In Genesis, in the Isaac on Mt. Moriah account, God gives a metaphor that He will bring the promised seed through death to life. In Genesis 23, in the burial of Sarah account, God gives to Abraham as his first titled possession of the promised land a grave to bury his wife. This grave was a representative deposit on the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that he would have a land. In that grave God gives the Land to Abraham representatively and definitively.
In the Old Testament, in both the promised seed and the promised land God surrounds the fulfillment of the promise with shadows of death. In the New Testament the promised seed does die and, like Sarah, is laid in a grave. But with the resurrection, death is swallowed up in life and the former occupant of the grave, by Messianic title, becomes the King over all the earth. As the elect are united with Christ they share in His resurrection life and become inheritors of the whole earth which in the New Covenant is the Christian’s promised land.
Like Joshua possessing the land that God promised and that Sarah was buried in, Christians are now then to progressively conquer the earth, by means of teaching, baptism and discipleship, what God has given to us definitively in the Resurrection.
My two boys were baptized today. Together with your post it is a reminder to me that God has given us many outward signs by which we are encouraged to trust in His promises. If we took more time and made more effort to notice, how much more would we praise God for His daily interventions into our lives by means of visible, tangible reminders that He provides perfectly for His people!