Friends, welcome back on this Tuesday afternoon.
We are glad to get to jump back into our Genesis study with you again.
We are here in chapter 21.
We would be picking up in verse 22,
but 22 through 34,
we’re really kind of breezed through
the day.
We’re not going to read this line for line.
We’re going to skip ahead to 22 and set up the sort of intro to what’s happening there.
The section here at the end of 21 is really,
it’s about Abraham and Abimelech.
Abimelech is essentially a ruler and Abraham and Abimelech come to an agreement on water
and God is faithful to provide for what Abraham needs,
where Abraham is.
It may be an interesting story,
but it’s not particularly interesting enough that we decide
that we wanted to hang out there for an entire day.
The point here is,
Abraham makes promises that he’s faithful to,
he swears in agreement
to this other person,
and so we see another side of Abraham.
He’s faithful to God,
he’s also faithful to humans.
Would you say that’s fair, Clint?
Yeah, I think so.
It’s just an informational story that would have had importance in the days where people
knew these places and lived in these areas,
but for us, there’s not a lot in it in terms
of continuing the overall part of the story.
So we move on to what is a pinnacle,
I mean, just an absolute crucial moment in the Abraham story.
In some ways, Michael, though there are some others that could,
you could make this case,
this is in many ways the defining moment of the Abraham story,
and it is a tough one.
This is a kind of text that raises lots of question,
doesn’t provide lots of answers,
is a,
the kind of story,
for me at least,
where even the best explanations still leave
me a little unsatisfied, to be honest.
Martin Luther once said of this part of the story,
“It is too big to preach.”
This is so complex and complicated,
it’s nearly impossible, if not impossible, to understand it.
So if you know the Abraham story,
you probably know where we’re going,
the testing of Abraham,
the sacrifice of Isaac.
So let me start in chapter 22 here.
We’re just going to look at a few verses today so we can talk
about the introduction of this
story and some of the themes,
some of the struggle in it.
So let’s start here,
22 verse 1.
“After these things,
God tested Abraham.
He 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 that I will show you.’
So Abraham rose early in the morning,
saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him.
His son Isaac,
and he cut the wood for the burnt offering and set out and went to the
place in the distance that God had shown him.
On the third day,
Abraham looked up and saw the place far off.
Then Abraham said to the young men,
‘Stay here with the donkey.
The boy and I will go over there.
We will worship,
and then we will come back to you.’”
So right off the bat,
this text raises all kinds of questions.
We don’t even get to the hardest part when we encounter,
“God tested Abraham.”
This is a word that is used in different ways in the Scripture.
Sometimes these tests are a result of God wanting to discern,
determine if someone is faithful or not.
Sometimes testing is spoken of as just the challenges of life.
This is one of the few instances where God designs the test.
God is wanting to make sure that Abraham is obedient.
He now has this son in his life,
and God makes it explicit.
Your son Isaac, the one you love, not Ishmael,
the son Isaac,
your only son,
the one you love,
and I want you to sacrifice him.
Now, there were groups that sacrificed children,
and they are roundly and completely condemned
throughout the Old Testament.
There’s nothing else that I can think of like this in the Scripture.
This is a unique story.
This is a
hard story.
This is essentially, if you want to talk about it theologically,
God asking Abraham, “Is there anything in your life that’s more important than being obedient to me?”
But it gets there in the most troubling way possible.
Right, so we’re going to leave the climax of this story outside of today’s conversation.
If you know the Scripture,
you sort of know what’s coming,
and maybe there’s a danger
in that, to be quite honest,
because we might miss some of these troubling notes right from the start.
When you begin to see this,
look at the end of verse 1 here.
He says to him,
“Abraham,” and Abraham replies,
“Here I am.”
This is a constant sort of refrain in Abraham’s story.
Here I am comes over and over and over again.
We’re going to see that within this story.
Actually, there’s multiple moments
where God addresses Abraham,
and Abraham responds, “Here I am.” It reflects back in some ways to that Garden of Eden story.
Where are you?
Right? And they’re hiding amidst the foliage,
right?
They’re hiding from God’s presence.
Abraham does not hide from God.
And we see all the way back to the New Testament book of Hebrews,
where we see that Abraham
is named as a pillar of faith because of his constant willingness to trust God to lead him.
Of course,
we saw that in the beginning of this story,
when God calls him out of this
foreign land and says,
“I’m going to take you to a place I’m going to show you.”
Well,
that,
take a look here at the end of verse 2,
where God says,
“Take your son, go to the land of Moriah,” at the very end there,
“to one of the mountains that I will show
you.” Right?
So once again,
just this connection to a God who continually calls Abraham,
and Abraham
continually responds,
“Here I am.
I’m willing to go.
I’m willing to do.”
And we’ve seen at different points of this story how already this has created complications
for Abraham.
I mean, there’s been moments when we’ve all wondered to ourselves,
“Come on, Abraham.
What are you doing?
Why are you making it hard?
Or why are you following in this instance or in this way?” Here,
every step he takes closer to the mountain is going to make it even more difficult for
us to understand what is happening here and exactly the exact nature of what God’s test is.
It doesn’t say,
and we would love for it to say,
God’s testing Abraham’s faith,
or God’s testing Abraham’s worship, or God’s testing the covenant.
I mean,
we’d love for that to be clear.
It’s not clear.
And so what we see is Abraham continually takes the next step as required,
and we don’t exactly know the full context of why that is.
That’s on purpose.
I mean,
the text has been written this way on purpose.
But this is a point,
or this is a story,
let me say, Clint,
where it never feels like you
have a firm grasp on the landscape.
It never feels like you know exactly where the next step is going to take you because
there’s so many reversals that happens all along the way.
And we have that in the first two verses of this section.
We will spend some time with this story this week because it is so important.
But I cannot, off the top of my head,
think of a story with as many layers.
The questions that this text evokes,
will God let Abraham do it?
Would Abraham do it?
Is God the kind of God that would ask this of a father?
Is this the kind of father that would do that?
What about the promise that God has already given,
that Isaac will be the bearer of the
covenant?
Is that now on the table or not?
Does Abraham know what God is doing and are they playing some kind of game of chicken?
There are so many nuances to this story,
both in the story itself,
but even in the ways that it’s written.
You know,
again,
something as simple as you read this and says,
“Stay here with the donkey.”
We’re in verse 5 here.
Abraham says to the young men,
“Stay here with the donkey.
The boy and I will go over there.
We will worship and then we will come back to you.”
Does that “we” mean something?
We don’t know.
It’s hard to know in this story exactly what lesson we’re being asked.
Is Abraham a man so faithful
that he will follow through with this heinous command?
Because other gods ask that of their people,
that the neighbors that live around Abraham
sacrifice children to their gods.
Is God that kind of God?
Is Abraham worshipping that kind of God?
Or is Abraham just unquestionably obedient?
You know,
again, typical of the Abraham story,
says, “I want you to go sacrifice your son.
You’re only the one you love.”
So Abraham rose.
So Abraham went.
We’ve seen that before.
This is a troubling kind of story,
less so because we know the ending of it.
But if you allow yourself to slowly dig through the layers of this story,
you’ll find more answers than questions, but they will all be profound and they will all be deep.
This is a
really, really difficult text to kind of
know what to do with.
So I think one of the core questions that maybe helps us into the text is to follow this theme,
this larger theme that we’ve been following this whole time,
which is namely
that God makes a covenant with Abraham.
God says that I will make you a great nation, right?
And this is going to happen through your son.
Abraham receives this son.
They name him laughter,
this idea of seeing the amazing goodness of God’s providential promise-keeping ability.
Now God calls Abraham to do a thing that would by its very definition of execution
finish that line.
It would keep Abraham from seeing the fulfillment of God’s covenant.
The question that follows is how can you have both of those?
How can you have God’s promise and God’s command to break that promise?
How do you find a road beyond that?
And maybe that question helps us sort of lean into a little bit of Abraham’s choices.
Now, Clint, you already alluded to this and I don’t find it particularly helpful to try
to bring character analysis to stories like this because quite frankly,
you’re speculating beyond reason.
What did Abraham feel?
What did he intend?
What did he think?
The text doesn’t tell us that and that’s on purpose.
In fact,
let me point to a detail here.
You know what is not common in the scriptures is right here when God says,
“Your only son,” this is verse 2,
“Your only son Isaac,
whom you love,” is not often in the scriptural
text that we get language of love.
I mean, that’s built into our culture.
It’s built into our way of thinking.
But in the scriptures,
we don’t get a lot of that kind of language.
Here, it’s clear.
It is supposed to be plain as day that Abraham loves his son.
He loves him not just for the outcome,
not just for his name being continued.
He loves him for who he is and yet God has asked a thing in this testing,
however we’re to understand that, that would unravel that.
So that unreconcilable force,
these diametrically opposed things,
set this story off.
As the story continues,
I think you can just say there’s more and more and more force applied to
it.
I mean, ultimately, the question becomes even more pressing.
Wait a minute.
Are we going to go farther?
Wait, how is this going to resolve?
Can this be resolved?
We only see it the very last minute when it is resolved.
If we could see this story,
Clint, with fresh eyes,
if we didn’t see the beginning of this
story through the lens of what we know happens at the end,
this story is both troubling,
but those layers are also far more present at the beginning than what you might think.
Yeah, there are some reasons to suspect that this text is not what we’ve often thought it is.
And why does Abraham have to do the sacrifice
after a journey of several days?
Why a particular mountain?
Why not where he is?
Why is the place he goes, Moriah,
a Hebrew word for something like to see?
I’m going to test you in the place where we’ll see,
where we look for something.
We see what we see.
Why is Abraham asked to do something that God has consistently in scripture
called abhorrent?
Why would God ask Abraham to do something immoral?
Is the question here whether Isaac is too important?
Is the question whether Isaac is an idol?
Why is Abraham being tested at all?
He’s been faithful at essentially every turn.
Why is it now in doubt that he would do what God asks?
There’s just so much here that I think we should be very careful.
We should generally be careful,
but we should be exceedingly careful in a story like this
with any confidence that we have it figured out.
This is really intricate,
really complex.
This is tough interpretation.
We will see some of that again as we continue with this story tomorrow.
But if this story makes you uncomfortable,
then I would say good.
You’re listening to it.
You’re hearing it.
You’re struggling with it.
This is not a story that one should take lightly and say,
“Oh good, Abraham did the right thing.”
Because I don’t think that’s the way the story is meant to be heard.
Yeah, I think that’s accurate,
Clint. And I do think that sometimes folks feel like coming to a text with a struggle as deep as this
is somehow unfaithful.
I want to encourage you that the scriptures are written for adults,
and they’re intended to speak to real human experience.
I think that is one of the most beautiful aspects of the scriptures is that ultimately
they’re not interested in painting humanity with a rosy picture where everything resolves nicely.
It doesn’t have a Disney-esque ending at every turn.
And that’s on purpose because that’s the experience of what it means to be human.
And here,
as we encounter a text like this,
let’s be very clear.
There are irresolvable tensions that along the way
have unbelievable revelatory
moments.
In this story alone,
that does not count,
and I’m not going to step further into this,
but that does not count what the New Testament Christian church does with this text as they
come back to it and they see it through the revelation of Jesus Christ.
It becomes even more full and varied and contextual,
contextual even.
And I just want to name that this is not a good story to turn to,
to find some sort of literal application and what do we do when children die,
or what God expects for children.
I mean,
at its worst,
this text has been turned to for those reasons.
It has to be read within the context of the whole rest of the Old Testament,
where Clint is right on.
This action is not only forbidden,
it’s against the law,
but it is rejected in the strongest language.
It’s not like just don’t do that because that’s the thing you shouldn’t do.
It is to say that those who do it are abhorrent.
What do we do with the fact that this is part of the testing and that this is part of Abraham
and the cost that’s asked and that Abraham was willing to do it in the first place or maybe?
I mean,
should we be confident of that, right?
All of these things together add up to a very wide-eyed kind of picture of what it looks like
when humans are following God’s will to the best of their ability.
And in the midst of all of that,
it’s not always simple.
It’s not always easy and the text doesn’t make it easy.
No, not at all.
And maybe just a couple of other thoughts as we pick up again tomorrow.
On the one hand,
it does matter.
God, of course, is above our human moral codes.
God is not accountable to what we say is good or bad.
God is beyond all that and what God does is good by the virtue of the fact that God does it.
Having said that,
the first verse is important.
God tested Abraham.
He did not command him.
He tested him.
God is the character in this story who perhaps knows that Isaac is in no danger.
God is going to learn something perhaps about Abraham either that he won’t do it
or that he would be willing.
And either way,
God is
going—I mean, there’s no—from God’s perspective,
it’s possible there’s no threat to Isaac at all.
On the other
thing, I think, to keep in mind is when you understand
the monumental importance of the covenant to Abraham in the Old Testament—really,
that covenant, that moment, is going to be the doorway that gets us to the entire rest
of the Old and New Testament.
And that moment of seriousness is a life and death moment.
Is Abraham the benefactor of God’s grace and promise?
Is Abraham the one who,
through all the nations, will be blessed?
Is he completely obedient?
Is he willing to be faithful in the hardest moment?
Is he able to
put aside everything else and willing to do whatever it is that God tells him to do?
Now,
this seems like a brutally unfair kind of test,
and it is.
But this is in some ways the biggest moment in the Old Testament.
I mean, one could make a case that this is one of the biggest moments in the Old Testament,
and that the rest of the story hinges in some fashion on this moment.
And again,
that means we shouldn’t jump in to either side.
We shouldn’t jump in,
“This is horrible.
Oh, this is great.” We should be able to live with the discomfort of it as we seek to hear what might be true in it.
Yeah, this is purposefully a narrative section of Scripture.
It’s purposely told as a story.
Stories have a unique ability to capture truth because they are not didactic.
They don’t sort of lay down in bullet point fashion.
This is what you should take away from the story.
Do remember,
just literally, I think two days ago,
we talked about—no, I’m sorry, that would have been yesterday—we talked about Hagar and Ishmael,
right?
I mean, there have been difficult decisions made at many steps of this journey,
and we have sort of lived through those.
What we come into now is another difficult step, except this time
it directly concerns the covenant.
And I think that’s what amps this up to the nth degree,
is that Hagar and Ishmael,
that makes us uncomfortable because these are minor
characters that are being put out.
This is the major character.
This is the one who physically represents God’s promise-keeping ability,
and the testing is at that nexus,
at that very place.
So it calls into question everything about Abraham’s intention,
about really his advantage and his willingness,
the
stuff of his soul.
It also does have implications for how we view God.
And I think that’s where a story like this does get
messy, is because while it’s teaching one thing,
it causes the human soul to ask a plethora of other legitimate questions,
and it’s not concerned to answer all of them.
And so that’s where we find ourselves.
For whatever you’ve heard today,
this is just the beginning.
It only gets more complex and nuanced as we go on.
Yeah, as you’ve said a number of times in Genesis, Michael,
we have to keep ultimately in mind that this is a story about God.
It has characters in it,
but it is God’s story.
And I think hanging over this text as we move tomorrow is the question,
what kind of God is this?
The Israelites knew of other gods who demanded the sacrifice of children.
Is God that kind of God?
And is Abraham’s only choice to do this horrible thing or to be punished and outcast by the God?
That was the belief of the people around them.
So hanging in that balance is the question,
do we have a God like the gods of the people around us,
or do we have a different kind of God?
And it doesn’t in some ways make the story more comfortable,
but the answer matters and we get to the answer tomorrow.
Thanks for being with us, friends.
We hope that this has spurred good questions for you,
and we look forward to continuing the conversation
and digging deeper into this story when we gather tomorrow.
Thanks a lot.