Abram stood and watched the demise of Sodom, the man who believed God. Lot ended crawling into a cave with his two daughters. And yet, those daughters had children. One of the children was a man called Moab, Moab. Lot's wife. Look back. And centuries later, there was a lovely woman, and she said to the Moabite girl, Go back! And Ruth said, No, I'm not going back. And she became an ancestress of Jesus of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Out of that cave, ladies and gentlemen. So there stood Abram in his faith, in his confidence in God, and there was Moab born in the most unseemly situation, both of them. Ancestors. the Savior. How do we cope with that kind of a God? It's magnificent, isn't it?
[00:06:55]
The most debilitating thing as we seek to walk after the Spirit is when we do it again, isn't it? And this should give us courage. Just think of the experience this man has had of God, and yet he does it again. And God doesn't write him off, but lifts him up and protects him because he has a purpose for him. And so for you, don't allow doing it again to destroy you and to hold you down permanently. We repent and come back to him. We can get up even if it happens twice or more.
[00:11:12]
God was interested in Ishmael and in his persistence and future existence and role on this planet. So Abram gets up early in the morning and gives her some bread and a skin of water. What is this? This is one of the wealthiest men in the region. This is his son. And he gives her a bottle of water and a bit of bread when he could have given her a whole train of donkeys and camels and food and an inheritance. And he doesn't do it. Why not? Perhaps because he secretly hoped she'd come back that evening. He didn't give her enough to last a day, let alone a lifetime. I don't know because we're not told. But we do know that very rapidly the water ran out and she put the child under one of the bushes and went out of earshot so she couldn't hear the child screaming. And the voice came again. What troubles you, Hagar? For God has heard the voice of the boy. Up, lift him up and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make him into a great nation. God does not forget Ishmael in all his love for Isaac. And we should remember it with the descendants of Ishmael in our contemporary world.
[00:14:02]
The offering up of Isaac is one of the most profound, difficult stories in the whole of Scripture. It was hard to let Ishmael go, the son he loved and whom he'd hoped would one time be the heir. Now he was to be faced with letting go his second son. We've just had a tale of Hagar, a distraught mother and her son, driven into the desert and despairing of life, being saved by the intervention of an angel who showed them a well. We're about to meet something much deeper, but very similar. Abram, the anguished father, silently obeying an injunction from God to take his son into the wilderness and sacrifice him. And he's saved by the intervention of an angel. It's a test. But Abram, of course, couldn't know it was a test.
[00:17:34]
God had said, go. God had said, believe me. God had said, I'm God Almighty. Walk before me and be perfect. And I'm going to give you a son. And he waited year after year after year after year. And supernaturally, a child was conceived. Please notice that. The thing was supernatural. And the whole context…is geared to convince us that it was supernatural.
[00:21:16]
The New Testament assures me that Abram had got to the point in his thinking that if God asks me to do this, I don't understand why, because it seems to ruin all the promises. Therefore, the only logical possibility is if I have to kill him, he'll rise from the dead. I'm amazed at that, you know. Abram didn't know a hundredth of what we know in this room. Abram had the experience of this, of course. His body good as dead, Sarah's good as dead. Can God bring life from the death was the big issue circling the birth of Isaac. It now gets even bigger, the very same issue. Can God generate physical life? So Abram is thinking that Isaac must live, not Isaac must die. He sees the ultimate goal, although as a father, he must have been torn to pieces psychologically inside.
[00:25:23]
He tells the two lads to wait while I and my son go to worship, and we will return to you. Isaac was old enough to be involved in worship. He wasn't a child. We will return. Is that a prophecy? Is it a despairing hope? Or is it an expression of a trembling faith that God's going to raise the boy from the dead?
[00:27:50]
There's something so deliberate about this. A dad and his son. A dad and his son, the dad and his son, in whom all the hopes of the planet in a sense are resting. And they're starting to climb the final ascent in more ways than one. The Genesis Rabbah, which is a Jewish Midrash commentary, says that Isaac, with the wood on his back, is like a condemned man carrying his own cross. And the centuries flip by in our imagination, he went out bearing his own cross. But that was a son that had the choice, Isaac had none.
[00:28:50]
Son, God will provide for himself the lamb for the burnt offering. A lamb will be provided. Is this a prayer, a prophecy, or an expression of uncommon trust? Abram may be speaking more than he knows, and perhaps there's rising in his heart the hope that Isaac won't need to be killed because his words turn out in the end to be exactly right. So they went, both of them together.
[00:30:27]
He binds him. In Jewish thinking, this is the binding, akita, of Isaac. Isaac was a tough young man who could easily have outrun a hundred -year -old father. The binding suggests to me that it was done willingly and cooperatively. What did Abram feel? What did Isaac feel? It's a turmoil of emotions. that leaves me far behind. I can't begin to penetrate this. Taking the lad whom he loved and in whom all his hope was and with trembling hands, getting him to lie down on the wood. And then, Abram takes out his knife and took it to slay his son. He lifts it up. The whole of heaven watches. This is the highest point of drama that the Bible has got to so far in its storyline.
[00:32:17]
And Abram lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by his horns, and he went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abram called the name of that place, the Lord will provide. As it is said to this day on the mount of the Lord, it will be provided. I do not know what it means that it was a ram, the father of a lamb that was caught in the thicket. But it seems to me to underline the sheer complexity of what's going on here. It's not simply a son suffering, it's a father suffering.
[00:34:33]
I feel I'm on the holiest ground because time seems to collapse as we think of the other father and the other son, who went up in all probability the very same mountain together and where the knife was allowed to fall. It's our salvation. This is the gospel. This is our God.
[00:36:15]
Now, you can argue from now to eternity philosophically about the nature of God's omniscience. But when I read here that God says, now I know, I believe it's true, that God expects the evidence that Abram's faith is real. And God expects the evidence that my faith and your faith is real.
[00:38:40]
We talk about mountaintop experiences, ladies and gentlemen. We should be careful. This was the mountaintop experience. Have you been up a mountain with God recently? God wants to know that you're real. He wants to know that I'm real. There's so much hypocrisy in my heart. So much deceit, so much pretense, so much playing the religious game. And in the end, God, in his wisdom, will test us.
[00:39:08]
That is, his activity, what he did confirmed the reality of his justification by faith. It didn't cause it, it confirmed it. And God demanded the evidence. And then God swears. And that is quoted too in the letter to the Hebrews. God swears to Abraham. And the application is very simple. And it's said in Hebrews, So when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise, the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it. with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters into the inner place behind the curtain where Jesus has gone as a forerunner for us, having become a high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek.
[00:40:17]
And the man stands forever as a paradigm of what it means to trust God, but also as a prototype on that mountain of the gospel.
[00:42:29]
Somewhere in his soul, he will always remember that Abram taught him to place his trust not in his father but in God. What about us fathers and mothers? Have we got it across to our children that God can take them on their journey of faith despite our failures?
[00:44:19]
Abram longs for a bride for his son who will repeat his journey. That's what it's all about. It started with the journey. You And now the cycle has come. The promised seed has been born. And now for the projected seed project to go forward, he must have a wife that will repeat his journey. I hope you've got such a wife or a husband. Oh, young men, if I may speak to you frankly, whatever you do, find a wife, if God has called you to have a wife, that will go on the journey. That will go on the journey.
[00:46:20]
This is what we're about. This is our task, like Eliezer, the servant, to take the wealth of the master's son and show it to people and say, will you go? And encourage them to fall in love with someone they've never seen to make that journey.
[00:51:23]
And Christ is so big. It's going to take all the millions of believers throughout all the ages to constitute his bride. And eternity will begin when we arrive at that wedding day. And I often think, you know, when I get there, my wife, will I turn to her and say, Sally, if I'd known what it was like, I'd have invested far more in it. May God bless you.
[00:52:56]
