Throughout the Abrahamic narratives, we have seen the development of Abraham’s faith. From the call of God in Genesis 12 to the mountains of Moriah in Genesis 22, God has been at work in Abraham to mature his faith, so that Abraham would come to treasure God more than anything God could do for him.
John Walton used the illustration of a rollercoaster versus a monorail to describe the life a faith. The monorail is a commuter train. It’s about the destination. The rollercoaster is for the sake of the ride. It’s about the journey. In reality, the growth of the life of faith is like both. At the level of our everyday lives, the normal life of faith is full of ups and downs. At macro level, however, by God’s good design, He is taking us to where He wants us to be. (Walton, Genesis 22).
Genesis 22 is the climax of the Abrahamic narratives. It is a surprising, shocking twist in the saga of Abraham’s life. Seemingly, out of nowhere, came this command of God for Abraham to take Isaac “to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering” (v1b-2).
There are some things about this event that are unique to Abraham, not to be repeated. For example, we miss the point of this text when we think the meaning of it can be found in imagining what we would do if God told us to offer one of our children as a burnt offering. The writer of Hebrews helps us with this. He tells us, By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.’ He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back (Heb. 11:17-19).
He tells us that Abraham acted in faith when he was tested by offering up Isaac, who was unique in history because through Isaac Abraham’s offspring would be named. Abraham trusted God to the point of believing God would keep His Word even if it meant raising Isaac from the dead. If Isaac died and stayed dead, the promise died, the history of redemption ends, and there is no hope for sinners.
Yet, there are some common experiences that every person of faith will have as God works Personally in our lives to develop and mature our faith. I want to draw these from the text for us.
The commonest thing among Christians is the trial of faith. The NT assumes that faith will be tried. James said, Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing (James 1:2-4; c.f. 1 Pet. 1:6-7). Nothing is more important than the testing of your faith and your faith proving genuine.
Mercifully the writer relieves the readers’ tension in verse 1 by revealing God was testing Abraham. Also verse 4 with the phrase “on the third day” lets the reader know a reversal is coming. Abraham does not know he is being tested, but we know he is, so this text gives us the unique view of a believer in the grip of a trial of faith.
God tests us for the development of our faith. Genesis 22 is the climax of the Abraham’s story for a reason. We might have guessed Isaac’s birth would have been the zenith of Abraham’s saga, but it’s not. The highest point of Abraham’s story is the test of his faith. Something needed done in Abraham. It seems from the nature of the command to offer Isaac and the threefold description of Isaac that Abraham had come to treasure the gift above the giver. God wants Abraham’s heart. There can be no rivals for Abraham’s devotion to and affection for God.
It can’t go without notice that the command for Abraham to offer Isaac echoes the call of Abraham in Genesis 12. These are the only two places in Genesis with the command “go,” and the two texts are worded similarly. The point is when God calls you to a life of faith, He calls you to end of your faith, the salvation of your souls. He will do whatever He has to do to get you there.
There is a conspicuous difference between Genesis 12 and 22. The command in Genesis 12 is buttressed with a great promise. Here, however, the promise does not come until after the pressing weight of radical obedience. It’s like God asking Abraham, “Will you love me, trust me, treasure me, walk with me for nothing? If I take everything away from you, will you still trust me?” You can’t answer that question until you are faced with the loss of your most precious treasures.
he test of faith is not only to prove your faith genuine but to deepen your trusting and treasuring of God. I wish there were a way to deepen faith and test faith other than the trial of faith, but for people such as we there is not. The God who knows all things, possibilities, and contingencies and has ordained all things that come to pass is the same God who is personal and walks with you through the trial of your faith aiding and helping and experiencing your painful, loving hope and treasuring of Him more than anything else.
The trial of faith is going to stretch us to our limit. How do you reconcile the character and promise of God with the command for Abraham to offer Isaac as a burnt offering? Did God not know that this command was contrary to everything He had said to and done with Abraham?
Dale Ralph Davis said, “When the Westminster Shorter Catechism asks, ‘What is God?’, the answer is: ‘God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness and truth,’” and, he added, “perplexity.” (Genesis 12-25, p134). Even though we know this is a test, the command is shocking. God is commanding Abraham to destroy the promise. We know this command is contrary to God’s promise and His character. Even though God is not going to go through with it, isn’t this cruel! How do we reconcile what we know to be true of God and God’s command to Abraham? I would add “infinite complexity” to Davis’ list of attributes.
I argued from Genesis 20:1-18 that we must apply gospel-centered thinking to every area of life. This is exactly what Abraham is doing in Genesis 22. No doubt the command to offer Isaac was a staggering blow, but Abraham knows what God has promised. He reasons, “We will go, and we will come again” (v6), and “God will provide for himself a burnt offering” (v8).
In the face of the complexity of God’s command, Abraham knows that God has purposed good for him. God can know that Abraham will pass the test, and yet can genuinely experience and express pleasure in Abraham response of faith. God knowing Abraham will pass the test and Abraham passing the test are not altogether the same thing. God is giving Abraham the opportunity to develop and deepen his faith.
We can desire and want things that are good—a spouse, children, job, car, a post of service, a house—, things that God has designed for our good, and those things can be withheld from us or be sources of great despair. Yet, in the hardship unfulfilled desire and want, God calls us to treasure Him above all of these, so that if these never turn out to be sources joy, you still have God. Being a pastor, I often see younger men go into the ministry and be crushed by the hardship of pastoring. Oh, how I wish there was some other way to make a man fruitful, but God intends to mold His servants in suffering and hardship.
God tests the faith of His people to develop and mature their faith and increase their capacity to trust Him. We keep trying to avoid the test. Any hardship, any disappointment, any discomfort, and we reason this can’t be the will of God. You may be fighting against God. I have often thought in times a great despair, “If I could simply embrace this as God’s loving discipline in my life, I think I could endure better and maybe even have some semblance of strange joy.
The sovereign God of verse 1, who ordained all things, is taking Abraham to the covenant LORD’s declaration of verse 12, Now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son from me. Did God not know the outcome, even ordain the outcome before the beginning? Obviously, He did. If that is the case, does it not make the test of Abraham a moot point? Notice the name change for God in the text from God to LORD. Though God knows every possibility and contingency and has in love ordained a path for each of us, the path is not theoretical. God is also Personal and works out the details of His plan for us in our history. A knowing that does not end in reality is no knowing at all. John Piper summarized Edward’s on this point:
God can look at the world through two lenses, a narrow lens or a wide-angle lens. Through His narrow lens, God sees things for what they are. He has compassion on the hurting and is angered by wickedness. But when God looks through His wide-angle lens He sees the Mosaic of His divine plan from eternity (Desiring God, p 40).
We see life with the narrow lens. We cannot see through the wide-angle lens, but in faith we trust that no matter what a good God is working for His glory and our good in all things. God knew the outcome, but the covenant LORD led Abraham to the demonstration of a faith that loved God more than anything God could give him, including a future. And God took pleasure in Abraham trust, increasing Abraham’s capacity to love and trust Him.
There is a legalistic obedience, which is no obedience at all, and there is the obedience of faith. We have a tendency to want to reduce obedience to a check list. If I do X, Y, and Z, I’m in good shape. If I can check my list, I feel good about myself. If, however, I cannot check my list, I feel great condemnation. Obedience in this case is like a formalized contract. Legalistic obedience doesn’t approach God as a Person who desires that we live in relationship to him.
God, however, is Personal, and he treats us as persons. Legalistic obedience would never have “offer your son as a burnt offering” on the check list. Through the obedience of faith God is going to take you where you would otherwise never go. He is taking you to a place that you will not arrive without, in faith, thinking through all the implications of the gospel and how those implications impact the decisions you make.
Legalistic obedience likes to get things settled with God. I was talking with a pastor about being a missionary. He said, “I settled that a long time ago.” I thought, “How do you ever do that?” How do you get the matters of the life of a faith settled to a place where you don’t have to think about them anymore?
Look at Abraham’s obedience here and see how it is fueled by faith. There is a marked difference between the Abraham in this text and previous texts. Look at Abraham. God commanded. We don’t hear a word. We simply see him act. This is shocking, when we recall his earlier replies to God. When God promised offspring, Abraham complained that till now Eliezer was the heir of his house (15:2). When God promised him a son through Sarah, Abraham objected, “Oh that Ishmael may live before you” (17:18). When God revealed He was going to destroy Sodom, Abraham questioned God’s justice and pleaded with him to spare the city for the sake of 10 righteous people. When God said, “Offer your son, your only son, whom you love,” Abraham said nothing. Don’t think his action are wooden. Don’t think he is cold or plotting. He is cut deeply. In verse 3, you can see he is stunned. He does things backward. You cut the wood before you saddle the donkey.
For 3 days they journeyed in silence. This is not hasty, mindless obedience. Abraham has had 3 long days to roll this over in his mind. We are starting to see the muscle of faith when Abraham told his servants, “You stay here. We will go, and we will return” (v5). When Isaac brought up the one thing they were missing, a sacrifice, Abraham’s faith sores again, “God will provide himself a lamb for the burnt offering (v8).
You can tell, Abraham is in the crucible. He is being crushed. The details of building the altar, laying the wood, binding Isaac, laying Isaac on the altar, and taking the knife, slow the pace to a crawl almost as if Abraham is stalling. At last the obedience of faith raises the knife, and God stays the knife and provides a substitute.
We could draw a wrong conclusion from this to keep us from ever following through in obedient faith. Perhaps someone may reason, “God simply wants us to be willing to do whatever He may ask us to do. If I’m willing to go to Africa to be a missionary or if I’m willing to give or if I’m willing to serve in the nursery or if I’m willing to…, but God hasn’t told me to do any of these. After all, Abraham had only to be willing to sacrifice Isaac.” This is the same kind of reasoning that says, “Jesus didn’t really mean the rich young ruler had to sell all he had and give his possession to the poor. After all, we not saved by giving, we are saved by faith in Christ alone.”
Certainly, God wants you to be willing to “give up everything,” but how do you determine willingness that never acts. Remember Abraham raised the knife. The reasoning of faith tells us, as it did Abraham, that God would have raised Isaac from the dead. It was impossible for Isaac not to live. God’s testing is not to find out our willingness. We can find ourselves in a position in which we are willing to do anything and give up everything and in actuality do and give nothing. That is not the reasoning of faith, it is the deception of unbelief.
I think I can illustrate this point in many areas of life, but let me illustrate this just in the area of our church life. God is working through this body, and He is making demands of us that will push us to the limits of our faith. Simply ask yourself the question, “Does my thinking, my desire, my service, my investment in my small group and in the lives of others, my giving, my praying, my personal holiness, etc., help move the church forward? Or am I imposing my personal preference, convenience, opinion, and use of my time above God’s obvious work in the church?” Think through it a bit—if everyone served like you, invested in the body like you, gave like you, etc., what would the state of the church be?
Another hindrance to faith borne obedience is calling and giftedness. A person could say, “I simply don’t enjoy nursery duty or some of the other mundane things that need done around church.” I understand that calling and gifts are spiritual realities, but I don’t think that means we can’t serve and shouldn’t serve outside the scope of our gifts and calling. Let me ask you, “What is your gift and calling?” People who are called and gifted to service organize and train the rest of us to survive doing what needs done (Eph 4).
Obedient faith is going to push us out of our comfort zones and stretch us to the limits. If you learn to read using 1st grade readers and read nothing else for the next 20 years, you will be really good at reading 1st grade readers, but a 2nd grade reader may present a challenge. God intends on putting all of us in the graduate school of faith.
Here is where it is hard for us to let go. We tend to have a couple problems. One, we’re afraid God will ask us to something we don’t want to do. We like our plans for us better than we like God’s plan for us. We feel that we have our own best interest at heart. We have decided that God seeking His glory may not be good for us. Or we may just plainly want what God forbids.
Second, we want to be able to see our way clear. In other words, we don’t want to have to trust God. Seeing your way clear, working out all the details before you move may seem wise and prudent. It is, however, arrogance veiled in humility. We are not in control. As hard as we work and plan and seek to live responsibly, we are not in control of anything. We can’t provide for ourselves. We can’t sustain our lives. We just think we can. One of the trillions of cells in our bodies, of which we are unaware unless we had a biology class, can suddenly mutate, multiply exponentially, and kill us in a matter of hours. While we work and live responsibly, forces of which we may be unaware can wreck national and global economies and bankrupt us. It is arrogance to think you are in control of the details of life.
Abraham learned this. You can hear it in his words to Isaac, God will provide himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son (v8). Isaac’s question was a question of details and a reasonable and obvious question at that. The word provide (v8, 14) is the sense of to see. Some of the older translations read verse 14 as, In the mount of the LORD it will be seen. This is the idea of the details. God is not only the God of the wide-range lens, He personally superintends the details, the narrow lens. He purposed not only all things at the eternal macro level, but all the minute details as well.
What an example of faith. In the crucible of offering up everything to God, Abraham knows that the details are beyond him. He understands, however, as far as He can that God has promised and nothing can change that.
We can be so intent on working out the details that we miss the ram in the thicket. What if Abraham had lookup, saw the ram, and made no association between the ram and God’s provision? The angel of the LORD didn’t mention the ram. Abraham was looking for God to care for the details as he walked in faith.
Perhaps you know at this point in your life what God is calling you to do, but the hold-up is you don’t think God has your best interest at heart, or you can’t see your way clear. You think, “I know I’m not where I need to be in my giving but I just can see my way clear.” Maybe you think, “I would invest in others but I just can’t see where I have time.” “God is calling me to plant a healthy church, but I just can’t see my way clear to move in that direction. Why do I have to prepare? What about my kids, earning a living, raising support, finding a place to live, leaving my family, etc?” Listen, we are going to gather wood and saddle the donkey, get the knife, and the fire, but you can’t do this thing unless you leave the details to God, ultimately trusting Him to provide for each step along the way. Otherwise, you will get there and disappointment and dissatisfaction will unsettle you and send you home.
God’s purpose does not terminate on me. It includes me, but it does not end with me, and it is much bigger than me. Here, the only time in the Pentateuch, God swears an oath. The writer of Hebrews takes this up and argues that God swore an oath by Himself because He could swear by no one greater to guarantee the promise.
God made a big promise to Abraham. Each time God reaffirms His promise to Abraham, He explains, clarifies, expands, and intensifies the promise. He does no less here. I want to imagine Abraham hearing God say, “Because you have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and multiply your offspring like the stars and sand.” On the heels of this, Abraham gets word that Nahor, his brother, has 12 sons (v20-24). God made promises like this but made Abraham disown all his sons except Isaac because in Isaac his seed would be named.
Then God promised that Abraham’s singular offspring would conquer his enemies and bless the nations. What did Abraham understand God to be saying to him? Through the small lens Abraham sees Isaac and has simply to bow before the promise of God that is beyond him.