Genesis 22 – Being Human

This is Genesis chapter twenty-two, the sacrifice of Isaac.

After these things, God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham, and he said, Here I am.

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, 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 from the burnt offering and arose and 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.

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 the fire, in his hand the fire and the knife.

So they went both of them 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?

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

So they went both of them together.

When they came to the place of 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 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 to him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham, and he said, Here I am.

He said, Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.

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

And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt 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 have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore.

And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you who have obeyed my voice.

So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beersheba, where Abraham lived at Beersheba.

And so reads God's word.

Welcome to you.

If you joined us while we were singing, my name is Mark.

I'm one of the leaders here at the church, and uh it's great to have you with us.

Please have Genesis 22 uh open in front of you or on your phone.

Um sorry I didn't talk to whoever's on the clicker.

I told uh Grace not to worry about the names at the end because there's just too much to be getting on with.

You can ask me what I think that's doing at the end of the chapter another time uh if you like, but pull it up on your phone so you have it in front of you.

More than 30 years ago, uh God had come to Abraham and told him uh to leave everything that he'd known behind, to turn aside from culture and kindred and to go to a new land, to step out and to have an adventure, to go to a land that God would promise.

Thirty years ago, he had promised him a new home, he had promised him that he would be a blessing to the people around him, and above all he promised him a son.

Over those years God had shown him that new land, he had made his life exceedingly fruitful in material terms.

He had caused him to prosper and become powerful, a man of prestige and renown in the area.

And still year after year, Abraham had to look into the eyes of his beautiful but aging wife Sarah, and go through the grief of not having a son.

And all hope of a child faded.

They tried to take matters into their own hands and come up with a plan to try and short circuit what God had promised, and Abraham got a son by the slave woman Hagar, but God said no.

He will not be the son of the promise.

He will not be the one through whom the world will be blessed.

God will provide it in his own way, at his own time.

And indeed he did provide it.

He came to Sarah a year before and said, This time next year, you're gonna have a baby boy in your arms, Sarah.

And God was right.

Sarah gave birth to Isaac.

All of the expectation and faded hope, the cynicism and sadness all faded away in that moment when she looked down at her baby boy.

Who could believe it?

After all these years a son was born to Abraham and Sarah.

Isaac, meaning laughter.

All of that yearning, all of that longing now transformed into love and delight, all focused on the Son of the Promise.

Years pass, and Isaac has grown into a young boy, a perpetual reminder of God's goodness.

Every cuddle in the morning speaking of the Lord's faithfulness, every bedtime story, a reminder and a testimony of God's goodness and grace to them as elderly parents.

God hadn't spoken to Abraham for a long time.

I wonder, did Abraham think?

Mission accomplished.

God has been good.

He has fulfilled his promises.

Perhaps he didn't even think that he would ever hear from him again.

And then God speaks to him.

Abraham responds immediately to his Lord, the one who has been so good, so faithful, so gracious, so preserving, even in his foolishness and even in all of the folly and silly decisions that Abraham has made in his life, God has always been there.

He's always kept his promises.

And so God comes and he says, Abraham, why wouldn't it?

Why wouldn't he respond by saying, Here I am?

It's great to hear from you.

It's like a call from a long-lost friend.

He had no idea what God would say next.

How could he have guessed that the next words out of God's mouth would be, take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and offer him up to me as a burnt sacrifice.

I'll tell you where.

But you need to go.

I wondered at every word land like a hammer blow on aged Abraham.

My son?

My only son?

The son I love Isaac?

Laughter, snuffed, eyed.

Why?

Why would God ask such a thing?

Why would he ask this?

Ask anything else?

Not this.

Why would he ask it?

Does God now condone child sacrifice like the pagan gods of old?

Has he now gone back on his promises and thought, well, I don't really like Isaac all that much?

He never has before.

Why is he commanding this?

Moses, the writer, tells us.

Right at the start in verse one, when he says, After these things, God tested Abraham.

Now you're sitting here and you're thinking, well, that doesn't make him much better.

Why test him?

Why this test?

So many questions swirl around this passage.

But here's the first point.

God's tests always reveal our trusts.

God's tests always reveal our trusts.

Why test Abraham at all?

Is God does God not know?

Surely God knows the nature of Abraham's faith.

If he is all knowing, if he is all powerful, why does he need to put Abraham to the test?

Of course, he knows.

But this test is not to fill a gap in God's ignorance.

It's to fill a gap in Abraham's faith.

Imagine you wanted to find out how strong you were.

Imagine you wanted to find out how fast you were.

I would never want to find that out.

I don't care.

But some people like to know.

Imagine you wanted to find out how strong or how fast you were.

What would you do?

Well, if you wanted to find out how strong you were, you would incrementally seek to bear more weight until you couldn't bear any more.

If you're on the bench, you're trying to find your one rep max, right?

You're putting on more and more weight to find out what is it that I can lift and know more.

Or if you're testing your speed, presumably you uh set some sort of distance and you time how long it takes you to cover that distance.

If I simply came to you and said I could lift as my one rep max 180 kilograms, and I can run a f a sub-four-minute mile, you might think that I was all talk.

And I would be.

That it's really true faith.

So this is perhaps one of the problems that we say, Sunday after Sunday after Sunday, that you are made right with God, forgiven your sin, declared innocent, and adopted into his family simply by faith, simply by trusting, simply by saying, Jesus is my Lord.

That's what happened to Abraham.

Abraham trusted the promises of God right back in chapter 15.

But how do we know that that's not just all talk?

How do we know that we're not just saying that?

How did Abraham know that it wasn't just all talk?

After all, Abraham at various points had actually failed to trust God.

Think back to the Hagar debacle, or to Pharaoh, or to Abimelech.

God stepped in all of those times and rescued him.

Abraham doesn't know how strong his faith is.

That is the depth of trust that he has.

And so when God comes to him here and makes this request of him, he's stretching out his hand saying, Abraham, do you trust me?

Do you trust me with this, Abraham?

Tests reveal our trusts.

But why this test?

I remember uh teaching a preaching class uh at the at the Church of Ireland Theological Institute, and uh we came across uh Genesis 22 and we were talking about it, and uh one of the people who was training to be a Church of Ireland minister said, I would never preach that text.

What an awful text to preach.

That's not the God that we worship.

How could you possibly preach a text like that?

That is just that's just old Canaanite mythology coming into the Bible.

And indeed, if you read Richard Dawkins, he cites Genesis 22 as one of the chief evidences of God's absurd vindictiveness and cruelty.

That he would bring Abraham through to this point where he's raising the knife, and for God to, in a sense, as Dawkins says, go, only joking.

It's like it's awful.

Why this test?

And I'm sure that even we, as you're sitting here this morning going, yeah, but but why this test?

Maybe we bulk at it.

It sounds wrong.

Is God endorsing child sacrifice?

In order to answer all of these questions, we need to remember who Isaac is.

Isaac is the son of the promise.

He is the one through whom all the nations of the world will be blessed.

He's the hope of the whole world at this point in the Bible.

No Isaac, no Jesus.

Everything hinges on Isaac.

And where Abraham has doubted before, will he now trust?

Will he now trust the promises?

Not only that, but for Abraham, this is personal.

This is his son, his only son, whom he loves.

You see that repeat, that repeat comes a couple of times in the passage, doesn't it?

Your son, your only son, whom you love, long for, yearned for, the desire of his heart.

And God says, Can you put the desire of your heart on the altar and trust me with it?

Tests always reveal what our heart is trusting in.

Where our heart truly lies.

Every one of you, every one of us here has particular longings, longings to succeed, longings for love.

Would you let God test you?

Would you let God say to you that thing that you're placing your hope in, that thing that is the desire of your heart, if God came to you and said, Could you put that on the altar and trust me with it?

What would you say?

No.

I trust you, God.

I believe in you, God.

I'm trusting in Jesus for the forgiveness of my sins, but don't ask that of me.

Don't ask that of me.

You can't have that.

You can't have that part of me.

You can't have that desire.

You can't have that relationship.

Don't ask that.

Don't ask me to turn aside from that because it would be too painful.

In that moment.

If you're sitting here and you're saying, I know where Mark's going with this, and I feel like I feel like he's poking at my heart, and you're like, stop poking.

But you've got to ask yourself, what does it reveal about what you're trusting?

Can you put it on the altar and have God say, Can you trust me with this?

And go, Yeah, okay.

That would be really knowing the pen.

And for God to be enough.

The test always reveals your trusts.

If you say you cannot have this part of me, then that part of you has your heart and not God.

Tests reveal your trusts.

Secondly, trust even when you don't understand.

Trust even when you don't understand.

Abraham's response is always as is almost as moving and as curious as the command.

God says, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall tell you.

And then immediately verse three.

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

He simply quietly, humbly obeys.

It can't have made sense to him at this point.

Surely it all seems contradictory.

And yet he follows the command.

So is that what Christianity is all about?

Christianity is all about don't think about it, just obey.

Don't question, just follow.

Blind faith.

Is that what I'm here to commend to you this morning?

No.

Something else is going on.

So they travel for three days to the region of Moriah, to the hill, where one day the temple of God would stand, and that's important.

And Abraham in verse five says to the men, then so read with me, verse five, then Abraham said to the young men, Stay here with the donkey.

I and the boy will go over there and worship and come back to you.

Now the implication there is the two of us will go and the two of us will come back.

We will go and we will return to you.

In fact, some of the translations like the NIV or the RSV put in the we.

We will go and we will return to you.

What's Abraham doing here?

Is Abraham trying to deceive the hired men?

So that they don't have any clue what's going on because they might step in and try and stop him.

Is Abraham being deceitful?

No.

Something else is happening here.

He lays the wood on his son's back himself with fire and knife, and silently they walk until Isaac breaks the silence and asks, Where's the lamb?

Where's the lamb for the offering?

Verse 7.

And Abraham responds and says in verse 8, God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.

This response is ambiguous.

It can be taken two ways, and I think that Moses, the writer, wants us to take it two ways.

In one way, it could be Abraham saying to uh to Isaac, Don't worry, Isaac, we're gonna get up there, and God's gonna provide the lamp.

He's got this.

Or it's God will provide the burnt offering.

My son.

Did Abraham intend to sacrifice Isaac?

Yes.

Yes, he did.

And at the very same time, he simultaneously trusted God that he would keep his promises.

There was something else going on here.

What is it?

Have in your mind's eye that elderly man and his twelve year old son walking towards that mountain in that dreadful, thick silence.

And as you picture them walking to that mountain, place your Himself in the shoes of the old man as he thinks back over the last thirty years.

What's he thinking?

I'll tell you what he's thinking.

He's beginning to realize that everything in his life has led to this point.

Everything that has happened to him is preparing him for this moment.

Time after time, God has shown Abraham that he is the God who brings life out of death.

Every moment of the last thirty years that we have journeyed with Abraham has built in him resurrection-shaped faith.

Sarah was barren, her womb was dead all her life.

We got that right the way back in Genesis chapter eleven, verse thirty.

Sarah was barren and could not have children.

But God made her womb alive again and gave her a son.

Their age, Abraham was a hundred years old.

He was as good as dead when Isaac was born.

And yet God brought life from their aged bodies.

And even in the little things, to turn aside from home and family and everything that he knows, that's the sort of death, isn't it?

And to trust God's promises, and God caused them to flourish.

God brought life out of death.

They suffered war and family breakdown with lot, and God preserved them through it.

Why?

Because God is always the one who brings life out of death.

Even in their foolishness and their sin and their faithless plans, God rescues them.

Why?

Because he brings life out of death.

So as they walk to the mountain, Abraham is trusting the God of resurrections.

He is trusting in the God who brings life out of death.

Abraham's faith is not blind, and neither is ours.

It is built on a lifetime of resurrection-shaped faithfulness.

He cannot see how, he doesn't understand how God will do it.

But he's not gonna ask he's not going to act faithlessly anymore.

He knows and he trusts.

And so he binds the most precious thing that he has ever known, and lays him on the altar and raises the knife, and cannot see in that moment how, but knows with every fibre of his being that God will keep his promise to bless the world through Isaac.

So the writer to the Hebrews in Hebrews chapter eleven says, By faith, Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac.

And he who had received the promise was in the act of offering up his son, of whom it was said, Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.

And he considered that God was able to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.

This is a lifetime of faith culminating in a strong and robust trust of God, a lifetime of trials and of learning of God's goodness and faithfulness, all coming into focus.

Brothers and sisters, what kind of follower of God do you want to be?

People of weak and shallow faith that when suffering comes we crumble and we curse God and we deny his goodness?

Or people that see everything that we have been through, every moment good and bad, every tear, every heartbreak, every grief all goes to make you a great oak of righteousness.

A great oak of faith, solid, storm strengthened, weather worn and joyful roots reaching deep down, down ever deeper into the God of resurrection shaped hope.

I want that for you.

Your family needs you to be that person.

Your friends need you to be that person.

Your community, your city, your church needs you to be that person.

To trust the God of resurrections even when we don't understand.

Thirdly and finally, trust the God who provides.

Trust the God who provides.

He was the hope of the whole world.

He was the one through whom all of the nations would be blessed.

But did Isaac deserve to die?

The answer to that question, biblically speaking, is yes.

There are complicated reasons for that, but let me just give you a simple one.

Isaac's a son of Adam, sinful by nature, and sin always leads to death.

God's claim on Isaac's life was not an unjust claim.

And so now we have a problem.

Isaac, in that cosmic eternal sense, deserves to die.

And God is committed to blessing the world through Isaac.

How can God satisfy both his holiness and his grace?

How can he do it?

Abraham has already told us God will provide the lamb.

Somehow.

Somehow a substitute will die in Isaac's place.

Somehow there will be a lamb who dies instead of Isaac.

And so they arrive at this region, the region of Jerusalem, and they ascend a hill.

Isaac carrying the wood of his execution on his back.

You're supposed to be thinking New Testament thoughts at this point, as Isaac walks up that hill, carrying the wood of his execution, willingly, the son of promise, submitting himself to being bound, silently led to the slaughter.

His father raises the knife, but it never falls.

The angel in that breathless moment speaks from heaven and Isaac is spared.

And Abraham looks up from his son and sees a ram caught in the thicket in a thorny bush, and he offers that in Isaac's place.

And so Abraham calls the place Jehovah Jira the Lord will provide verse fourteen.

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

But the eagle eyed or eagle eared eagle do eagles have ears?

I suppose they do.

Among you will have realized that Abraham says God will provide a lamb, and he looks up and he sees not a lamb.

He sees a ram instead.

Why is that?

He calls the place Jehovah Jare, and then Moses tells us that the saying around that hill is on the mountain of the Lord it shall be provided.

It shall be provided.

God sent the ram because the lamb was still to come.

God sent the ram because the lamb was still to be provided.

God did not ask Abraham to go through with the sacrifice of Isaac.

But one dark Friday he would God would send the lamb who would take away the sin of the world.

Not just the lamb the son, the only son, whom he loves.

And he would die for all who trust his promise of forgiveness, his promise of resurrection hope.

That's it.

That's it.

We trust the promise.

We trust the promise of the one who died for us.

We trust him.

And we live.

Jesus, descended from Isaac, the true son of the promise, the one through whom all of the nations of the world will be blessed, who came to bless the world by dying for it.

That all who would trust in him would know forgiveness and life.

Our faith, the Christian faith, like Abraham's, is resurrection shaped.

He walked down from that mountain with his son.

More sure of the promises of God than when he went up.

That's why God reiterates the promises at the end of the passage.

Because actually, he doesn't just know them intellectually anymore, because he's gone through the test, he feels the truth of them.

He is more assured because he has gone through the test, because he has saw seen his son raised from the dead.

In the same way Jesus was raised from the dead, so that we might not just believe, but that we might know for certain that we really are forgiven because of the Lamb who dies in our place, that life really is ours to live, that God really does preserve us and persevere with us through every trial, through every test, through every suffering.

And because he lives, we can know that he will make us those oaks of faith and righteousness.

The resurrected Jesus Like Isaac walking down the mountain, walks out of the garden tomb.

And in a sense he looks at each one of us and he holds out that hand and he says Do you trust me?

Do you trust me?

Thank you for listening to this week's sermon.

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