up the scale of being as you move toward God, go Godhood. And why would you want to creep back down to human normal ordinary life?

You see, and again, the Eastern Orthodox, so does Mr. Gilquist, have this problem because their view of sanctification eventually ends up with us becoming deity, part of deity, godlike. Not godlike in the sense that we think of it, but incorporated into deities. That’s how I understand them to teach. You see that both those two ideas then that Abraham was some kind of guy not like us and Mary was somebody not like us and therefore they shouldn’t have gone back and either had kids one way or the other.

We got to root that out of our thinking. That’s non-biblical thinking. The Bible extols and exalts ordinary life. The Bible and the other thought, the Greek thought that somehow sexuality is not honoring and it’s a bad thing and gee, he should have learned by now he’s four years single. had the child to s all that stuff. Why didn’t he just knock it off now at his old age? Must be some kind of dirty old man for having interest in sexuality.

See, that’s Greek thinking. That’s not biblical thinking. Our ancestors, our great, one of our great fathers in the past, Abraham, you know, would have fit that category if that’s the way we wanted to judge him as a dirty old man somehow. Now, he’s not interested just in sexuality. He’s raising children. But the point is, human sexuality in the ordinary life is a good thing. One of the things this also tells us and I used the term ordinary life if we look at the story of Abraham and the kind of the miracle story of Isaac’s marriage arrangement last week it’s real kind of hard to identify with that in a way because it’s like an exceptional situation the same way it’s hard to identify with Mary very exceptional situ Mary is unique of course but when we read about Abraham marrying Keturah much easier to connect with that isn’t it remarriage he’s kind of like one of us now.

You know, things happen in his life. Wives dies, remarriage, has a bunch of kids. They end up squabbling with his other kids. We sort of relate more to that. And it’s interesting because he lives quite a long time, long enough, probably about 35 years, long enough to have six kids, but we don’t know anything that happened. All the record that God gives us of Abraham, nearly every bit of it, all the details are about his call at one end of his life and his marriage to Sarah.

And at the other end of his life, his death of Sarah and passing on the call of the covenant succession and seed to Isaac. That’s the bookends of Abraham’s life. See, he gets called out special call. He’s going to be a priest. He’s going to be a priest of God. He’s going to be a priestly man who prays for nations and they’re blessed or cursed by God. He’s a priest and he’s called specially to that task. And in that call, it relates his marriage to Sarah.

Now, when Sarah dies and then Isaac’s wife is taken or given to provided for him by God. Isaac now is the priest. You see the priestly line, the seed line now goes through Isaac and Abraham steps back from that calling. It’s like a minister going into retirement sort of not really but he goes on to other work. And there are in the lives of many people you have special tasks given for a particular period of your life and then you’re called to a new task that might be far less glorious and external appearance a marriage to a second wife and having kids you know as opposed to a marriage to the first wife the priestly call miracles you know miracle miraculous birth of Isaac provision of God when he’s in a sacrifice the whole story is filled with neat stuff and now his life is normal it’s like us but the Bible presents that to us as a positive example not as a negative one the Bible commends to us the ordinary life of people That’s important for us on lots of levels.

One comment I want to make before we move on is it’s important when we see our lives changed when God does an Abraham and Keturah sort of thing where one phase is over and another phase begins. You know, you’ll see I know in music fields for instance sometimes it seems like a band only has one album in them and after that they ought to just shut down because they’re not doing anything new anymore. Or a director might have one excellent movie and just struggle to meet that apex.

You know, it’s referred to as a person’s magnum opus, his great deal that he does for himself and then maybe he just goes into obscurity. That’s not because God’s judgment is upon him. God calls us for particular tasks and then we go to different tasks that may be less outwardly glorious. Everybody or nearly everybody goes through that in one sense because nearly everybody has kids and you have kids for a period of time, but you know then after a while you don’t have kids in the home anymore.

You go to a different kind of life. And that isn’t bad. You’re leaving one room that God’s brought you into and you’re going into another. And when you end up with one responsibility over, he brings you into a different one. And maybe the next responsibility isn’t so obvious or isn’t so externally glorious, but still God exalts the idea here of ordinary life and remarriage. Hope I’ve got that point across. The scriptures tell us that Abraham enters into remarriage, sexual activity, and the ordinary life and that is a good thing.

Matthew Henry in commenting on this text says that Abraham lived after the marriage of Isaac 35 years and all that is recorded concerning him during the time lies here in a very few verses. We hear no more of God’s extraordinary appearances to him or trials of him for all the days even of the best and greatest saints are not eminent days. All the days of all of us are not eminent days. Some slide on silently and neither come nor go with observation.

Such were these last days of Abraham. There are many people that’s all their life ever is. No external glory in what they’re doing. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not internal glory. It doesn’t mean that they’re calling it somehow second status or something. No, it means that God deals in those ordinary affairs of life. Let me read one more quote before we go to the next point. This is from a commentary I got this week by a guy named Jensen.

Abraham and all the families of the earth covering Genesis 12-50 and he begins first with a comment on this section by Gerard von Rod Vonrod is a you read his commentaries everywhere I think he was 19th century von Rod wrote this he said actually this section does detract somewhat from the uniqueness and extraordinariness of Isaac’s procreation and birth and now commenting on that Jensen says this such a reading not only fails to appreciate the storyteller’s art in including this material but implies a theological devaluation of persons and people who do not fit the main story being presented.

As indicated in the twin destinies of Ishmael and Isaac in Genesis 17, Abraham lives with one foot planted firmly in each son’s subsequent story. We’re going to see this as we go through this text. With one foot planted in each son’s subsequent story, he did not cease to have Ishmael-type children with the birth of Isaac cuz He has Keturah kids which are like Ishmael kids. This indeed may be suggested by the juxtaposition of the materials relating to Keturah and her children with the materials relating to Ishmael.

In Hebrews 11 and let me just pause there. What he’s saying is that you know Ishmael I Abraham stays involved in his life and Ishmael is related to Keturah’s kids. They’re both children of the concubines. We’ll see that in a couple of minutes. In First Chronicles. When we go through the genealogies, we have the kids of Ishmael listed. Then the next section lists the kids of Keturah and the next section lists the kids of Isaac.

So they’re all kind of lumped together as the three sets of kids that Abraham had. Okay? So there’s a relationship here. Now he goes on to quote from Hebrews 11:13-16. Hebrews 11:13-16 has it that the ancestors of the faith, quote, were strangers and exiles on the earth and quote, “They desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one.” But passages like Genesis 25:1-6 shows these ancestors nevertheless fully living out their earthly lives and not merely wrapping themselves in their desire like a cocoon and dreaming there of the butterflies they will one day become.

You see, Abraham is an earthy kind of a guy, not in the sense of not being heavenly minded. When our citizenship is in heaven. They sought a better country, but it doesn’t mean they wrapped themselves in a cocoon and just waited for the butterfly they’d become upon that. They engaged themselves on earth here, seeing the relationship of the will of God in heaven and what’s done here on earth and living out lives that are earthly kind of normal ordinary lives except for special periods of calling and production.

So this text, you know, I really hope you take this to heart. I really hope that this encourages you on what may be an ordinary part of your life. I hope it encourages you in the sexuality if you’re a married person here. You’re looking forward to marriage in your sexuality as a couple. It’s a very important part of your being. And we’ve been trained, you know, we have we’ve been trained in the Greek thinking that the whole thing is distasteful.

Oh yeah, there’s momentary pleasures involved. That is distasteful. No. Try to root that out of your minds. Remember Abraham and Keturah and the goodness of that relationship and the children it produced.

Second, the birth of more gentile nations. The birth of a nation, you know, birth of more gentile nations is given here. These six sons that Abraham has with Keturah, if we look at both the biblical accounts and the historical accounts, they became six tribes or nations.

Probably the most obvious to us in terms of that are the Midianites, which we’ll talk about more in length in a couple of minutes. But the children is a group in Judges 6:3 are called children of the east. They go to the east. We’ll talk about that in a couple of minutes. too. But so Abraham and this marriage Keturah it’s ordinary but on the other hand it produces these kids who have more kids and we’re kind of at a formative period of the populating of the earth here and they become tribes various tribes who are the children of the east.

Job is thought by some commentators to be a Midianite. don’t know for sure Job it’s a little tough but we’re told in terms of his comforters that two of the comforters if you look at their chronologies were descended from Esau. And Bildad is called Bildad the Shuhite. And Shuah was one of the children of Keturah, one of that same group. And so it seems like the whole Job story is a picture of Midianites and other children of the East working in the context of their relationship.

Now, I’m going to stress this a lot more in a couple of minutes, but we need to correct our thinking not just on sexuality and the ordinary life. We need to correct our thinking on the Old Testament and the relationship of the of the chosen people. The priestly nation of Israel and the rest of the world. we typically sort of think that as we look at the Old Testament church is Israel now. Israel was the church then and everybody that’s not in Israel, not in Canaan or not a Jew, they’re all going to hell.

But that’s not the way the Bible is. The Bible is filled with Gentile God-fearers just as the book of Acts is filled with references to the Gentile God-fearers saved but not of the priestly nation. And the whole book of Job seems to have that as its context.

Now, we thought and we think of these three comforters and we think, well, those guys, you know, they weren’t really nice to him. They weren’t helpful. They didn’t know the right thing. Well, who did? Would you have? No. If you look at their speech, it really is peppered with much wise and sage advice. Matthew Henry says this. He says, “The preserving of so much wisdom and piety among those that were strangers to the covenants of promise was a happy presage of God’s grace to the Gentiles when the partition wall should in the latter days be taken down.”

Well, I think he’s right in acknowledging that there’s wisdom and sagacity and piety in Job and in his friends, but I don’t think that they were strangers fully to the covenants of promise. They were in the sense of being not part of the priestly nation, but the entire point of the priestly nation was to take the knowledge of God to the gentile god-fearers, as we’ll see more in a couple of minutes.

So, there was the birth of these nations that came forth from this old age union of Abraham and Keturah. And it’s interesting seeing what people try to do with this. The Numerical Bible and its commentary on this passage says that these nations that came forth from Abraham’s loins were probably a picture of the millennial nations who were going to come to obedience to Christ in the context of the millennium.

So people look at this and oh what does this mean? And we’ll talk a little bit about that in a couple of minutes, but for now the point is that this ordinary life has long-term big consequences not like Isaac who is the seedbearer in the line of Christ but in terms of production of nations who become part of the gentile god-fearing people. Okay.

Third, the meaning of a concubine. We’re told in this text that first of all that he married Keturah and then we’re told secondly that to the children of the concubines he gave gifts. He gives u he gives all of his inheritance to Isaac. Isaac is the covenant seed succession guy and he gets all the inheritance as Christ gets all the inheritance to the earth. But he gives gifts to the sons of his concubines.

Now the text here doesn’t explicitly say that Keturah was a concubine but it does say that explicitly in 1 Chronicles 1:32. It specifically identifies Keturah as a concubine. Again, this challenges, you know, typical thinking of what a concubine is. Most people think for instance I think the Eastman Bible dictionary says that concubinage finds its roots in polygamy and they think of concubines who are wives in addition to other wives. But that’s this clearly puts that on its head because there’s no other wife around. It’s just Abraham and Keturah unless you want to start saying well maybe this happened earlier in his life etc. All of which is not necessary.

A concubine is not a second wife. Actually second wives could be full wives but concubine is something different. Reading from the theological wordbook of the Old Testament on its definition of this Hebrew word that’s used, a concubine was a true wife. Now, we know that because Keturah is a wife, though of a secondary rank. Well, we know that, too, because her children don’t get the inheritance. So, that’s right.

This is identified or indicated, for example, by the references to a concubine’s husband in Judges 19:3. The father-in-law in Judges 19:4 and the son-in-law in Judges 19:5. The concubine was not a kept mistress, did not cohabit with a man unless married to him. So concubine is not this picture that we seem to have. Again, to quote from the Eastman Bible dictionary, in the Bible, a concubine denotes a female conjugally or sexually united to a man, but in a relation inferior to that of a wife.

Well, that’s wrong, isn’t it? Because she is a wife. So, see, we’re taught that concubines weren’t really wives. They were somehow something else. But they are wives. That’s what the text tells us in the first verse. Among the early Jews from various causes, the difference between a wife and a concubine was less marked than it would be amongst us. Now, that’s true. The concubine was a wife of secondary rank.

Much better statement. So, concubines are a wife of a secondary rank. And I’m going to treat with this more fully when we get to the case laws about marriage in a couple of months, but for now, what we are given is A couple of things we are given the fact that when Isaac’s wife is sought out by Abraham, she is given dowry or gifts by Abraham or by Isaac. Turn back to Genesis 24. A long chapter, isn’t it?

Okay. Verses 52 and 53. Came to pass that when 52 came to pass when Abraham’s servant heard their words that Rebecca could go with him. She’d be the wife. He worshiped the Lord, bowing himself to the earth. And the servant brought forth jewels of silver and jewels of gold and raiment and gave them to Rebecca. He gave also to her brother and to her mother precious things. This sets up, and we’ll look at this more when we get to the case laws, but this sets up the basic pattern for marriage.

Got a marriage overseen by a father. We got a marriage that involves the use of dowry and a bride price. What do I mean with that? Well, the gifts are given to the bride. That’s the dowry that Isaac is transferring by way of his servant to the bride. But then other small things, small gifts were given to her covenantal head, Laban, and her mother, her father probably being old or seen now, whatever it was.

And so this bride price is a picture of the of the transference, the covenantal transference of the daughter from one covenantal head to the other. aided by money. Now that doesn’t you know that shouldn’t reduce our estimation of covenantal headship and marriage and the transfer of a person to another person. That should exalt our understanding of the commercial contracts we enter into because we also tend to think in Greek ways that money is a bad thing.

So if money’s involved in the transference of headship from one to the other and somehow the whole thing is debased and he’s just bought himself a wife. He can do anything. he wants to with her. No, no, no. the idea of money accompanying the transference should exalt our opinions of the contractual the commercial covenants that we enter into. They should be seen as holy as well and sanctified by God’s word.

But the point here is that this is a full wife. She’s a full wife. She’s contrasted with Abraham’s second wife of Keturah because she’s been given dowry and she is the recipient her and Isaac that is of the inheritance of Abraham and the concubine’s children while she’s a true wife, they do not receive inheritance, they receive gifts again as opposed to a full inheritance.

So I believe and we’ll look at this as I said in more detail in the future, but it’s important to touch on it here in the opening scenes here of what the dowry is all about. The dowry establishes a wife fully endowed gifted. She has responsibilities. She is her children will receive inheritance that will come through the Isaac line. And a concubine may not be a secondary it may be the primary wife a person has as Abraham has here. But the concubine is not endowed and doesn’t have inheritance rights. She is a wife of secondary rank.

If we look at the dowry aspect of it and look at the Proverbs woman, we see that the Proverbs one woman is a reflection of that dowering gift. The money that she has to buy fields et etc. And she is a fully functioning adult with real power and authority in the context of the home, albeit delegated power and authority.

What I’m suggesting here, and again we’ll talk about this more in weeks to come, but what I’m suggesting from these two texts is that again we have to readjust our thinking of what kind of wives we have. And it seems like in the context of American Christianity that our wives typically are not endowed our wives don’t have the kind of decision-making authority that the Proverbs woman seems to have had.

And thus, our wives seem to be more like a concubine wife than a full-orbed endowed wife of the scriptures. Now, in Abraham’s case, the remarried wife, she isn’t the same as Sarah. There’s a distinction made and would have been wrong for Abraham to treat Sarah that way. But somehow this secondary wife, perhaps because of the priestly calling of Abraham and the lineage going through Isaac and Sarah becomes a concubine and that is certainly part of it because the inheritance has to go to Isaac.

So third here it helps us to think through a little bit of what a concubine is. A concubine does not have the protection of dowry. Dowry protects a wife from death of the husband, protects her from the divorce of the husband. She’s got resources at her hand if that happens. It provides the sense of the well-being of the person she’s going to marry. that they become fully mature, etc. Lots of reasons for dowry to be a part of this.

And by way of application, I think we should think about, and I’m going to continue to stress this as we move through a couple of other sermons in the case laws on dowry, but I think we should really think about endowing our existing wives. If we were not able to do that, either through ignorance or inability when we first got married, then it seems like a positive thing to do if the budget will allow for it, and I would put it as a high budgetary item to begin to transfer some resources to the wife that would look something like the amount of a biblical dowry.

So this text is interesting for that aspect because it corrects us. It says a dow a concubine isn’t just a second wife. It isn’t a wife that isn’t really a wife. A Keturah is a wife. She’s his only wife and yet she’s a concubine. And that’s related to the fact that her children do not get inheritance. Okay.

Fourth point of going through these verses from Genesis 25 is the relationship of Isaac the priest and his brothers the Gentiles in verses 5 and 6. Abraham gave all that he had to Isaac but Abraham gave gifts to the sons of the concubines which Abraham had and while he was still living he sent them eastward away from Isaac his son to the country of the east.

Now again here I mentioned this in our when we read Psalm 98 as we did earlier had read to us and when we sing Psalm 98 it doesn’t just talk about God blessings to the earth or the land people, the people in Israel. It talks about all the nations of the earth coming to the throne of God. Indeed, these very nations that are pictured as coming forth from Abraham are represented to us in Isaiah. wasn’t going to make this point now, but I think I will. I can find the verse. Yes. Isaiah chapter 60 verse 6. Now, we talked about this verse when we dealt with the magi. And we related them back to the Midianites as well. But Isaiah 60:6 says, “The multitude of camels shall cover your land.

The dromedaries of Midian and Ephah.” Now, those are two specific descendants of Abraham and Keturah in the text from Genesis we just read. All those from Sheba shall come. They shall bring gold and incense and they shall proclaim the praises of the Lord. These people, the creation of these nations was not to the end that these nations would just go off on their own and go to hell and not worship and praise God.

The whole point is those gentile nations, those God-fearing nations are to come to the praises of God. As we read in Isaiah 60, specifically about some of the children of this relationship between Abraham and Keturah, this ordinary life of Abraham and Keturah manifests the dominion of God into the context of all the earth as these gentile nations are supposed to flow to Jerusalem and to praise and worship God there.

Now, we said that Isaac is the priestly line of Abraham. Abraham passes the torch as it were to Isaac now and goes into ordinary life. Remember where we last left Isaac when he got his wife last week in Genesis 24. He’s at the well, the well where God sees and by implication provides for people where Hagar was. He’s at a well and he’s at a well where a particular appearance of God’s angel occurred to Hagar and he’s meditating probably on the word works of God and maybe the word and works of God at that spot.

I believe there’s a picture there of the place of Isaac that correlates to this idea that he’s to be a priestly the head of a priestly nation to these other brothers of his. He’s at the well. The well is a picture of the bringing Eden to where the people were. Remember we talked about that last week. And at that well contemplating of the special presence of God that occurs at that particular site, meditating on God, his bride comes to form the new priestly family.

It’s a beautiful picture. And indeed, even the text before us says that these tribes were sent eastward from where Isaac was to dwell. What do we have a picture of? We’ve got Isaac with a renewed picture of the idyllic blessings of God with wells and the trees, the oaks of Mamre, all that stuff in the promised land. And we have the people of God, the Gentile nations rather, to the east of that garden of Eden.

And what’s supposed to happen? The gentile Gentile nations are supposed to come to that east gate of the garden from which the expulsion occurred based upon the work of the greater Isaac, the Lord Jesus Christ. The tabernacle had an east gate. The temple had an east gate that the nations were to come in through. It’s those same nations.

What we should see in this you we look at this and we see Midian. What do we know about Midian? Well, we sing Psalm 83 in this church. Treat them as Midian. The Midianites were those bad guys. The Midianites are identified with the Ishmaelites when Joseph is sold into captivity in Egypt. Remember that caravan comes along. Those camels again just like in Isaiah 60 come along and it says the Midianites were traders and the Ishmaelites then took Joseph to Egypt. And we think of the Midianites that way and later the Midianites oppress Israel for seven years during the period of the judges.

Gideon is raised up by God to make war on them. And we think of the Midianites as bad guys. But can you think of a different Midianite that shows a picture of the Gentile nations? working in concert with the priestly nation to bring glory to God. It’s the story of Moses, of course. Moses leaves Egypt and spends 40 years where? With the Midianites. And he specifically marries the daughter of a Midianite god-fearing priest named Jethro.

He marries her. And then as they’re going on the promise toward the promised land in the wilderness and God and Moses has a hard time organizing the judicial cases of the people, who comes along to instruct them in how to organize the people of God. It’s Jethro again, the Midianite God-fearing Gentile priest. You see, they’re not of the line of Abraham and Sarah and Isaac. They’re not of the priestly family, the Israelites.

The way the Old Testament world worked was that the descendants of Isaac, those Abraham those descendants of Abraham were the priestly people who are going to find themselves in the context of a priestly nation, Canaan. And Even there they had concentric circles, right? Only the high priests went into the holy of holies. The other Levitical priests ministered in the context of the temple. Outside of that, the Levites ministered in the context of the land.

And beyond that, the Israelite people as a whole comprised a priestly nation set there not to isolate themselves and pull back from the world, but to minister to their brothers, to the Midianites, to the Ishmaelites, you see, to minister to the Gentile nations, and to lead them into the praises of God like we read about and sang about in Psalm 98. They’re there to minister. It was precisely the failure of the Jews to understand their mission as a priestly people to the whole world that is that is the subject of our savior’s rebukes and the contention in the first in the in the epistles of the New Testament.

It’s precisely that distinction that is done away with. There will no longer be a separate priestly people. All people will come into one because they failed in their priestly responsibility. Not all of them, but some of them failed in that by thinking that they were the only people of God and they were to pull back from everybody else and not having to do with the goyim out there, the Gentiles.

When in point of fact, the whole situation was set up that they’d be a priestly people to minister to these nations to the east. The Midianites, the children of the east, weren’t just people who had been sent there. And I know that there were struggles later I mentioned several months ago when we talked about the life of Abraham that if you look at the center of Abraham’s life in terms of chronologically 86 years of age and if you look at the center what seems to be the literary structure of Abraham’s career it seems like the center is not the birth of Isaac the center is Ishmael the blessings to Ishmael now why would that be if that’s true does that make sense well it does Because Isaac was not an end unto himself.

Isaac came as the line of the priest to bring those nations to the east door of the temple to bring those nations to the east door of the garden of Eden to bring those nations to praise God to bring him with their dromedaries and camels in Isaiah 60 to proclaim the praises of God. And then the picture of that being the coming of those magi men from the east god-fearing men from the east to do homage to the greater Isaac, the Lord Jesus Christ.

The picture of Abraham’s story is that Abraham, God said over and over, would be a blessing to many nations. Out of him, many nations would come and he would be a blessing to the nations through Christ certainly. But also in the context of the story that Isaac would come as the minister to Ismaelite and Keturite seed that came forth from Abraham. We see in this text that relationship taking place.

We see the Ishmaelites included a reference to the sons of the concubines plural that includes Hagar. We see Isaac getting all the inheritance, but we see the Gentile nations getting gifts and we see the Gentile nations being sent eastward from whence they’ll come to the east gate to worship and praise God.

So, this text hopefully does a little chiropractic fix on our back. What do they call that? A adjustment to us in terms of the ordinary life, in terms of remarriage, in terms of human sexuality in terms of what true biblical wives are to be and in terms specifically of the relationship of Israel of the Old Testament to the nations round about and as a result also should bring us to a renewed application of a missionary thrust in our thinking that our job is not to cloister ourselves off from the world but to see ourselves as the fiery stream going to the world if you have more knowledge than your Christian brother it’s to the end not that you would feel superior it’s to the end that to administer to that brother.