Text: Genesis 22:1-18                                                                                X Invocavit (1^st Sunday in Lent)

Shades of Things to Come

            In the name of Jesus, dear friends in Christ:  today’s Old Testament lesson, the story of the near sacrifice of Isaac, is surely one of the most startling and puzzling episodes in the entire Bible. I think maybe to a certain degree we are desensitized to it from having heard it so many times before; but if you were just reading through the book of Genesis for the first time, it would really take you by surprise.  I mean think about it in context:  God calls Abraham when he is a stately seventy-five years old and tells him to pack up and move out.  He tells him, “I’m going to give you a land of your own, Abraham.  It’s going to be my gift to you and your descendants after you forever.  So get going and keep heading west.  I’ll tell you when you get there.”  So, amazingly, though they are both already well passed retirement age, Abraham and his wife, Sarah, collect up their things, and they head west.  Oh, and they have no children.  So they’re heading to a land that they haven’t seen that’s supposed to be inherited by descendants that they haven’t got, nor, considering their age, are they likely to get.  But they step out in faith because … well, because the Lord said so.

            Once they arrive in Canaan, however, they don’t find what they expect.  Oh, the land is very nice indeed, just like the Lord said it would be; but it turns out that it’s already completely populated by various groups of natives. And these people are for the most part pagan, wicked, warlike … they aren’t too keen on sharing their land with an elderly couple recently arrived from the east.  Much less do they plan to move out peacefully so Abraham and his as yet nonexistent descendants can take over.  And that’s pretty much how the situation stands for the next twenty-five years. Abraham and Sarah live as nomads the whole time, without so much as an acre of land to call their own.  And every day they get a little older, and so every day the goal of having a child slips that much farther behind them.  Then, finally, when the situation is so far passed being hopeless that it’s become utterly inconceivable, the Lord returns and says, “Get ready.  This time next year you two will have a baby.”  I mean, they are one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.  They’ve been out shopping for caskets and headstones, and along comes the Lord and tells them to get the nursery ready. Both of them laugh out loud at the Lord’s Word.  It simply can’t happen.  And by now they are so used to disappointment with the Lord and his grand promises that they probably don’t care.  “Look, we did what you told us to do, and what have we got to show for it?  Nothing.  So, it’s a very funny joke; but we’re tired of it.  Stop pulling our legs.”

            Good thing the Lord loves a challenge – especially when that challenge includes working faith in the hearts of hardened unbelievers.  To the both of them the Lord said, “What are you laughing at? I’ve told you that you will have a child, and you will.”  And true to his word, the Lord delivered – or rather, I suppose I should say that he kept his word and Sarah delivered.  In any case, they named their baby boy Isaac, which means laughter.  They called him that for two reasons:  first as a reminder they had had the foolish temerity to laugh at God’s promises, and second and more importantly, because their son filled their lives with such great delight.  Little Isaac became the bright light and joy of their old age.  And he was more than a son to them.  He was also the proof positive that God makes the impossible happen in order to fulfill his promises to the people he loves.  Isaac was their living miracle – and they knew that he was the means by which God would fulfill all the rest of the promises he had made to them.

            So, like I said, if you were reading the story for the first time, at this point it would have seemed to have come to its happy conclusion.  You’d be thinking, “Isn’t that nice?  Though it was a long time in coming, the Lord finally came through and kept his word.  Now Abraham and Sarah can live happily ever after.”  It would seem so; but then you come to this next chapter and find that it’s not over at all.  In fact, the hardest challenge is yet to come.  When Isaac is a lad of about 10 or 12 years and everyone is just about as happy and satisfied as they can be, along comes the Lord with a test for Abraham. He says, “Abraham, take your son, your only son, the one you love, Isaac, take him to a place that I will show you and sacrifice him there as a burnt offering to me.”

            And we think, “What?  What’s going on here?  How can he demand such a terrible thing?  Doesn’t he know what that will do to Abraham?  How it will tear his heart out and destroy him?  And since when does God ever demand human sacrifices of anyone? It’s just not right!  And how will God keep his promise to Abraham if Isaac is dead?  The Lord said that it was through Isaac that the promises would be fulfilled.”  It doesn’t make any sense.  And it raises a number of other disturbing questions.  I mean even for us who know how the story ends, we want to know why does God have to test anyone if, since he’s God, he already knows what the results will be.  And if he wasn’t really going to make Abraham sacrifice Isaac anyway, why did he put him through the living hell of spending all that time thinking that he would have to? That seems just plain cruel.  And then at about that point you have to start asking, “Does the Lord ever test people like that today?  Does he ever test me like that?  And is that how much faith I would have to have to pass the test – enough that I would be willing to sacrifice my own child?  You’ve got to be kidding!  How could I ever pass a test like that?”

            Yes, this story raises a lot of questions; and so what I’d like to do is spend some time discovering the answers to at least some of them.  We have before us what is obviously a test of faith – no one will debate that.  And it’s clear that Abraham had faith; that’s why he so boldly answered the Lord’s call and stepped out to go to the Promised Land in the first place.  The trouble is that Abraham wanted to combine his faith with his own works.  He thought that he had to help make the promises of God come true by his own strength and effort.  “Yes, God gave me the promise, but I’m the one who grabbed hold of it.  I’m the one who moved.  I’m the one who, somehow, is going to have to wrest this land away from its pagan inhabitants.  And I’m the one who will have to produce a child and heir.”  You see, the problem with Abraham’s faith was that it was mostly in himself.  So the Lord waits twenty-five years, until Abraham has been forced to give up all hope in himself before he acts.  In so doing, he’s teaching Abraham an important lesson.  “It’s not about what you can do; it’s about what I have promised. Your job is to do nothing and simply trust me to do what I’ve said.”  But when the first real test of faith under these conditions comes and the Lord says, “Abraham, within the year you will have a son”, Abraham flunks the test miserably. He laughs in the Lord’s face.  But you see the problem.  Abraham thinks that the Lord can’t fulfill his promise because neither he nor his wife are able to do their part.  But that’s what the Lord is trying to get him to understand: “You don’t have a part.  I’m doing this for you.”  And to emphasize his point, the Lord turns Abraham’s mocking smirk of unbelief to the full-bellied laughter of joy.  Abraham is glad to admit, “Yes Lord, despite my unbelief your word is always true.”

            So now, a decade or so later, the question is, “Did Abraham really learn the lesson?  Does he still believe it?”  The Lord comes asking him, “Will you trust me now?  Though you cannot see how, and though I’m asking you to do something unthinkable, will you trust me enough to believe that if I tell you to sacrifice your son and you do it that somehow I will still fulfill all the promises I have made to you – and that I will fulfill them through Isaac just as I have said?”  We’ve already noted that God knows the answer to the question.  The one who doesn’t know is Abraham.  You never know how well you will do on any test until you take it.  And so we see that the test, as difficult as it is, is for Abraham’s benefit.  He’s given the opportunity to try his faith precisely so that he (and all the rest of us) can see how far he’s come.  And it turns out that as soon as he knows the answer for sure, when he’s fully committed to plunging the knife into his beloved son’s throat, convinced that if his boy dies the Lord will raise him up again from the dead—at that point the Lord stays his hand.  “That’s enough, Abraham; you don’t have to sacrifice your son for me – but because you have shown such great faith in your willingness to do even this you can be absolutely certain that I will fulfill all the promises I’ve made to you – and that through your offspring all peoples of the world will be blessed.”

            And so it happens that by passing this test of faith, Abraham became more than just an example for us; he became also the spiritual father of all the faithful – of all who like him renounce what they themselves are able to do, and who deny what their own eyes see, what their sinful hearts tell them, what their worldly reason and logic insist must be true, and instead trust implicitly and completely in the words and promises of God.  And more than that even, though I seriously doubt he knew that the was doing it at the time, by passing this test of faith the way he did, Abraham demonstrated in a prophetic sort of way exactly how the Lord God would keep all the promises he made.     

            What do I mean by that?  Well I’ve said before that pretty much the whole story of the Bible is laid out for us already in the book of Genesis – that the stories and persons therein are the shades and shadows of much greater things to come.  They carry a deeper theological message than what’s apparent on the surface.  And we should expect as much because our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the very Word of God, and who is the one through whom all God’s promises to us are kept, is always the sum, the substance, and the key to understanding the Scriptures.  If we haven’t yet found Jesus in the story, then we really haven’t fully understood it.  So, here we have a story about someone having to sacrifice his son – and that should sound awfully familiar to us.

Then we consider who the main characters are.  We have Abraham, whose name means “the exalted father”, and who, as I said, is considered the father of all the faithful.  If we had to guess who it is he might be representing, it seems rather obvious that it would be the one who really is our exalted Father in heaven. Okay, then we’ve got his son, his only son, the one he loves – who just also happens to be the long expected child of promise who was born as a result of a miraculous conception.  There can’t be any doubt about who it is that he represents.

            The two of them, then, travel by donkey (of all things) a theologically loaded three days to Mount Moriah – the very place where, a thousand years in the future, King Solomon will erect a magnificent temple to the Lord, and where for the next thousand years after that until Christ is born, the blood of countless sacrificial animals will be shed to atone for the sins of the people.  There at the base of that stony hill, the father lays upon his son the wood that will be used to raise him up from the earth and destroy his body.  The boy has to carry it up the hill to the place of his own sacrifice.  And again, it all sounds awfully familiar.

            As they climb, we can feel the father’s anguish knowing what he must do when they arrive at the top.  Then, breaking his silent reflection, the innocent question of his son, “Father, I see we’ve got everything in order, the wood, the fire, the knife … but where’s the lamb for the sacrifice?”  Abraham’s answer is far more prophetic than he knows. “The Lord will provide himself the lamb for the sacrifice.”  And so he did:  for Abraham and Isaac with a substitution:  a ram caught by its horns – its crown, as it were – in a thorn thicket, no less; and then in the same place much later, for all of us a substitution: instead of the ones who justly deserved to die for their sins, his own beloved Son lifted up on the wood and wearing a crown of thorns.

            Abraham showed his faith by his willingness to offer up his beloved son, just as the Lord had asked; but the Lord showed his infinite faithfulness to Abraham and to us by completing the sacrificial offering of his beloved Son as the atonement for all sin.  And in so doing, all his promises to us are fulfilled and we inherit the eternal Promised Land.  Our part, like Abraham, is to do nothing; but simply to hold out our hands and receive in faith what God in his mercy freely gives.  And to strengthen your faith and assure you of the absolute reality of what he has done for you and for your salvation, in a few moments he’s going to give you again the very body and blood of the Son he offered to up to death and raised to life again.

            He does this so that you, like Abraham, will believe him.  He wants you to believe that what he says is true – that you can trust him – and that nothing that may happen, not trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger of the sword; and not death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any other powers, neither height or depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate you from his love which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.  Today and every day that follows, may God grant us the grace to repent of our unbelief and mistrust and to believe this good news.  In Jesus’ name.  Amen.

Soli Deo Gloria!