Entrusting Ourselves to the God of the Living
In my office rests a small mason jar of red dirt, the soil of western Oklahoma rich in oxidized iron and clay. The dirt is from the freshly dug grave of my youngest sister, who died twelve years ago this month. She was six. I was eleven.
We lived in Illinois but buried her in Oklahoma, where a small family plot already gathered several generations of extended family and now a child. We had lived in several places all over the country and figured her grave would be better tended and longer remembered here than anywhere else.
We would visit her grave yearly, usually once in the summer and once in the winter, marking seasons and years together. The strangeness of grief is that you continue to change while the one you’ve lost remains as they were, and so over time the gap between you grows wider and wider.
During our visits we would walk among family headstones while my mom taught us the history behind the names. Fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, somebody’s child, somebody’s lover, somebody’s friend. I am a continuation of their lives.
It’s strange how understanding our history can shape how we understand our lives presently. Our history being unknown to us doesn’t put us beyond the reach of its influence. When we feel lost or unsure, it can be helpful to retrace our own history. We can find a foreshadowing of the future rooted in our past.
THE GENERATIONS OF ABRAHAM
As I recently read Genesis, I noticed anew how the patterns of family history play out in the four generations of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph.
First, God comes to Abraham and calls him away from his home, his people, and his family to wander. Abraham is given a promise but nothing more—not even a name to call his caller by, yet he is called a “friend of God” (James 2:23 ESV). He never finds a place to rest except for the grove of trees near Mamre, where he builds an altar, encounters God, hosts angels, and buries his own wife Sarah. Later, Abraham himself is buried with her.
“We can find a foreshadowing of the future rooted in our past.”
God then appears to his son, Isaac, promising to “confirm the oath I swore to your father Abraham” (Gen. 26:3 NIV). God connects past promises given to Abraham to Isaac, who is the recipient of his father’s blessing. The God of Abraham becomes the God of Isaac. He and his wife Rebekah join the family grave in Mamre.
Isaac’s sons quarrel and betray one another, seeking to receive that same blessing in their own lives. The younger, Jacob, is a trickster who outsmarts his brother to take the blessing. Out of fear of Esau’s vengeance, Jacob flees. While Jacob is sleeping, God appears, saying, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac” (Gen 28:13 NIV). Jacob has become the next link in the chain, and this mysterious God continues his work within the family lineage. He and Leah are buried at Mamre as well.
Jacob’s favored son Joseph never hears from God directly, but he retains faith in God’s continued covenant with his family. His last known words are “I am about to die. But God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land he promised on oath to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” (Gen. 50:24 NIV). Joseph makes his people swear an oath that their descendants will take his remains and bury them at Mamre when they are delivered from Egypt.
A LIVING LINEAGE
For these people, their connection to God was completely separate from organized religious practice or texts; it was entirely dependent on the continued blessing of God in the lives of their family. The story of family history and the story of their faith were one and the same.
God promised to take this family and make them into a people, blessing the world through them. The full scope of what that would mean was a mystery. These people lived, died, and were buried, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob continued his work in the world.
Thousands of years later, Jesus gave insight into this mystery, saying, “Moses showed that the dead will rise, for he calls the Lord ‘the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ He is not the God of the dead, but of the living, for to him all are alive” (Luke 20:37–38 NIV).
“For those who are in Christ, their family history of the dead is transformed into living history through God.”
For those who are in Christ, their family history of the dead is transformed into living history through God, as all are alive to him. The story of God’s people is living, book-ended by a history of those alive to God in the past and those resurrected by God in the future.
The lineage of mankind focuses on God’s work in history, not ours. Jesus incarnate stepped into time and space to make another shocking statement: “Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was born, I am!” (John 8:58 NIV). Jesus refuses to be seen simply as a continuation of Abraham’s story, instead claiming that the story of the Abrahamic people is really a continuation of his story.
Jesus was before Abraham; his history and our history are chapters in a bigger story, with Christ as the center. How then should we see ourselves in light of the way Jesus understood himself? How do we answer the questions, “Who do you come from?” and, “Where are you going?”
AN ENDURING STORY
Often our response to these two questions is one of uncertainty. We despair when living an unknown story, buffeted by the events of the day, unsure if any of this life means anything at all. We are wracked with anxiety when we live a self-made story, amputated from history and future, toiling endlessly to flourish ourselves into an imagined good life. We sell ourselves to the culture through tribalism and go to war for the greatness of our church, our party, or our country.
We need a story that is known, bigger than ourselves, and longer than the day. For this, we can look to Christ.
On the night he was betrayed, Jesus “knew the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God” (John 13:3 NIV). This knowing enabled Jesus to sacrifice his status, his comfort, his honor, and even his life in order to become a servant, washing the grimy feet of his disciples who would abandon him to torture and death that same night. Christ entrusted himself to the God of the living, knowing that his own death would not put him out of reach of the One to whom all are alive.
“Christ entrusted himself to the God of the living, knowing that his own death would not put him out of reach of the One to whom all are alive.”
As Christians, we too entrust ourselves to the God of the living. When we accept the invitation to unite our lives with the life of Christ, our individual stories get stitched into the tapestry of a much bigger story belonging to the One who was before Abraham. Our story is no longer limited to our lives or our families because our story is more ancient and new than any of these.
When we join with God, we are connected to a story reaching back before the beginning of the universe and extending far beyond the horizon of the future, to the resurrection of the dead, and into the new creation.
WEAVING OUR STORY INTO CHRIST’S
In the generations of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, we see how everyone carries their history with them. Our past is never escaped but can be redeemed. Our lives are redeemed when they are grafted into the life of Christ, and seeing how he has worked in the past gives us hope for how he may be at work today.
I am a young man now. Like many young people, I live somewhere else than I grew up, away from almost all my family. It can be easy to imagine I am making a fresh start, leaving my past behind. This is not the case.
“I take my past with me wherever I go.”
The events of my life have shaped me, and because of that, I take my past with me wherever I go. Caring for a sick sibling during her short life forever marked the way I understand love that serves. Facing the reality that everyone I love will die burned away the illusions of immortality and assumed longevity. Though I was angry with God for a long time, this was a formative experience in having a personal relationship with him.
Right now it is more important than ever to ruthlessly examine the story of your life. Hope is essential in times when the future seems uncertain and our lives are rocked by wave after wave of trouble.
Our hope is not in ourselves, our families, our work, our nation, or our time. Our hope is in the God of the living. This hope leaves us free to work, serve, love, pray, and even die without despair.
WHAT ABOUT YOUR STORY?
I invite you to consider the story running in your mind right now. It has been helpful for me recently to write out my fears in very specific terms, reexamining my past and looking for the ways it might shed light on the future. It might be helpful to write out your own multi-generational history—the good and the bad—to see how you arrived where you are.
When I examine my life from that perspective, it shrinks and expands all at once. It shrinks as I realize I am a very small part of something much larger than myself. It expands because I participate in the unfolding story surrounded by a great cloud of living witnesses.
I am not my own, which is the worst news for my ego, and the best news for my soul. As someone who loves people in a world where they will get sick and die, the good news of God is that even death does not remove us from him.
The jar of red dirt on my shelf is not only a reminder of grief but of hope—just as God will raise our forefathers in faith from the graves of Mamre, so too will he raise the dead from the graves of western Oklahoma.
Ryder Mills is a student director at Christ Church Anglican, where he oversees the discipleship and formation of middle and high school students. He lives with his wife and their dog in Overland Park, Kansas. They love walks, books, and trying new recipes.