LESSONS FROM THE LIVES OF THE PATRIARCHS
GENESIS PART 2 – POSTDILUVIAN/PATRIARCHAL HISTORY
ABRAHAM & ISAAC: A PICTURE OF FAITH IN ACTION
GENESIS 22:1-19
INTRODUCTION
- As we begin our short look at Isaac today you will notice that this portion of Scripture is really just as much about Abraham as it is Isaac. In fact, this is the only glimpse of Isaac that we are going to get in this look at Genesis. Next time we will be moving on to Jacob and eventually Joseph, simply because they lend themselves so well to character studies. But this is by far one of the most important instances in the life of Isaac; and it doesn’t take us very long to figure out why.
- Now for some of us, this is not only an important occurrence in Isaac’s life, but it is also a confusing one. For in this account, Abraham is told by God to sacrifice his son Isaac as a burnt offering. Immediately everything inside of us wonders how God could demand such a thing. This is one of those stories that unbelievers and atheists pounce on in order to try to attack God’s character.
- One of my favorite people of an opposing viewpoint to quote, as you know, is Richard Dawkins. Here is what he writes on p.31 of his book The God Delusion about God as revealed in the Old Testament in accounts like the one we will be looking at today: The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
- Now for those of us who have not received our Doctor of Philosophy degrees from the University of Oxford, here is what Dawkins said: God is jealous, petty, unjust, unforgiving, revengeful; a bloodthirsty racist, a hater of women, fearful of homosexuals, a baby killer, a mass murderer, someone who commands people to kill their own children, having an inflated ego while enjoying watching others endure pain. He is a mean-hearted, evil bully and loves himself for it.
- I cannot imagine a more twisted and erroneous understanding of God. But that’s what certain intellectuals think about our God. And this story is one of the accounts they use to justify this understanding. So we must take great care in understanding, interpreting, and applying it. Let’s read the passage first, then we will see if the God Dawkins sees is really there. And if not (and most of us are already assuming not), what does this actually tell us about God?
[READ GENESIS 22:1-19]
- What I want us to notice right off the bat here is that God never intended for Abraham to kill Isaac. Even Abraham seems to recognize this. He tells Isaac that God is going to provide the lamb for the offering. He tells his servants that both he and the boy will return to them when the sacrifice is complete. God has no desire for Abraham to commit filicide. In other words, he doesn’t want to see Abraham kill his own son. What he does want to see is Abraham’s faith, which was credited to him as righteousness, in action. So he asks Abraham to do the most unimaginable thing we could think of in order to reveal the genuineness of Abraham’s faith. And that is the first thing we should notice about this passage:
GOD REVEALS THE AUTHENTICITY OF OUR FAITH BY TESTING IT
- That first verse of Genesis 22 is very important. It says that God tested Abraham. Moses, the author of this account gives us an explanatory statement before the story begins. It’s almost as if he knows the story is going to raise eyebrows, so he helps us out. He gives us information that Abraham didn’t have. He tells us that what God is doing is testing Abraham’s faith.
- Now what was it about this situation that tested Abraham’s faith? Well the answer is rather obvious isn’t it? Having sent Ishmael away with Hagar, Abraham now only has one son, Isaac; and the future of the covenant promise rested with him. He was the child that God gave to Abraham and Sarah in their old age by a supernatural work. All of the promises of God were to come to pass, according to God himself, through Isaac and his seed. Killing Isaac would ruin everything. So there was no greater thing God could have asked Abraham to do than to sacrifice his son Isaac.
- Dr. Warren Wiersbe writes this in his commentary on the Pentateuch: Our faith is not really tested until God asks us to bear what seems unbearable, do what seems unreasonable, and expect what seems impossible. We need to understand that God does to us what he did here to Abraham. He tests us through various difficulties and trials. He does this, according to James 1, in order to perfect our character and our faith. And according to 1 Peter 1, that perfected, genuine faith will glorify Jesus Christ when he returns to this earth.
- For most of us, this is not a new concept, but it is one we quickly forget or fail to apply. We want the good life 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We want our lives to have the same nickname as New Orleans: the big easy. We want our lives to be the big easy. And sometimes life is easy. Sometimes we go through periods when it seems like nothing is going wrong. And that’s okay; but we learn more about who we are and who our faith is in when the big easy is flipped upside down.
- The extent and magnitude of Abraham’s faith and trust in God is revealed in this test. And the extent and magnitude of our faith and trust in God is revealed when God allows tests into our lives. Maybe it is the test of sickness, or financial loss, family problems, or issues on the job. Or maybe some of those things are happening simply as a part of life on an imperfect planet and God is not testing us at all; but he will still use those situations in our lives for our own good and for his glory.
- Now I want us to notice just how much Abraham trusted God in this situation. To this point Abraham’s trust has gone up and down like the world’s best roller coaster. Now his faith is unwavering. He is convinced God is going to provide a way to save Isaac and thus preserve the promised seed. He was so convinced that Hebrews 11:17-19 says this: By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back. Even if, for some unthinkable reason, God allowed Isaac to die Abraham believed God would bring him back from the dead. Whatever happened, Abraham knew Isaac wasn’t going anywhere. What a turn around from the up and down trust of a few chapters ago!
- This is what authentic faith looks like in real life. This is putting your money where your mouth is, so to speak. This is not only saying you believe God is good, gracious, perfect, and yet holy and just; but living like those truths are the heartbeat of your soul. And this is why God does what he does; so that when his people respond like Abraham, he is magnified as God.
- When people watch us going through our “Isaac test”, whatever it is, with unwavering faith in Jesus Christ the Holy Spirit uses that to draw some to repentance and faith. The greatest gospel testimony we can give to the people around us is not merely following God when life is good, but relentlessly pursuing him when life is horrible, or when we must endure a test of faith.
- When people see that, they know we’re the genuine article. And they wonder where it comes from because if they know us at all they know it doesn’t come from us. Then we point them to God, the giver of life. So God reveals the authenticity of our faith by testing it; and secondly:
GOD REQUIRES OUR WILLINGNESS TO DO WHATEVER HE ASKS OF US
- Let’s go back to that quote from Dr. Wiersbe: Our faith is not really tested until God asks us to bear what seems unbearable, do what seems unreasonable, and expect what seems impossible. If sacrificing your own son as a burnt offering doesn’t seem unreasonable, I don’t know what would seem unreasonable to you. This certainly would have shocked Abraham to his core. But there is no hesitation in his response of obedience. The text simply says: 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 went to the place of which God had told him.
- That simple statement amazes me. There is no response from Abraham questioning God. There is no questioning of the morality of human sacrifice. Nothing. Simply obedience. It is this kind of obedience that God wants from all of us, his followers. Now here is where we need to be awfully careful. Here is where men like Dawkins, and Hitchens, and Barker pounce. How are we to know if God is not asking us to do exactly the same thing Abraham did? Who are we to say that someone can’t offer up their child as an act of obedience to God today?
- There are a few things to remember. And these are not trivial things. These are crucial to remember in order to avoid misinterpreting and misapplying the text. The first thing to remember is this, and we’ve already mentioned it: God did not allow Abraham to kill Isaac; and Abraham knew, or at least had an idea that this would be the case the whole time. Second: we no longer offer burnt offerings of any kind to God. Jesus Christ was the supreme sacrifice offered to God on behalf of sinners. So saying this text teaches us that God is pleased when we kill our children is about as dumb of a statement as I can think of; and I’ve heard some pretty dumb things in my lifetime!
- The swift obedience to whatever God asked of Abraham is the principle we take from this account. And let’s not forget Isaac’s willingness to go along with his father. Isaac was probably a young man. Since Abraham was a century old he could have easily taken his father down physically. But he allowed his father to bind him and lay him on the altar. Whatever was going on in his mind (and I’m sure his mind was racing), he trusted his father and he trusted his father’s God.
- So let’s integrate that obedience into some real life examples for a moment. It’s not hard for us to obey something we feel God is asking us to do when it makes sense to us. Let’s say we have two employment opportunities. One job offers us $100,000 dollars a year with full benefits. The other offers us $30,000 a year with partial benefits. If we feel God is leading us to take the $100,000 job, obedience is easy. But let’s say that it is rather obvious that God would be more glorified if we took the $30,000 job. Now obedience becomes a little harder doesn’t it?
- The reason it’s so hard to obey in tough situations is that we want things to make sense to us. Sometimes we fail to recognize that things always makes sense to God. God is not in the business of confusing himself. Things may not make sense to us, but they always make sense to God. When he asks us to do things, he always has a reason, always has a plan, always has great and glorious purpose. In this case, it was show Abraham that he is the provider.
- God wants us to be followers who do whatever he asks of us; not people who obey when it’s convenient or justify our disobedience when things seem unreasonable. When God told Abraham to do something, he did it; even though it seemed outlandish.
- But notice what happened. Notice how the story ends. There is no sacrificing of the only son of promise. There is no filicide. There is no immoral action. There is no tragedy. There is a blessing and the revealing of God as the provider of blessings. Here is the last thing we see from this account:
GOD BLESSES THE OBEDIENCE THAT COMES FROM TRUE FAITH
- Just as Abraham knew God would, God provides the lamb for the burnt offering. Abraham has bound Isaac. The altar is set. And Abraham draws his knife. And the picture we get from the text is that the knife was raised and Abraham was a split second away from doing the unthinkable. The angel calls out to Abraham: “Abraham! Abraham!”. He stops him in mid act. And Abraham looks, and there is a ram caught in a thicket. God provides a suitable offering for Abraham in place of Isaac and then confirms his covenant with him.
- In the same way, God blesses the obedience of all of his children. When we set aside our self- sufficiency and recognize that we can trust God in all things and follow him accordingly, God blesses us. In the example we just used, he may bless us with a life that is ten times more fulfilling than if we had taken the $100,000 job. He rewards obedience. And remember, he does so so that we might be grateful and worship him even more. His blessings always have a larger purpose than simply our benefit – the larger purpose is his exaltation.
- And I simply have to point this last thing out. This account introduces to us substitutionary atonement in its infantile stage. In case you need a refresher, substitutionary atonement is the doctrine that states that God acted as a wrath-satisfying substitute for sinners in Jesus Christ when he died on the cross and rose again. We are privileged to a glimpse of that here.
- Let’s see the parallel. The ram is the substitute for Isaac. And who provides the ram? God. In the same way God provided a substitute sacrifice for Isaac, he provides in Christ a substitute sacrifice for sinners. The familiar words of 1 Peter 3 say: For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God. And again in 2 Corinthians 5:21: For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
- As Isaac nearly died, we deserve to die. But we will not die if we have faith in Jesus Christ because he has stepped in as the perfect Lamb of God. So we not only have a lesson on the blessings of obedience, but also a lesson on how atonement works. The substitutionary death of Jesus Christ is foreshadowed here; even if in a small way.
CONCLUSION
- So think about these things as we close: how might God be testing your faith in order to reveal it as authentic? Maybe you don’t sense any testing or stretching of your faith right now. How have you seen God test your faith in the past? And how has that strengthened you and enabled you to show your faith to others in a real life situation?
- And we should ask ourselves: “Are we willing to do whatever God asks of us?” Will we obey his word even though in certain situations it may not make the most sense. See Christianity is not an irrational faith, but ultimate rationality does not rest in our human minds, it rests in the mind of our omniscient God. So if things don’t make sense to us, we can trust that if we are following God’s word, they make sense to him. It’s not up to us to make ultimate sense of everything.
- As Isaiah the prophet reminds us with these familiar words: For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
- There in that context Isaiah tells us that though it may not make sense to us that an infinitely holy God would pardon the greatest of sinners, he does so by his grace. And just as he understands why and how he does that, he understands why and how he does each and every thing in our lives. So as Abraham did, let us trust him with all of our hearts.
