The story that will disrupt your idolatry.

Introduction

Good morning. I’m a little unwell this morning. When Miles or I are unwell, we play a little game with each other: who’s going to be the most sick on Sunday, and therefore, who gets the sermon? It’s a game that has to be decided coming into the weekend to prepare. I just had a sore throat, so I was like, “I’ll push through, it’ll be fine.” It turned bad last night, so we’ll see how we go. I’ll try to keep my energy up. You’re blessed to have some distance between you and me, and we’re going to have communion, but your communion food isn’t coming near me, so it’s okay. We’ll press on.

When I first started preaching, I had this fear of public speaking. I still have that, but some of the fears that you have are things like, what if I get hiccups during a public talk? I think when Jimmy was praying a sermon, I said that to him, and he said, “Great, new fear unlocked.” Maybe not my wisest moment of encouragement, or you get a runny nose and you can’t do anything about it, or you get sneezes. The runny nose one, I now know how to handle that. I dealt with that at 8:00 AM, so we’ll see how we go. We’re looking at this passage in Genesis 22. It’s a really well-known story, and it’s quite a disturbing story, isn’t it? This story of child sacrifice with Abraham and Isaac is a story that, unless you have time to explain it, it’s one you’d prefer to jump over with a friend if you’re reading through the Bible. It’s one that you need some time to process.

God has asked Abraham to sacrifice his son. It’s quite a disturbing thing. Years ago, my connect group was talking about this. Years ago, there was a TV series of the Bible. I think it was just called “The Bible” that was produced, I think, like 15 years ago now. Well produced. The only real issue with it was the American accents. Everything looked Middle Eastern, but the American accents were a bit of a jarring impact on that. Beyond that, it was well produced, but as always, when people bring out stories of the Bible in drama, there’s this creative license. This story, the Abraham story, the creative license they took really portrays him as a real crazy man. God has spoken to him. I mean, you can’t blame them for interpreting it this way. God has spoken to him, told him to take his son. What’s weird about the story, the way they portray it, is Abraham and Isaac, they go together. They don’t have the servants in this version, like the Bible has, but just the two of them go up, and weirdly, it cuts back to Sarah back at the tents, and she runs over to the sheep herders and says, “Did Abraham take a lamb for the sacrifice?” And they go, “No, Abraham didn’t take any lamb.” And she freaks out, and it’s really weird. Why is this a common thing? Is Abraham always forgetting the lamb? Here he goes again trying to sacrifice Isaac again. This is kind of weird that that’s her conclusion. So the whole episode plays out as he’s going up the mountain with Isaac, and she’s a long way back but desperately trying to catch up to them to stop this terrible thing that Abraham’s going to do, and you can kind of understand the drama that’s drawn into that, but that’s certainly not how this story plays out.

But there is a level of this that is quite disturbing. It’s quite disturbing that God has asked this of Abraham, but I think at the end of the day, it is quite a helpful story for us. It’s quite a profound story, and I think one of the things we want to say is, while on the face of it might appear a disturbing story, actually in reality, what this is is a disrupting story. This is a story that disrupts some of thoughts about what we value and how much we trust God and how much we’re willing to give to God. It raises that question: what do you do when God asks you to give your all? What do you do when God asks you to give the thing he promised and he gave you in this case? What do you do when God asks you to give him the thing you worked hard for? What do you do when God asks you to give him the thing you hoped and dreamed for and you finally have, or the thing that you hope and dream for and he hasn’t given that to you, and so the very hope of it you’re giving to him?

This is on the face of it a disturbing story, but in reality, it’s quite a disrupting story, because while I think this is a unique story for Abraham, it’s disrupting for us as we apply to what this means for us, how do we think about some of these things ourselves? What we see in this story is it’s a calling that disrupts our own idolatry. I don’t think really in reality, if you really understand the story, it’s as disturbing as it probably seems on the face of it.

A test for Abraham

God is doing something particular here

The first thing is we’re told right from the beginning that this is a test for Abraham. Right from verse one, the author wants us to know that God is doing something particular here. There’s a plan going on, and that this is a test for Abraham. What this isn’t is what the Bible series kind of portrays, and it’s some temptation of Abraham to do this. If we compare testing and tempting, testing is something we do to reinforce and strengthen something. You test it to see where its weaknesses are so you can improve on it. Tempting is something that tries to seek out the weak points and cause the problem to break something, to pull something down. So testing is something for reinforcing, tempting is something for weakening and undermining. What’s happening here is a test for Abraham. It’s very specific for him.

One of the things we see is it echoes his very own calling right at the back, at the start. We meet Abraham in chapter 11, but chapter 12, we get the first call of Abraham, and there’s an echo of the call of Abraham back in chapter 12 and what we read in this story. Let me put just some of those words side by side on the screen there. On the left here, we have the Genesis 12 passage where we get this language: leave your father’s family and go to the land that I will show you. In the passage we just read, we get some similar kind of language. So in the first one, it’s leave your father’s family. It’s a level of prioritize God over your family. In this one, we get take your son. Go to the land that I will show you, he said in the beginning, and here he says, go to one of the mountains. We’re told, go to the land of Mariah to one of the mountains which I will show you. It does seem on one level that God, just for Abraham, he likes to be the turn by turn GPS, like not going to tell you where to go, just going to take you turn by turn. There is something where this is evident of God’s helping Abraham take each step in his life, and so we see this particular testing in that context, that this is God showing and revealing another thing to Abraham in his life.

He has that language of, I’m going to guide you as you go. I heard there’s a comedian, I think he’s on Britain’s Got Talent or America’s Got Talent or something. He’s got a speech impediment, a stutter, and one of the things he says with the stutter is, there’s some jobs you would never get. One of them is the voice of the GPS person. You got the starter, and you know the turn’s coming up, and you’re saying, in the next 500, 5, 300 meters, take a U-turn. There’s a sense where we understand that idea of wanting to know something before it happens, but what’s happening in this story for Abraham, and it’s consistent in his life, is God is showing him step by step as he goes, and we see that same concept in here. It’s a reflection, an echo of his initial call.

A very specific thing for Abraham

This is a very specific thing for Abraham. It only doesn’t only reflect his call, but it addresses the promises that God has given to Abraham, very specific promises that were given just to Abraham. You remember the promise: he will be a great nation, all nations will be blessed through him, his descendants will be like the sands on the seashore or the stars in the sky. So when God calls him to sacrifice Isaac, the one who this hope of this promise is going to be fulfilled through, and God has told him that this is a testing that’s tied very directly to the promise that God has given to him specifically, so it’s very specific to Abraham. This is not a universal testing to all people. This is not a universal command to all followers of Yahweh that they go and make this sacrifice. In fact, the Bible is quite explicitly against child sacrifice. When the law comes out later on in Leviticus, we’re told that the punishment of child sacrifice is capital punishment, that God says anyone who kills a child in sacrifice should be put to death themselves. So compared to other nations around at the time, God has given his people very explicit instructions not to do this sort of thing, and so this is not some sort of command or exception for Abraham to do this. God is doing a very specific thing, and so in that sense, it’s not so much a disturbing command that God intends for him to carry out, but really a disrupting plan, a command to undermine the things that he values, the trust he has in God, and for Abraham, the father of faith, a very specific command in shaping who he is as the one who trusts God for this future promise that has been given to him.

This isn’t just a thing about child sacrifice where other nations would sacrifice their children to idols. This is instead a test where God is testing Abraham whether he’s treating his child as an idol. It’s a question of his values, what he’s clinging to, and so this is a calling that disrupts idolatry. It’s a calling to Abraham that disrupts idolatry because it’s a test of the heart. You see that verse, verse two, really digs deep into the heart for Abraham. Verse two says, “Take your son.” Then to push a little bit further, he says, “Your only son.” Now that already is a strange thing for God to say because Isaac is not Abraham’s only son. He has another son to his servant Hagar. He’s got Ishmael. So this statement, your only son, explicitly means the only one who this hope is placed in, the only one who has the promise of many generations through him. Take that son. So he’s digging deep into not just your son, but the one who all the promises I’ve given to you are held in, and if Abraham still hasn’t got it, God pushes it one step further and says, “Isaac,” just to be clear. That’s the old, when you go into surgeon, you’re right, not this leg, this leg. That’s God making sure this is the one I’m talking about, and then just to twist it even further, he says, “Whom you love so much.” Right? In fact, this is the first time we’re in chapter 22 in the Bible. This is the first time the word love is used in the Bible. This is a test that is tied to the heart, and a test that is tied to the heart is a test of where the heart is tied, right? That’s what’s going on here. This isn’t take your son to work day, not the best experience for work day. This is digging deep at the heart, and while it’s not a command for us, it’s a disrupting command if we think about the test of the heart and how that looks for us, what God might call us to do.

There’s a similar story in the New Testament. You might remember Jesus is talking to a rich young ruler, and the rich young ruler says, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” And Jesus says, “This is what Mark, Matthew 19 tells us.” He said, “Go sell all your possessions and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, then come follow me.” I’ve always wondered with that story how much it’s similar to Abraham’s story, that if the rich young ruler turned around and said, “Okay, I’ll do it,” if Jesus actually would say, “Great, now that you’re willing, the answer is you don’t need to sell all your possessions. You could use them for God’s kingdom and think about how you use them.” Well, I’ve always wondered that, but we don’t ever find that out in this story because the rich young ruler, we’re told, goes away sad because he had a lot of wealth. I met this just a week ago. I met with the fundraiser who is going to help us as a church to raise some funds for our new church building. So our financial gap for our new church building, if we can sell off some of the assets we have, we need to find about $2 million to make that gap, and the dasis, because we’re part of the new churches for new areas program, are going to try to find some wealthy people that might give us some money towards making up that gap, and the guy was just talking to me about the idea that often people who have inherited wealth are much more generous and willing to give it away than those that have worked for their wealth. That just seems to be a phenomenon for people that those that have worked hard for their wealth, and you can kind of understand some of that, can’t you? Those that have received generosity could feel more likely to be generous. They’ve done very little to earn that, so therefore it’s easier to give away, whereas those that have spent their life being strategic, being shrewd in their money, being hardworking, much harder to say, after all I’ve done to achieve this, I will happily give it away, and once again, we see how much the impact of our heart has to do with the situation that’s going on, what we have worked for, what we have invested in, what we have clung to, and so there’s a sense where this is not a direct command for us, but it is a disrupting command for us.

What are the things in our life that we would be not willing to give up?

I watched that Bible epic episode again this week as I was preparing, and when I was watching it, Jet was watching over my shoulder, and after the episode, after we watched it, he said, “If God asked you to kill me, would you?” Then he answered his own question, and he said, “Well, I guess if God asks, you’d have to.” Now my kids face a problem that when they ask a question like that, they get a 20 minute sermon, and about 30 seconds into it, I think they’re thinking, Jet’s thinking, I already answered the question, move on, and Jet, if you’re home, if you’re listening now, I’ll answer it again. The answer is a tricky question, and the answer is God will never, I’m confident, never ask us to sacrifice our children in the way that this story is. It is the only story of its kind in the Bible, and it’s a unique story just for Abraham, so that’s the first part of the answer is we, God would never ask us to do that, and yet at the same time, God does ask us to give up our families, be willing to give everything for him. In fact, Jesus uses the language, no one who has lost father or mother, brother or sister for my sake, very much. That’s the language, and while we might not experience this very thing, other parts in our world with persecution, there is a very real application that’s similar to this, not that they might kill their own children, but the call to follow Jesus can be a life-threatening call for you and your family, and so this is much more real than we often think about it. It is something that should disrupt our own idolatry and ask the question, what are the things in our life that we would be not willing to give up, that we worship, that we cling to, that we live for? Are we bold enough to us to pray the prayer that says, “God, if I’m hanging on too tight, then break my grip?” It’s quite a disrupting command. It’s a call that disrupts our idolatry.

It’s a faith with resurrection priorities. A strange component to this story is Abraham has in this story a resurrection faith. We get little glimmers of it. I mean, right from the beginning, we have this disorienting obedience of Abraham. We’re told he gets up early in the morning to make this trip after God tells him. It almost reads like he’s so eager. He’s so eager to do this thing God asked him to do, that his first thing, I mean, good chance he didn’t sleep all night, and he’s just stressed, and he gets up, but there’s this disorienting obedience where Abraham just says, “Okay,” and he gets up. There’s a resurrection obedience we get from him in the way he answers questions that he’s asked. Look at where he says in verse five. He’s talking to the servants, and he says, “We will worship.” He’s telling them, “You stay here,” and then he says, “We will worship,” talking about him and Isaac, “And then we will come back to you.” You see what he says there? Now perhaps he’s playing some devious kind of just don’t let them catch on to the real plan, but we’re told later on in the Bible that it’s more than that. He has here a resurrection obedience. He has here a relentless hope in God. Not only is there this line that sounds like a lie, there’s the next one where Isaac says, “Hang on, God, I notice we got wood, notice we got knife, where’s the lamb?” And Abraham answers, verse 8, God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son. I don’t know what he’s thinking about that phrase. It’s not like they have Amazon Prime next day delivery. The lamb’s going to just droned in. It’s a sight to see a lamb coming in on drones. I don’t know what Abraham’s thinking, but there the undertone of this is that there is a hope and a confidence from Abraham that the God who has promised to him time and time again that there’s a plan for him to have all these descendants through Isaac, that God has a plan here, and it’s a resurrection hope.

A faith with resurrection priorities

Abraham has a resurrection hope

We get it spelled out really clearly to us by the author in Hebrews later on in the Bible. He says this, this is Hebrews 11, Abraham who had received God’s promises was ready to sacrifice his only son Isaac, even though God had told him Isaac is a son through whom all your descendants will be counted. So Abraham has this confidence that God has given him this plan, and he’s willing to sacrifice Isaac even though he knows that Isaac is the one that’s going to be the blessing is going to come through, and then we’re told Abraham reasoned that if Isaac died, God was able to bring him back to life again, and in a sense, Abraham did receive his son back from the dead. It’s spelt out really clearly for us there, but we get glimmers of it in this Genesis story, but Abraham has a resurrection hope that’s driving him in this, that God is going to be good and kind, and actually he has actually doesn’t have the right idea. In fact, the blessing that he receives from God is far greater than Isaac being raised back to life. It’s Isaac doesn’t need to suffer the death in the first place. The gift they receive is far greater than what Abraham hopes for, but because of this resurrection hope he has, it transforms it, reorients his priorities. The God who can bring people back to life will provide in this situation and even more.

I think we see that resurrection hope in our own lives, that we’re promised and not just a hope like Abraham has, but we see it in a very real way. Jesus who does defeat death, who is the first amongst those that are raised back to life, an eternal life that is the hope that we have in, and that should be a reorienting of our priorities. It makes a difference. It makes a difference if we’re living for this life or the next. It makes a difference if we’re thinking about what we’re doing now or we’re living for eternity. It should make a difference, and so we want to think about how we live life for Jesus in this temporary life. We’re going to take a moment and reflect on the hope we have in Jesus. Let me finish and then I’m going to come back and preach the last bit of the sermon and we’re going to do communion, but let me finish with this one last story as the band comes. Some of you have heard the story of when I was camping with my family in, we were flooded out in a river. They say don’t ever camp in a riverbed. What they don’t say is it’s not always obvious that it’s a riverbed. Some tips for you, if you ever have to drive down the river bank to get to your campsite, you might be in a riverbed. If the surface under the water is the same as the surface you’re camping on, you might be in a riverbed, but we had this moment. We set up camp. We were at this campsite. It started raining, and we noticed the river had been rising. We were like 12 m away from the river, not close, but it was quite flat. It was just a gentle hill down. We saw that the river was rising, and it got dark, and we checked it a few times. In the end, everyone went to bed. I was one of the last ones that went to bed, and I thought I would just go out and check where the river was up to before I went to bed. As I walked out, the river was now about a foot from my tent, so it had moved 12 m up the bank in that time. What’s crazy is I was still questioning what to do there, still questioning, should I wake everyone else? They’re asleep. I don’t want to disturb them. In the end, I kind of woke up my dad and said, “Can you come out and look at this, my brother, can you come out and look at this?” And we had, it was the same thing. We were like, “Yeah, is it really, maybe it’s not going to rise anymore.” We ended up putting a stick on the edge because the water’s lapping, it’s hard to see. We put a stick there, and within like 5 minutes, the stick was completely submerged, like it had moved that far in five minutes, so we said, “Okay, time to go home.” And we, the fastest tent pack up we’ve ever done. We end up walking out. So one of the last things I did was just carrying our table which was floating behind me. It was about waist deep, carrying it out and up the bank. There was a moment that someone said, “Did anyone untie the dog from the tree?” Someone had, and by the next half an hour that we kind of sat on the edge, we had a lot of kind of repacking the car to try to actually get everything, we just dragged it up the bank. So the next half hour, the water went up 5 m, and we were on the other side of the bridge, but it went over the bridge that would have been the way out, and it’s a great story only because it ends well, I guess for the dog especially, but it is that reminder that sometimes life is more temporary than we think, and the way we’ve set ourselves up in our life is more temporary than we think, and what’s crazy is we live this life often forgetting that it’s temporary, and we go about setting up a life like a family setting up camp by a riverside, making everything as good as we can, forgetting that there’s it’s limited, and this is a reminder, this story of Abraham is a reminder of what it looks like to live with resurrection priorities, what it looks like to think about how we make Jesus the priority in everything we do.

We’re going to sing a song together, and that song is the Apostles Creed. It’s a reminder of that framework that we believe in that is our hope, the one that we that Christians have sung for the last 2,000 years or said for the last 2,000 years, and it’s a reminder of all the things that we put our hope in in God’s character in who he is in the salvation in Jesus and the promise in the Holy Spirit. So I’m going to invite you to stand and we’re going to sing.

The Lord will provide

The climax of the sacrifice story

As you take a seat, I’ve got one more point in my sermon to preach because I’ve only done two, and I’m a good Sydney Anken boy, and I’m going to do three, and we’re going to flow from that into communion as we think about the sacrifice that Jesus gave. This story of Abraham, it delivers like all the good parts of a great drama. In fact, in one sense, the author hasn’t even teased it out as much as he could, but we do get right to that point. Listen to the final climax of this sacrifice story, verse 10, and Abraham picked up the knife to kill his son as a sacrifice, right? It carries right through to that last moment, and then we’re told at that moment, the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and stopped him in his tracks, Abraham, Abraham. We’re told there’s a thicket there. He saw it in the thicket, a ram caught by its horns. The way the Bible epic kind of plays it out is this scene where the knife hovers over Isaac for a time and then even brings it right down as God calls out to him, and he kind of misses Isaac and stabs it into the wood, right? There you get that tension that’s happening there, and because of that tension, it really shows the contrast of the salvation that has come because you feel the pressure of things coming so close, it increases our feeling towards the gift of life that has come, and so the writer of Hebrews says, “In a sense, Abraham did receive his son back from the dead because it carried through to that very moment for him.”

Abraham has a really prophetic moment of worship after that. We’re told he names the place as part of his expression of worship, verse 14, Abraham named the place Yahweh yra, or you know, the word Yahweh sometimes is pronounced Jehovah, like we do that the Y and the J. The original Hebrew didn’t have vowels in it, and so ways people, so more common people would think of the words Jehovah gyra is what this is, Yahweh yra, and it means, listen to this, the Lord will provide, not the Lord did provide, not the Lord has provided. Abraham after all this names the place the Lord will provide. Not only that, but we’re told it becomes a proverb to people. This is the proverb to this day. People still use that name as a proverb, and this is the proverb, on the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided. In Abraham’s worship in that moment, there’s a very, there’s a, there’s a prophecy that comes from his mouth. The prophecy is that the Lord will in the future provide, that this is not just a celebration of what has happened, but a celebration of what will happen. It’s a foreshadowing of Jesus.

A foreshadowing of Jesus

In fact, it’s amazing how much this story foreshadows Jesus. We get, for example, the very first chapter of John when Jesus shows up, John the, John the Apostle is writing about John the Baptizer and says that John the Baptizer says, “Behold the lamb of God.” He says when he sees Jesus who takes away the sin of the world. This is the foreshadowing that’s happening in this story in Abraham. In fact, incredibly, the Old Testament, I mean, Genesis was written more than a thousand years before Jesus. People would like to argue over, you know, how far before that, but we have historians have copies of Genesis that are over a hundred years before Jesus, and so that’s not disputed, at least 100 plus years this scripture exists, and listen to some of the things that we see in it. The first time the word love is used in the Bible is about a father sacrificing his son. The first time worship is used is in this passage, and it relates to going and sacrificing. The first time lamb is used in the Bible is in this passage, and it’s about a substitute that is going to be provided. Not only that, but Isaac so hugely represents things that we see in the story of Jesus as he carries the bundle of sticks up on the mountain, quite literally carrying his own altar up to the place to be sacrificed. We see Jesus carry his cross out to the place that he is executed. We see the story of Isaac being tied. We’re not really told much detail about it. We’re certainly not told there’s any kind of fighting against Abraham in the story. The way it’s portrayed to us is quite a willing, quite a willingness that happens. We get a very similar picture when we look at the picture of Jesus being nailed down willingly.

Even the location where they are, Mariah, Mariah is a mountain, it’s a set of mountains, it’s not just one mountain, and so they, that’s why the passage says, “Go to the land of Mariah, and I will show you the mountain, go to the mountain, I’ll show you.” So it’s a set of mountains, although in Chronicles when Solomon builds the temple, we’re told he built it on Mount Mariah, so one mountain in particular in that area, and that’s where Jerusalem is established and built around Mariah and the mountain, and what that means is the place that Jesus is taken to just outside Jerusalem up onto the mount of Goltha is a mountain in the Mariah mountains, the very region and place where this story plays out, where Abraham names this place the Lord will provide, the proverb that comes from that, on the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided, that is the very place where Jesus provides the one and ultimate sacrifice where at the last minute he isn’t spared, but his life is given and the resurrection happens so that our lives might be spared. I can only imagine what worship must have looked like for Isaac and Abraham as they sacrificed that ram that was caught in the thicket, like of any sacrifice they’d ever done, how joyous that one must have been, the message of the reminder of the the sacrifi, the substitute that has happened in place of them. In fact, I can’t imagine Abraham ever did a sacrifice again and didn’t remember that moment. I imagine every sacrifice he ever did in the rest of his life was a reminder of the sparing of his son and the life they received. There’s a sense where that is the same thing as we come to the communion table. There’s a sense where we are remembering what it is Jesus did, and as we think about the way it should disrupt our idols, as we think about the way it should impact our life, most of all we want to celebrate joyously the sparing that we have, that while we deserve to be separated from God, Jesus came and died that we might have lost.