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"The Test of Faith" Text Comments: v.2 "Moriah" is identified in 2 Chronicles 3:1 as the place where God had halted the plague upon Jerusalem and where subsequently Solomon had built the temple, the first indication that what follows is, indeed, a picture of the sacrifice that Abraham's seed -- not Isaac, but Jesus Christ -- would offer for the salvation of God's people. v.3 The early start, as in 21:14, signifies the promptness and resolution with which Abraham approached the difficult assignment he had been given. Those who look very carefully and think long and hard about the text of Holy Scripture have noticed that the order of Abraham's actions is unusual. He saddled...took...and he cut wood... the sequence of words in the Hebrew suggesting a chronological order even more than in English translation. Certainly he would have been expected to cut the word first and then saddle his donkey and collect his servants and son. It is suggested that this is a clue into Abraham's state of mind: either he is so distraught he can't think straight, or he is trying to keep everyone in the dark about the purpose of the journey until the last possible moment, or he is postponing the most painful part of his preparations until it can be put off no longer. v.4 "On the third day..." Protracted, sustained obedience under pressure. v.6 We cannot avoid thinking of the fact that Jesus was made to carry his own cross. It is fascinating that the Genesis Rabbah, the Jewish commentary on Genesis, comprised of materials finally collected some centuries after Christ, speaks of Isaac with the wood on his back as like a condemned man carrying his cross. Further, Abraham walked alongside his son carrying the knife and fire. Father and son together. A point is made of them walking together, as the refrain is repeated in v. 8. "It was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer..." Isaiah 53:10 v.7 It was Isaac who broke the oppressive silence. v.8 However you imagine Isaac in this scene, either willingly trusting himself to his father's good intentions -- if he has not yet gathered what is about to happen -- or surrendering himself to death in submission to his father and God, the boy is already a man of faith. We have before us in this text, only a portion of which we have so far read, one of the greatest stories in the Bible. I use the word "story" advisedly, for I do not mean to suggest that we do not also have here the purest history, an account of what actually happened. Surely we do. But as a narrative, as a story, it is one of the most dramatic, memorable, powerful, and moving in the entire Bible. And why not? It is, as every reader of the Bible fully understands, an enacted depiction of the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus Christ for us and for our salvation. We will get to that next week, Lord willing. I want this morning to pay attention to its more subjective features. I want to see it as an account of God's dealing with Abraham, of Abraham's faith being tested. Whatever the text may say about the way of salvation through the death of a substitute -- and it surely has much to say very beautifully about that! -- the chapter opens with an explanation of the meaning of what follows: "Some time later God tested Abraham." Scholars have pointed out [Caird, Language and Imagery of the Bible, pp. 93-94] that Moses' narrative style is strikingly different from that of the writers of other ancient epics. In Homer, for example, every detail of time, place, circumstance, feeling, and motive is made explicit. Sometimes a particular episode in the Iliad or Odyssey is lengthened by many lines as Homer labors to make everything, the entire background and foreground, explicit and clear to his reader. Economy, however, is the hallmark of Moses' narrative style. The story is told in the starkest outline and everything else is left to the imagination. Why did God test Abraham? What did Abraham think when this terrible order was given to him? What sort of conversations passed between father and son over those three days? Exactly what did Abraham have in mind when he said to his servants, in v. 5, "we will come back to you"? All these questions and others are what Homer would have devoted much space to answering: what petty antagonisms of the gods were here spilling over into the life of mankind, with what passion, whether of sorrow or anger, his hero responded, etc. But Moses has said nothing about any of this. We are forced to ponder them ourselves and, in our pondering, we are forced to discover what all of this might mean to us and what is being taught us here about Abraham's faith and about our own. How much more powerful an account of all that it is for its understatement, for the economy of Moses' style. Now, the nature of the test is obvious, even if the reason for it is shrouded in mystery. God was asking Abraham to kill his son for sacrifice -- a thing not done by the people of God, never to be done by them, a thing that was known as a terrible evil, for it was a thing done by the wicked peoples of the world of that day -- a thing, in other words, itself and by its very nature repugnant to a righteous man. A thing the Holy God forbad and would never ask of men! But, there is more. The son he is ordered to offer to God as a burnt offering, is none other than Isaac, the promised heir, the child God had promised him so many years before and finally, miraculously had given to him and his wife Sarah. This is the son upon whom God himself had taught Abraham to pin all of his hopes for the realization of the promise that God would make of Abraham a great nation and that all the world would be blessed through him. So much so, that in the previous chapter God required Abraham to send his other son, Ishmael, away B a heartbreaking duty in its own right so far as Abraham was concerned. And now this! Everything being taken from him! And, still more, this is the son of Abraham's old age, whom God himself acknowledges Abraham loves more than life itself. This is the son God tells him to kill! As Theodore Beza, Calvin's colleague and successor -- who was a poet before he was a Christian theologian --, puts the thought into Abraham's mind, in his dramatic poem devoted to this episode: Because, O God, this is thy pleasure, it is sure Now, we think -- we cannot help but think -- that this is not so terrible a thing because, of course, we know how the story ends. But Abraham did not. He had dealt with God for many years and this was not the first time God had seemed peremptory, even cruel, to Abraham. God had promised Abraham a son and then for years there had been nothing but silence from heaven. And now God is ordering Abraham to kill that same son. No, we have here in Abraham, a man who does not yet know the end of the story, and to whom this news -- the narrative makes clear -- came as a body-blow. What we have here, is what we have in many other places in Holy Scripture, viz. the hiddenness of God, what Luther called "Deus Absconditus," the hidden God. What is meant by this is that God acts in ways that are not only mysterious to us but defy our wisdom and our understanding -- ways that seem virtually to contradict what we have been taught about God and his character and his ways. I do not say that they do contradict the truth that has been revealed to us about God, only that we cannot see how to bring that truth into harmony with what God is doing in our lives or in the world. The Bible is very candid about this reality. Ecclesiastes is a book of the Bible devoted entirely to an exposition of it, but there are many passages in the Bible in which we see believers wrestling with God's hiddenness, or in which it is confessed, or even in which we find the saints complaining to God because of it and crying out to him to show himself and reconcile his actions with what he has taught us to believe of his character. In Holy Scripture there is nothing of that chatty certainty about God's purposes that we find in modern preachers. No, his thoughts are far above ours, a great deep we cannot sound, and his ways are, very often, simply past finding out, no matter how much faith a man or woman has! God often asks of his people very difficult things that are hard to understand given what we are taught of his love and mercy and much happens in the world that is frankly very difficult to square with the sovereignty of God. This is what it means to live by faith and why faith is required. Because we must believe to be true what we cannot often demonstrate even to ourselves with the evidence of our eyes. Will Abraham accuse God of a fault, will he conclude that such a command does not deserve to be obeyed, or will he, in humility and faith, conclude rather that in God's hiddenness there must be unexplored and as yet unrecognized wisdom? That is Abraham's test. It is a test of his faith in God. And, as it happens, Abraham responds to this confusing, harrowing demand with faith and love, and learns the lesson that C.S. Lewis described this way in one of his Letters to Malcolm (p. 83):
Abraham's passing this test, the triumph of his faith under this terrible pressure, results from two particular certainties, convictions that stood him very well and which we must cultivate in our own faith ourselves. All because God is God!
This is all that he knew, but it was enough. He didn't know why he was being asked to do the cruel thing God had commanded, but he knew the one who had asked it of him. As we said, we do not know all that Abraham thought through these three days, but v. 8 tells us what was, at least finally, at the bottom of his thoughts: "God himself will provide the lamb..." It is not clear even here that Abraham knows what will happen, how all of this will unfold, but it is clear that this good man is entrusting the matter to God in the confidence that, as he says on another occasion, "the Judge of all the earth will do right." He leaves the matter to God and simply obeys, because he has come in his life to the conviction that God will do what is right, what is faithful, and what is good. God's manner and method have baffled Abraham before -- have even unmanned him before -- but he knows now that manner and method are God's own affair; God's faithfulness is no longer in doubt in Abraham's mind and heart. God will provide -- in whatever way he chooses and whenever he chooses -- God will provide! That is enough and so Abraham follows on in the darkness, doing what he has been told. Surely you and I must be able to think our own way through to this same conviction. Of course the high God, so far above us, seeing as we do not, the infinitely complex web of history, including as it does, its untold connections to each personal life, concerned as he is with so much that we cannot conceive or measure -- the outcome of events and the march of time as well as the unfolding of his purposes of grace and judgment in every human life, as that life is connected to every other human life -- I say, of course the high God is going to act in ways that we cannot fathom and which seem a dark and unwelcome mystery to us. How often a child feels mistreated by a parent who is only looking out for that child's best interest; how often a child feels discouraged and despondent because a true good has been done to him or her, a good he or she cannot see yet or measure. This is faith. If all of God's acts were transparent and easily seen to be consistent with his character by his creatures, infinitely limited in sight and understanding as they are, no faith would be required of us. But faith is required, every day, more faith than most of us can easily produce. All because God is God and infinitely high above us in all his acts -- we are only his creatures.
You are aware, perhaps, that Abraham's statement to his servants in v. 5 -- "we will come back to you" -- is explained in Hebrews 11:19 as a belief that God could raise Isaac to life again if he were killed. At this point -- v. 5 -- Abraham does not know what God will do. He still imagines that he must kill his son. But, he already is sure that even if Isaac dies, he will live again and God's promises to him will prove themselves once more "yes and amen." It is one thing to kill your son if you imagine yourself to be burying all your hopes and dreams with him. It is another thing to kill your son if you are sure you will see him alive again and that all that has been promised to you will still come to pass. And Abraham's mind, the Scripture explicitly tells us, was of that latter sort. How many things in life discourage us and even defeat us because we cannot -- even by faith -- see a future in which all of this grief, or loss, or setback, or disappointment, will be forgotten and all happily confessed to have been God's perfect plan for us and for others. Abraham had travelled the path of faith far enough now to know that the present could not be rightly estimated apart from a future in which all would be well! You know, other ages have had it much worse than we have it today. Far more often they stood weeping beside the graves of those it seemed God should not have permitted to die, the graves in which they had buried so much of their hopes and happiness. A few years ago I stood in Elmwood Cemetery in Columbia, S.C. beside the grave of Nannie Witherspoon Thornwell, the daughter of John Henry Thornwell, the prince of the Southern Presbyterian Church. Nannie had died at 20 years of age, just a few days short of the day on which she was to marry. She was buried in her wedding dress, or, as her gravestone has it, "She descended to the grave adorned as a bride to meet the bridegroom." But her parents had faith enough to know that if they could see her in heaven with Christ, they would neither call her down to earth or charge God with any fault in taking her so soon. But I have a better illustration still. I gave it to a few of you who were then in the church when I first used it in a sermon in April of 1983. But it occurred to me that most of you were not here then and have not heard this story and I want you to know it, because, in my judgment, it so beautifully expresses Abraham's state of mind, his confidence in God in the midst of a terribly dark and impenetrable mystery, grief, and disappointment -- just such a situation as the Bible tells us all to expect in this life. It concerns a hero of mine, Thomas Boston, the eighteenth century Scottish pastor, author, and theologian, still more, a man of God. Read Boston's memoirs if you would learn what it means to live a godly life. My private opinion is that Boston's Memoirs is not only one of the greatest books I have ever read but one of the very finest and most valuable of all the Christian autobiographies. Rabbi Duncan used to say that, if he could, he would sit at the feet of Jonathan Edwards to learn what godliness was, and then at the feet of Thomas Boston to learn how to obtain it. Boston's wife was not a woman of robust health -- indeed her later years were spent under the spell of what an older writer kindly referred to as "a racking disorder of the intellect" -- and every childbirth was for her not only an ordeal, but a threat to her life. In April of 1707, Boston records having prayed earnestly for his wife's safety, as she was near to delivering a child. He says that while in prayer he was given an impression that the child would be a boy and, at that moment, he promised the Lord that if it were a boy and if God delivered it alive, he would name the child Ebenezer, after the memorial to God's goodness that Samuel had set up in Israel. He tells us later that on the 23rd of that month his wife safely delivered and his heart leaped for joy, hearing it was a boy and, so, Ebenezer. But, in the entry for September of that same year we read: "It pleased the Lord, for my further trial, to remove by death, on the 8th September, my son Ebenezer." He goes on: "I never had more confidence with God in any such case, than in that child's being the Lord's. I had indeed more than ordinary, in giving him away to the Lord, to be saved by the blood of Christ. But his death was exceeding afflicting to me, and matter of sharp exercise. To bury his name, was indeed harder than to bury his body...but I saw a necessity of allowing a latitude to [God's] sovereignty." A year later, in August, Mrs. Boston delivered another son, which, Boston said, "after no small struggle with myself, I named Ebenezer." But in October of that same year this son too fell ill with the measles. Boston records how he went out to the barn and there prayed for his son. He writes: "I renewed my covenant with God, and did solemnly and explicitly covenant for Ebenezer, and in his name accept of the covenant, and of Christ offered in the gospel; and gave him away to the Lord, before angels, and the stones of that house as witnesses. I cried also for his life, that Ebenezer might live before him, if it were his will. But when, after that exercise, I came into the house, I found, that instead of being better, he was worse [and in a few hours he was dead]. After the funeral of this his second Ebenezer, Boston wrote: "I see most plainly that...I must stoop, and be content to follow the Lord in an untrodden path..." Now, you tell me, if you can, who is a God like our God who can require of his children that they pass through such deep waters, through such pitch darkness, such punishing sorrows -- when every word of the covenant that God made with them would lead them to believe that he would keep them from such trials and griefs -- and still, at the end, his children love him and trust him and are sure that he would never have asked such things of them were it not absolutely right and good and necessary that he do so. What is this but the highest proof of a true faith, the noblest demonstration of the reality of God's presence in the life of a man or woman, the most powerful evidence of the possibility of mere human beings actually knowing the living God! No wonder, then, that C.S. Lewis should have the old devil Screwtape say to Wormwood, his demon nephew: "Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys." For what else is this but faith in its purest, most Christian form -- this faith of Abraham and the Thornwells and Thomas Boston. This taking God at his word even when it seems that that word is null and void -- what is that but the highest compliment that a human being ever pays to the living God, the highest demonstration of our love for him and our gratitude for the covenant he has made with us, the most persuasive evidence possible that he has proved himself a faithful God to his people. Or, as Beza has Abraham concluding: If then to borrow Isaac is thy will, But what is pleasing to the Lord himself. [In Hughes, Hebrews, p. 486] |
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