Sermons

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“And God Said Go…” Part II
November 17 , 2002
Pastor Dan Baumgartner
Last in a sermon series, "Back to the Beginning," on Genesis
Genesis 22:1-14

Good morning. It’s good to be together to worship, isn’t it?

Some mornings our passage of scripture for the sermon is a great pleasure to talk about. This morning, it feels more like “in fear and trembling.” We are now on the last of eleven sermons that we have spent in the early chapters of Genesis. After nine foundational stories of the beginning…last week we looked at the beginning of the story of Abram, from chapter 12. We talked about this simple word, “GO,” that God spoke to Abram. And we talked about the difficulty for Abram in uprooting, and following after God’s call. It was especially difficult because the future that God promised seemed so very unlikely: children for senior citizens who could not have kids, in fact multitudes of descendants…that would be a blessing to the whole earth. It was a surprising and hard word, that first time that God said to Abram, “GO.” But it is NOTHING compared to the second time. Join me in Genesis 22.

Abraham, for that is his name now…and Sarah finally had a child. Miracle of miracles! Abraham is one hundred years old, and Sarah is no spring chicken either…and amid the absolute laughter of their doubting God’s ability to actually keep His Word…He does, and the child comes. They name him Isaac, or “laughter.” I wonder what Abraham’s dreams were for this child. I wonder if he dreamed about his times with his boy? I wonder if he imagined a time with Isaac like the one that Stu Webber describes with his dad. Webber, as a boy, was standing on the Yakima River with his dad, throwing rocks. The idea…you’ve done this…was to see how far out into the wide, swift river they could throw. Then he writes,

“Something awesome happened. Dad picked up a rock a little larger than the others. He windmilled it once around his shoulder, stepped into it, and heaved that rock like I had not seen before. Wide-eyed, I traced its arc into the sky, watching it seemingly gather power as it flew. And it sailed clear across … all the … (“holy jumpin’ toledo!”) … it cleared the whole river and bounced on the opposite bank. My jaw dropped. To this youngster it was an awe-inspiring display of raw power. My little mind couldn’t put it all together. But I do remember wondering that day if my dad might really be Clark Kent. Superman. I thought to myself, “I am the son of the most powerful man in the universe. Everything in me swelled up. I wanted to be just like him.”

Maybe that’s the kind of thing Abraham daydreamed about. I don’t know. But I DO know what he did NOT dream about. He did not in his wildest dreams believe that God would ever say what God did: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love … and GO … GO and sacrifice him. Kill him as an offering.”

First of all, God wouldn’t say it because He was not a god of human sacrifice. As the people of God emerge in the scripture, the human sacrifices you see are connected to other religions. Now, God DOES demand the firstborn of Israelite families to be dedicated to HIM…but then provides a way of sort of symbolically doing this: Israel is to set aside a whole tribe, the Levites, to serve God perpetually.

But secondly, Abraham knew that God would never ask him to sacrifice Isaac because God had already said some other things. He had already said, “I will make a great nation out of you. I will bless you. I will make your name great. In you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” God had already said, “I am your shield.” He had already said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them. So shall your descendants be.” God had already changed his name to Abraham, “ancestor of a multitude.” God had already said, “I shall make nations from you, I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout all generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.” All these things and more God had said. And one more, very very important thing God said: “All this will happen through your son, Isaac.” So every time Abraham laid his eyes on Isaac, he was reminded of God’s promises.

If you want to follow Christ, the evangelist says, just lay your hands on the TV set.

And after you’ve done that, write a check for our ministry, and you’ll see that God will give you back MORE than you gave! Well, how can you say no to an offer like that? It’s an easy decision, if that’s what following God is like.

Abraham is intent on following God. “Here I am,” he says. If Abraham thought following God would be a “no brainer,” he’s suddenly aware of just how wrong he is.

“All of the promises will come through Isaac.”

“Take Isaac, and sacrifice him.”

It doesn’t work. It doesn’t fit together. The two are in direct conflict with one another, and there is no way of getting around it. Even our spiritual forefathers, Martin Luther and John Calvin looked at this and said, “The promise and the command are in conflict.” Luther wrote, “There is no human reason or philosophy that comprehends these two marks.” And as far as I’m concerned, there is no way of fitting them together. It is a choice of unspeakable horror. What God tells Abraham to do is totally unreasonable. How can Abraham trust a God who acts like this?

A woman says, “I just can’t be a Christian. I don’t think God holds up His part of the bargain. I told God I would follow him so that I could improve my life, and since I did that I have lost my job and broken up with my boyfriend. Following God has made my life worse, not better. I can’t be a Christian.

So Abraham goes. He takes two young men (probably servants), and this “lad,” this “boy” Isaac, takes a donkey, and takes some wood for a burnt offering and heads off to a mountain God has pointed out. When they get close, Abraham leaves the donkey and the two servants, and says to them, “Stay here. WE will worship, and then WE will come back to you.”

The really interesting words there are the “WE’s.” Is Abraham covering up so that Isaac … or the servants … don’t suspect what he is going to do? Does Abraham suspect that God will do something to interrupt the horrible thing he has been told to do? We don’t know. All we see is this incredibly powerful picture of the father and the son. Abraham carries the fire and the knife. And he takes the wood for the burnt offering, and lays it on Isaac’s young back. One ancient Jewish midrash (commentary on scripture), actually comments, “Isaac with the wood on his back is like a condemned man, carrying his own cross.” And so the two of them walk on, together. Will Abraham follow through? It is unspeakable. It is unreasonable.

Does Isaac know what is about to happen? It seems unlikely.

“Father?”

“Here I am … MY SON.”

“All the components of the sacrifice are here but one … where is the lamb?”

And Abraham says in a choked voice that is either the most ambivalent answer of all time, or the one place in these verses with a glimmer of hope: “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering…my son.” So the two of them walk on together. Surely Abraham’s head is spinning. Surely he cannot come to grips with this. How can he trust God’s promise when God has instructed him to kill it? It doesn’t make sense.

The man said: I don’t think I will ever trust God again. When my wife came down with cancer, we prayed and prayed. We’ve been Christians for years, faithful Christians. We prayed and believed that God would heal her…and he didn’t. I will NEVER believe that God can do anything for me…or if He can, He is too weak to do anything that matters. I can no longer follow God.

Still Abraham and Isaac walk together towards the hill. It is unspeakable. It is utterly unreasonable.

Abraham builds an altar, lays the wood down and then BINDS his son Isaac. (In Jewish tradition, this story is actually called the AKEDAH, which in Hebrew means “The Binding.”) Abraham reaches out his trembling hand and takes the knife to kill his only and beloved son Isaac. The blood pounds in his head, the noise is deafening, the thought is unspeakable, his mind screams at him, “You cannot hold ANYTHING BACK! Give it ALL to God!” and at the last possible moment, even as his arm is raised and the knife is silhouetted against the sky…there is an even louder shout, and the angel of the Lord says,

“Abraham, Abraham! Do not lay your hand on the boy…now I know that you have not even withheld your son, your ONLY son, from me.”

And God provides the lamb that is needed.

Yesterday I had the privilege of talking with our Newcomer/New Member class for awhile, and spent a few minutes on the declaration one makes when we come into the church of confessing “Jesus Christ as my Savior…and Lord.” And when we talked about Lordship, we talked about turning over ALL of our lives to God…not just a spiritual compartment or aspect, but EVERYTHING.

But this. This is a little extreme, isn’t it? Abraham has gone off the deep end. Or else God has. Couldn’t God have gotten His answer with just a simple question? Couldn’t He just have said, “What is there in your life right now…that would cause you to not follow Me if it were removed? Livelihood? Health? A person?”

He might have asked Abraham that question. He might ask it of us.

What is there in your life right now…that would cause YOU to not follow God if it were removed? Job? Health? A person?

But God’s request, no God’s demand, is not to be included in our life. But to have it. All of it.

Maybe we should go for a less demanding God. Lots of people do. Maybe we should find a more predictable God. A God who will adhere to the rules of the game, where everything is clearly agreed upon, that won’t allow us to be put on the horns of such incredibly hard dilemmas. We can do that…but we won’t be following THIS God, the mysterious God of the Bible. The God who sometimes seems so close and intimate, and other times so far away. The God who sometimes seems to make perfect, rational sense, and sometimes no sense at all.

When I was in Moscow Idaho after Christmas last year, we stopped at a nursing home so I could run in and visit my grandma. We used to spend summers with her, playing cards, telling jokes, cooking burgers. But for the last seven years, Grandma has disappeared. Her body is still there, but Alzheimer’s has taken her mind. When I visit, I watch the nursing staff feed her baby food. Her eyes have no recognition of anything. And when I leave, I say, “God, what are you thinking? Don’t you want me to trust you? Then how can you allow this to happen?!

You see…the God of the Bible asks us to trust Him…beyond all reasonable limits.

This story … is one of the richest, hardest in the Bible. I’ve read more commentators in the last two weeks than I care to confess…and some of them actually made me mad. They made it simplistic. Easy. “The moral of the story is…just act like Abraham and everything will be okay.” No! This is a hard story. It is a ringing condemnation of every watered-down form of Christianity that would make our relationship with God out to be a convenient bargaining arrangement. It is a condemnation of the watered-down faith that is just another component of life. This is uncomfortable, it is not neat and clean. There is a man put in the hardest spot I can imagine, as a test of his faith! There is a young boy who thinks he is going to die at the hand of his own father! There is a situation that pits one thing God has said against another! And through the frightful despair of it all is the voice of God, saying, “Will you hold anything back from me? Or will you give me everything. Will you follow me in spite of everything AND regardless of the cost?”

I’m not sure we can answer that honestly…until we arrive in the situation that tests our faith to the limit. But I’ll tell you what my inclination is. My inclination is to say, “God, there is only ONE way I’ll go all the way with you, only ONE way I will turn my life over, only ONE way I’ll believe you are present even in the times when it doesn’t look like it. The only way, God, that I will invest like that…is if YOU will. Are YOU going to be there, God? What is YOUR answer? How will I know?

I believe that the answer comes. It starts out as a low hum, moving across the oceans of the world. The sound of that answer grows a little louder as it moves onto the land, rushing across the deserts and the prairies. It increases and mounts to a roar as it swirls through forests, across cities and moves up the mountains and hills…and lands on one hill in particular in the Middle East, that is marked with a cross. The answer of God, the God who “did not withhold His own Son, but gave him up for all of us” (Romans 8) shouts out from an empty cross and an empty tomb, YES! The answer is YES. In Jesus Christ, God says to you and me, “I’m in.” Because as much as Abraham loved Isaac, God loved His Son more. But He would not hold back. As anguished as Abraham was when Isaac said, “Father?,” imagine the heart of God being torn in two to hear HIS Son crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Yet He would not hold back. Why not?

Because His love for you and me is so immense, his desire for you and me to be free of our sin and the junk that messes up life and the fear of death…and to find our way back to Him is so great…that He would give His Son, his only Son, whom he loved. In Jesus Christ, God says, “Yes.” It is entirely…unreasonable.

And so the word goes out, to Abraham…and to us: “Go. And for God’s sake, hold nothing back.”