The Scripture reading is from the book of Genesis in the Old Testament, chapter 22 verses 1 through 19. That's Genesis 22 beginning at verse 1. After these things, God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham, and he said, Here am I, he said, take your son, your only son Isaac whom you love and go to the land of Mariah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you. 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. 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 am I, 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. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham, and he said, Here am I, 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. And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, By myself I have sworn declare 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 a sand that is on the sea shore. 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 be a sheba and Abraham lived at the sheba. The word of the Lord. Thank you, speak to God. Thank you, Helen and Bob, beautifully read one of the great passages in the Bible that we get to look at together this morning. Let's ask for the Holy Spirit's guidance and help. Oh, great God and spirit of the living word. Would you now take that word and cause it to come alive in our hearts that we might be transformed more and more into the likeness of the promised son, the one and only unique son of God who became the Lamb of God for us. And we pray beholding him and in his name, Amen. Well, this morning we come, excuse me to the climax and the conclusion of our series on the life of Abraham, called People of Promise. We've been looking for the last two months at this great patriarch of really three great world religions, feedback to him, Islam, the Jewish faith and of course the Christian faith. And what we've said is that the New Testament really sinks its teeth into the life of Abraham saying, look, this man was called to live a life of faith based on the promises of God, to live a life of faith, not sight, not experience, not a life based on intuition or feeling, but a life based on faith in the promises of God. And that out of him comes a holy nation unto God and we are those people, we are people of promise, how are we to live that life. That's what this series has been about and really what we've been saying is that the human race ever since the beginning when our first parents decided to disobey God and to choose to live by sight and by feeling and experience rather than the promises of God. When they chose to do that, it's like they took the entire human race with them. It's like we're on a roller coaster but we've been derailed and we're going crazy, it's got this out of control engine on it and so we are just scooting all over the place without any tracks to run on. When Abraham comes around, his life story becomes for us a way to get back on track and in a lot of ways this final chapter, there's a couple more chapters in Abraham's life but this really literally is the high water mark of his life story, it is the climax. And so in this great story, chapter 22, the offering up of his son Isaac, everything is encapsulated. If you want to know how to be a people of promise, how to live life, how to get back on the tracks of life, even though life is a roller coaster in many ways, how to get back on the tracks of the roller coaster. This passage, as the whole story, the last two months has shown us, will reveal. And there's three things that I want to focus on this morning. First of all, the path before us, the path of life that this passage shows us that we're called to follow as people of promise. The provision that God gives to us, God calls us to a very difficult path, a very narrow road. How do we stay on that road? How do we get there? It's only by the provision given to us, by God. And then thirdly and finally, the privilege that it is to be people of promise. We need something to set us forth from here as the people of God into his world as we conclude this series and so we'll look at the privilege that is highlighted in this passage. So we come to the end of our course on Abraham. And what do we see here? A final exam that God gives to him. And the good news in this final exam, I always hated final exams. What about you? In this final exam, the good thing is at the end of this course, someone else takes it. It's Abraham that takes this final exam. And some final exams are tragic. This one becomes triumphant by pointing us to the path, the provision, and the privilege of being people of promise. First of all, the path. What's going on here? Well, this is an extremely difficult, troubling passage. The more you read this passage, the more you study it, the more you begin to become dismayed by some of the things within it. But in it, questions pop up. How in the world can the God of the Bible be asking one of his great figures to kill his son, to murder his son? This is child sacrifice. This is bizarre. This sounds like other ancient Near Eastern cultures. It doesn't sound like the culture of the Bible inculcates. What's going on here? This has been troubling and problematic for a lot of people throughout the ages. One of the great sages of our day Larry King of Larry King Live fame said this, I envy people who have faith. I just can't make the leap. I remember as a kid my father died when I was young, and that was unexplainable to me. The God of the Old Testament, I didn't like things he did. Abraham sacrificed your son. That always bothered me as a kid. I remember thinking, why would he do that to Abraham? As a test. So I said to myself, I don't know, I just don't know, and it's still true to this day. And there's been great thinkers, philosophers, theologians that have struggled with it as well. The Dane philosopher, theologian, Sorn Kierkegaard said this, that he, after wrestling with this passage, he found God's command to be illogical and absurd. And even the very conservative scholar Bruce Walkie, who's one of my heroes, great Old Testament scholar said this, he said this is one of the most theologically difficult texts of the Old Testament, and it actually teeters on the edge of morality. It's very difficult. But look, what's going on here is a test. We're told that right at the outset, it's like the author, Moses wants a big ban or to be raised over this troubling situation, to say, look, this is a test, and it's clear from the way the Lord fulfills or ends the story, that he never intended for Abraham to follow through with it. I think really one of the things is going on here is this ends up being one of the features, early on in the Bible, the distinguishes the Hebrew faith, the Christian faith, from the surrounding ancient Near Eastern cultures, it celebrated horrible things like child sacrifices. This became really a clarion called two morality rather than just the opposite, it ends up being an indictment on other neighboring ancient cultures. And afterwards, later, the same author, Moses, would pin the commandments, the ten commandments, the six commandments, would emphasize that there would be no taking of innocent lives, that would be immoral. And so it's very clearly not supposed to be a passage that encourages this in any way, shape, or form, it is a test. And one of the things to keep in mind is the concept of the first born in the Jewish culture. The first born was the prized child, the heir. And this child was to be gods. Abraham knew this. He had consecrated Isaac to the Lord, he'd circumcised him, he'd set him apart, as holy unto the Lord, now comes the final exam, the real test. Are you going to follow God's directive and actually give up the very thing that he has given to you in Isaac? The other thing to note, I think, is the question that I think some people have in this passage, why does he refer to Isaac as the only son? He's not the only son, Ishmael is really the first born, so how can Isaac be considered the first born? How can he be the only son? It's because Isaac is the only child of promise, that's key. Remember, what's driving the whole Abraham story from the beginning, the promises of God given to him, that must come to fruition through him, through the child, the first born child that will come from the union of Abraham. And so this tension has been building throughout the entire story, beginning in chapter 12, that now comes to its climactic crisis point. And indeed, the word sign in this passage is used ten times over and over and over again, you can't get away with it, I think, for this reason, to accentuate the monumental sacrifice God was calling Abraham to make. It was an extremely severe test. So the passage may be demanding, difficult to understand, mysterious, perplexing, but I want to suggest that the point behind the passage is actually more demanding, because what he's talking about here in this passage is what is to be indicative of all the lives, the people of promise. That is that the path that we're to follow is to be narrow. It is to be an arduous, very difficult path of obedience, radical obedience. Abraham's life, and especially this story, reminds us that that path of faith is one of radical, unqualified obedience. And it's kind of interesting how I think God takes this concept and frames the entire Abraham story. Chapter 12, where the Abraham story begins begins with this line, go to the region, excuse me, go to the land, I will show you. He's to leave behind everything that's familiar, his family, his comfort, everything that he's been doing, all his identity that's been rooted back in the earth of the Caldys, and he's to leave that behind and go to the place that he's going to show. I'll show you later, just go. That's the very beginning at the very end in this passage. Chapter 22, verse 2, it says, go to the region of Mariah on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you. And that, the Hebrew phrase that's captured in both of those verses, go. Literally, you could translate it, get out of there, get up and leave, go where I tell you to go. So, that Hebrew wording is only used interestingly twice in the entire Bible, and it's in these two verses. Unmistakably, the author here is framing the entire Abraham story and saying, look, Abraham's life is framed by the dramatic, drastic, utterly demanding call of God upon his life. And guess what? So is yours. So is mine. Jesus said, unless you deny yourself and take up your cross daily and follow me, you cannot be my disciple. So the road is narrow, and few people find it. It's very easy to fall off on one side or the other of comfort, of legalistic rigidity. And what this passage reiterates is the very demanding, difficult pathway that is laid out, a series of tests throughout Abraham's experiences, you might call them pop quizzes, culminating in this great final exam. Now, this has been in this passage, one of the things that's been difficult to understand about this passage is the way that the Apostle James and the New Testament uses it. Because if you remember in James 2, James who is obsessed with a faith that is really practical, do you appreciate Christianity that is very practical, that ends up doing something, a faith that is at work? That's where James was. He understood, he wrote in a context where people understood that you were justified, you're accepted by God based on what God has done for us in Christ, not anything we do, we receive it by faith alone. What James was hitting at was an abuse of that. It says it doesn't matter what I do. Because I'm saved based, not on my works, my performance, but on God's, then I can live any way I please. It's called antinomianism against the law. Now, in other words, I can live against the explicit law and commands of God because I'm a person of grace in Jesus. James says that is ludicrous, total misunderstanding and he uses Abraham as an example and he says, look, what's not Abraham? Our father, here's our patriarch, was he not justified by works and not simply by faith? And Martin Luther, you know, in the 16th century, he just freaked out over this. He could not stomach this. Call the pistol of James a mightstrawie epistle as a result. But others, John Calvin, for instance, would come along and say, no, look, there's a perfectly understandable way to harmonize these concepts. We are justified by faith alone, absolutely from first to last, but not ever by a faith that is alone. See, you know, if you're alive, they're going to be certain vital indicators, right? You're going to have a pulse. Your heart's going to be beating. You're going to have blood pressure, right? Those things don't technically make you alive. Those are symptomatic of a condition that you are alive. If you're alive, you're going to have those vital signs. If you have faith that is genuine. If you've caught the real disease, so to speak, then it's going to evidence itself, symptomatically, in a life where you lay down your life for others. When you are tempted to lose your temper at someone and you're able to trust instead in the promise of God and not lose your temper, see, that's faith at work. When you're able to leave your comfort zone and go minister to someone who's in physical need, going through great suffering, that's faith at work. When the church is the light of the world or we are the body of Christ, we're going out and ministering in his name, the gospel, in word and deed. That's faith at work and that is tough. It's difficult because it demands everything in our life. When you think of the specific request that God made to Abraham, the command, it is even more difficult. Take your son. Take that which is more precious to you than anything in all of life. Take that which you love and treasure more than anything in all of life. Take your dreams. I mean, all of Abraham's dreams, albeit God's dreams too, were lodged in this son of promise, Isaac. He said, take all of that in this only son whom you truly love and give it up to me. Can you begin to imagine that? I mean, if you ask me, Leo, what's the most painful thing you could ever imagine? What do you not even like to think about? Because it's so heinous. Is that something would happen to one of my children or to my wife. I can't even go there and God tells him to go there and he responds in obedience immediately, early the next morning he's up. Three days he has to mull it over on his journey, his three-day journey, but he's obedient from first to last here. And I think the question that the passage is begging us to ask, certainly, is what's your Isaac? Say, what is it in your life that you dream for? Where are your longings, your hopes? It can be something very promising or it can be something very paralyzing and poisonous. It can be a crutch. Something that keeps you in a comfort zone, something that helps you escape from the pressures of life. One of the ways to get it is to fill in this question. I must have God and standard of living. Certain standard of living or I can't contemplate life without it. If you're a student, I must have God and grades or reputation. I must have God and this certain career path and success therein or otherwise I'm just totally a disaster. I must have my health, my physical health. If you think in terms of crutches, I must have alcohol. I must have this other substance. I must have the ability to do anything I want on the internet. What is your Isaac? What's your dream? Have you always dreamed of getting married and having the perfect marriage and having the perfect children? See, these dreams become for us functional gods and God would never have anything supplant his place of allegiance in our life. It can be something promising like Isaac or something poisonous. Like, remember in Lord of the Rings, Gollum who was dehumanized or de-hobotized, I suppose, by his obsession with the rain. What is precious to you? What is your treasure? What is your Isaac? What if it were all taken away? Job had it all taken away. He's maybe one of the classic examples in the Bible. God came to, or the evil one came to God. God said, if you considered my servant, Job, there's no one like him. Fear is God, righteous man. The devil says, yeah, anybody would be like that if you gave him a blank check. You've hemmed him in. You've given him everything. Lap of luxury, of course. He's on your side. God, but you take those things away. You remove those crutches and he will curse you to your face. So God gives Satan considerable rain, considerable territory. First, his economic system, his portfolio completely collapses overnight. He is bankrupt. Then this horrendous storm, like a tornado or hurricane, collapses this place where all of his children or his children died just like that. His wife begins to cave in and she actually becomes an instrument of the evil one and begs him to curse God to the face. God allows the evil one to even have his physical well-being, totally obliterated. Don't allow him to kill him. Job's response, naked. I came into this world and naked, I will leave. The Lord gives. The Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Oh, it gets tough for him and he's got these friends that come along, you know, as the old adage with friends like these who needs enemies, you know, that pepper him with questions and know. So you brought this all on yourself, Job. Things get pretty bad. But ultimately God comes out of the whirlwind of this horrible experience to remind him that when you have God, the God who laid the foundations of the earth, who created the mountains, who can feed the Leviathan, when you have this great God, you need nothing else. No one always get the answer why to the why question of life's difficulties answered. But as long as you have the who, front and center, you don't need anything else. What is your Isaac? This passage is begging us to see because wherever there's an Isaac, there's a bump in the road, the pathway must be leveled out. For the path, the life of faith is extremely difficult. And you say, yeah, this is what troubles me about my own walk with God or about the Christian faith in general. It's just way too narrow. I can't handle it. I can't stomach it. I can't do it. But see, listen, we talk about it here a lot at Christ the King. That's intentional. Christianity is not simply challenging. All right. This is not just a spiritual boot camp. This is designed to be impossible so that we must rely completely upon supernatural provision. In order to walk this pathway of life as people have promised, we must feed upon the provisions given to us. And this is something that really is central to this passage. Abraham is walking in obedience and Isaac at one point begins to put some of the picture together and he says Isaac is probably an adolescent at this point. It's best to guess that I have here. Verse 7, my father, hear my son. Behold the fire and the wood. He's carrying the own wood. His own wood here, verse, sacrifice. But where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And listen to Abraham's response. God will provide for himself the lamb. My son, God will provide. Jehovah gyra, the great provider. Of course, that's exactly what he did. He provided the ram caught in a thicket, the substitute. And he believed that God would do something like that. The book of Hebrews said, look, if he even needed to go to the extent that he'd raise him from the dead, then Abraham believed that and figuratively speaking, he did receive his son back from the dead. But there's also another indicator in the passage that he really believed he wasn't going to have to come to that because he told the two servants here with him that they needed to stay right there at the foot of Mount Mariah and he and the boy would go and then and worship and then they would come back. He anticipated Isaac would return with him that God would provide. And see, it's that view that keeps us from giving our heart to these other crutches or these other dreams that we've got to have. The question is, what do we fear most? That life won't be whole if I lose these things or do I fear God? Do I reverence him? Am I in awe of his spectacular majesty? His amazing grace.
Abraham was told by God in verse 12, now I know that you fear God. You've passed the test. You fear God. That's what it's all about. God is central. You love him, you adore him, you prize him, you treasure him more than these other things, even your only son, Isaac.
And it really is about the Lord providing that becomes the context, the impetus for art to be able to live this narrow road and walk this path. And this event of Isaac being offered up as a sacrifice, of course, hails for us a future provision of the Lord. Verse 8 tells us that God actually, that was, excuse me, verse 8 tells us that Abraham anticipated a lamb being provided. And technically a lamb wasn't provided, was it? It was a ram that was provided to suitable substitute. And the other thing to note is that God didn't simply, when Abraham passed the test, blow off the requirement for the sacrifice. You've passed the test, we don't need to go through with the sacrifice now. Still had to be a sacrifice. There still had to be an atonement for the guilt. And yet there's a victim change, a victim substitute, a vicar now, this ram. But that ram doesn't quite do it. It's not an unblemished lamb, and it points us through the pages of the Bible, of course, to the coming of the great Lamb of God. Do you remember John the Baptist at the beginning of Jesus' ministry? His job was to stir up a frenzy of interest and enthusiasm and direct people to Jesus, and he saw Jesus walking toward him one day, and he said, behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. It's the same picture here, behold, behold the Lamb, the provision. Mount Moriah curiously, where Isaac was offered up, becomes in the future the place where Solomon's temple is built, where thousands upon thousands of bloody sacrifices would be offered over time, leading as it were a bloody trail, just out the doors of the temple, a short journey, a short walk to Calvary, where Jesus spread out his arms and died. Jesus in John, chapter 8, said, Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. Certainly, Abraham rejoiced, because as he went through this most horrific of experiences of his life, God pointed him to Jesus' day. So where all the provision comes from, look, whenever you and I are tempted to wander off the path, all we need is to feed upon to behold the Lamb. Have you ever heard about the farmer, a guy named Yates, who lived on this farm, and he barely made enough through his work as a farmer to make it in life. He was just struggling, he was on virtual poverty, and was discovered late in life after he'd sold the property that underneath that property was a vast reservoir of petroleum. He was a millionaire several times over, but he lived in poverty. Spiritually, that's exactly how we are, a lot of the time, isn't it? That we've got to live on this path, and we just get burned out, we get run-down life as so tough as this out-of-control rollercoaster, but we have all that we need at every step God provides. So that the Apostle Paul would say in Romans 8, he who did not spare his own son, certainly drawing upon the illusion of Isaac being offered up. He who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? That's the provision, now the privilege. We've got the path that is fulfilled by the provision of God's grace in Jesus, the Lamb of God. The privilege. And we've been talking about really essential themes since January, and it's why God has called us into being as a church. We say that He's called us into being to be a church in the city for the city, for the benefit of the city. And I think that this picture has been reiterated through Jonah and through the journey in the middle of the gospel of Luke, and we've seen it in the story of Abraham over and over who was anticipating a city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. How can we be a people useful in God's hands? It's being a people with the same sense of privilege that Abraham finally came to, laid in life. I mean why was he headed out to Mariah? We say to obey God. But what did he say to the servants? The boy and I will go over to that mount and worship. And then we will come back. And that's what's pictured in the offering up sacrifice, the burnt offering, so much so that the Apostle Paul and Romans 12, after 11 chapters of meditating on God's grace, God's provision in Jesus Christ, He says, therefore, in view of the mercies of God, offer yourselves up as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God for this is your spiritual act of worship. It's a privilege, people, of being worshipers, of being people, of promise, who are alive because we live to worship. But we also live to be His instruments in this city, nation and world. I want to leave you with, because it's been reiterated over and over and over again. God said, I'm going to bless you, Abraham, I'm going to bless you, Abraham. But then He said, in your offspring, shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. Who's his offspring? Jesus, and in Him, we are blessed and become, as Abraham, blessing bears to the city of Houston. What is the only hope for Houston that the light of the world, the Lamb of God, the Son of God, the Son, who has offered up for this world? My impact might spread His grace far and wide, overcoming the difficulties and disastrous effects of the fall. God has called us to live as people of worship, to live in Him as people of grace, and to live as people of blessing, the light of the world, the hope of Houston. May God bless us to that end. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.