Believing even when God wants the unreasonable
Genesis 22:1-18
Faith is trusting that which we cannot understand. This is why Jesus demands the faith of a child. Because children are called upon all the time to trust their parents in situations they don’t understand. And they do it well. Abraham’s trust in God, and Isaac’s trust in Abraham illustrate this idea better than any other story I know.
I have never met anyone who was not taken aback by this story. God is clearly asking the unreasonable. And God knows that what He is demanding is unreasonable. I like the translations that maintain the climatic word order:
Take your son
your only son
whom you love
Isaac
Abraham has two sons, after all, but God is not leaving anything to question. He is driving home just how much He knows Isaac means to Abraham.
We think of this event too much in theological terms:
• Isaac was the son of promise
• God hates human sacrifice
• God would not contradict Himself by saying Isaac will be the heir and then taking the heir away
There are all kinds of theological dilemmas here for us to noodle over, and we can try to explain them, address them, and mitigate them all day long. But God knew that for Abraham, his theology was very wrapped up in his personal life. It had less to do with Abraham’s conception of God than it had to do with his feeling for his son
Take your son
your only son
whom you love
Isaac
How old was Isaac? We really don’t know. The story begins with the vague phrase: "Some time later." So it fits in between the time he was weaned and the death of his mother at the age of 127. That means that sometime between the time Isaac was about 3 years old, and when he was about 37, this event happened. There is something reprehensible about it at any age:
• If he was a confused adolescent
• If he was a young man in his active prime
• If he was a responsible adult
We know that he had the strength to carry the wood for the fire himself. He was not a toddler. The way Abraham called him "lad" or "boy" suggests a youth, the same way the word is used of someone in the service industry, like a "pool boy". He may be quite young, but he is also strong and able, responsible.
We know he was capable of reasoning, because he questioned his father about the procedure and knew something was missing. This may even mean that he was old enough to be doing sacrifices himself.
In the end, his age is not so important. In his earlier years, he would have been a child betrayed by the father he trusted. In his later years he would have been a thinking, active man who needed to be convinced to give up his life to go along with the plan.
What can we learn from Abraham?
Abraham was willing to give God everything
This is, as far as I can tell, the unanimous, primary interpretation of the passage. Both Christians and Jews observe that the account demonstrates Abraham’s willingness to abandon everything for God. He had already
• given up his home
• given up the best pastures
• given up his own plan for success
• given up his first son
Now he was being called to give up the son of promise. For Abraham, nothing was as valuable as what God wanted. He was willing to keep nothing back. Thomas Hooker, one of the early preachers of Hartford CT says of this episode:
If God would have anything, He should have it, whatsoever it were, tho it were his own life, for no question Isaac was dearer to him than his own life (Hooker, The World’s Great Sermons - Vol 2, 15).
Abraham did everything his understanding of the situation demanded
He did not go into the situation half cocked, simply because he did not understand it all. He had wood, a knife, and a torch. He outfitted a week long excursion: three days out, and three days back. He had provisions, baggage and servants.
There were things about God’s command that he did not understand.
• He did not know why God was doing this
• He trusted that God would save Isaac, but he did not know how
• He didn’t even know exactly where he was going, just to the hill country
And yet, he did not allow his incomplete knowledge to affect the thoroughness of his obedience. He took all the information he had and he followed through completely, the best he could.
Abraham trusted God and distrusted his own understanding
Twice Abraham indicates that he believes that God will, in some way, spare Isaac. The first time, is on the way when he leaves the servants behind and takes his son along, telling them that they will return later. The second time is when Isaac asks why they have no animal to sacrifice. Abraham responds that God will provide.
At first glance, these may seem like denial or like Abraham’s misdirection to ensure that he can carry out his intentions. However, the writer of Hebrews assures us that there is more to it.
Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.
(Hebrews 11:19 TNIV)
Abraham was absolutely willing to follow through to the bitter end of God’s command, personally assured that his own understanding of God’s plan was not the end of the story.
We only get to know God’s provision when we follow through with obedience
Abraham trusted God. He knew that God would come through and save Isaac in some way. He had no idea how it would be done. He had an inkling when he told Isaac that God would provide a lamb ... but at that point, it was mere conjecture.
It was only after he followed through on God’s command and allowed God to choose the appropriate resolution that he saw the ram in the thicket. This was a familiar image to Abraham. Art objects found at Ur include statues of a ram tangled in a bush. The familiarity of God’s provision served to further comfort Abraham after the ordeal he had just been through. The idea is immortalized in a proverb:
On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided
In other words. Ask yourself what you need in order to follow through to the end of God’s command. If you don’t have it in hand, and you don’t know what it is, faith is your tool. God will equip you to do exactly as He wishes.
But we don’t always get to know what He will provide or how He will provide it until His timing. We don’t get to see the ram if we don’t climb the mountain.
Abraham could have rationalized a different scenario:
• God promised me this son
• God does not go for human sacrifice
• God does not contradict Himself
• God would never ask me to give up something I love so much
And in his rationalization, he might have decided never to climb Mt. Moriah. You could argue that the outcome would have been the same.
• He would still have had his son
• But he never would have known God’s amazing deliverance
• He never would have seen the ram
The only way to see God’s deliverance is to be in a position to need God’s deliverance. If we do everything within the boundaries of spiritual safety, we will never find the place Abraham found.
Complete obedience may require you to convince someone else to go along with it
Isaac, we have seen, was no child. He was old enough to resist. At his father’s age, he was likely old enough to overpower Abraham. Isaac had to trust his father and God enough to believe that what his dad was doing was right. Certainly Sarah would have weighed in on the decision.
Our own ability to lead others into a path of trust in God will often be a part of following Him ourselves. In families this is most obvious. We are more likely to meet resistance and perhaps even ridicule in our own homes for trusting God than anywhere else. This means that, like Abraham, our devotion to God must be completely authentic. Our families will lose faith in us if we do not make God consistently part of our life equation. If we are faking it, they will know first.
Anyone you want to bring along on your journey of faith will need to be certain of your commitment, or your own ability to obey may be stunted.
Ultimately, God did not demand anything inconsistent with His own character
Murder, human sacrifice, infanticide: God hates these things. We know it because the Bible says so. Abraham did not have the benefit of the whole Bible to understand God’s character as well as you do. He knew nothing about Moses’ law or Jesus’ teachings. They hadn’t happened yet. He only knew obedience.
Even in Abraham’s vacuum of knowledge, God was consistent with Himself and stopped Abraham from doing anything sinful. This is the difference between Abraham and the woman in Texas who said she killed her children because God told her to. God told Abraham to, but prevented him from doing something sinful. In the end, Abraham did not kill Isaac.
We may think we understand God, that He has taught us things and demonstrated Himself to us in certain ways. We may be right, or we may be wrong in our understanding ... or like Abraham, our understanding may be incomplete. It does not matter. God will not require us to follow through in a direction contrary to Him.
His follow through renewed God’s former promises
The promise delivered by the angel at the end of this story is the same promise that has already been delivered to Abraham at other important junctures in his life. He is promised that his descendants will possess the cities of their enemies, but this promise was implicit in the promise of a homeland. It is really nothing new.
Here is a hard pill to swallow. God is establishing a future for you. He will be faithful to deliver it as long as we arrive in the place of delivery on time. There are side paths along our road to that delivery place that may take us in completely wrong directions. God will work with us, where ever He finds us, but the grand promise and potential of our lives may only be reached with faithful, repeated obedience.
The payout of God’s promises may never change. They may always be the same as they were from the beginning, but they will be grand as only God’s scale can make them. And they are only possible on His terms.
Moving forward on faith involves a willingness to trust that goes beyond normal faith.
• It may involve trusting God for His reasoning in the loss of someone you loved
• It may involve confronting somebody who is abrasive and difficult
• It may involve a move for you or your family members whom you love and will miss greatly
• It may involve a long walk through a painful illness
• It may involve excruciating waiting that erodes your peace
You can always trust God, even when your family, your mind, your security, your health, or your life is on the line. If what God is requiring of you does not make sense, all that is necessary for you to understand is obedience and follow through. Know that what God wants from you is best for His own plan and for your own life. I’m not sure Abraham’s actions ever made sense to him, except that he was obeying. Or he may have walked away with a clearer picture of the difference between God and the pagan gods surrounding him. He may have walked away with a clearer picture of the stability and strength of God’s promises.
The reward is an understanding of God in a bigger more magnificent way.
