An alternative title for this sermon is “I’ll Tell You Later…” This sermon was preached at St. David’s by the Sea on the Fifth Sunday after Pentecost (July 2, 2023). The lectionary texts were: Genesis 22:1-14; Psalm 13, Romans 6:12-23; Matthew 10:40-42. The audio will be up later this week, but you can watch the sermon here. The sermon begins at time stamp 20:09.
We are jumping immediately into the text this morning. We have a lot of backstory to cover–10 chapters or 40 years of Abraham’s life to be precise. Genesis 22 is both my favorite Old Testament story and one of the most theologically significant. For centuries this passage has fascinated philosophers and theologians, most notably Martin Luther, Soren Kierkegaard, and Jacques Derrida. Faithful wrestling with the text has led to such questions as: How could Abraham raise the knife? Is God bloodthirsty? Do Christians support infanticide? How is Abraham an example to us?
The binding of Isaac represents the dramatic climax of the Abrahamic narrative, but Abraham’s decision to raise the knife wasn’t made in the moment, it was decided years and years before. When studying scripture, context is key. As I’ve said before, the three biggest rules when reading your Bible are context, context, context.
So turn your Bibles to Genesis 22 and let’s begin!
Our passage opens with the phrase: After these things God tested Abraham. Your first question should be: After what things?! This story takes place after two key events. First, the kerfuffle–a solid theological term ;)–surrounding Hagar and Ishmael which we talked about last week; and second, it takes place after Abraham makes a covenant with Abimelech, King of Shechem. Abraham had already met Abimelech once when Abraham pretended that Sarah was his sister, not his wife. Abimelech took Sarah as his own wife and in Genesis 20 we find out that Abimelech was about to consummate the union when God intervened. God said to Abimelech, “You are about to die because of the woman whom you have taken, for she is a married woman.”
Abimelech is not pleased with Abraham. “What have you done to us? How have I sinned against you…? You have done things to me that ought not to be done.” Abimelech then gives Abraham sheep, oxen, slaves, 1,000 pieces of silver, and the permission to settle in Gerar, all to restore Sarah’s dignity.
The second time, Abimelech welcomed Abraham as a prophet, saying, “God is with you in all that you do.” Abraham makes a covenant with Abimelech, restoring to him a well that he had dug but that the King’s servants had seized. With the well rightfully returned, Abraham lived in the land of the Philistines, in Beer-Sheba, for many days praising the name of the Everlasting God.
Abraham’s story thus appeared to be a “job well done.” He and Sarah had finally had their promised son, Isaac, and now they were rich and settled…and it was after those things that God tested Abraham.
The testing-story opens up with God speaking to Abraham. God has been speaking to Abraham for the better part of 40 years by this point.
Here is a schematic of Abraham’s walking-and-talking with God:1
God: Leave your land; Abram: where? God: I’ll tell you later;
God: Go to a land; Abram: where? God: I’ll tell you later;
God: I’ll give you a son; Abram: how?; God: I’ll tell you later;
God: Kill your son; Abraham: why? God: I’ll tell you later…
The surprise is not the act of speaking with God but the absurd and outlandish command that God has given Abraham. God says to Abraham: “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 that I shall show you.”
There is no way around it: God has just commanded the unthinkable of Abraham. Regardless of how many times we tell the story, it is never not shocking. As Fleming Rutledge puts it, “There has never been another story like this in the whole world…we are [so] horrified by the thought of a father being commanded to slaughter his own son…”2
The command may be unfathomable, but the language of the command is deeply familiar. Turn back to chapter 12 so we can compare:
Genesis 12 Genesis 22
“Go from your country “Take your son,
and your kindred your only son Isaac,
and your father’s house whom you love,
to the land and go to the land of Moriah
that I will show you.” that I shall show you.”
The author of Genesis wants you to pay attention, wants you to connect the dots, wants you to understand that this new command is in keeping with the first commandment!
40 years before YHWH commands Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son, YHWH called to Abram while he was living in Ur of the Chaldeans. In that place, there was a pantheon of approximately 4,000 gods. You had a god of the harvest and a god of fertility and a god of protection and a god for the Florida Gators to win the college baseball world series. Clearly all of them false gods. Out of that plurality of gods, one God, the true and Living God, calls out to Abram and tells him to leave, to get out, to go. Abram is asked to destroy his past and he does it!
God makes three important promises in verses 2 and 3, promises which Abram and Sarai held onto: a people, a land, and that the nations of the world would be blessed through him. Abram believed, though he did not know the ways or the means, and later it would be “reckoned to him as righteousness.”
God’s promises to Abraham are not given in a vacuum. These promises represent the outline of fulfillment to a promise God made in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 3. The first humans sinned but God promised salvation. There would be enmity between the woman’s offspring and the serpent, and there would be toil when working the ground and pain in childbirth…but God promised to set the world to rights. The promises to Abram in Genesis 12 are the beginning of that process!
Abram believed. He obeyed. He picked up and moved on. Abram and Sarai held tightly to the promise, but their bodies got older, her womb more barren, and Abram began to inquire of the LORD. He said, “Um, God, these promises are great but we’re not getting any younger…how do you plan on doing this for us?”
Let me be very clear: no one is too old for service in the Kingdom of God. Mission and ministry are not a young person’s game and as I’ve said before there is no retirement plan in the Kingdom of God. Despite thinking themselves too old, Abram and Sarai knew they served a God who was limitless. Nothing is impossible for God. In fact, in Romans 4, Paul says that Abraham believed that God gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist.
As part of the promise, God made a covenant with Abram, giving him the name Abraham. This was a well-known ritual in the ANE. He didn’t sign his “Abraham Hancock” on a paper contrat; in that time and place they wanted something that was both costly and demonstrative. To make covenant, you would take animals and cut them in half and lay the half-body-parts in two lines. The contracting parties would stand at opposite ends of the carcasses and then pass between them. The meaning was abundantly clear: if I do not do what I have promised to do then may I be destroyed, cut off, annihilated like these animals.
Friends, YHWH makes that very covenant with Abraham and it is YHWH who promises to keep both sides of the covenant! Essentially, YHWH says “if I cannot keep this promise may my limitlessness experience limitations, may my immortality become mortal, may my omnipotence become impotent, may my immutability experience mutation.” YHWH pledges himself to Abraham, promising that Abraham’s future is secure. YHWH is Abraham’s past, present, and future.
So between the initial promise in Genesis 12 and the reiteration of the promise in Genesis 15 and 17, and despite twice passing Sarah off as his sister and taking matters into their own hands by conceiving a child with Hagar the slave rather than Sarah the wife, between all of that, Abraham is learning to walk by faith, not by sight with his God, day in and day out.
God fulfills his promise: Sarah gives birth to Isaac. This is the son of promise, the one through whom the rest of God’s promises would be fulfilled, the one through whom the inheritance would be given!
Fast forward 13 years and we are finally back where we started: the day when God commanded Abraham to kill Isaac. If God destroyed Abraham’s past in Genesis 12 when he told him to leave, he is now commanding Abraham to destroy his future. Isaac is the one through whom the promises will flow, so if Isaac is gone then how will they come true? You imagine Abraham asking God that very question. And you can imagine God’s response: I’ll tell you later.
Horrific? Yes! Absurd? Of course! But Abraham’s faithful obedience has been forged over four decades. He has made a covenant with the Almighty and Most High God of the universe, the God who has pledged himself eternally to Abraham and his seed, the God who has promised to keep the covenant for both parties.
This is actually the second time Abraham has been commanded to give up a son. Sarah commanded him to send Ishmael away, a command which God echoed, and Abraham did it. At the ripe age of 113, and with one son already sent away and another being taken to his sacrifice, Abraham has no prospects for a future.
All he has is his God,
His God who is both covenant maker and covenant keeper.
And friends, that is enough so Abraham agrees to it.
To make matters worse, Abraham and Isaac have a three-day journey to Mount Moriah. This was probably father-son bonding time for Isaac. He’s thinking about the fly-fishing that they’ll do when they get there; the salmon to be caught and the s’mores to be roasted on an open fire. Little does he know that father and son bonding would become father binding son…
For Abraham, it must have been anguish and torture. Three days of thinking and festering on what he would have to do when they arrived. I imagine Abraham acting like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane: LORD, let this cup pass from me! Isn’t there another way?
Finally, they see the location in the distance. Abraham tells the servants to stay behind with the donkeys. Abraham tells them that “the boy and I are going to worship.” Abraham knew that he was going to worship the Living God.
Abraham took the wood that he had cut for the offering and he “laid it on his son, Isaac.” The promised son was charged with carrying the very wood that he would later be bound to for the sacrifice. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Isaac then realizes they have everything for the sacrifice except for the key ingredient: the lamb. In Abraham’s response you can hear the hint of hopeful desperation: God himself will provide the lamb. Abraham has no idea what is going to happen, how it is going to take place, or why it has been asked of him, but he knows that God has made him a promise, he knows that God has revealed himself as trustworthy and steadfast with his promises over the last 40 years.
They arrive at their final destination and begin to erect the altar. Abraham binds his son, his only son Isaac, whom he loves. Isaac is an adolescent boy and Abraham is well into his 12th decade at this point…it can’t have been easy for them.
I wonder what it would have been like. Did Isaac put up a fight? Did Abraham overpower him? Did Abraham take him by surprise? Or, did Abraham attempt to explain the covenant?
We aren’t told.
All we know is that Isaac is bound and Abraham does the unimaginable: he raises the knife.
This is not a story of facades or “fake-it-till-you-make-it.” Abraham had faith, true faith. He trusted that God was who he said he was and that he would do all he had promised. He trusted in the LORD, he believed that he would get Isaac back from the dead. And because of all of that, he offered up his son to the LORD. In Romans 4, Paul says: “No distrust made him waver concerning the promise of God, but he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, being fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised.” And in Hebrews 11, the author writes that he who received the promise was ready to offer up his son because “He considered the fact that God is able even to raise someone from the dead.”
Abraham worshiped the Gift Giver rather than the gift given;
He surrendered to the Promise Keeper rather than idolizing the promise;
He sought the Covenant Maker rather than seeking a contractual loophole.
Abraham is an exemplar of faith-in-action. He has “hope against all hope” because Abraham’s faith wasn’t rooted in himself or centered on his own abilities. No, his faith was anchored in God. Where is your faith anchored?
Mercifully, God intervenes. Abraham is told to drop the knife and spare the boy. The LORD knew that Abraham wouldn’t even keep his son, his future, his promise from the LORD. It all belongs to God. It always belonged to God. It will always belong to God. All of it, including Isaac.
Notice that for the third time in the story, Abraham’s response is “Here I am.” He says it twice to God and once to Isaac. When God beckons you further up and further in, the only response is the response of faith: Here I am! It isn’t “Who is it?” or “Just one second, God” or “Can you show me your credentials?” It is simply: here I am!
It gets even better! Abraham looks up and sees a ram caught in a thicket. The LORD has indeed provided the sacrifice. Abraham and Isaac worship atop the mountain as promised. They worshiped the God who provides! The God who makes and keeps his promises!
Abraham’s test wasn’t for God’s benefit. God does not require tests to see if we meet the grade or match up to the standard. God knows our thoughts and actions before we ever have them or do them. The test, then, was to reveal to Abraham what true faith looks like. Abraham is listed in Romans as “the Father of all believers” because in him we see not just faith enacted but the Faithful One in whom that faith is held.
Beloved, we see the Abraham-Isaac story recapitulated in the Gospels. God did what Abraham was spared from doing: he sacrificed his son.
Jesus, the son of promise, is born to a virgin in Bethlehem;
At Jesus’ baptism the Father says, “This is my son, whom I love.”
Jesus is led like a lamb to the slaughter;
He is led into the “wilderness” to the top of a hill outside of the city.
Jesus carried his own wood up to the mountain top and there offered himself in obedience to God’s will, as an act of worship.
There would be no ram caught in the thicket this time.
Jesus is the lamb, the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the world.
Like Abraham, we worship the God who provides. We worship the God who makes and keeps his promises. We worship the God who calls things into existence that do not exist and who raises the dead to life.
Beloved, your past, your present, and your future are held securely in God’s hands. Whether you’re dealing with pain from the past, trouble in the present, or worry about the future they all belong to God.
Abraham’s story is marked by two key things: faith and praise. Abraham believed the One who spoke to him; he believed the One about promises he made; and he turned to praise that One in the middle of feast and famine, through thick and thin, through promises made and tests given.
We praise the God of Abraham because he is the God who called Abraham, who spared Isaac, and who gave and raised his only son. We can place our trust in God because he has fulfilled his promise once and for all in the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. To this Faithful, Promising Keeping God belong all might, majesty, and endless praise as we hail Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
FOOTNOTES
1. This schematic is taken from Tim Keller’s sermon on Genesis 22 in which he admits that he originally heard this schematic from a source he does not remember.
2. Fleming Rutledge, “The Future of God,” And God Spoke to Abraham, 64-65.
Porter C. Taylor 