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We’ve all set out to pursue what we think God wants, only to watch the road curve in ways that make no sense. How do you trust Him when His path seems to undo the very promise He gave? In Genesis 22 Abraham faces exactly that moment as God calls him to offer Isaac.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
Check, check, there we are. Okay. Went straight to mute, I don’t know. Yeah. If you’re wondering what we’re doing online, everything was working about an hour before service and then started acting in interesting ways thereafter, but here we are. Isn’t that a perfect case for why we need to have a topic we’re looking at tonight, which is: How do I trust in God when things aren’t working the way I thought they should? That wasn’t planned, but you know, technology never fails to provide a good illustration.
Let’s think for a moment. We’re going to go into a very familiar passage. This is the sacrifice of Isaac, perhaps the dramatic high point of the book of Genesis in many ways until the very end, right? We have two big dramatic points in the book of Genesis. The first is the lead-up to the birth of Isaac. We talked about that last week—Isaac comes into the world, everyone celebrating—and then later on one of his descendants is going to save the people in Israel. We’re going to get to the story of Joseph as I keep going through Genesis. We’re not going to do that in this series, but you have those two dramatic points, and the high point of the drama in Isaac’s life ironically isn’t about what he does as an adult. It’s not really even what he does; it’s what Abraham does with him. He’s been promised, and now Isaac is supposed to be a sacrifice.
God says to Abraham, “Go and sacrifice your son whom you love, the one that I promised you, the one that you’ve been anticipating so long.” You imagine being in Abraham’s shoes at that moment. Now, most of us haven’t spent our lives having God tell us in actual words, “Here is what your life is going to mean. Here is what you’re going to do with it. Now go and leave your home, go far, far away to the land you don’t know, and trust me that I’m going to fulfill that.” Most of us haven’t had that experience. I don’t think anyone in this room has had that experience. But we’ve all set course, we’ve all set out to pursue what we think God wants us to do in an area of our life and we set out, and then it doesn’t go how we thought it would. What do we do in those moments?
A lot of times, when we’re called to do things and God wants us to trust Him, what we find is that the path we’re on is counterintuitive. Then what are we going to do? How are we going to deal with that? Because what we’re often going to think is, “Well, I am going to solve the counterintuitive problem myself,” and that ends up being even worse. Abraham did that a lot. He tried to do that before Isaac was born. Sarah wasn’t able to have children, so he and Sarah decided, “Oh, well, we can come up with a different plan if Abraham is supposed to have a child.” And so you have Abraham having a child with Hagar and Ishmael. They think this is going to solve the problem, here’s the one who’s going to fulfill God’s plan and promise, but that wasn’t God’s plan.
Several times Abraham decides to try to save his own skin by pretending that Sarah’s his sister. That doesn’t go well either. And that’s how our plans typically go. If you drive around St. Charles County, have you noticed how many new homes and apartments and things are being built at the moment? I can’t — it’s been a very long time since this many were being built all at once. I mean, they’re building homes and apartments like mad. I can’t imagine how they’re going to even fill them all. I know they are; I know that there’s all these reports there aren’t enough homes for everybody and that we need more housing, and so on. But it’s amazing how they’re building them.
But the interesting thing that struck me is you drive a little further out, right? You get out on the borders of the major cities of the county—like you go out past Wentzville, start heading towards New Melle and so on—you go out that way and you find bigger plots of land that people built houses on. Now, why do you go out there and buy, say, a three-acre plot and build a house on it? Well, because you thought, “I see that the city is moving out,” and maybe right now some people are doing that because they say, “Well, I was in this nice quiet area, now there’s 500 new homes and apartments being built, and I just want to feel more like I’m in the country again.” So what do you do? Well, I’ll go out a little further and I’ll buy that plot of land and it’ll be nice and peaceful.
So a bunch of people do that and then what do they say? “Well, you know, it’s so frustrating trying to get out here from my job in the city when the weather is not so great. We need to straighten the road a little bit.” So they take out that curvy road they loved when they were driving out there and found the plot of land. You put a straighter road and a road that can handle more traffic and then now there’s a road that can handle more traffic. What do you do? You build more homes. Then you build some schools, and now you have schools so you can build even more homes. And what you know, the next thing you know, someone’s living out there and saying, “I wonder if I could move out a little further so I could live in the country.” Our plans are often self-defeating ironically as we pursue the things we think we want. Oftentimes we’re playing a part in actually defeating them.
And Abraham here, he’s trying to figure out how his plan is going to work. How does Isaac factor into it? He has a choice to make, and that’s what we’re going to see. And that choice is: Am I going to follow God’s way even though it seems counterintuitive? Or am I going to try to reroute, straighten out the roads a little bit so I can get to that scenic, beautiful plot of land where I’m going to live? What’s he going to do?
Well, let’s go ahead and take a look at verses 1 to 7 of Genesis 22 and hear what he does up to that point. At least we’re not going to go all the way through the story at first; we’re going to leave a bit of a cliffhanger. But let’s take a look here.
“After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, ‘Abraham!’ 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 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, and 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 both went together. And Isaac said to his father Abraham, ‘My father.’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ He said, ‘Behold the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’”
Let’s pray as we dig into this passage. Father, would you be with us tonight as we study your word and help us as we try to understand how to do the things you’ve called us to do? Sometimes it feels, Lord, that we’re defeating ourselves, that we’re just getting ourselves into an inescapable mess as we seek to pursue what we even think you’re calling us to do. Would you help us to see what it is that you want us to see and do what you want us to do? We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.
Sometimes as God calls us, we face circumstances that simply don’t make sense. Anyone ever been there? Anyone ever been there? I’ve been there, and it’s okay to say that. It’s not wrong; it’s not showing a lack of faith to say, as you’re trying to do what God’s called you to do, that it simply doesn’t seem to make sense how you’re going to do it. How is it going to work? That’s not very comfortable either, is it?
We’re not told much about what Abraham’s thinking in this story, but I have to think as Abraham is on this trip he’s thinking a lot. We don’t get a lot of words. It doesn’t sound like Isaac and Abraham are having a deep father-son chat, you know, they’re really bonding as father and son, building up stories of how you travel and what God’s going to do or how the baseball team over in the next land’s doing or anything like that. It’s not; it sounds like it’s a relatively meditative journey, and I believe that’s probably the case. I think Abraham is lost in his thoughts. He’s trying to figure out what in the world’s going on here.
Because here’s the basic problem for Abraham: God’s promised descendants to come through Isaac. God’s promised that he’s going to build a great nation, and here’s one thing—out of all the miracles that God’s done, one thing that Abraham is probably relatively certain of because he knows, it’s never happened—a dead man is not going to be the father of a great nation. I’m going to be dead now.
If Isaac already had children and then, as a middle-aged man, Abraham is a very old man at that point, says, “Hey son, let’s go on this journey and I’m going to sacrifice you,” well, for one, it might have been a little harder for Abraham to make that arrangement. Maybe then Isaac would have said, “I don’t know, Dad. I mean, you’ve said all these years about God, God, and how he’s been faithful to you and so on, but I might wait and see if he wants to tell me about this first.”
It might have been a little more difficult, but Abraham at least as he contemplated that, as horrible as it would have been, could have seen how God’s plan could do both things, right? “I’m going to sacrifice my son Isaac, and Isaac is going to be the father of a great nation.” That’s not how it works.
Isaac is a boy still. Usually, he’s placed somewhere around 12 or 13. He’s young still. He’s not someone who is a baby crawling up the mountain next to Abraham, right? But neither is he decades into life where he might fight back Abraham as he’s being sacrificed. I wanted to mention that very clearly. I think that’s sort of how we assume it.
I saw the other day someone posted a really interesting thread on X about the sacrifice of Isaac, and it was fascinating in so many ways, a wonderful thread. I was thinking, “Oh, this is really interesting.” Professor Philosophy posted it. It was all digging into the details of what Abraham’s thinking and how this might work and how it plays out with Sarah when he returns. Makes this a really fascinating case. Only one issue: It didn’t take into account the ages we’re told.
And so the way he worked it out, Isaac would have been 39 years old when he was being sacrificed. That’s not the case. So it’s helpful to keep in mind where the timeline is here because it helps us to understand the implications. This is closer to the promise occurring than the living out of that promise, and it’s also going to be decades still that Abraham is going to return and he and Sarah are going to have to contemplate what almost happened together. So there’s lots of implications going on here, and they’re not necessarily pleasant ones for Abraham, and maybe he’s even thinking about this when I come back down the hill alone, when I write back home, what in the world am I going to say? How am I going to deal with…
And I kind of wonder if Abraham thought maybe God will get busy doing something else. Could I maybe just come up with a better road to get to honoring God? I could do something a little different. You know, why do I think that? Maybe Abraham wondered that because that’s something I think almost all of us do at some point. God says what he wants us to do. Sometimes we have a very specific sense of call. Sometimes it’s just how should we live? What does God call us to do to be righteous? What does He want us to live like? You know, how should the words of our mouths be shaped? What should they sound like? You know, should we think about, “Am I speaking in a way that’s pleasing to God? How should I interact with other people? Am I living in a way that’s pleasing to God? Am I fleeing things that are impure and running towards the purity of the cross?” There’s so many things in all of our lives, and we do a pretty good job oftentimes of resisting, until it suddenly is a moment like this where the road is curving dramatically, and it sure looks a lot easier if we could just take a shortcut.
And so Abraham was a human being. I think he wrestled with that. We know he did elsewhere, and I don’t think Abraham in between the two times that he basically betrays his wife to save his own skin suddenly otherwise became a much stronger person that goes here and never ever even doubts what he’s doing. Now, to be clear as we go along, as we’re going to see, Abraham does exactly what God is asking him to do, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t struggling with it.
And I think that’s important for us to say that because I think sometimes the way that the evil one likes to say it is that because—sometimes the way that the evil one likes to defeat us is to say, “Well, if you had faith like Abraham, you wouldn’t even contemplate sinning at this point. So you don’t have faith like Abraham; you’re never going to be like Abraham. You’re never going to do what God really wants you to do, so you might as well embrace the sin right now. You’re going to fail anyway, you’re not going to amount to anything, so just go ahead and do whatever—it doesn’t really matter. You’re just in the middle of everyone else who is righteous doing the things that they want to do or maybe some of them right. Everyone’s doing what they want to do, but then there’s the righteous few; they’re doing what God wants them to do, and maybe here’s the amazing thing: they actually are doing what they want to do as they’re doing what God wants them to do. You’re not that person, so just give up right now.”
What do we do when we feel that? We feel that? I think we need to understand how normal it is to struggle. We see it over and over and over again in Scripture, and in this case, and that’s why we’re given this story, it shows yes, we can’t overcome that one of the reasons we’re given this story, but we can see over and over again in Scripture both those who are clearly seeking to follow the Lord and those who really don’t care if they follow the Lord doing all kinds of things and taking all kinds of shortcuts whenever the heat is turned up, whenever the road gets really curvy and it’s really, really uncomfortable.
Consider, for example, the Israelites. We’ve read, if we finished off a few months ago, the journey of the Exodus in our Tuesday night Bible study. They spent 40 years in the wilderness, and 40 years is a picture of a time when they keep messing up. They keep turning away from the Lord. Sometimes they want to follow the Lord. Sometimes they’re all excited, but then they get tired of the menu and they just don’t want to follow the Lord anymore. They get worried, “Well, God’s always provided for us, but what if He doesn’t provide for me tomorrow?” And they don’t want to follow him any longer.
What about the kings? Look at the kings, and time and time again the kings follow the Lord until they don’t. They follow the Lord until maybe a foreign army looks kind of strong, and they say, “Well, you know, I know that God’s provided for us, but is He going to continue?” Maybe I should align with this pagan nation that’s going to lead us into idolatry, because at least then we won’t die. The road’s too curvy—there’s deer jumping across the road and you’re swerving—and you say, “Well, maybe it’s just easier if I take the all-terrain route because, you know, deer crossing.” Think about the disciples.
I shared yesterday that Donna’s memorial—the passage from Mark chapter 4 where the disciples are panicked because Jesus is asleep, and there’s a storm coming up the boat. They’re with the Son of God. He’s right there. They’ve seen him. They’ve seen him do miracles. But they do exactly what I would do: “Well, Jesus has done lots of great things, but why does something bad happen while he’s asleep? He’ll die.” It’s like a wonder.
Now, unlike the kings and unlike the Israelites, what do they do? They actually wake Jesus up. They say, “Hey Jesus, now what?” That should be encouragement to us. Jesus protects them when they come to him. God would have protected the kings as they come to him; they didn’t. And what do we see here with Abraham? Abraham’s challenge: Am I going to trust that God is going to do what’s good even though there’s a whole herd of deer crossing the road and it looks like I need to divert or I’m going to die?
Why do we struggle? That’s because when we put our trust in almost anything at any time in our lives, we find that it’s misplaced. I don’t mean to sound cynical. I don’t mean to sound cynical at all. I’m not saying we shouldn’t trust each other, but what do we know about each other? We’re flawed. We make mistakes. We forget things. I’m really good at that. I’m really good at forgetting things. I have good intentions and I just forget something. I don’t mean to; I’m not trying to fail. Sometimes it’s just pure negligence on my own part, on your own part. Sometimes it’s other circumstances. We get sick, can’t do something, right? We have illness going around the church right now, and we just can’t, and we wonder, “Well, what happens if the circumstance is something where God can’t?” And life seems to tell us that we should question whether we can trust in anything that we’re called to do when the roads start really curving.
So, it was 21 years ago that the Columbia Space Shuttle went up on its final mission. You remember the Columbia? Complete all kinds of missions wonderfully, but this particular mission as it went up, a chunk of the insulation, because it wasn’t properly cared for, came off. And as it came out later on, the sensors on the shuttle revealed that they could see exactly the path as it tossed and hit different parts of the shuttlecraft. So they had a pretty good idea what was wrong, and there was a history at NASA of pretty ingenious thinking at certain times.
For example, if nowhere else maybe you’ve seen the movie Apollo 13 and/or maybe for some of you you remember when Apollo 13 actually happened—the real Apollo 13—not the movie. And you think, “Wow, here is a far less technically sophisticated space program at that time. They’re in a dire, dire situation. What do they do? They thought from the seat of their pants and despite all the odds they managed to get home.”
But what did NASA do as they looked at this? They said, “Well, it doesn’t look like it’s really that bad. I think it’ll be okay.” Now, if I take my car into the shop and the mechanic says, “Well, I think those brakes are going to be okay,” I’ll say, “Well, how about you fix them?” So you say, “I know they’re going to be okay,” right? I don’t want my brakes to go out on my car, but here’s something I’m pretty certain: If I were ever an astronaut, I don’t think I want a ‘think.’ I want a ‘no.’ I don’t want a ‘think.’ I want a ‘no.’
Why did I want that? Because of exactly what we saw with the Columbia disaster. It came back in the hot gases around the re-entering space shuttle came right in where the damage had occurred, and blew the thing up. And the first NASA act shock—it seemed like it was okay. And what could we have done anyway? It would have been hard to go ahead and repair it. Well, if I’m on that space shuttle, I don’t care if it’s hard. Send me out in a space suit and see what I can do. Don’t just send me back in to disintegrate.
Right, and so I kind of imagined the next set of astronauts that went up in the next space shuttle before the program ended wondered what they’re going to say if something happens on my flight. Are they going to say, “Well, you know, it’s probably okay,” and if they say it’s probably okay, can I trust that? And that’s what we experience in big ways and small ways throughout our lives. We experience people saying, “It seems like it’s okay. If you do this it’ll be fine.” And then it isn’t.
And then when God calls us to do something, we say, “But when people say go ahead and do it, even though it seems counterintuitive, even though it seems problematic, more often than not it ends up me being the astronaut on the space shuttle, disintegrating into the atmosphere.” And it ends up being, “No, no, no, if it’s not perfectly clear that everything is okay, I’m not trusting.”
Abraham’s being challenged. Can he understand that God is so trustworthy that even though Abraham knows things don’t always work out in life? Even though he knows that people don’t always manage to pull off what they say they’re going to do, or sometimes they outright lie, that in this case, because it’s God, that he can trust Him even though it doesn’t make any sense at all? If you’re going to do that, that’s really the question of this story.
And it challenges, I think, each and every one of us because we may not ever be put in that exact position, but we’re all going to be asked to do things for the Lord, and it’s going to seem counterintuitive both to our big picture of what we think God really wants out of our lives and what we want out of our lives. And we’re all going to be asked to do things for the Lord. Big picture of what we think God really wants out of our lives and what we want out of our lives. Just like it was for Abraham, Abraham wanted Isaac to grow up. He wanted to see a large family descend from him that was going to be a great nation. He put his whole life on that promise from God.
He wanted that, but he also knew that that’s what God said He was going to do, and he wanted that for God. So there’s both a self-serving and an altruistic motive here, and he wants both of those, and neither of those seem to fit with what God’s saying. And it feels a bit like God’s saying, “You know, yeah, all the heat shielding just fell off the bottom of the shuttle, but go ahead and fly into earth. It’ll be fine.”
God, can I trust you in what do we do in those moments? A lot of times, we decide to compromise. And I imagine that there were times when the astronauts that went up after Columbia had to answer the question: Am I going to listen to what mission control tells me? Because mission control hasn’t proven to always be reliable. “I’m going to listen.” Now, imagine though if every crew that went up there, they had mutiny and they said, “Well, whatever mission control says, I know I can’t trust that. I’m just going to do whatever I think is best.” Well, it probably wouldn’t have ended up very well either because when mission control was telling them exactly what they needed and they start improvising their own plans instead, they’re going to miss the asteroid that’s coming at them or the debris from an old satellite or something, and they’re going to die.
But why would they do it? Well, naturally they’ve seen that there’s an unreliable source of information. What are we going to do with God? Though, that’s different. It’s reliable, and yet we say, “We see all those experiences we have elsewhere, and we say, ‘Well, those aren’t reliable,’ so I don’t know.” We start to improvise, and what’s going to happen? We’re going to run into that space junk that’s floating around. It’s going to blow us up. Yet we do it anyway. We do it over and over again.
The Israelites did it over and over again. They did turn against the Lord, judgment comes down or the enemy defeats them, and they say, “Well, that didn’t work out.” So, they go back briefly, and then they go right back to it. Just like we do.
The disciples: How many times do they doubt what Jesus could do? They saw Jesus calm the storm and then later on when the Roman soldiers are taking Jesus to the cross, they’re all in hiding because they’re saying, “Well, it was pretty scary when that storm happened, but now we’re talking the power of Rome. I don’t know.”
Maybe Rome has limited jurisdiction. It’s not quite covering this area. Sometimes it just seems like the way that we’re going to get where God wants us is so unclear we’re going to compromise. And I think all of us have been there, and all of us have, at times, compromised those times where you say, “I’m going to work this out because I don’t think God can.”
Now, sometimes it’s just we’re impatient. It’s not happening fast enough on God’s schedule; I’m going to make it happen so I can feel good now. Sometimes we just completely divert, and we say, “I’m not going to worry about what God wants in my life at this moment because I’m tired of feeling miserable and I’m going to do something that I know isn’t pleasing to God, but I’m going to do it because I don’t want to wait on how God is arranging.”
God’s plan might take decades. God’s plan might take decades. It took Abraham’s whole life to get to where God wanted him. It wasn’t like God said, “I’m going to establish a great nation for you, Abraham,” and Abraham is a 30-year-old, suddenly goes and starts building a castle and makes himself a king, and suddenly he has all kinds of subjects and everything’s going great. No. Abraham’s an old man. He’s still waiting to see the promise, and in fact, he dies and he still hasn’t seen the promise come to complete fulfillment.
I don’t want to play that game. As we say to God’s mission control, “You know, there’s an awful lot of things that are unreliable in this life, and I’ve seen people guided by all kinds of wisdom that doesn’t seem to work out, right? I’m just going to turn off the radio and do what I want to do because I want to get where I want to get.”
But there’s two things that we see here that God provides. That God gives of Himself, and those two things change everything.
Now, before we go any further, I think there’s something that’s important to say here because you might say, “Well, my problem is I’m pretty certain God’s called me to do something that His word says I shouldn’t do, but God’s called me to do it.” And I can see here that Abraham had the same situation because I know that God’s word prohibits the sacrifice of human beings, and God calls Abraham to go sacrifice his son.
So maybe, in my case, God’s telling me, “Yes, it’s okay if I act dishonestly at work because I know God’s called me to this position. Yes, it’s okay if I cheat on the test because I know that God wants me to get into that college. It’s okay if I am unkind to these people because they’re in my way and I need to get where I am going. Okay, if I send a little here and there in a way that you know may cheer me up and perk me up and that way I can be the happy, lucky person that God wants me to be, it’s okay if I do these things,” and it won’t be so bad. And after all, Abraham, he was ready to sacrifice his son.
How do we make sense of that? We need to remember where we are in the story, and a key thing that we see here is that Abraham comes before the law. That sounds straightforward, right? If you studied the Bible, you say, “Well, duh, right? Moses is a distant descendant of Abraham, so…”
Yeah, what are you saying to him? Well, when we talk about the prohibition on human sacrifice, while the Bible, just to be clear, never ever says that human sacrifice is actually a good thing, Abraham hasn’t received that law yet. Abraham hasn’t received that law yet. So he has the advantage, at least the contradiction, of, isn’t that God has said, “Don’t sacrifice children,” but goes, “Go sacrifice your child.”
The only issue is here is the promise that God has promised me, and it seems like what God’s saying explicitly for me to do gets in the way of the blessing of that promise. And that’s very different from what we often run into when we’re making those compromises thinking, “Well, sometimes you just have to sin a little to get to a lot of blessing.”
That’s not how God works. You see, Abraham, if God really had intended for him to go through with this and to sacrifice his son, Abraham wasn’t breaking God’s law. He was just giving up the promise that he should cling to.
When we find ourselves in those situations where we’re tempted to compromise, it’s a little different because what frequently it is—what it frequently is is we’re thinking, “Maybe I can break one of God’s laws to get to the blessing He’s intended.”
And I think we need to be really, really clear: That’s not how God works. God never works that way. Can He take evil and somehow use it for good? Yes. Do we ever get exactly where God wants us by actively turning against His will and saying, “I’m going to do the thing that’s displeasing to God because I know that’s what He wants me to do”? He wants me to do this? No.
We do that because we want to get to where God’s commanded us by breaking His word. Abraham is just saying, “I’m going to hold so loosely to the things I want that God’s promised me that there’s this mystery here of how I get from point A to point B.”
But what’s important isn’t what God’s giving me. What’s important is what God is telling me, and I want to do what God is telling me. It’s really the exact opposite attitude that we often have because if we always say, “I just want to do what God’s telling me to do. I just want to be faithful to where God’s calling me,” we’re not going to find ourselves in situations where we’re saying, “Well, maybe I should do this sin so that I can get to where God wants me to be.”
And yet, actually, here, Christians—public speaker-type Christians, Christian author-type people—who make cases like that today. And friends, if you see that, run. It’s not true. It’s not what God wants us to do.
No, God wants us to turn to His faithfulness and say, “I want to be more like You. I want to be more faithful even when I don’t understand how it’s going to get me to where I believe You’re taking me.”
Because when we turn to God’s faithfulness, what we find is that He takes the senseless—the road that seems impossibly curvy and has way too much wildlife running across it—and He makes that road a road that’s safe to arrive where He wants us to be.
Take a look at verse 8 of Genesis 22, which you don’t see on screen, so I’m going to just read it from here. I’m going to go past what’s on screen here.
“Abraham said to Isaac,” that was where we stopped off, “Abraham said, ‘God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’ So they went both of them together.”
So they went both of them together. When they came to the place 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!” He said, “Here I am.” 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.”
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.”
Notice what Abraham doesn’t do here. He doesn’t try to short-circuit what God’s called him to do so that he can be sure of where it’s going.
The other week in Bible study, someone asked the question, “Well, I know that the Bible says that we should marry people who confess Jesus. We should seek to have marriages that share faith in Jesus. But what if I care about someone an awful lot, and I want to make sure that he or she actually knows Jesus? And if I say, ‘Well, I can’t marry you unless you know Jesus,’ that person might not know Jesus. And I need to make sure I know God wants me to make sure that person knows Jesus. So maybe if I just ignore that one command, and I say, ‘Well, but there’s so much good that can come from it, it’ll work out.’”
And imagine here Abraham is in a similar circumstance. He knows that God wants to build this nation that’s going to be a blessing to the world. And you can’t have a nation that’s going to bless the world if you kill the person who’s going to be the father of that nation.
So Abraham says, “Well, I know God cares about blessing the world, so I don’t know, maybe I just lay Isaac on the altar and say, ‘Isaac, let’s pretend for a moment I was going to sacrifice you and now you, Isaac, get off. And we’ll light the wood and God will be able to smell the aroma that you were laying on the wood, and it will be almost enough and God will be pleased and all will be good.’”
No. What does Abraham do? Abraham says, “God told me to do this, and God’s going to provide.”
And in a sense, Abraham is maybe just trying to avoid the conversation with Isaac because Isaac says, “Hey Dad, forget something? Nothing to sacrifice you,” and Abraham says, “God will provide.”
But what we see here, I believe, is Abraham overcoming all that wrestling, all that uncertainty, saying, “I don’t know how God’s going to provide. I don’t even know what that means. Maybe it means I go through with it. But what I know is that God has always provided. And so even though mission control is telling me to do something that seems totally, totally confusing and contradictory to everything I thought I was working towards, I know the thing I always should do is what God’s called me to do. I know I should always listen to Him, and so I’m going to trust that God’s going to provide.”
Hebrews 11:17 says, “By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promise was in the act of offering up his only son of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.’ And he considered that God was able to raise him from the dead, from which figuratively speaking he did receive him back.”
Now that’s faith. Abraham could have done it on his own. God was empowering Abraham. But what Abraham figures here is, “Well, okay, I don’t know how it’s going to work. Maybe God’s going to raise Isaac back up from the dead after I sacrifice him. I know two things: God doesn’t lie, and He said He’s going to make this promise come true, and God told me to do this.” And that finalizes it. This is what I’m going to do because I know those two things.
My friends, that’s something that we can say too.
No, I’m not advocating that you go and sacrifice somebody or have a nice human sacrifice ritual this week. I’m not saying that because clearly God has said in His word He will never call us to do that.
And just as He never intended for Abraham to go through with it, He was going to prevent Abraham from going through with it, which is exactly what He does. God doesn’t want us to do that today, and whatever sin we might think, “Well, maybe this could somehow result in a pleasing outcome for God today,” God doesn’t want us to do that either.
We have a benefit that Abraham didn’t have. Abraham had a benefit we don’t have. He actually held conversations with God. He could ask God questions. But we have this word here, and God’s given it to us, and when we think, “Well, maybe God’s calling me this way or that,” if we would just come to this and say, “I want to take You at Your word. I want to hear Your word, God, the God who provides, what He’s provided,” He’s provided the truth of Himself in here. And if I turn to this, I can see what that is.
We say, “But God says He wants to bless me. He says that God intends good for His people, but it seems like anytime I actually stick to what He wants, things go terribly wrong.” So how’s that work?
What God’s calling us to do is to believe the same thing Abraham did for ourselves. You see, Abraham took a longer view than we typically take. He said, “It might take a resurrection from the dead, but I know that God is going to be faithful in His promises,” and that is what we’re called to do. To understand, “Does God intend good for us?” Yes. But sometimes we’re not going to see it tomorrow. Sometimes we’re not going to see it in a decade. Sometimes we’re not going to see it in this life. But what we know is that God has offered His promise to us that He loves us, and sometimes it’s waiting in the resurrection.
If you think about those memorials that we prayed over earlier, we mourn those who pass, those whom we love. There’s a part of the blessing that we yearn for that isn’t there right now, but God says you can trust Me that I’m going to come through with it.
God will provide for us too.
2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “For our sake He made Himself to be sin who knew no sin, that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” All those places we fail, all those places we compromise, I said, “I’ll take those away, and I will make you the sort of righteous person through My Son.”
“I said I’m going to do what I didn’t ask Abraham to go through.”
He told the Father took His Son, the perfect offering, the perfect Lamb. John the Baptist, when he saw Jesus, said, “Behold the Lamb of God.”
God did provide, ultimately. He took His Son. Isaac was the son of promise, but Jesus was the true Son of Promise. He took Him, and He actually went through with the fact. Jesus took on all the sin that you’ve committed, and I’ve committed, and everyone who’s ever lived and everyone who ever will live has committed or will commit. He took that all on Himself and became sin that the promise of being reunited with God would be something we could count on.
Say, “So often I can’t trust the promises around me. You—have you ever gone to a garage sale and bought a jigsaw puzzle or maybe some other kind of puzzle, and it’s naturally not assembled right because the point of a puzzle is that it’s not assembled; you put it together.”
What’s the problem if you go to a garage sale and buy a jigsaw puzzle? Missing pieces—you don’t know if everything’s there, and you won’t know until you try to solve it, that you trust that you can solve it whether it’s all there or not. Sometimes it is; sometimes it isn’t. And sometimes I think our lives, we think we have a garage sale jigsaw puzzle, and we don’t know if all the pieces are going to come together in a way that puts together a picture of goodness and blessing or if it’s going to come to the end and the central part of the picture is just missing because some dogs three owners of the puzzle ago ate the pieces. Not Cookie; she wouldn’t do that.
They say, “I don’t know, God. Are you sure You gave me a good puzzle? They get one of the bad puzzles.” From an earthly standpoint, we can’t trust that those puzzle pieces are all going to go together. And in our lives, we can’t trust from an earthly standpoint, from our own will and ability, that all those pieces are going to go together.
But here’s the thing that we’re promised over and over again in God’s word: that all the pieces will come together and not see it all in this life. In fact, we won’t. We’re not going to be made whole until Jesus returns, but God has always been faithful.
And so in the middle of that, when we feel like a side character, when we’re Isaac laying on the pile of wood wondering what in the world my dad—I thought he loved me, and I see a knife coming down at me—and we wonder, how do the pieces fit together? The in the senselessness, in the uncertainty, in that winding road that just goes everywhere to and fro but not to where we thought we were supposed to be—in those places, God’s faithfulness is there, and He’s going to take that senselessness and He’s going to make sense of it.
All we need to do is actually listen to His word and say, “God, I don’t know how doing this is going to get me exactly where You want me, but one thing I know is that it’s never going to get me there by not doing it. You want me to be someone who follows You.”
And when we say ultimately, “I know it’s been solved. Ultimately, the pieces of the puzzle have already been put together in the most senseless of all ways, that Jesus would take on what He didn’t deserve so we would receive what we don’t deserve.”
And whatever puzzle pieces in your life you’re thinking, “These don’t make any sense.” You know that God is ultimately going to bring them together, and He’ll take that senselessness and make it sensible. And in the middle of that senselessness, I’ll see Jesus standing there with me.
Would you praise Him, please?
Lord, each of us has parts of our puzzle that feel like they’re just missing, that maybe they’re never to return, that some—someone has thrown them away, some—someone has eaten them, someone has kept them when they gave us the puzzle—and we wonder, how does it make sense to even follow You?
Would You give us the strength to hold on to You and to Your promises? To know that when You are the Mission Control, when Your word is what’s guiding us, that You will not lead us astray, and even when it seems counterintuitive, even when it seems to be working against ourselves, our hopes, or our dreams, or even the very promises You’ve given us, that we can know if we stand firm on You and trust in You that You are good and faithful and that You will make things right.
Because we know that You are good. We know that You are good. We pray this in the precious name of our Savior Jesus. Amen.
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