"Abraham's Test" Sermon: Hebrews 11:17-19

“Abraham’s Test”

[Hebrews 11:17-19]

September 29, 2013 Second Reformed Church

We return to our look at Hebrews chapter eleven, and we need to remind ourselves that faith is a means by which we receive by God – it is not a thing we do.  It is by faith that we receive God’s promises as true, and it is by faith that we believe those things and beings which are invisible to us.  Faith is like a gutter that moves rain from one place to another.

And so we look at another aspect of the faith of Abraham.  We remember that twelve years after God promised to give Abraham and Sarah a son, they sinned and Abraham had a son by their servant, Hagar, named Ishmael.  God rebuked them and told them that Ishmael was not the son of promise – he was not the one God would bless all the nations through – he was not the one who would receive the promises God made to Abraham.

In Genesis 22, thirteen years later, twenty-five years after God made His promise, Isaac was born.  The son that God promised to Abraham and Sarah was born and they named him “laughter,” because it seemed laughable to them that people of their age should bare a son, especially since Sarah was barren.

At this time, Sarah got jealous and sent Hagar and Ishmael off into the wilderness and told them to never come back.  But God met Hagar and Ishmael in the wilderness and promised to protect them and make him the father of the people who would surround the land of Canaan – the Arabs.

Chapter 22 ends with Abraham making a treaty with Abimelech when Isaac was somewhere in his late teens.  It is at this time that God gave Abraham a test.

Through it we see:

First, God’s Word may seem irrational, but if it is God’s Word, we must obey it.

Second, God’s Word received by faith compels us to obedience.

Third, God’s Word received by faith enjoins trust in God.

Fourth, if we live by faith, God will provide for our needs.

Fifth, despite the greatest of odds, God is faithful and victorious for the children of Abraham.

“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.’”

First, God’s Word may seem irrational, but if it is God’s Word, we must obey it.

To understand, we turn back to Genesis 23:

            “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 of which I shall tell you.’”

The first thing we notice is that Moses records that God tested Abraham.  The word “tempted” and “tested” are virtually interchangeable, so, we remember what James wrote, “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am being tempted by God,’ for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death” (James 1:13-15, ESV).

            Besides this, God had told Abraham that Isaac was the son of promise – the one He would fulfill His promise to Abraham through – to bless the nations – and take the land.  And God had sworn by Himself, waking through the split carcasses of animals – effectively swearing that if God did not keep His promise, God would tear Himself in half – He would self-destruct.

            And God said, “You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way, for every abominable thing that the LORD hates they have done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31, ESV).

            What is going on?  Has God lost His mind – has God broken His promise?  Or has Abraham misheard God?  Or, perhaps, heard the voice of the evil one?  How could God tell Abraham to take the son of promise and offer him up as a burnt offering to God?

            And notice how Isaac is described, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love.”  There is more repetition in the Hebrew than is present in the English – God repeated tells Abraham to take his son, his only son, the son he loved – and we understand that he is the “only son” in the sense that he is the only son of Abraham and Sarah – the son of promise – his son – his only son – the son he loved.  Abraham loved his son with an abounding love.

            And what does God tell Abraham – God doesn’t tell Abraham that his son will die – this is not the tragedy that Job suffered when God caused their house to fall on Job’s children and kill them – which would have been heart-wrenching enough for Abraham.  No – God tells Abraham to murder his son – his only son – the son he loved – and burn him on the pyre.

            And to add insult to injury – God doesn’t tell Abraham to kill Isaac in the camp – he tells him to go more than a three days’ ride, climb a mountain, and there put him to death.

            What a horrible thing for God to command.  It would be devastating enough for his son to die, but to be commanded to kill him, and to drag it out over days of travel…how could God command something so irrational, so against God’s character?

            I can’t imagine the pain of losing a child.  I know some of you have had your children die – it must be an extraordinary pain.  It may, perhaps, be the greatest pain a parent can suffer.  My mother lost three children through miscarriage.  My grandmother suffered the death of one of her daughters as an adult.  Barbara Araromi, one of our members who has moved away, suffered the death of her only son as an adult.  And this week Suzette Rodriguez suffered the death of her youngest son – Javier’s brother, Christian.

            If God spoke to one of us and said that we had to kill – murder – one of our children – I suspect was would shake our fist at God and shout, “Never!”

            And, perhaps, that is the answer to what God commanded Abraham to do.

            Remember, we are told, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (James 1:17, ESV).

            And, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8, ESV).

            God does not change – the twenty-five cent word is “immutable” – God does not mutate – God does not change in any way – God is always the same and cannot contradict Himself in any way.

            So, what do we do?  (Try not to remember what happens yet!)

            Peter wrote, “so that the tested genuineness of your faith—more precious than gold that perishes though it is tested by fire—may be found to result in praise and glory and honor at the revelation of Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 1:7, ESV).

            The way to make sense of this test – of this terrible command of God – is to understand it as God trying Abraham’s faith – as God melting out the dross – the impurities from Abraham’s faith.  One of the things that makes this command so heart-breaking is the sin that God was working to purge from Abraham – Isaac was his only son – the son he loved – the son he idolized.  Abraham was committing idolatry – looking to his son as the promise and not to God.  God has taken a back-seat to the glory of Isaac.  Abraham had Isaac up on a pedestal where he thought not even God could hurt him, because he was the promised son.

            Abraham did not know what God was up to – as we shall see – but he believed that, as irrational as this Word seemed, it was God’s Word, so he had to obey.

Second, God’s Word received by faith compels us to obedience.

            “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. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar.”

            I would love to know what Abraham was thinking.  He had told God’s command to no-one.  He got up early – had he slept at all that night?  He had prayed to be delivered from the test?  He put a saddle on his donkey.  He cut the wood for the burnt offering – were his servants wondering why he didn’t ask them to cut it?  Two young men carried the wood and the fire.  Abraham had his knife.  And they began the trek towards Mount Moriah, over three days travel.  Did knowledge of what he had to do fester and boil in his heart?  Did Satan attach his mind on the way and try to get him to abandon the trip – to deny God and sin?  What did they talk about on the trip?  Finally, Abraham saw the Mount in the distance.  Did Abraham choke to see it?  Did he cry?

            As we read through God’s Word, there may be passages that we wish weren’t there – commands that make Christianity exclusive of other religions, commands that tell us that we must deny the desires of our flesh, commands that tell us we must obey human law, so long as it doesn’t cause us to sin – there may be places where we ask, “why?” and receive no answer, except, because God said so.  Do we receive God’s Word by faith and obey?  Are we compelled for the love of Christ?

            Abraham received the Word of God by faith and obeyed.

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

Third, God’s Word received by faith enjoins trust in God.

“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 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 altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son.”

            Abraham believed that God had told him to sacrifice Isaac.  Yet, in receiving God’s Word, he also trusted God for three things:  He trusted God that both of them would return from the sacrifice.  He trusted God that there would be a sacrifice.  And he trusted that God would not break His promise to Abraham to bless the world through him and through the lineage of this son.

            It was only in recent years that God hit me in the face with the first verse of this section:  “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.’”

            Abraham trusted God that no matter what happened there, somehow, both of them would return.  Abraham and Isaac would return after they worshipped.

            Once Abraham and Isaac ascended the mountain, it occurred to Isaac that they had the wood, they had the fire, and they had the knife for making a sacrifice to God, but they didn’t have a lamb.  And here again, we might wonder with what tone of voice Abraham answered, “God will provide the lamb.” 

            And so they prepared an altar of rocks, and put the wood on top of it, and Abraham bound Isaac and placed him on the altar.

            Consider for a moment:  Abraham was about 117 years old, and Isaac was about seventeen years old.  How did Abraham bind Isaac and place him on the altar?  It’s unlikely that Abraham had Samson-like strength.  What is more likely is that Abraham told Isaac that he was to be the lamb sacrificed to God and Isaac humbly obeyed his father.

            It’s probably hard enough for you to get your children to take the garbage out or to clean their rooms – if you took them aside and told them that God had spoken to you and that God wanted you to kill them and burn them on an altar, would your son or daughter submit and let you tie him or her up?

            The only explanation is that Isaac was a man of faith – a believer – as well as his father, and he, also, recognized the Word of God when his father told him what God said, so he received it by faith and trusted in God for whatever God was up to – and he allowed his father to tie him up and place him on the altar.

            Abraham believed God when God said there would be a sacrifice, and he trusted God and readied to sacrifice his son as God had commanded. 

And, in trust, he raised the knife, ready to plunge it into Isaac’s heart.  Because he believed that God would not break His promise – he trusted God that He would raise up a people through the line of Isaac through whom the whole world would be blessed.  He believed that God would not – and could not – ever break His promise.  So he was ready to kill Isaac, because he trusted God and believed that even if God required him to murder and burn his son, God could raise him from the dead to fulfill God’s promise.

(As a side note – if anyone tells you that there is no evidence of belief in the resurrection of the body in the Old Testament – here’s one place you can point to.  The Old Testament believers believed what we believe:  when Jesus – God the Savior – returns, the dead will be raised to life everlasting or to suffering everlasting.  And, as we see in the Gospels, especially, God can raise the dead, now, if He wants to.)

            Fourth, if we live by faith, God will provide for our needs.

“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 up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his 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.’”

Abraham had the knife in his hand, ready to plunge it into his son, and God said, “stop.”  The text tells us that God said to stop because “now I know that you fear God.”  Are we being told that God doesn’t know everything?  Did God have to test Abraham because He wasn’t sure of Abraham’s fidelity?  Wasn’t God sure that Abraham was the man to carry out His plan?

Of course not! 

As David wrote:  “O LORD, you have searched me and known me!  You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from afar.  You search out my path and my lying down and are acquainted with all my ways.  Even before a word is on my tongue, behold, O LORD, you know it altogether.  You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me.  Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high; I cannot attain it.  Where shall I go from your Spirit?  Or where shall I flee from your presence?  If I ascend to heaven, you are there!  If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!  If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.  If I say, ‘Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light about me be night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is bright as the day, for darkness is as light with you.  For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb.  I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.  My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.  Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (Psalm 139:1-16, ESV).

In saying,” now I know that you fear God,” God was showing Abraham that he had renounced his idolatry of Isaac – recognizing God as the only One worthy of worship.  God Knows everything – God knew the outcome of the test – Abraham’s repentance and worship of the One True God.  He still loved his son, but he put him in his rightful place, recognizing that God’s promise will be fulfilled because God is God, not because of any particular son.  Isaac was not the key to the promise – God is.

Having said that, we see that God did choose to work through Isaac, and God provided for their needs, not by raising Isaac from the dead, which he could have done, but by providing a ram for them to sacrifice. 

We see, through faith, God provided for their needs.  God strengthened their faith in the promise God had made.  God broke Abraham of his idolatry of Isaac.  Faith in God’s Word was witnessed to Isaac in a powerful way.  God allowed Abraham to see Isaac’s faith in the Word of God in a powerful way.  These were things they needed, and God provided them for them.

That is not to say that God’s provision of our needs will always to our liking.  We remember as Job’s children were killed and his wealth taken away and he became ill and suffered, Job recognized – even without fully understanding – that God is Sovereign, so this must be what he needed, as he confessed, “And he said, ‘Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD’” (Job 1:21, ESV).

Understand, Job suffered, and he didn’t want to suffer – he questioned God about what the point of his plight was, yet he submitted to the Hand and the Wisdom of God.

God has asked us to ask Him to supply our needs – as we pray in the Lord’s prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” (Matthew 6:11, ESV) – with surety that we shall receive whatever it is.

Still, we may rebuff this – How could the death of my child be what I need?  How could my divorce be what I need?  How could being abused be what I need?  How could being terminally ill be what I need?  How could losing all my money be what I need?

We dare not give each other simple answers – we often don’t know why God has ordained things to happen in our lives.  But, we serve a Sovereign God Who holds all things in His Hands and has predestined everything that comes to pass.  That’s why I can be sure that my illness has a purpose – and I have seen some good come of it – not that I wouldn’t take a cure if one is found…

We will not understand all that is the Mind of God, but God has promised to provide for all our needs, and Abraham needed his idolatry to be crushed.

Fifth, despite the greatest of odds, God is faithful and victorious for the children of Abraham.

            “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 have obeyed my voice.’ So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beersheba. And Abraham lived at Beersheba.”

            If God were to leave the completing of His Plan to us, all would be lost.  We continue to sin, despite God’s confirmation of His promise, despite God’s faithfulness, despite God’s intercession, as we see in the life of Abraham.

            God did bless Abraham and Isaac, and over the generations, God is raising up a people for Himself – a people who believe in the ancient promise God made to our first parents – that God would send a Savior that all of God’s chosen would be saved from the Wrath of God and received into His Kingdom.

            But, to do so would come with a price.  Someone had to pay for the sins of God’s people and make them righteous, so God could receive them into His Kingdom.  And here we see that Abraham’s test was also a foreshadowing of what God would do to save His people.  God also has One Son, His Beloved Son, and it was only by God reaching out His Hand to sacrifice His Son that the descendants of Abraham could be received into the Kingdom – forgiven and righteous.

            Jesus explained it this way, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed. But whoever does what is true comes to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that his works have been carried out in God” (John 3:16-21, ESV).

            And John put it this way, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9-10, ESV).

            I don’t know why some have you have suffered the death of your children.  I don’t know why some of you have suffered in other horrible ways.  But I know God is Sovereign.  He and His Word are trustworthy – for He was willing to offer up His Own Beloved Son as a sacrifice to make everyone right with God who would believe.

            It is a horrible thing to suffer the death of a child.  God has suffered the death of His Son, that You might be right with God.  What greater sacrifice could God have made for us?

            Remember:

God’s Word may seem irrational, but if it is God’s Word, we must obey it.

God’s Word received by faith compels us to obedience.

God’s Word received by faith enjoins trust in God.

If we live by faith, God will provide for our needs.

Despite the greatest of odds, God is faithful and victorious for the children of Abraham.

Let us pray:

Almighty God, we look at what You commanded Abraham, and we are, initially, horrified that You would command him to murder his son in the worship of You.  Some of us know the pain of suffering the death of a child and may find this even more repulsive at first glance.  Lord, help us to receive Your Word by faith, follow after You in trust and obedience, believe that You are providing for us, and marvel at the gift of Your Son, Who You put to death for the sake of all who will believe.  For it is in Jesus’ Name we pray, Amen.