9 Genesis, Abraham and Isaac Themes from Genesis with R C Sproul

In this segment, we're going to be considering an episode in the life of Abraham, which I think is one of the most poignant and moving and passionate moments that we find throughout the book of Genesis.

It's a very famous chapter, chapter 22 of Genesis, in which we have the record of the sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah. Let's look at the text if we can now in verse 1. Now, it came about after these things that God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham.

And Abraham said, Here I am. And God said, Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.

Now think for a minute of what's going on here in this text. As we know, Abraham is the one that God had called out of a distant land and had entered into a unique covenant with Abraham in which God had promised this old man that out of his seed all of the nations of the world would be blessed.

And He told him that his descendants would be as the stars of the sky and of the sand.

Of the sea.

And so, Abraham had to wait for years for that promise to be fulfilled. And you know the story, how that finally in her old age and in her barrenness, Abraham's wife, Sarah, conceived, and she bore a son, and what was the son's name?

Isaac. And why was he called Isaac? What does Isaac mean in Hebrew? Does anybody know? Professor Murphy? Isaac means laughter. That's what his name meant, laughter, because when God came to Sarah and said, You're going to have a baby, what did Sarah do?

She broke out. You have to be kidding me.

Have a baby?

I'm too old.

But when the child was born, out of Sarah's barrenness, Abraham saw then the tangible, tactile, concrete evidence of God's faithfulness to His promise. And he was rejoicing. He couldn't believe it that actually he was going to be the father of a child.

And out of that child, all of the nations of the world were going to be blessed. And then, after the celebration and after the child begins to be nurtured and grow up two, three, four, five years old, God comes to Abraham and says, Abraham.

And the text says that Abraham's initial response is what? Here I am. It's like whatever you say, God, I'm ready to respond.

Go on.

And then God lays this news upon Abraham. He said, Okay, Abraham, here's what I want you to do. I want you to take your son and take him to Mount Moriah, an offering as a burnt sacrifice. I want you to take your son and kill him as a test of your obedience to Me.

This is utterly unthinkable. It's a commandment that is contrary to and in radical conflict with the very moral law of God. Though God's law of the Old Testament makes it very clear that the practice of Moloch, which was a practice of human sacrifice in ancient days, was an utter abomination to God, and yet here it seems that God is saying to Abraham, Take your son and kill him.

Well, I've made on purpose kind of a shorthand mistake of the text in relating it to you in the last couple of minutes. It's really not what God said. If God would have simply come to Abraham and said, Abraham, take your son and take him to Mount Moriah and kill him, what do you think Abraham would have done?

If that's all God said, think of it carefully. If God said, Abraham, take your son and kill him, what would you have done if you had been Abraham?

You wouldn't have done it.

Well, Professor Murphy over here would at least try to be obedient to the divine mandate.

Then.

What would you do? Is there any way as a lawyer you could get around that mandate? I'd rationalize it.

How?

I'd say that couldn't be the Lord speaking. Oh, it couldn't be the Lord speaking. Okay, but what if you came to convince that it was the Lord speaking, and what He commanded of you was to take your son and kill him?

What would you do? You're Abraham now. How many sons did Abraham have, Ray?

Just one.

Just one. I see we have a real airy addition here in Old Testament history. Did Abraham only have one son? He had Ishmael from Hagar, right? What would you have done if you'd have been Abraham and God would have said, take your.

Son and kill him?

You must mean Ishmael.

You go straight to Ishmael's bedroom.

You pick up Ishmael, and Ishmael goes to Moriah in a hurry, right? Certainly not Isaac, but notice how God imposes the test. Listen to the words that He uses, Abraham, take now thy son, thy only son, that is your only authentic, legitimate son.

You know which one I mean, Abraham, the one whom thou lovest. See how God's qualifying it? And then, unless there's any doubt at all, He says, Isaac, take your son, your only son, the one whom you love, Isaac.

That's the one I want. No mistake about it. Take him to a place that I will show you in the land of Moriah and offer him as a burnt.

Offering.

Verse 3 begins with words that have puzzled commentators and theologians for a century. So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, took two of his young men with him and Isaac his son, and he split wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him.

Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher of the nineteenth century, wrote a little book that was entitled Fear and Trembling. Maybe some of you have read that book. Kierkegaard not only was a philosopher, but he was also a poet.

He was a man of acute sensitivity. He was a man of passion, a man of feeling, a man of caring, and he was not so much a systematic, rational scholar as he was one of those rare individuals that has that momentary vignette of insight into the depths of personal experiences.

Well, Kierkegaard read this text in the Old Testament, and he puzzled over it.

He labored over it. He said, he said, just as one of the men here said, how could God ever ask somebody to kill.

Another person?

He said, how could he believe that there's a…. How could he do that?

This would require what Kierkegaard called the temporary suspension of the ethical, which was… creates all kinds of moral conflict within a person. But then on a human level, what really puzzled Kierkegaard was this text that Abraham rose up early in the….

And Kierkegaard speculates a bit, and he says, why does Abraham get up early in the morning? And Kierkegaard reacted to the traditional saccharine plastic syrupy way in which Christians tend to handle this text.

They said, well, obviously the reason why Abraham woke up early in the morning was it didn't matter whatever God called him to do. He was prepared to do, and he would do it without murmuring, without a moment's hesitation.

If God said, kill your son, Abraham said, yes, sir, sets the alarm for five o 'clock, gets up so that he can be prompt and on the job to perform the act of obedience. That is utter nonsense. This is what I like about Kierkegaard's understanding.

He said he turns to the Old Testament, and the thing that he finds in the Old Testament is a life and a pattern that breathes reality. These are real people, people of flesh and blood, people like you, people like me, people who don't always find it easy to obey the commandments of God.

God has asked for the ultimate sacrifice from Abraham, and Kierkegaard looks at it from several ways, and he speculates, and he said, the only reason I can figure out why Abraham got up early in the morning was it because he couldn't sleep.

The guy was tossing and turning all night long, and it's like a man who is faced with a dreadful task, an awesome task, where there's a certain point, even as soldiers are preparing for battle in the still beforehand, the last thing in the world they want is the conflict of the firefight, but when one is sitting waiting for it, there's a sense in which you say, well, let's get it going, let's do it, let's get it over with, and so Abraham can't sleep.

He's a wreck.

He gets up in the morning, and here's a man who is one of the wealthiest men in the ancient world, Abraham. His house is filled with servants, and normally when he wanted to go on a trip, he would call to his servants and say, saddle the donkeys or saddle the horses or whatever or the camels, and that would all be taken care of, and the master of the house when the time of departure came would step off the stoop, and there would be his camel prepared to go, but on this occasion he doesn't even bother the servants.

He goes and he saddles the animal himself, and not only that, he goes out and with his own hands picks up the axe and starts cutting the wood, again a menial task that a man of the wealth of Abraham in the ancient Near Eastern world would never touch, but this is something God is calling him to do alone, and so he goes and he picks up the axe and he starts to chop the wood.

Now think about it. What's he chopping the wood for? He's cutting that wood for kindling to put on the altar the wood that he's going to ignite that will consume the flesh of his own son. You know, in terms of the pathos, humanly speaking, of what's going through this man's mind, I can hardly conceive of it.

He takes that thing, and I can see all of the frustration, the anger, the fears are pouring down through his arms and out through that axe handle, through the axe head into.

That wood.

You know, this can't be God. Is it really? Did you ever do that as you fought for your soul under the claim that God has on your.

Life?

I think if Christianity is threatened by anything in the twentieth century, it is threatened by the intrusion of superficiality. You know, that faith means saying your prayers once or twice a day, putting a blessing over the food, throwing your dollar into the collection plate.

But when God is playing for keeps, He wants a man's life. I remember that when I was converted to Christianity, that after I had to face the call of God on my life, that I was miserable wrestling with that call, knowing that there was no going back, that there was no looking back, that God was playing for keeps.

And I think I can understand how Abraham was throwing that axe around into the wood. So he starts off, and he went to the place where God had told him, and on the third day Abraham raised his eyes and saw the place from a distance.

Listen to that.

Abraham starts walking towards Mount Moriah with his son, with Isaac, and they travel three days, and they're still not there. They can see it, but they can see it from a distance. So this wasn't that God asked Abraham to go across the street and offer his son there.

I really can't relate to this in terms of experience from my own life. The only thing that even approaches it, and it doesn't approach it really, is when we first moved here to the Ligonier Valley. We were given a gift of a gorgeous German Shepherd puppy.

And the first week we lived here, this puppy came into the house, and its head was swollen twice its normal size, and I thought, the dog's got his head into a bee's nest or something and has been stung repeatedly.

I better take him to the vet. So I took him to the veterinarian hospital, and the veterinarian examined him and said right away it wasn't bees. He said the dog revealed three fang marks on his head from a copperhead.

And here the little puppy had tangled with a poisonous snake, and the snake had stricken him three times in the head and just ballooned up his head. His eyes were swollen shut. Well, the first we went through was the initial shock of the toxic attack into the nervous system of the dog.

We thought the dog was going to die in the first twenty-four hours, but it survived. And then they thought he would die because he was blinded, and the dogs will give in and surrender to despair and die, but that didn't kill him.

And so after two weeks of intensive care, then the dog suffered necrosis, which is the rotting of the skin tissue in every juncture where the poison has penetrated the system, so that the dog's coat and fur in his whole face just literally rotted and fell off, exposing the sinews and the sinus cavities of this dog to the naked eye.

It was the most horrible, grotesque-looking animal I've ever seen. And when I walked into that hospital after two weeks and saw that dog without a face, my first thought was, why didn't you put that dog away?

And the doctor said to me, well, we can save the dog. He said, you take him home now, and what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to put this medicine on his face every day on these bare skin tissues.

And he gave me gloves, and I brought that dog home, and really he was so ugly I could hardly look at him, and I went into the garage where I kept him because of the stench from the putrefaction of the flesh, and I took this salve with gloves and gingerly applied it to his face.

You know, it was awful.

But the dog responded. I mean, the dog was miserable, and the dog somehow sensed that this was difficult for.

Me to do.

I don't know how dogs communicate to people, but it was sort of like he was saying with his eyes, thank you for this act of tenderness. And after the first day, I would go in there three times a day with my bare hands and put that stuff on that dog's face, and it didn't even bother me.

Well because of that experience, I think, a special relationship developed between that.

Dog.

You know, when you're nursing the animal from the point of death through back to restoration of health, you have that kind of camaraderie, and you know the old story of the man and his dog. This dog would go with me wherever I went.

When I lectured, he would sleep right beside me. When I'd go out hunting, he was at my side all the time. For two years, he thrived. He was strong. He was very ugly. His face, as it healed up with scar tissue, was twisted into what looked like a perpetual snarl.

I prefer to interpret it as a perpetual smile, but other people didn't. But after two years, suddenly the dog started having severe seizures. And we took him again to the vet, and they talked about a delayed reaction to the toxins of the snake affecting the brain.

And after all different kinds of medications had been attempted, the verdict of the physician was the dog's not going to make it. And he was having six seizures a day, and he was helpless. And so my wife said to me, we've got to put this dog away.

Well, you put a dog away, there are different ways to do it. I could take him out in the backyard, take my deer gun out and shoot him. It's painless. It's quick. It's fast. It's very inexpensive. But there was no way in the world I could bring myself to raise my gun and point it at that dog and pull the trigger.

I couldn't do it.

My wife said, well, let's spend the money and take him to the veterinarian and have him put to sleep, euphemistically, painlessly. And I said, honey, I can't do it. She said, here's what we'll do. When I'm, you know, in town or something, get one of the students, don't tell me what day it is, to pick up the dog, take him to the vet, have the vet put him away, and tell.

Me about it after it happened.

I just did not have it within me to take that dog and put him in the front seat of my car or in the back seat of the car and drive 20 minutes to the animal hospital knowing in my mind that I was taking the dog to its death.

That's a dog. It wasn't my son. Abraham takes his son, and he walks him, not just for 20 minutes, but for three days they're walking, and Abraham's taking this boy to his death, and what happens? Abraham said to his young man, stay here with the donkey, and I and the lad will go yonder, and we will worship and return to you.

And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac, his son, and took in his hand the fire and the knife, and the two of them walked on together. And then Isaac spoke to his father, and he said, my father, and Abraham said, here I am, my son.

And the boy said, behold the fire and the wood, but where's the lamb for the burnt offering? Dad, you know, what's going on here? I see the wood, and I see the knife, and I see…we have everything we need, but I don't…did you forget to bring the lamb?

How do you think he felt? How do you think Abraham felt when his son said, hey, Dad, where's the lamb? Abraham is going to say, hey, Isaac, you're it. He said, son, don't worry about it.

God will provide.

Abraham is saying, God will provide, I hope. He goes ahead with it, and certainly he's trusting in it, but he doesn't know for.

Certain that God's going to show up there.

Not in an experience like this when God is asking Abraham to do that which is unthinkable, and he trusts, yes. He believes, yes. He has faith, yes. But what I'm trying to communicate is don't superficialize that faith.

Sometimes the faith by which the Christian stands is a faith that is made with clenched teeth, where you're hanging on by your fingernails, and I'm convinced this is what was the life situation of Abraham.

So they came to the place of which God had told him, and Abraham built the altar there and arranged the wood, and he bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Mercifully, the Bible doesn't tell us what Isaac said when his father tied him up.

I don't know how old Isaac was. He was old enough to walk. He was old enough to notice things like there's no lamb and to ask questions. If he was old enough to ask questions, he was certainly old enough to understand that something was amiss when his own father tied him up and put him on that.

But as I said, I'm glad that the Bible doesn't record the words that were exchanged then. Abraham tied his son, bound his son, and laid him on the altar on top of the wood, and Abraham stretched out his hand, took the knife to slay his son.

This is how far it goes. You know, they say that God's an eleventh-hour God. It's more like ten seconds to twelve, right?

It's not just the last minute. It's the last second.

Abraham goes to the very line of obedience. This is why he's the father of the faithful. What I'm saying to you is that his faith was not an easy faith, but it was a trusting faith.

He did it.

He did what God required him to do. He obeyed, and he goes right down to the last minute. He ties his son up as loathsome as it is to himself. He grabs that knife. He raises it up, and he is now ready to do the last act, to plunge that knife into the heart of his son.

And at the last possible second, what happens? An angel screams, Abraham, Abraham, lay not thy hand upon thy son, for now I know that you trust me. You know what the Guinness Book of World Records is for dropping a knife?

The fastest knife drop in history took place. Abraham heard it. That knife was gone. Abraham turned, and what did he see? Behold, a ram caught by its horns in a fling. A substitute had been provided by God.

When Abraham saw that, he had those ropes off his son so fast. He grabbed that boy, and he held him, and he said, thank you, God, for that substitute. In the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided.

And God spoke from heaven and said, by Myself I have sworn, and because you have done this, I will not withhold My promises from you. But we see in this drama, in this historical episode of conflict between a father and his son, the clearest paradigm in the Old Testament of the ultimate act of redemption, don't we?

What does the New Testament teach us? Every child in Sunday school learns John 3 .16, God so loved the world, that He gave His Son. What Son? His only Son, the monogenes, the only begotten Son, the Son whom God loved, Jesus.

And tradition has it that the very mountain where the cross of Golgotha hung was at the site of this Old Testament place called Moriah, that the parallels, one after another, God takes His own Son and takes Him to a mountain to slay Him, right?

The same story is rehearsed only with one distinctive difference.

What is it?

When God raised His hand over Jesus, nobody hollered, nobody stopped it, and God took the knife and plunged it through the heart of His Son. That's the basis of our redemption, the kind of God that we serve that will kill His own Son.

And it's the kind of faith that we're to have, is the faith of Abraham, to trust Him if it means hanging on a bar of fingernails, in blood, if it means going to Moriah. And I'll tell you this, dear friends, I don't think there's ever been a Christian who hasn't been called at some point in his Christian life to some kind of Mount Moriah experience.