This seems to be written from the standpoint that Abraham and Sarah were living apart, like he was in Beersheba and she was in Hebron, or maybe they were just apart as she was visiting in Hebron and died. But in any rate, she was there and he came to Hebron after she died.
Now there is more that is said about Sarah than I care to go into at this time, so I am only going to deal with this aspect of her death. It shows the father of the faithful mourning. There are those who think that one should show no emotion over the death of a loved one because we know their end. We know that they are going to be resurrected. They are either going to be resurrected in the second resurrection, or they are going to be resurrected in the first resurrection. We will not even consider the third resurrection at this point. But there is an extremely high percentage that they are going to in one of those two, and we can just assume that since we are dealing with Sarah, that we know of these people, that she is going to be in the first resurrection.
Life for a Christian is more than just a cold appraisal of truth. God gave us emotions and they are similar to His emotions. We find that when Jesus became a man, that He wept, He was a man that was experienced grief. In addition to that, God is portrayed in His Word expressing a wide variety of emotion—being happy, being angry.
Now even though one knows that the deceased is going to be in the Kingdom of God, that does not erase a multitude of experiences that one had with that person, perhaps over a period of fifty years or more. To be denied of life’s experiences with all of its attended hopes and joys and fears and doubts and worries and discouragement, and not being able to experience the personality and all of its unique characteristics that make up what that person is, is something to mourn about. Now is that selfish? No. Because there is going to be a void that will never be filled. It cannot be duplicated, because no two personalities are exactly alike.
In Sarah’s case, I like to think of her death, maybe this sounds weird to you, but being like the felling of a tall and beautiful tree, it leaves a hole up there that cannot be replaced. You know when you look up in the forest and there is an empty place in the sky because the tree has fallen. In good and bad, in evil and righteousness, this beautiful women shared everything with Abraham.
