Go to the website www.worstcasescenarios.com, and you’ll find out what to do in the event you find yourself in a real-life, worst-case scenario. For example, there are complete instructions for such things as
How to jump from a building into a dumpster
How to survive if your parachute fails to open
How to land a plane
How to Fend Off a Shark
I thought I’d do a public service this morning by helping you with some practical instruction on
How to wrestle free from an alligator Free from an Alligator
1. If you are on land, try to get on the alligator’s back and put downward pressure on its neck. This will force its head and jaws down.
2. Cover the alligator’s eyes. This will usually make it more sedate.
3. If you are attacked, go for the eyes and nose. Use any weapon you have, or your fist.
4. If its jaws are closed on something you want to remove (for example, a limb), tap or punch it on the snout. Alligators often open their mouths when tapped lightly. They may drop whatever it is they have taken hold of, and back off.
5. If the alligator gets you in its jaws, you must prevent it from shaking you or rolling over—these instinctual actions cause severe tissue damage. Try to keep the mouth clamped shut so the alligator does not begin shaking.
6. Seek medical attention immediately, even for a small cut or bruise, to treat infection. Alligators have a huge number of pathogens in their mouths.
We approach the text in Genesis 22, and we have to say that what we find confronting Abraham is little short of a “worst-case scenario”. Read verses 1-2 with me. Everything had finally turned out great for Abraham. After many years of waiting; after many years of uneven growth in the walk of faith, punctuated by mountaintop experiences talking with God, and valleys of trying to live by his own wisdom—and reaping the consequences; after now seeing the provision of God in Isaac and watching his baby boy grow more into a man each day, life was good. God had blessed Abraham mightily, and now the patriarch was looking forward to the rest of his life being one of great enjoyment of the goodness of God. But then, the very God who has brought resolution, stability, and order to Abraham’s life now brings an incredible amount of turmoil, the “perfect storm”, the worst-case scenario in Abraham’s life.
In one brief moment, we might say, Laughter turned to horror. The son Isaac, whose very name meant “laughter”, would be the slain sacrifice on an altar to the God Who had provided that son in the first place. It had to be surreal to Abraham. “Take”; “go”; “sacrifice”. Little further explanation is offered; pretty much, God just gives him the bare minimum details of what it is He wants Abraham to do. God’s words are stark and sparing. God made of Abraham
1. A dreadful request
Now, we are privy to the fact that this was a test from God; it’s announced to us in verse 1. But Abraham wasn’t; it’s not like God said to him, “This is a test of Abraham’s belief system. This is only a test…”
a. The Test
God tests Abraham. Such testing determines the quality of the characteristic being tested. God, in this case, stretches Abraham to the limit for the purpose of determining the quality of his faith. True, Abraham has been tested by God before, if you will; he has been asked by God to give up some things and reach toward new things by faith. He is asked by God to believe things that he has not seen. But this testing is different: in each other case, there was a promise from God to “balance” the test, if you will. For stepping out and leaving home and family and friends, Abraham is promised something greater: new family, new and larger home, etc. Here, though, no promises are made; he is simply asked to give up what likely was his most-treasured possession, his son. Further, to kill Isaac would equate to killing the promise of God, the promise of future blessing, land, posterity. If Isaac is dead, so are the things that motivated Abraham to move in the first place. Is Abraham willing to cling to God above the promised blessings of God? As Derek Kidner writes, “Abraham’s trust was to be weighed in the balance against common sense, human affection, and lifelong ambition.”
This is at least one thing (one of the many, I’d suggest) that is missing in the contemporary what’s-in-it-for-me theology of folks like Joel Osteen. There is a huge emphasis upon how we can get ahead, or be fulfilled, or overcome obstacles, or what have you, and little to no emphasis upon the glory of God. God becomes the means to our own ends. Abraham is now faced with the question of whether he is devoted to God for God’s sake, or devoted to God for the sake of Abraham’s own future blessing. And this is one we’d better wrestle with a little bit…
Job said, “though He slay me, yet will I trust Him.” Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego told the king that they were confident that God could deliver them from the fiery furnace, but that even if God chose not to, they still would not bow down. Every martyr who takes his place in the annals of Christian history echoes this theme: it is about God’s glory, not my own gain. What is it that drives your faith: is it what you gain, or God and His glory? What if there seems to be nothing in it for you? What if following God were to suddenly and spectacularly begin to fail a cost/benefit analysis? This was the test that Abraham faced. And for what purpose?
b. The Purpose
Might we say that there was a two-fold purpose? First, God, though he knows the future exhaustively, yet in some way is experientially gaining knowledge of the reality of Abraham’s faith; as unusual as that might sound, the wording in verse 12 gives this indication. Second, Abraham’s faith, in addition to being proven, is likewise strengthened by this encounter.
The way to increase faith is to stretch it, to exercise it, to put it to use. In a few weeks, you’ll have the opportunity to step out in a faith response to God’s call to personal involvement in world evangelization, and you will face a test: will I trust God, and find a faith-filled level of personal, financial involvement in world missions, or will I not? Will I walk by sight, or will I walk by faith? Will I join in the Mission Possible of reaching every person on the planet with the gospel, or will I, in defiance of God’s command, find some excuse to sit it out?
2. A deliberate reaction
a. What Abraham might have felt
Might we engage in a few moments of speculation here? The text, which we’ll read in a moment, gives us few details into the mental and emotional state of the patriarch as he receives from God the words of the dreadful request. In homeschool this week, we took Friday’s Bible time to watch the first part of a made-for-TV movie called “In the Beginning”. Martin Landau plays Abraham, and in the film version, when God makes this dreadful request of Abraham, he screams back at God, in agony of mind and spirit. That’s a bit of creative license, of course, but it’s not unfair or even unlikely; the fact is that we are given no insight into Abraham’s actual emotional or mental response. Abraham had proven himself to be a pretty flesh-and-blood guy; he’d taken matters into his own hands several times already, so to suggest that this man of faith had no moments of confusion, anguish, even anger would be to make of him some superhuman that Scripture does not support.
What would Abraham’s response have been to this command of God?
• Extreme emotion, almost certainly. This is the son of the promise, remember; all of Abraham’s hopes and dreams are pinned on this boy
• On the other hand, he probably responded to the thought of human sacrifice with not with as much shock as we feel; remember, Abraham, though God spoke with Him as a friend, he knew much less of God and His ways than do we! In the Canaanite worldview, according to John Walton, the fertility god demanded a portion of what had been produced. In Abraham’s evolving knowledge of God, would he have thought that this fit right into his worldview about the way a god was supposed to act? Probably not, and yet, his was a growing understanding of God, without benefit of written Scripture such as we have.
• Baffled – how will God do what He has promised He will do if I sacrifice my son? It had to have been downright confusing; his mind must have played similar questions over and over.
But what is important is
b. What Abraham did do
Read with me verses 3-10. Abraham’s response was one of faith – “we will come back to you” (:5) and “God will provide the sacrifice” (:8). Here’s what was going through Abraham’s mind: Hebrews 11:17-19.
It was by faith that Abraham offered Isaac as a sacrifice when God was testing him. Abraham, who had received God’s promises, was ready to sacrifice his only son, Isaac, though God had promised him, "Isaac is the son through whom your descendants will be counted." Abraham assumed that if Isaac died, God was able to bring him back to life again.
It sure seemed like an irrational request/command on the part of God, and thus Abraham was faced with a clear choice: determine that God had somehow lost it, didn’t know what he was saying, or conversely that what Abraham knew of God was precisely that God could be trusted, that His Word was good, that He was in sovereign control, and would make a way despite the fact that Abraham couldn’t see it. Ultimately, Abraham acted in keeping with his knowledge of Who God had proven Himself to be.
For three days, Abraham travels. This is no knee-jerk decision, no “well, if I get it over quickly enough, I won’t have to really think about it”. No, three days journey lay ahead prior to the decisive event. Three days of questioning. Three days of potential turning-back. Three days of back-and-forth in his own mind. This is not a mere reaction; it is a volitional, thought-through decision by the time the events on the mountain take place.
Throughout a whole lot of perfunctory details provided by Moses, and over three days of journeying together, we hear nothing from Abraham. The only words he is recorded as speaking are the words of faith spoken to his servants, that they must wait as he and Isaac go to worship, and that they will return, and in reply to Isaac’s question, “we’ve got everything else, Dad, except for the animal for sacrifice. Where is it?” The reply Abraham gives to the agonizing question asked by his son, Isaac, evidences both his faith in God’s ultimate provision for the need, and his complete openness to the details of that provision. He has had a whole lot of time to think things through, that’s for sure. And now he has an answer: “God will provide a lamb.” Abraham doesn’t try to fit God into a little box of his own making; he doesn’t suggest to God how best to run things; he just believes and accepts God’s goodness and wisdom.
The wood goes on the back of the sacrifice, Isaac. It is no stretch at all, because of the many parallels here, to see in this our Savior “bearing His own cross, to the place called the place of a skull” (John 19:17). But unlike innocent and trusting Isaac, Christ carried His cross to Calvary knowing full-well that sacrifice awaited, that He would die as the sacrifice. Isaac, in tender trust, simply asked his father where the lamb was; he was familiar enough with sacrifice to know that one ingredient, indeed the most important, was missing.
But there’s something else here that echoes the sacrifice of Christ: Isaac was a teenager, Abraham over 100 years old. Granting that people in Abraham’s day lived longer, and maintained vigor longer, it’s still mighty difficult to see Abraham being able to catch Isaac had he chosen to run, or even subdue Isaac had the youngster chosen to fight; after all, Abraham had laid the wood on Isaac to carry, just as I call on Brent to do my heavy lifting! He was a strong young man, in other words, and if so, Isaac, though not knowing the details of the outcome any more surely than did his father, willingly became the sacrifice. Jesus told His followers that no man took His life from Him, but that instead He willingly laid it down. Father and son, here, Abraham and Isaac as well, are willing to obey God. And the father binds him hand and foot. And the boy lies on the wood. And the father, with one final loving look at his son and a glance toward heaven, unsheathes the knife from his belt and slowly raises it above his head in order to plunge it into the chest of the dearest thing on earth to him. It is then—and only then—that we see
3. A divine response
As Kent Hughes notes, after Abraham had made all of the preparation and even lifted his hand to kill his own son, he was met with a threefold divine response of divine intervention, divine provision, and a divine oath. Read with me verses 11-19:
a. Divine intervention –“don’t kill him!”
There is no need at this point to sacrifice the boy, to end Isaac’s life; he remains the child of the promise, and the point has been made.
b. Divine provision – a ram in a bush
“God will provide a lamb”, Abraham had said, and here it is, an animal caught by his horns in a bush, put there by God for just this purpose. And this was the sacrifice—and can you imagine the worship service that Abraham and his son Isaac had there! No offense to Michael and Warren, but they needed no praise band, no music; they undoubtedly made their own, in an experience of worship that they’d carry with them as a precious memory for the rest of their lives. Abraham gives the place a name; he calls it “Jehovah-jireh”, meaning, “the Lord will provide.” And He always does. And then God makes a
c. Divine oath – reaffirming His promise
Now put in the strongest possible terms, every possible assurance from God existed that God would keep His word to Abraham. How could Abraham or Isaac ever possibly again doubt the all-sufficiency of God for all of their needs, and to keep all of His promises? But we conclude by pointing to
4. A deeper reality: A type of Christ
Here is the ultimate divine response to the human dilemma, to the worst-case scenario that each of us face on account of our sin. Isaac prefigures the coming of Jesus Christ as our ultimate, once-for-all sacrifice for sin. Abraham’s words were more prophetic than he could possibly understand. God has provided a Lamb! John Baptist’s words expressed this clearly, when he said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world!” Foreshadowed in God’s providing of a lamb to take the place of Isaac was His ultimate provision of His only Son, Who unlike Isaac did die on the cross, effecting our salvation.
Is this story about Abraham’s faith, or about God’s provision? Well, it’s about both; we are challenged by such working-without-a-net faith. Abraham had no backup plan, and yet he willingly obeyed this worst-case scenario command of God. I don’t always have to like it. I don’t always have to understand it. I don’t always have to see “what’s in it for me.” I always have to walk by faith. I always demonstrate that I’m doing that by obeying God. That’s working without a net. That’s living by faith, and remember, without faith, I have utterly no chance of pleasing God.
And we are encouraged in our faith in God by virtue of this key theological truth, that God is the One Who is our Provider. And ultimately, we are thankful that God has provided for our ultimate need. We, who have been alienated from God because of our sin, have been made right through the sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb.
Without a Net In Your Life
1. Have you ever found yourself more focused on the blessings of God than on God Himself?
2. What would you find most difficult to give up in your own life?
3. How does the promise that “the Lord will provide” make a difference in your own life?
