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February 27, 2005

The God Who Provides

The question today is: “Are we gambling when we put our faith in God?” And some would have you believe that. Sometimes when we read the Scriptures it looks like that. This morning I’m going to read you a scripture that is one of the most magnificent scriptures in the Bible, but it is also one of the most perplexing. It is the story of Abraham, who is given the command by God to take his son Isaac – his one and only son – and sacrifice him, a human sacrifice.

Continuing my series of sermons that I have begun a few weeks ago on the names or titles of God in the Bible, and today we will talk about “the Lord will provide.” I’m going to read this passage from Genesis 22 to you and then I’ll also read a few verses from Hebrews which talks about this incident in the Old Testament.

Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about. Early the next morning Abraham got up and 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. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.” Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?” “Yes, my son?” Abraham replied. “The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together. When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. But the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.”

And from Hebrews 11, beginning at verse 17:

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 had 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.

This is the word of the Lord. Let us pray together.

Prayer

“Father, where are we going?” “We’re going to Mount Moriah, my son,” I said. “Where is that,” Isaac asked. “It is to the north; the Lord has instructed me to make a sacrifice there.” I could see the question in his eyes: If we are going to sacrifice, where is the sacrifice? But he said nothing and we walked on. Where is the sacrifice? The question burned in my mind because the Lord had appeared to me in a dream and told me that I must do the most awful thing. He told me to take my son, my only son, to Mount Moriah and sacrifice him there. But why? After all we had been through. You know the story. First, many years ago the promises came. Then month after month, year after year, waiting for the promise to be fulfilled.

One thing I’ve learned about the Lord in all my years, He does not mind making you wait. It’s His time or no time. It’s His way or no way. In the middle of all the waiting Sarah and I decided we would take matters into our own hands and she gave me her servant Haggar to be my wife, to bear us a child on Sarah’s behalf. We did and Ishmael was born. We thought this was the answer, but the Lord said “No! The children I have promised will come through a son born to you and Sarah.” So we waited again, this time 11 more years, 24 in all. Until the promise of a son had been given; waiting until I was 99 and Sarah was 90. How Sarah and I laughed at the thought of even having a child at this age. Deep in our hearts we thought it was frankly ridiculous.

But at long last, the Lord’s word came true. And how we laughed when it came true…this time with joy! The Lord had given us a son who had the right name, Isaac, or laughter. But now such a contradiction. The Lord promised that all my descendents would come through Isaac. He made it perfectly clear but now He says go and sacrifice him. Take your son, your only son, whom you love. Yes indeed. And go to Moriah and sacrifice him there. I had a hard time believing this, let alone understanding. My God is different than all the other gods, those bloody gods who require human sacrifice; capricious and blood-thirsty. Not El-Shaddai, not El-Elyon, God Most High. I knew this God, or at least I thought I did.

It was with these thoughts flowing through my mind that we made our way north to Moriah. It was a holy mountain, they said, one which sacrifices had been made on for time unknown. It loomed large against the horizon. I told my servants to wait as Isaac and I began the long walk up the slope. As we walked, I could see my son thinking. Finally he asked, “Father, you said we were going to make a sacrifice?” “Yes, my son, we are.” “We have the wood for burning, but where is the sacrifice?” he asked. I felt a stab as though I had put the knife I was carrying in my own heart. What could I say to him? Should I tell him that he is the sacrifice? No, I will not believe that even now. The Lord will show what purposes He has. I must obey. “The Lord will provide a lamb for a sacrifice, my son,” I replied. He just nodded, accepting my answer. So often I had told him the stories about how the Lord had taken care of us, how he had been born, how he was a miracle in himself. Now both of us would learn what trust was all about. I could say nothing more.

We ascended the hill and as we did, I kept looking…behind a bush there, a rock here. I kept waiting to see if indeed the Lord had sent something to sacrifice. When we arrived at the top I found myself looking around desperately. Where was the Lord’s provision? Must I really kill my own son? Trembling I built the altar, put the wood on it, then to my son’s great surprise and fear I bound him and put him on the wood. “What are you doing, my father?” I could not answer. I raised the knife up. I closed my eyes ready to strike. And then I heard him, “Abraham! Abraham!” “Here am I” I replied, joy leaping in my heart. “Do not lay a hand on the boy, do not do anything. And now I know you fear God because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” I looked there in the thicket and saw a ram caught by its horns. I went over and took the ram. I untied my son and bound the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering. And I named that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, on the Mountain of the Lord, it will be provided.

Such is the story of Abraham and Isaac. It is a difficult story to say the least. And we really don’t know what to do with it all. One theologian was trying to describe it, he called it the suspension of the ethical – because somehow God had done away with His own rules in asking Abraham to take his son and sacrifice him. And there’s a lot that we don’t understand about the story, but there’s a lot that we do. Because I believe that God was testing Abraham and trying to teach him about Himself. And through Abraham, to teach us as well.

First and foremost, I believe that God was trying to tell us that we need to trust in Him. Very basic stuff. You know I think that the modern world has misinterpreted faith in some ways. You know me by now enough to know that I like movies and some of my favorite movies are the Indiana Jones Chronicles. In the last one, we see Indiana Jones pursuing the Holy Grail and he’s coming through a cave and just as he gets to the place where the Grail is, he comes to a huge chasm. And it looks like there is nothing there for him to walk across on and he has to close his eyes and take a leap of faith, if you will. And that’s the modern conception of faith. Faith is not rational, we’re told. Faith has to be done with our eyes closed, we’re told. Faith is a leap of faith.

I don’t buy that, at least totally. I believe that faith has a great deal of logic and reason behind it. After all, what is more reasonable to believe – that we all got here by chance or it was planned? For me it takes a lot more faith, the wrong kind of faith, to believe that it happened all by chance and yet so many people have this sort of grandeur of intellect that they believe that we all got here by chance and we just have to tough it out you know. I don’t know about that. But it is true – we are called to believe in something more than just logic and reason. We are called to believe in a person. And all this time, all these years - we wonder why did God do that to Abraham anyway? Twenty four years, thirty years of waiting.

You know in my own life I’ve come to call God the last-minute God. God always seems to wait until the last minute to come through. He always comes through, but it’s always at the last minute. Well that’s because He knows something about me – He knows something about all of us – that we have a hard time trusting. And we have to learn this lesson again and again and again…that God is trustworthy. You know, isn’t it true? We meet a new person, we don’t trust them. We have to wait until they prove themselves. Isn’t that right? Even people we know, we make them prove themselves over and over again. Even our spouses when we’ve been married 30 years. We make them prove themselves, don’t we? You know what I mean, don’t you? I know you do. We’re not a very trustworthy bunch. And God proves Himself. He makes us go through things to show that He is trustworthy. And Abraham had gone through all these things, leading up to this moment, and he had to draw on every ounce of his experience to go through this thing.

Which leads us to the second thing I think God is trying to teach us that goes with the first. That not only do we have to trust in God, we have to trust that God is good. That may seem like basic stuff, but in the heat of the moment sometimes we just don’t trust that God is good. Oswald Chambers once said that much evil is propagated by the suspicion that God is not good. You remember the story of Adam and Eve of course. And this is kind of an aside. You know when the Devil was tempting Eve, a lot of people have blamed Eve for all of that but it’s just not true. If you read the Scriptures very carefully, you’ll see that Adam was right there watching the whole thing. And being typically male, not saying anything. In my view, he’s more culpable. But then he’s the covenant head anyway, you reformed theologians know what I’m talking about. But be that as it may, he’s to blame. But what’s going on there? Adam and Eve are tempted, yes, by this fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and it’s supposed to make them wise, that is put them on a level with God. And there’s pride there, but there’s more than that. There’s a lack of trust. You see in the temptation it’s almost as though God is not letting you have something that is good, isn’t that right? As though God isn’t going to give you something better later on. There’s a suspicion that God is not good.

We do the same thing. We like to control our own lives. It’s the lesson that we have to learn over and over again. That we were never meant to do it on our own. And so often we treat God as a sort of appendage to our lives; we’ve got it in control, we’ve got our date-books and this and that and when we get in trouble we call on God. Now this doesn’t mean we don’t love God or believe in God but we only call on Him when we need Him. Other than that, thank you, I have my life under control.

We were never meant to be in control of our lives. God is good. And sometimes when we go through hell – somebody has cancer, a child dies, we look at tsunamis, we see hurricanes, we read about serial killers like the one in Wichita – and we wonder, God where are you? Or why do You allow it? The suspicion sometimes that God isn’t good or He’s powerless. And we have to draw on all our experience to say that God is good. I’ve come to believe that faith is as much looking backwards as it is looking forwards. We look backward at our own lives and remember what God has done in our lives, time and time again in our lives. This is what Abraham had to do. And we look at the Scriptures too and we are confirmed that God comes through, especially in those times when we are confused by pain and suffering and situations we are in, we have to look back. And as the writer of the Hebrews says, to be certain of what we do not see. When it doesn’t look like God is good.

The third thing we have to do is to trust God’s purposes and this is the neat part of the story. I shared with you a few years ago that Cindy and I took one of those whirlwind trips to Israel, for like 8 days. We were in Jerusalem and going to the alternative garden tomb. You see, there’s a lot of arguments about where the real tomb is and where Jesus was buried. You know Israel is kind of like Europe…in Europe people say A.B.C., another blooming castle. In Israel, it’s another blooming church and every holy place there’s some church, some place. I don’t mean to sound sacrilegious, but to me it takes away from the experience at least somewhat. But in this case, there’s sort of an argument about where the tomb is – and there’s a church there, of course. There’s another site just outside the city.

The story goes that there was a man who was walking along the walls of Jerusalem, kind of wondering about all of this and he looked across and he saw this hill where the rocks had fallen in and doggone, if it didn’t look just like a skull. Of course we remember that Jesus was crucified at the place of the skull. And he was going wow. Then he began looking around because it’s said that Jesus was buried just outside of this place and sure enough, just maybe a hundred or two hundred yards away there was a garden. And they found a tomb; it may not be Jesus’ tomb, but it’s a first century tomb and it had to be somewhat like it. And there was (or at least there used to be) a big stone and you can see where it rolled, all of it. It’s cool. But what’s interesting about this place is the chaplain – a British Army chaplain has the right, they come and spend some time here and they give tours. He was all excited, you know, he was telling us all about this. He took us over to the place where we can see the little hill that has the skull. He said “imagine this hill used to be connected – you have Jerusalem over here on a ridge and then you have this little hill with the skull and in ancient times they had dug out this whole area to use to build buildings, it was a quarry. In Jesus’ time, the main drag was right here by the wall and this flat space that was right next to the road was the place where they did a lot of crucifixions because the Romans, being who they were, wanted everyone to see their handiwork – as if to say this is going to happen to you if you don’t obey. Now imagine this hill over here on which Jerusalem sits is Mount Moriah, the same mountain of Abraham – on which this mountain God will provide. And even though they had dug out part of that mountain, the place where Jesus was sacrificed could be said to be still Mount Moriah. I don’t know if that’s true or not but it’s still neat to think of it that way. I believe it. I’ve come to believe it. We’ll find out later in Heaven, I suppose.

But Abraham didn’t understand the total purpose of God – he didn’t understand that what God was asking him to do would be a picture, if you will, of what God Himself would do later. Sacrifice His one and only son whom He loves, for us. Abraham just knew that God knew what He was doing. And we have to believe that too. So many people have said that history is “His-story”, all of history is a story that God is telling. We each have a place in that story. But we don’t see the whole story all of the time. I would say actually that we never see the whole story, we see parts of it. But we have to believe that God is telling His story and He is going to win in the end. And we’re part of that. We don’t always see all the purposes, but we have to trust Him. And Abraham did. The writer to the Hebrews kind of looks back into Abraham’s bind and he says Abraham believed that God could raise the dead. You know you could think about what he was thinking – well, he’s going to provide a sacrifice, but even if he doesn’t, I know God and I know who He is and He’s powerful. He could make me have a child when I’m 100 years old, He could raise the dead. There’s nothing wrong with that logic. We trust in God’s power.

And last but not least, God wanted Abraham to obey. You know, a lot of times we want to accent the positive, how much God loves us, and He does. But sometimes we lose perspective and think that God is always nice to us. In the way that we want to be treated; that means never making anything hard on us, always making it easy. But frankly, that’s not how I read the Scriptures. God does test us, for our good. You know, Abraham would have never been able to go through this experience if he hadn’t been tested for 30 years before that. He’d been tested again and again and again, strengthened by all those tests. And God does the same with you and me and He wants us to obey even when it hurts.

Several years I was asked to do a wedding; a man came to me and he wanted to marry a woman in my church. It was one of those weddings I wish I had said no. He began to tell me about why he wanted to marry her because he had been divorced and you know preachers are supposed to be nosy and I had to ask him why he had divorced his wife – or he was in the middle of divorcing her, I guess, at the time. Well, he said, “she’s overweight, she’s sickly all the time and she’s hard to live with.” And I was just about to ask another question and he cut me off and he said, “I just can’t believe that God doesn’t want me to be happy.” I should have said no, get out, right then. Because God does not have as His first order of business to make us happy. Now God has promised joy beyond all imagination, please do not get me wrong. But God’s first purpose in life is not to make us happy, it’s to make us His. It is to make us equipped for this life. It is to bring us into the heavenly glory. Getting there is difficult. God wants us to obey, even when it hurts…even when it costs us money…even when there’s pain involved. He does want us to obey.

I just want to close by saying that Scriptures like this help us to get to know God a little better. And I really believe that God does love us. And I shared with you around Christmas that we have a family ritual around Christmastime. And our ritual is that Cindy likes to open presents as quickly as possible and I like to wait until Christmas. So we always have this argument on Christmas Eve, do we open a few presents or not? And I’m always going “no, I want to wait.” And my whole family is against me, they want to open a present or two. And I always lose. It’s fun, we’ve done it for years and I know how it’s going to end and all of that. But I like surprises. I really believe that sometimes we believe that God is behind us going “get on with it, get on with your life,” and pushes us in the right direction. I don’t think that is right, I think God is ahead of us going “come on, come on, I’ve got a surprise for you. You may have to wait, you may have to work. You’re going to have to trust, you’re going to have to believe that I’m going to provide, but come on, I’ve got something wonderful.” And that’s the kind of God we need to believe in. So trust in God; trust that He is good even though it doesn’t seem like He is good sometimes. Trust in His purpose for you. Seek to obey Him. And know that He’s out there waiting for us, beckoning us to come to Him because He loves us. He is providing for us, in Jesus Christ and in every aspect of our lives.

Let us pray.