Genesis 22:1-14
1 – Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied.
2 – Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.”
3 – Early the next morning Abraham got up and saddled his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about.
4 – On the third day, Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance.
5 – He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”
6 – Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together,
7 – Isaac spoke up and said to his father, Abraham, “Father?” “Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.
“The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”
8 – Abraham answered, “God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together.
9 – When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it.
He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.
10 – Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.
11 – But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham, Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied.
12 – “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him.
Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”
13 – Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son.
14 – So Abraham called that place, “The Lord Will Provide.” And to this day it is said, “on the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”
Hebrews 11: 17-19
17 – By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son,
18 – Even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.”
19 – Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.
When I was a young boy in elementary school…my favorite time each week was our visit to the library. I loved to read! And my favorite books to read back then were biographies. I discovered that our library had an entire series of biographies of famous American heroes and they were easy to find because they were all had orange book covers.
So they really stood out on the book shelves.
Well, I checked out and read every “orange” book in our library.
Sometimes I would read them in one day….turn them in the next and check out another. I thoroughly enjoyed reading about famous people. It was almost like “meeting” Teddy Roosevelt or Stephen Foster, Louis Pasteur or George Washington Carver, Lou Gherig or Jackie Robinson, Betsy Ross or Harriet Tubman. And by reading about their lives, I learned many lessons that have helped me in my own life. Maybe that’s why I have so enjoyed preparing “biographical” sermons about these heros of the faith over the last several weeks. I don’t know about you but I’ve learned several “faith lessons”in this series….principles that have helped me to embrace a deeper faith in God.
Now, in case you are our guest, let me get you up to speed. I have been using my pulpit time lately to lead our church in a study of the eleventh chapter of the New Testament book of Hebrews. And I’ve focused our study around the lives of the individuals mentioned in this popular text. I’ve pointed out that these people really were Heros of Faith for they way they lived their lives showed that they had amazing faith in God. In fact in Hebrews 11:38 it says their faith was so great that “the world was not worthy of them.” Let’s briefly review the faith lessons that we have gleaned so far from the study of these amazing individuals: Our study of Noah showed us that our faith has a firm foundation.
Noah’s life helped underscore the truth that Faith is not hoping for the best. It is not some wishy-washy dream that religious people entertain.
No — our faith is real. It has a basis for it is founded on God’s Word — the things God says. By building his ark Noah also taught us that faith and works go hand in hand like two oars in the same boat. And by looking at Noah’s life we learned that the storms-the tough times we face day in and day out are good for us. They mature us and strengthen our faith.
Our study of the life of Joseph revealed the adequacy of faith.
His experiences on this earth proved that if faith is all you have — if you lose everything in life but your faith, it is still enough. Joseph would tell us that faith enables us to endure painful circumstances. It is all you need to give you the power to refuse the temptation of sinful passion, The way he lived showed us that faith even makes it possible for us keep our heads straight when we enjoy times of prosperity and power.
Our only female faith hero in this study has been Rahab.
And she taught us that when we live a life of faith people notice and are drawn to faith in God themselves. But she also introduced us to the grace of faith. By looking at Rahab’s life we learned that we can begin again in life — that Jesus’ grace-filled sacrifice on our behalf makes it possible for us to “take a mulligan” and start our lives over with a clean slate.
From Moses we learned that faith lifts us up and gives us a perspective that faith-LESS people don’t have.
It enables us to look back down the trail of our lives and see things like the incredible power of a heritage of faith or the fact that in every experience of life God is shaping us for His purposes. Moses’ life also showed us that faith gives us the ability to see sin for what it really is — a temporary pleasure that only leads to death.
So,we have learned a GREAT DEAL about faith in these weeks of biographical Bible study. And today I want us to conclude this series by looking at the life of one more FAITH HERO.
His name is Abraham. People have admired Abraham’s faith for thousands of years. In fact, in Romans Paul refers to Abraham as the “father of ALL who believe.” And Paul is correct for in a spiritual sense all of us ARE descendants of Abraham. Galatians 3:6-9 says, “Consider Abraham: ‘He believed God and it was credited to him as righteousness.’ Understand, then, that those who believe are children of Abraham. The Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham saying: ‘All nations will be blessed through you.’ So those who have faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.”
Now for the past few weeks in Sunday School here at Redland we have all been studying Abraham’s life and in fact this morning you looked at the exact same passage that we will examine in this sermon. I didn’t know this when I made my sermon plans but God did and He knew that this would just be a communion meditation….not a full sermon so He no doubt used the SS planners to fill in the blanks of Abraham’s life!
Well, I want to top off this study of faith by pointing out one special aspect of faith that Abraham’s life shows us which I think of as THE WAY OF FAITH. And this may be the deepest form of faith we can embrace. For Abraham would say that his long walk with God taught him that the strongest faith in God is a faith that is based on an understanding of God’s nature. He learned that not only is God all powerful-He is all loving. He learned to trust that God loved him and because of that He would always use His power to act in Abrahams’ best interests. And when you and I develop a deep faith like this we come to realize that we can indeed “…throw the whole weight of our anxieties on God for we ARE His personal concern.” (I Peter 5:7 ) And Abraham definitely demonstrated this quality of faith in the chapter of his life that is recorded in the 22nd chapter of Genesis.
You remember the story. God came to him and “tested” him by asking him to take his only son, Isaac and sacrifice him as a burnt offering on a mountain in Moriah.
Now it is important for us to note that this testing was for Abraham’s benefit, not God’s. God of course already knew Abrahams’ heart and that he had a faith of this depth. But Abraham needed to learn this. And this “test” would show Abraham just how mature his faith really was. You know all of us are like Abraham in that we never fully understand our strengths and weaknesses until we have been tested in the fires of pain, suffering, and defeat.
Well, the way Abraham responded to this “test” showed that he had indeed become a man who accepted God’s commands even when he didn’t understand them.When it came to following God’s instructions Abraham had learned to stop trying to reason them out. He knew Who God was so Abraham trusted His nature. He learned that, as our own Dick McLain says, “submission to God is the place of tender care.” This kind of faith relationship between God and Abraham began when Abraham obeyed God and left his family in Ur even though he did not know where God was leading him. It continued when he believed God’s promise that he would be the father of a great nation even though he had no children of his own — and he and his wife were senior citizens well past child bearing years.
In these and other experiences Abraham discovered that nothing was impossible to God. He saw time and again that God COULD make a way when there was no way. And perhaps more importantly Abraham realized that it was God’s loving nature to do so. You see a truly deep Faith is basically a confidence in the character of God.
It is seen when we firmly and deliberately say, “I do not understand what God is doing or even where God is, but I know that He is out to do me good.” Abraham had this quality of faith so he trusted and obeyed God even when he did not understand His directions and commands. And in this text Abraham received another completely incomprehensible demand from God.
Now remember Abraham had been promised by God that through his son Isaac, his descendants would grow until he became a mighty nation….a nation through which all nations would be blessed.
So this promise depended on the life of Isaac — and now God was asking for his life. Can you imagine the mental struggle that Abraham went through?
As Chrysostom puts it, “The things of God seemed to fight against the things of God, and faith fought with faith, and the commandment fought with the promise.” You know many of us have times in our lives when things happen for no reason……horrible things that we cannot understand. Businesses fail. Our health fades. Our loved ones die. Bad things happen for no apparent reason. And it is in these times that we are faced with life’s most difficult battle….the struggle to TRUST the nature of GOD for those things that we cannot understand.
This kind of trust is so hard embrace but we need to grow to the place where, like Abraham we put our faith in the Person of God and not in the circumstances of life. And Abraham did this. He placed His son’s life in God’s hands. He believed that even if God were to take Isaac’s life, He would give it back. He placed his faith in the Person of God — the nature of his Heavenly Father not in the circumstance. Scan today’s text with me to see this aspect of Abraham’s faith: In Hebrews 11:19 it says that Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac to God because he, “….reasoned that God could raise the dead…” In Genesis 22:5 Abraham left his servants behind and went up to sacrifice his son but he said, “WE -not I-WE — will come back to you.” In verse 8 when his son asks him where the lamb was that they would sacrifice he said, “God Himself will provide the lamb.” And Abraham’s faith was not misplaced for GOD once again made a way. He did produce a lamb for a sacrifice.
And I want us to catch something important here. After this experience…after he and his son had sacrificed the lamb and worshiped God…Abraham named the mountain, “God will provide”. He did not call it “God DID provide” in memory of something God had done.
No, he called it, “God WILL provide”. Now, Abraham wasn’t making a grammatical tense error here. Rather than just record the past, God was using Abraham to prophecy into the future. You see, Abraham and his fellow heros of the faith were oriented toward the future. As it says in Hebrews 11:13, “They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance.”
Abraham’s faith enabled him to see into the future — to see that there was coming a time when God would once again lovingly act in our best interests and make a WAY when their was no way. In naming this mountain, “GOD WILL PROVIDE” Abraham was foretelling the sending of His only Son to provide a WAY for us all to know Him. Abraham’s sacrifice that day anticipated another sacrifice…another LAMB that God would provide. You see, because of our sinful state there was no WAY we could know God. As it says in Romans 5 we were all, “God’s enemies.” separated from Him…far away…without hope. But Ephesians 2:13 says, “But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. Consequently you are no longer foreigners and aliens….but members of God’s household.” In sending “the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world,” God once again was revealing His nature.
You know, in Jesus’ day when it came time for lambs to be born, shepherds frequently faced the problem of what to do with a newborn lamb who’s mother died in giving birth. They also faced the opposite of that problem: what to do with a mother who’s newborn lamb died or is born dead.
So they had a baby lamb needing a mother and a mother needing a baby lamb. And the mother would not recognize this orphan as her own child….she would not care for it.
Well, long ago they discovered a way to solve both of these problems at the same time. To get this mother to “adopt” this motherless little lamb…to get her to see this lamb as her own child and nurture it and feed it, here is what they would do: They would take the ewe’s dead lamb and drain it’s blood and then they would take the motherless lamb and cover it with the blood from nose to tail. When they did this, the ewe would adopt this baby as her own. The scent would be that of her own offspring and she would eagerly love it and nurse it as if it were her own flesh and blood.
And I share this because it is a parallel of what happens to us when we become Christians. Jesus was God’s own Son. He died on the cross for our sins and when we ask Him to, He washes us in His blood. And then God adopts us as His own children. According to I Peter 1:19, “We were redeemed…with the precious blood of Christ, a Lamb without blemish or defect.” So as I John 3:1 says, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” And we rejoice in this truth today…as we take communion! We celebrate the fact that Abraham proclaimed on that mountain so long ago. God did provide the Lamb! God has made a WAY when there was none!
As we begin let me encourage all Christians present today to join us.Even if you are not a member of this church, join us in this time of communion. If you are His, this is Yours.
COMMUNION
The words to our invitation hymn proclaim the glorious news that: “….there is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Immanuel’s veins….and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains!”And this morning we invite you to hear this truth and respond. In sending His only Son to die on Calvary’s cross, God gave us the clearest picture of His true nature. He loved all mankind sinful though it is to make a way when there was no way–a way for our sin to be cleansed so that He could claim us as His own children.
So, if you are here today and are not God’s child. If you have never asked God to forgive you of your sins then we invite you to do so.
Put your faith in the Lamb Who was slain before the foundation of the world. And make that decision public by coming forward and sharing it with me as we sing. If you have other decisions to make public we encourage you to do so. Perhaps God is leading you to join this church or rededicate your life to God in some way. Whatever your decision, I encourage you to walk this aisle and share it with me.