by Logan Ames
My wife and I had the pleasure of going on what was at that time the trip of our lives for our honeymoon in the summer of 2016. Thanks to the Lord providing for us through several different avenues, we were able to spend an entire week on the island of Kaua’i in Hawaii. While there are some who have the means to take a trip like that every year, we felt it was pretty likely this would be our only chance to visit such a place in our lifetimes. That reality gave me a little bit of a different perspective on the trip. I found that there was a little bit of pressure to try to make sure we saw and experienced everything we could on the island. We rented a Chevy Camaro convertible in order to see and experience it “the right way." As the week continued, I began to grieve the end of it, almost as much as I was thankful for the amazing vacation.
Most of us have had experiences like that. We focus so much on the great gift we are receiving and grasp it so tightly out of fear or sadness of losing it that we forget to remain grateful. The heroes of our faith had to learn to have the opposite view, depending on their God and Creator while everything else around them was falling apart. Abraham and Sarah received a promise from God very early in their journey, but while things did not seem to be going according to plan, their choice was whether to trust in the promise or the Promiser.
In Hebrews 11:13-16, we see that Abraham and Sarah got to a point where they were “assured” of the promises made to them even though those promises were still far away. This echoes what we see in Hebrews 11:1. Even though they didn’t understand why things weren’t happening as quickly as they thought, they “embraced” what the Promiser had revealed to them. The Greek word for “embraced” in that passage can also be translated “saluted." The passage gives us the idea that the promises of God were like a constant companion for Abraham and Sarah. Even if they were far away, the couple never let them out of their sight. What if we tried this? Could we wake up each morning while we face difficulties and greet or “salute” God’s promises? That intentional acknowledgement could change your life!
For Abraham and Sarah, God’s promises caused them to live as “strangers and pilgrims on the earth” (v. 13). The passage goes on to tell us that the more they trusted in God and embraced his promises, the more they ignored whatever they left behind. Had they been thinking about what they left, they could have gone back (v. 15). When we focus on God instead of all the things we have to leave or all the things we love that come to an end in this life, we can truly begin to see our true home as heaven rather than the temporary attachments we have here.
We’re now in our third and final week of looking at the faith of Abraham (his wife Sarah was obviously a huge part of the story as well). We’ve looked at everything they went through and the patience in the midst of trials that God required of them. But because Abraham learned through those situations to depend so much on the Promiser rather than the promise, he was ready for his toughest trial yet. Hebrews 11:17-19 describes his faith even as he was ready to sacrifice his own son, Isaac, who was to be the heir of the promise Abraham had begun to embrace. Let’s remember that God started by promising to make Abraham into a great nation (Genesis 12:2), then proceeded to tell him his descendants would be as numerous as the stars in the sky (Genesis 15:4-5), then finally guaranteed him that he and his wife would have a son at the ripe old ages of 100 and 90, that they would name him “Isaac," and that he would be the heir to the original promise (Genesis 17:17-19). Isaac was born 24 YEARS after the original promise. You’d think that after God made Abraham go through all of that, he’d finally agree to just leave him alone and let him live in peace! Surely, Abraham had passed the test of faith.
We ought to know that God does not do things our way. He doesn’t act or think like we presume that he “should," because his ways and thoughts are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9). After finally giving Abraham and Sarah the son they were waiting for, God still had more purposes for Abraham as the “father” that many nations would look to as an example of faith. So, he decided to test Abraham once again. Genesis 22 tells us the story of God appearing to Abraham and commanding him to take Isaac up on a mountain and sacrifice him as a burnt offering. You can read the story on your own and I strongly encourage you to do so because there is so much to learn and see. There are so many parallels between Isaac in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament, from the fact that Isaac was the “only begotten son” of the promise, to the fact that he trusted his father no matter what, to the geographical region where it took place being a mountain outside of what later became Jerusalem, to the sacrifice being over wood, to the relief coming on the third day, to God himself ultimately providing the lamb for the sacrifice. For the purposes of learning from Abraham’s faith, the most important thing for us to know is that he was obedient, and then to understand why.
Genesis 22:3 tells us that Abraham did what God commanded him to do the very next morning after he received the order. Verse 8 tells us that he was confident in God’s ability to provide a lamb for the burnt offering, but verse 10 tells us that he was also ready to go through with killing his son just before God intervened and stopped him. Why was he willing to kill his son, who was the only one that would be able to carry out the promise God had given him? Hebrews 11:19 gives us the answer. Abraham “reasoned” that even if he killed his own son, God was able and willing to raise him back to life. Abraham was so confident that whatever God said was true and right, even if it seemed crazy and contrary to everything else. He believed that he couldn’t go wrong following the Promiser, who he knew he could trust to come through no matter what. We must not assume that Abraham knew God would stop him, just to make it easier to relate to our own lives. He only knew that God was in control, and he couldn’t go wrong with full obedience. May we all learn to simply obey and trust God with the results.
Going back to our foundational verse of Hebrews 11:3, I believe that Abraham was able to “reason” that God could raise the dead only because he first understood that God made everything in the universe out of nothing. Faith in God is not blind. It makes the most sense. As of Abraham’s time, no one had ever been raised from the dead. But if our foundation of faith is that God made everything from nothing, then is there anything he can’t do? Regardless of what God requires of you in this life, always ask yourself if you truly have any reason to doubt him. He might ask you to give up more than you ever thought you could, but obedience will never go wrong for you. When everything else will fade away, he is the one sure thing.
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1 comments:
The account's Hebrew text plainly implies that God made a plea, not issued a command.
For one thing, the Hebrew word in v. 2 commonly translated as 'now' is, in many other passages of the OT, self-evidently a plea, and this by o9ne person of another of equal status.
For another thing, God did NOT just say, 'kill Isaac'.
Rather, God PREFACED that with an appeal to Abraham's knowledge of, and hopeful faith in, the Tradition of a sacrificial lamb, and of its connection to Messianic promise (Genesis 3:15) and the implications of these two.
So God did not first say 'kill Isaac', and then draw that out with increasing bad news to Abraham.
No. God did NOT present the issue to Abe in a way that would have 'mounted up' the bad news of the deed. God was not making the issue worse and worse for Abe. God was appealing to Abe's hope in the Messiah and in the final resurrection of the righteous.
Too, Abe was no modern 'cultural' Christian who simply lived in ancient times. Job was akin to such a Christian. Abe, on the other hand, had grown up a *paganized* man.
It had been Shem who had won Abe over to the God of Noah and Adam. So Abe's conversion, though precluding his simply killing an innocent, did not preclude either his or Isaac's willingness concerning the Promise.
Part of the issue is that of the ever-operative nature of the relation between God and Satan in the Court of Holy Angels. The other part is that Abe, unlike Job, was the other 'horn' of Satan's efforts to somehow prove that God is a a fool for praising the saints to Satan's face. Concerning Job, God did not enjoy what He had to allow Satan to do. But, concerning Abe, God had had to be the one to act to test Abe.
The sum total of Hebrews 11:17-19 is a total that is utterly void of any hint that the thing God did there was to *command* Abe to do the deed. In fact, had it been a command, then the Hebrews passage is beside the point. For, that passage suggests only one thing: Abe's very motive for opting in to God's plea in the first place:
'God wants to resurrect my son!'
This was no rationalization, on Abe's part, for having supposesly already complied with the supposed command. It was Abe's very reason for FREELY opting into the plea. ONLY IN THIS WAY was Abe like God the father.
I once had a co-worker who, at that same time, was a youth pastor. His name was Jerry. Somehow, he a and I got into a debate with one another over what is the lesson of the test of the Akeda. He insisted that it was obedience to a command. I, in contrast, argued, purely from everyday normal reason, that Abe reasoned exactly as the Hebrews passage says.
But all during this debate, I did not so much as hint to Jerry about that passage. The debate lasted, off and on, for months, I trying every way I could to show him sound reason.
Ironically, Jerry had been raised in a church that, every year, taught on that very Hebrews passage. But this was a church that, just like Jerry, had the uptight belief that the Akeda was a command, not a plea. So it was that Jerry may as well not have ever heard that passage.
Long story short, I had to finally tell Jerry of that passage. Specifically, I simply cited chapter and verse, told him to read it as his soonest convenience, and explained that it said essentially what I had been saying all along.
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