something that’s Oh, okay. That’s why. Let’s try this again. How’s that? So, we’re looking at a passage this morning that uh both celebrates prepares us to celebrate communion together and I think uh leads us into a new year of knowing God and ministering together. It’s a passage that’s uh familiar, but it’s confusing, maybe even infuriating. Uh the story itself draws us in. It’s it’s very detailed, very riveting. But people have wrestled with this story and its implications for many, many centuries. It’s the call from God for Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac. And the story challenges a lot of what we believe about the character and the kindness of God. challenges what we believe about how God works in the lives of his people, including ourselves. But if we do, I think, some investigation into this passage, it can also help us confidently prepare to receive whatever wise and merciful plans God has in store for us in 2022. Story is told in Genesis chapter 22. And it begins by letting us readers in on something that Abraham had no idea about at the time. It says, “Sometime later, God tested Abraham.” So Abraham’s about to be tested by God. From our vantage point, if we’ve read this passage before, we know both the test and the result. But for Abraham, of course, everything was happening in real time, in excruciating real time. And if we look at the Bible and the tests of God, we find some interesting things. First, God only ever tests his friends. He only tests his people. God doesn’t test his enemies. Three times in scripture, Abraham is referred to as a friend of God. Says in the New Testament that Jesus is not ashamed to call us his friends as well. So as a result of our relationship or our friendship with God, it means that God will test all of us. Second point to know is that testing is not the same as tempting. God will never tempt us. This is from the book of James chapter 1. It says, “When tempted, no one should say, God is tempting me. For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone. But each one is tempted when by his own evil desire he’s dragged away and enticed. Then after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin. And sin, when it’s full grown, gives birth to death.” So God will never tempt anyone. He’ll never entice any of us towards sin. We own our temptations. God’s not responsible for the faulty wiring now inside our hearts that lead us in sin’s direction. It’s our own evil desires that drag us in that direction. And it’s Satan, the tempter and the accuser, who uses that material inside us to try to get us to fall into sin. And he tempts us in order to destroy us. But testing from God doesn’t come to destroy us. It comes to exercise our faith and to reveal what is good and solid and permanent about our faith. Hebrews chap 11 is a chapter in scripture that’s focused on faith and gives some of the greatest scriptural examples of people of faith. Naturally enough, Abraham is mentioned and it says of him that he went into the land of promise that God called him not knowing where he was going and what he was really looking for. It said by faith was the city with foundations whose builder and maker was God. So he was called to leave all the places we all occupy that don’t really have secure foundations and to search for or look for or hope in the city with eternally solid foundations. And if God isn’t the one who’s setting the foundations in our lives, then our foundations won’t hold the weight that we rest on them. If you can imagine looking at a um newspaper or academic articles being published in the year 1950, not that long ago at the time, those papers or those articles would have represented the best scholarly and popular opinions that people held. And today we look at some of what they believed, what they thought was true and confirmed. And it’s embarrassing. Many of the things that intelligent, sophisticated, educated people held to back then seem ridiculous and laughable to us today. But we can only chuckle until we realize that probably our adult grandchildren will be laughing at many of the things that educated people in our day believe and hold to. And so we discover again that divorced from God, there are no foundations. There’s no solid intellectual foundations. Every reason, in fact, today that people hold against the existence of God will someday seem p. Every objection to God’s truth will someday be shown to be juvenile and archaic. So God tests us to expose our unstable foundations. And he shakes our footings only uh so that that which is unshakable remains. For Abraham, the test of his foundation comes in this form. Will you hold the life of your son ahead of your life with me? And if you follow Abraham’s story up to this point in the book of Genesis, you know that so much of his faith journey was tied in waiting for this son to arrive. son was promised very early on, but Abraham and his wife Sarah grew older and older and moved beyond the border of being able to have children naturally. Through Sarah’s maid, Hagar, they contrived the birth of Ishmael. But that wasn’t God’s way of doing things. God’s way was to move them past any hope of having a child naturally and then very supernaturally provide them with this baby boy named Isaac. And he was the one through whom all the mass of promises that God gave to Abraham would be realized. Abraham had longed for a son to and an heir to carry on his name. For decades, he’d waited for this boy. Now that the child was here and growing up, who could blame Abra uh Abraham for allowing that boy to become the emotional center of his life? Tim Keller writes, “My wife and I once knew a single woman, Anna, who wanted desperately to have children. She eventually married and contrary to the expectation of her doctors, was able to bear two healthy children despite her age. But her dreams did not come true. Her overpowering drive to give her children a perfect life made it impossible for her to actually enjoy them. Her overprotectiveness, fears, and anxieties, her need to control every detail of her children’s lives made the family miserable. Anna’s oldest child did poorly in school and showed signs of serious emotional problems. Younger child was filled with anger. There’s a good chance her drive to give her children wonderful lives will actually be the thing that ruins them. Getting her heart’s deepest desire may end up being the worst thing that ever happened to her. So because our eyes aren’t always turned toward that city whose foundations are laid by God, because we take all those good things like romantic relationships and spouses and careers and children, we tend to build our foundation or make them our foundations. That’s the reason God has to test us. Now, surely not with all the drama of Abraham’s test, but we’re all tested nonetheless. God tests us as his friends and he wants us to pass those tests. So God says to Abraham, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love. Offer him as a burnt offering.” That’s pretty graphic. A burnt offering would involve slitting the throat of the victim and dismembering it and cutting it into pieces and laying the pieces on an altar and burning it down until it’s reduced to nothing but ashes. Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love. Now, surprisingly, this is the very first mention of love in the Bible. We’re 22 chapters in. Love is not used to speak of Adam and Eve, or it’s not used in the context of the romantic relationship between Abraham and Sarah. God doesn’t choose to talk about love first in a romantic context. First time he mentions love is a love between a father and a son. Now that Abraham finally had all he ever wanted with his son and heir, God calls him to give up the son he loves. Will you hold the life of your son ahead of your life with me? Now you think about that. This command by God, it contradicts the promise of God. It means destroying the heir. God had said, “Yes, your wife Sarah will bear you a son. He’ll call him Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for the descendants after him. Isaac is the one in whom God has promised to bless all nations for all time. He’s the promised seed. And now God says, “Kill the seed.” When God first met with Abraham in Genesis 12, told him to say goodbye to his past, say goodbye to his country, his culture, his people, his stability. And now that Abraham’s old, the tests don’t get easier, they just get harder. In essence, God is saying, “Before I told you to say goodbye to your past, but now I’m telling you to say goodbye to your future.” This command contradicts God’s character, contradicts God’s word, his promises. It challenges all of the natural affection that a parent has for their child. It’s quite a test, and the story is related in agonizing detail. Upon hearing God’s command, says, “Early the next morning, Abraham got up, saddled his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about.” Well, it’s a three-day walk from Beersa, where Abraham had been staying, north to the region of Mariah, about 80 kilometers. So for three days, the boy and his dad traveled together, talking and sharing stories and lying in their tent together at night. We don’t know what Abraham was thinking on that long journey, but he had to be rolling over and over in his mind this incomprehensible command of God for the pending execution of his son. Says, “On the third day, Abraham looked up, saw the place in the distance. He took the wood he’d cut. And he asked his son, who was presumably the younger, stronger man, to carry the wood up the hill. Abraham himself would carry the instruments of death, the fire, and the knife. And then everything just unfolds in slow motion. And we have this the only conversation in the Bible between Abraham and his son Isaac. Father, yes, my son, Abraham replied. The fire and wood are here, Isaac said. But where’s the lamb for the burnt offering? Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” Now, the son is innocent and curious. The father’s affectionate. Isaac entirely trusts his father’s good intentions. Abraham can only express this ambiguous hope that God will provide a lamb. And as he gives that answer to his son, we do get a glimpse into what Abraham had been mulling over the previous three days. expresses something very interesting to those two servants who traveled with them. He said, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” Now, it’s the New Testament book of Hebrews that really opens up some insight into Abraham’s thought process. Hebrews 11 17-19 says, “By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead. And figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from the dead. See how Abraham was working things out in his mind. It’s a beautiful bit of brilliant, complicated, inspired, faith injected logic. I mean, for three long days, Abraham had thought it out. God’s not a liar. He can’t be mistaken. He told me beyond question that I should have a son. Here, my son walks beside me. God has said that this son is the one through whom all the promises that God has made to me will be fulfilled. Therefore, the son must live or God would be found false. And yet God commands me to put my son to death. In God, there’s power, there’s wisdom, there’s majesty, but there’s never contradiction in God. So what do I do? Since there’s no contradiction in God, the only answer my mind can fathom is God is going to perform some miracle and raise Isaac from the dead. I’m to burn my son in ashes on the altar. And although there’s never been a resurrection in the history of the world, it doesn’t make any difference. God won’t lie. God is life. God’s the author of life. Surely it’s a small matter for the God who created the universe, including the first man from dust to bring life back into a dead body. So the one clear logical conclusion is that God must raise my son Isaac from the dead. This is remarkable. This is a man without any New Testament doctrine of resurrection. He still foresees playing with his grandkids. It’s a magnificent mathematics of Abraham’s thinking. God didn’t tell Abraham how it worked. Abraham had to reason it out by gut-wrenching faith. A faith that could muster the courage to face a bloody and violent loss, yet also anticipate a miracle to set it right. So Abraham had to reason out the miracle and the mystery of the New Testament gospel. He had to reason that a sacrifice must take place, but then God would raise the victim from the dead. This really is the climax of Abraham’s life of faith with God. No matter what happens in the next few minutes, Isaac will return with me. Sorry, I put my finger on the wrong side of my iPad here. When they reached the place that God had told them about, Abraham built an altar there. He arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac. He laid him on the altar on top of the wood. And I suppose again that Isaac, as the younger, faster, likely stronger of the two, could have escaped if he’d wanted to. He could have fought his dad off. Instead, he trusted his dad. He held out his hands while his dad tied ropes around them. Dad, do you really want me to lie down on the wood? Do you want me to die here today? Yes, son. That’s what the Lord has said. Isaac laid down and Abraham raised the knife. And I’m sure he wanted to make one quick kill stroke, clean and uh and sharp. And don’t think it’s much of a a stretch to imagine both father and son weeping at the moment. But then the angel of the Lord called out from heaven, Abraham, Abraham, here I am, he replied. Do not lay a hand on the boy. Do not do anything to him. That’s interesting. You know in the first verses of this chapter when God is commanding Abraham and God is acting in this strange remote inexplicable way asking Abraham to sacrifice his son. The Lord God is referred to by the general generic Hebrew word for the creator God Elohim. But at this climactic moment it’s not Elohim who intervenes. The Lord here is Yahweh. that personal name for God by which he wants his covenant people to know him. Stop, Abraham. Put the knife down. Don’t lay a hand on your son. You passed the test. I’m so pleased with you. You have given me the proper place in your life as the ultimate person, the ultimate uh uh source of your worship. Now, I know that you fear God because you’ve not withheld from me your son, your only son. And it wasn’t that God was uncertain whether or not Abraham loved him. God knows the states of every heart. But in this test, God was putting Abraham through the furnace. He was squeezing out Abraham’s faith like squeezing out toothpaste so that Abraham’s faith could be brought to the surface, could be refined, could be pur purified, and made like gold. Through this test, God was stripping away a potential idol from Abraham’s life so that neither Abraham nor Isaac would have their lives ruined by false devotion. And then God said, “Now Abraham, now that you have shown this willingness to sacrifice your son, let me show you what I have to give you back in return.” He got his son back. He was able to help his son off the wood back to his feet, undo the ropes, embrace his son with tenderness and delight. And then the altar, the wood, the sacrifice. They’d still need all that because they look up and they see a lamb caught in the thicket. The ram will be offered in place of the sun as a substitute for the son Isaac. They can still make a sacrifice to God that day, a sacrifice that God himself provides. You can imagine the joy of the father and son as they watched the flames consume the animal and Abraham and Isaac offer their hearts to God. In ecstasy, Abraham called the name of that place, the Lord will provide. And to this day, it is said on the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided. The name of that place is called Jehovah Gyra, the Lord will provide. And then God reiterates and strengthens the promises he had given to Abraham in the past. I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you’ve done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies. And though your off and through your offspring, all nations on earth will be blessed because you’ve obeyed me. So the blessing of Abraham’s offspring coming to all the nations of the earth, it’s extrapolated to us in Galatians chapter 3 where it says, “If you are Christ’s, if you put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ for your salvation, if you are Christ’s then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise.” So Abraham’s test has consequences that directly extend to all of us this morning if we’re found to be in Christ related to God by faith in Jesus. And the reason why this story I think is such a good communion meditation is that 2 Chronicles 3:1 tells us that on these same hills in the region of Mariah is where the city of Jerusalem will one day be built. It’s where Solomon will build the first temple. It’s where the mount will stand, Mount Galgotha, Calvary. And to this day, it is said, “On the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided.” In that very region where Isaac was offered to God some 2,000 years later, another son would walk up one of those hills. As Abraham led his son up the mountain, the father would lead his son up the mountain. And as Isaac carried the wood for his own sacrifice, the later son would also walk carrying the wood on which he’d be sacrificed. But where Isaac would be set free and the ram sacrificed in his place as a substitute, Jesus himself was the s the sacrificial lamb. And he was willing to be our substitute. He had left the glory of heaven to come to earth as a man. He had led a life without sin. He had no debt of his own to pay on the cross. On the cross, Christ our substitute cried out, “God, God, why have you forsaken me?” But the father who stayed the hand of Abraham coming down on Isaac didn’t stop the hand of death on his own son. Our heavenly father and his beloved son Jesus Christ went all the way with the ultimate sacrifice. Doing that made the way for our sins to be paid. Father did not spare his own son on the same spot where he tested Abraham so that we might have everything in return. Romans 8:32 says, “He who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all, how will he not also along with him graciously give us all things.” And what does that tell us about the way God feels about us this morning? What would he ever withhold from us? What test is there that we’d ever go through that God wouldn’t provide for? He tests us only to give us things that we don’t already have. And as we head into a new year together, we’re sure to face all kinds of tests, as individuals, as couples, as families. We’ll be tested as a church. It’s crucial for us to remember that the same God who tests is also the one who provides. God knows all the Isaacs that we have in our lives. We don’t have to stop loving them. They just need to be demoted so they don’t control us in an unhealthy way. They’re only safe for us to have back when they stop being so completely vital to us. And as we go through the tests, whatever they involve, new variants of concern, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there’s still nine more letters after omocrron in the Greek alphabet that we may have to face this coming year. I’m sure we’re going to face sickness, economic strain, psychological and emotional turmoil, relational sorrow. We need to keep telling ourselves that it’s part of God’s good work in our lives for him to test his friends. And because of that, at times, the same God who is saving us will feel a little bit like the one who’s trying to kill us. Elizabeth Elliot says that uh that dawned on her one day when she was visiting some friends in northern Wales who kept sheep. She saw a shepherd pick up a sheep and take it and plop it into a vat of antiseptic. It had to go in there so that it wouldn’t be eaten alive by all sorts of parasites and ticks. And the shepherd would put the sheep in the vat and the sheep would desperately struggle to get out. And the shepherd would simply push the terrified sheep’s head down again and again. And Elizabeth Elliot mused, “I wonder what it’s like to feel like your shepherd is trying to kill you.” And then she thought of her life with God. And she says, “Oh, I know what that feels like.” So judging by Abraham, God’s tests, they don’t get easier with age. They get more difficult. But God wants our commitment to follow him no matter what he tells us. He speaks to us the same as he speaks to Abraham. Go to a place where I’ve not shown you yet. God’s non-negotiable on that. We can’t say, “God, I’ll become a Christian as long as you don’t do this to me or tell me to stop doing that. I’ll follow you as long as it helps me get to my real God.” God wants us to come to him as our true non-negotiable king. He’s leading us deeper and deeper into unconditional obedience to him. And he wants us to know that there’s no fear of losing anything of true value through his testing. And at the moment of what seems like our greatest sacrifice and our greatest test is likely when we’re going to see his greatest provision in our lives. Let’s bow in prayer.