5/10/26 - Genesis 22:1-15: Beliefs - Heath

Good morning.

Happy Mother's Day.

Thank you, Brad and Justin, for reading this morning.

Brad, I know that was a lot.

He asked me the whole thing.

But that chapter, you know, many chapters in scripture can be broken into sections, which still have the desired effect within the section.

That chapter needs to be read in its entirety.

So thank you.

Definitely happy Mother's Day.

So many amazing moms here that take care of us.

We'd never make it to church on time, any of us.

If it weren't for moms.

Or as in our house, mom.

She's been mom for 15 years now.

Well, something like that.

Today I want to talk about belief.

Belief is important to me, and I think in faith, and I often wondered like, why is that particular thing, the focus on our minds work towards that ascription to God and trusting that and working that out?

And I can only think that in all my years and 15 years as a hospital chaplain, I had to make that choice over and over and over because disaster after disaster and catastrophe after catastrophe, I had to, as the minister in the room, or as in the aftermath, I had to choose to continue believing.

So I guess in working that out, I'll work it out for the rest of my life.

But today, in considering belief and what it is to believe, and how tough it is to believe, but what we gain from belief.

It's very important to us.

So, has anybody ever heard of prediction markets?

It's kind of a new thing.

Um, it's a weird thing.

Um prediction markets are places where people make guesses about future events.

Um, and these guesses get turned into simple odds.

And they're basically a way of saying here's what people think will happen based on how many choose one outcome over another.

And if you guess or predict correctly, you win the bet that you made on your guess, as educated as your guest could possibly be.

Um, of course, nobody's trying to cheat that system.

Um now there's a big old mess with that.

But prediction markets are built on the idea that people will place value, sometimes money, sometimes reputation, on what they will believe will happen in the future.

The market then aggregates probability, which often people treat as if it were a reliable picture of what's coming.

In other words, prediction markets turn human expectations into something that feels authoritative.

They reveal how much trust people put in their own foresight, their own analysis, and the collective wisdom of the crowd.

But even the most sophisticated prediction systems are fragile because they depend on limited human knowledge, shifting circumstances, and the assumptions of people, which all of us are, that can't see the whole story.

In contrast, Christian life is not built on prediction, but on promise.

And we don't stake our hope on probabilities or market-driven forecasts.

We anchor our lives in the unchanging faithfulness of Christ.

Where prediction markets say, based on what we can see here, here's what might happen.

The gospel says, based on who God is, here is what will happen, what will happen.

Our confidence doesn't rise and fall with public sentiment or human speculation.

It rests on the one who we know, who knows the end from the beginning, who holds history in his hands, who invites us to trust him, even when the future feels uncertain.

Faith in Christ frees us from the anxiety of prediction and roots us in the peace of divine certainty, his certainty.

Today I want to examine the tension between the direction of the way of information and the capital T, capital W, the way of the promise of our Father.

It's been said that long, long ago we lived in the age of wisdom.

Then we moved into the age of knowledge, and now we live in the age of information.

T.

S.

Eliot wrote in Choruses from the Rock, where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

I'd like to show how our choosing to believe in the unbelievable and trust in the invisible, which takes us away from the intense human drive to find out and figure out a way by way of information, and away from the safety that we believe it might afford us.

Into the sometimes terrifying world of faith.

My purpose statement today is that God can never be understood in the sense that his divine will can be predicted in such a way that we, in our carnal capacity, could ever forecast our futures in a way that would afford us rest outside of him.

And that truth can be agonizing and absurd, and which causes us to recoil and push away from his guiding word and calling, instead, creating and clinging to the things of this world which are primed and destined for fading away.

Our only chance at life and rest comes by way of trusting in that which we can not only never explain, but often asks us to leave behind what we have decided is safe for what we must trust in Him that is right and good.

Trading this world away for it.

But when we do set aside our simple and temporary sense of control, we find ourselves held and beyond the cross with new eyes, set and fixed on the living hope, which is Christ Jesus, our Lord and Savior.

What I've been sorting and fleshing out is what it means to believe in something bigger and broader than anything that I can get my head around.

This God, who, just beginning our first point, is the object of our belief.

Who is he?

What is he?

Can I ever make sense of him?

What does it mean for me to believe in him?

What does it mean for us to believe in him?

What does it cost us?

Is the next question everybody's going to come to.

What, or and can we even tolerate that cost?

What does believing in him and his word give us?

Who is that man upstairs, as pop culture refers to?

Brad, in reading you the whole 37th chapter of Job, we reveal where Elihu, one of Job's best friends, an equality friend, I think, a wiser friend, issues a challenge to Job to acknowledge that we humans cannot understand or even justly imagine the unimaginable God.

See here in the beginning of the 14th verse, going down into the 16th, hear this, O Job, stop and consider the wondrous works of God.

Do you know how God lays his command upon them and causes the lightning of his cloud to shine?

Do you know the balancing of the clouds and the wondrous works of him who is perfect in knowledge?

Here Elihu is telling Job to understand or try to understand that to put his trust in and his wholeness in a God that we cannot understand.

And that assaults our senses.

We want to be able to understand things.

Our brain cannot stand to not be able to make sense of things.

But we can't understand.

We can't fathom God.

We cannot fathom God.

Think with me this morning about the men in the ancient books that we're looking into this morning.

Job and Abraham in Genesis.

Ancient.

Job is actually, people guess, 400 years older as far as books go than even Genesis.

These are very ancient times.

These are pre-Mosaic men that we see offering their own burnt sacrifices.

This is pre-priesthood.

This is a very primitive time where these men exist with themselves and a connection to God, which is mysterious.

And it's, you know, if they ever did a movie about Job, I mean, it would be weirdly dark and hopeful and all of these things.

But these people only had their interactions with this mysterious God of creation.

There was no Gideon's Bible where they traveled.

There were no Sunday schools or Bible drills in their childhood.

There was them.

There was creation and God.

It was it's good, it's perfect and precious to the true power that we do have and can hold and read, study, and share God's word in the Bible.

I'm not discounting that at all.

I'm asking you to look and realize that if we aren't careful, we can allow God to be a character in a book that's confined to our literary understanding of a character in a book.

We think then that we can capture his identity so that we can reconcile our minds and as our brains are desperate to do with things, understand him.

We cannot.

You will not, on this side of glory.

Understand God.

In Isaiah 55, God thunders, for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return there, but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my words be that goes out from my mouth.

It shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

I will have God saying, if I want it done, it will be done.

He doesn't rely or manipulate physics, he is physics.

He is math, he is gravity.

He is the force and the will and the mechanics of the whole universe.

I believe that we're desperate to turn something so big that we can only encounter it with a faith or a childlike belief.

We're trying to move from that.

Christ has said, don't move from that childlike belief.

We want to turn it into a believable, containable, transferable knowledge.

Like I said, our brains are desperate to make sense of things.

Our brains want to make sense of things because they're trend machines.

If we experience something negative, the brain wants to avoid that thing ever happening again.

It doesn't want the trend to be created.

If we experience something good, it wants to recreate that.

I mean, imagine you and your spouse go to dinner with a couple you've never eaten dinner with before, and you the to a restaurant you've never been to before.

And uh the food is amazing, the conversation is delightful, the atmosphere is wonderful.

What's one of you going to tell the other on the way home?

We should do that again.

That's the brain saying, that was good, let's do it again.

It's a trend machine.

So it wants to understand so that it can create trends or avoid trends, so it can live in that goodness or avoid something negative.

The brain is desperate to do that.

It wants knowledge, it craves knowledge so that it can prognosticate.

It wants to run the numbers, it wants the data, it wants to compute, it wants to reconcile.

And that's what Job wanted to do with his situation.

We want the why and we want it to make sense.

We want God to make sense because it's so much easier when things make sense.

And that's just not how it works.

Ask Abraham not too far into the 22nd chapter of Genesis.

If you want to follow along, I'm going to read from that chapter.

I'll give you some time to turn there.

As we move to our second point today.

After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham, and he said, Here I am, and he said, Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering, on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.

So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac.

And he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and arose, and he went to the place of which God had told him.

On the third day, Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar.

Then Abraham said to his young men, Stay here with the donkey, and I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.

And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac, his son.

And he took his hand, and he took in his hand the fire and the knife.

So they both of them went together.

And Isaac said to his father, Abraham, my father, and he said, Here I am, my son.

He said, Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?

And Abraham said, God will provide for him himself a lamb, a lamb for a burnt offering, my son.

So both of them went together.

What?

Abraham, I mean, he seems stunned in that scripture.

It's just like he, we see obedience, but I see just a stunned father.

Stunned.

Take this son whom you promised me, and from whom the continuation of him you said was going to be as numerous as the stars in the sky and sacrifice him.

What?

The only word, and the best, well, there's a lot of words, but the best word for this is absurdity.

It's easy for us to do, you know, what my wonderful wife Emily does with basically every book that she reads, and read forward to the end of the story.

See?

I'm not telling anything off.

She's unapologetic.

She's over there.

It's so much easier.

It's been easy for our whole lives to read this story because we know the ending.

Have you ever considered that?

We kind of breeze right to the happy ending.

We knew that everything was going to be okay.

We knew that Isaac was going to be okay.

Which causes us to miss something so important.

That agony.

You know, it's Mother's Day.

Mothers, think of knowing what your husband was taking your child to do.

But we knew that Isaac was going to be okay, that he would father Esau and Jacob, and that a nation would, as promised, the big promise, come from his dad, Abraham.

But what was Abraham, where what kind of headspace did he have to be in that day?

I wonder how much he slept that night.

He didn't go to Sarah and weigh the pros and cons.

He just followed.

And he did.

But he's not a robot.

He's a father who's.

He's prayed and begged and pleaded in prayer for this child.

But here he swallows the horror and the terror of what he's being asked to do and trudge forward in absurdity and agony.

You see, as heroic as we want to make Abraham here, he's not a hero.

As he begins to make his way to Mount Moriah that day, he's either a murderous madman or a believer in some one that is completely good.

And completely beyond understanding.

Hebrews 11 reminds us that Abraham is a man that followed a belief in a mysterious God in the face of adversity and doubt.

Stumbling some and worrying plenty, never truly in his physical life taking hold of what he was promised.

Why?

Because it's tough to cling and lean into that absurdity.

I mean, how honest with you with yourselves.

Have you ever been about the absurdity of so much of what we're called to believe?

We skim over points in Scripture where God orders men and kingdoms to go slaughter everyone, every man, woman, and child from a nation.

Why do we skim over that?

Why do we dismiss that?

Because we don't want to face the absurdity of that.

I'm inviting you to something deeper.

A complete surrender from your own logic, your own ability to make sense.

Of this, your own critical thinking.

How might I believe in God in that way?

Paul, in his letter to Philippi in the second chapter, beginning in verse 12, exhorts, therefore, my beloved, as you've always obeyed, now, so now not only in my presence, but much more in my absence, work out your faith, work out your salvation with fear and trembling.

For it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.

Do all things without grumbling or disputing.

That script 14 is not in there so that you'll get up and go to work with a good attitude.

It's not in there so that you'll be a good sport when your team loses.

Verse 14 is in there because you are being called into the absurd, sometimes the horrifying.

Look at the first century Christians.

They were called into slaughter.

Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation among you, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life.

Why do you have to hold fast?

Because that's where our hope is.

So that in the day of Christ I may be proud that I did not run in vain or labor in vain.

Why do we need to work it out with fear and trembling?

Because this faith that we've been given, what we are called into is beyond our understanding.

And it will be.

It will be scary.

Young people, it will be terrifying to believe at points in our life.

Work it out with fear and trembling.

Believe in the unbelievable.

Live in the hope of the unseen.

While the whole world looks at you like you're crazy.

Know that in this world there will be trouble.

Know that we're being steered away from the guarantees that we can orchestrate or engineer in this world.

We're steered away from the idols that we can understand and place our hands on.

Think for a moment about what God was asking Abraham to do with his son.

He was asking him to terminate the very product of his and Sarah's biological drive to reproduce.

One whom he had begged and pleaded for in prayer.

And quite possibly, at least on some days, made an idol out of.

Turn away from this world, no matter what it costs you.

Do it without grumbling or disputing.

Heath, Abraham, Job, give this world away.

Hebrews 11, 13, these all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar, having acknowledged that they were strangers and exile on earth.

Why in the world would I use a word like agony?

Isn't that extreme?

The agony of our belief?

Our belief is supposed to bring us only good things.

But belief can be agonizing.

It will be agonizing.

Give this world away the same way that you leave a shopping cart behind in a grocery store parking lot.

Don't need it anymore.

Leave it.

The same attitude.

Hopefully you put it in the right spot.

But just leave it.

You don't wonder.

You drive home worrying about the driving car.

Is this one going to wind up on I-55?

Leave it behind.

Leave this world behind.

Because there is good, good news.

Really good news.

How good?

Listen to 1 Peter 1, 10 through 12.

Concerning this salvation, the prophets who prophesied about the grace that was to be yours searched and inquired carefully, inquiring what person or time the Spirit of Christ in them was indicating when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the subsequent glories.

It was revealed to them that they were serving not themselves, but you.

And the things that have now been announced to you through those who preach the good news to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven things in which angels long to look.

Angels see heaven all the time.

They've seen the glory, they see the unfolding, unfurling, roiling glory of God all the time.

But this, this good news.

Maybe it's the something up here at the pulpit.

But this good news, like angels are like telling, I'm like, guys, come over here.

This is amazing.

Which brings me to the third and final point.

The joy of our belief.

Let me read the end of the story.

Emily's favorite part of the story.

Beginning back in Genesis 22, beginning at verse 9.

When they came to the place at which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar on top of the wood.

Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son.

But the angel of the Lord called from him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham.

And he said, Here I am.

And he said, Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him.

For now I know that you fear God, seeing that you've not withheld your son, your only son, from him.

And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram and caught caught in a thicket by his horns.

And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burn offering instead of his son.

So Abraham called the name of that place, the Lord will provide.

As it is said to this day, on the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.

And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and not withheld your son, your only son.

I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offering as the stars of the heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore, and your offspring shall possess the gates of his enemies.

There's so much to unpack here.

I want to try to stay focused and distill what I can.

Here we have Abraham preparing for the unspeakable, because he's been ordered to do, commanded to do the absurd.

Living and breathing in that horrific, in the horror of what had to have been the longest day of his life.

Somehow steadying himself to kill his son.

Remember, Abraham did not have the luxury of a lifetime of Christian Bible culture.

Not knowing how this completely upside-down story was going to end, he yielded to God, this universe-striding, unimaginable, amazing God, that Elihu correctly identified as a God that could not be contained with any narrative or literary capsule.

Abraham had ordered his way to go God's way, even beyond his understanding.

When nothing seemed right, and his world was being shredded before his very eyes, by his own hand, in agony, he believed.

What we see and what we realize is that God would be there.

But he's a good God.

But he's good.

God created a way.

A sufficient substitution that delivered a way for something so big, so amazing, that the whole of humanity could realize and find deliverance in.

On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram saying, To your offspring I give this land.

God had just put Abram to sleep to prevent him from trying.

To make a promise he couldn't keep.

So God moved through the pieces.

What we could never do.

He would make a promise born out of love for his people.

And he would forever keep it.

God is unimaginable.

He is larger and greater than our little brains could ever process.

Again, he's not safe.

But he's good.

I said that twice for Robert.

I know he gets it.

And because as Peter writes in 2 Peter 1, we have obtained a faith.

Like he's God didn't even leave it up to us to even have a faith.

He delivered that word that he uses there in that passage obtained is the same as if we were to go to our door and open it, and there'd be a package there.

God's like, here, I'm sending you something.

We only have to believe.

And in belief, we stand facing whatever we have set before us, even in the most absurd or agonizing of days.

Just as a frail older woman in Mark V believed in the ridiculous, absurd notion that if she were to only work her way through the crowd and touch the hem of this man's cloak, she would be healed.

And guess what?

You know the end of that story.

She was healed.

Christ would call her daughter, the only person we ever have record of him saying that to.

And tell her that her faith had healed her.

Her working her way, not only was it absurd, it was risky.

She was frail in her frailty working her way through the crowd.

She only had to believe, and God would begin to sort out her.

But because she believed and because she worked her way to him, she was already healed.

When she touched his garment, her body was healed.

But she'd already had a faith, a belief, that it healed her for eternity.

And we only have to do the same.

From this belief in the unbelievable, everything begins to change for us.

But it is not in a God that we create or design for our satisfaction, that we'll be subject to our order and our prioritization, even though we try to.

In our fleshly fear, we seek to divine and develop our way to some sort of control.

I came across an article recently that included the following words.

I think it's from Houston Christian University.

If the extrasensory world, the world of God and angels, can be assessed, accessed, I'm sorry, accessed with its own set of handles and levers, then technology, as a kind of magic, will come to dominate the spiritual.

Since technology is at its root a method for interacting with the unknown and the mysterious, perhaps the siren song of technology is irresistible when thinking about the great mystery of the divine and the afterlife.

Faced with an unknown that cannot be explained, all our human ingenuity can muster is a set of handles and levers.

Thus, our natural tendency is to pay our tithes as though they were an investment in a financial instrument, recite the sinner's prayer as though it were an incantation, and offer evangelism lessons by way of a flowchart.

Yet the life and the teachings of Christ run counter to our technological instincts.

There are no inputs and outputs for repentance or loving one's neighbor.

The sinner who prostrated himself at the temple and begged for mercy, grasped no handles and pulled no lever.

Faith is the inversion of the technological, since there are no inputs and outputs.

In stark contrast to the technological, by teaching us to love, Jesus opens up a new and different way to connect to the unknown.

We can no longer engineer our behavior to ensure an expected result.

Instead, Jesus asks us to trust him, to be confident that he loves us and is preparing a place for us so that where he is, we may be also.

In closing, it is the God of heaven and earth that is more astounding, more loving than we could ever comprehend.

And the truth is, the more comfortable and predictable that we try to make this world, the harder it will become to believe in a Lord that could be holding together the universe by the word of his power.

But this is what we are called to.

Called to a faith, and here's the most absurd thing.

A faith in the absurdity of God's love for us.

That He loves us.

That he loves me.

That's absurd.

Abraham had to lean into it even as heart, even as his heart trembled in terror at the thought of his son's blood on his hands.

He did not have the luxury of certainty.

He did not know how Genesis 22 would end.

And we don't have the luxury of certainty.

We don't have it.

Certainty is the opposite of faith.

But we do have faith.

Faith always invites out.

They always seem to ride together.

Doubt will be there.

Don't fear it.

It can strengthen your faith.

It's okay.

It better be okay.

We trust and we hold fast to a God who loves us.

To ponder in prayer.

What it means to pray very intentionally into a God, to a God, into his ear.

In response to the fact that he loves us and get through that for three minutes.

Knowing that the object of our faith is worth the agony that our faith can sometimes call us to.

Because from the agony, the joy of fellowship with God is to be found.

Thank you.