Making Life Count--When You Feel Inadequate
- Stephen Phelan
- Oct 11, 2009
- Series: Making Life Count
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Making Life Count—When You Are Tested
Gen. 22, Mid-City Oct. 11, 2009
We’re in a series on making life count and we’re looking at those who went before us who ran the race well and made their lives count. Abraham—known as the father of faith, would certainly fall into that category. Now, let me just give you a brief little sketch of Abraham’s life that comes out of Gen. 12-21. At the age of 75, Abraham receives the call of God to leave his birthplace and all that he knows and go. God doesn’t even tell him where—just pack up. More details to follow.
Can you imagine? Honey, pack up. “OK, where are we going?” “Don’t know—God said he would show us once we’re in the car?”
Abraham heard the call of God and he packs up the family and goes, but, not surprisingly, what sets in along the way……fear. In fact, he gets so scared in
Then step 3 happens that we have talked about. Call, Fear, & Reassurance. God comes to Abraham, reassures him of His presence in 2 ways. (1) God inflicts illness on Pharoah and his household and they send Sara packing back to Abraham.
(2) God makes this remarkable covenant in Gen. 15 with Abraham where he passes through the pieces of an animal cut in two to remind Abraham, “I am with you. Do not fear. I’ll make good on my promise to make you a blessing to all the nations.”
Abraham then moves into another land and has the same test—2nd time around.. He has this beautiful wife in a land of scary foreigners. Same decision—to trust God or not. Surely he is going to get it this time right. This is Abraham—Mr. Faith. Right. Wrong. He throws her under the bus again: “Uhh, King Abimelech, she is my sister. Really.” I am not making this up—Gen. 20. You thought you were the only one who keeps continually botching it. You’re not.
So Abimelech takes her into his harem. Thankfully, God is gracious with Abraham like he is with us when we jump back into our ol faithful sin patterns, and he reassures Abraham once again—“I am with you and won’t give up on you.” He reassures him in 2 ways. (1) He goes to King Abimelech in a dream and says, “Sara is Abraham’s wife. Don’t touch her, and send her back.”
(2) He opens Sarah’s barren womb. God gave a child to Abraham & Sara in their old age. And after this happens, we come to our story—to the big test, where he is asked to sacrifice this child that has been long promised to him.
And we’re going to do it by looking at 4 things:
1. The Reality of God’s Test
2. The Difficulty of God’s Test
3. The Goal of God’s Test
4. The Hope to pass God’s Test
First, the reality of God’s test. Interestingly enough, I hear Christians say this from time to time, “God doesn’t test you—that is the devil.” Right pastor. Wrong. Look at v1, “Some time later God tested Abraham.” I don’t know how the Bible could be any clearer. Ex. 15:25; 16:4; Deut. 8:2 and I could go on and on showing you places where God tests his people.
Now, don’t confuse God testing you with God tempting you. Jms. 1:12-13 says God doesn’t tempt anyone. He tests, but he doesn’t tempt. Deut. 8:2 says this, “Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart.” See Dt. 8:2 gives us the reality of God’s test--He tests you to reveal what is in your heart.
If you’re an athlete, you get this. You only learn so much in practice. Where you really find out what kind of player you are is in a game. Or think about it from a aviation perspective. You only learn so much in a simulator. At some point, you have to get in the cockpit to find out what kind of pilot you are.
(2) The Difficulty of the Test
So, expect tests. But expect another thing—they will be difficult. Let’s consider the difficulty of Abraham’s test. For those of you who are Christians, you become so familiar with some stories like this one that you forget how strange they can sound when you read them for the first time. So let me start by addressing those of you who are not yet Christians because this story has been a sticking point for a number of people who are not yet Christians. You read this and say, “So you Christians tell me that your God is good, but yet he gives insane commands like, “Hey, Abraham, go murder your son—then I’ll know that you love me.” I am sorry, but you people are whacked. And if you don’t think that is whacked, well, then you have been drinking the Kool-Aid for too long to know any better.
Now let me answer that--God is not asking Abraham to murder his son. But given the radical cultural shifts that have taken place since Abraham’s culture, I can see why most of us read it this way today. So what we have to do is go back and unearth the original meaning based on the historical context in which it was written, and we have quite a bit of work to do so this week. See that is where you always start, by asking what did this passage mean to the original audience in their historical and cultural context that it was written. Then you make the necessary cultural and epochal adjustments to apply it to our lives in 2009.
Now I want to thank a professor of mine named Bruce Waltke, Derek Kidner, Soren Kierkegaard, and I am heavily indebted to Tim Keller for helping me get to the original meaning. Much of their analysis follows.
See a really smart philosopher by the name of Soren Kierkegaard called out most Christians for the way they read this passage in his famous book called Fear and Trembling. The traditional read—do whatever God says, even if it is nutty and makes no sense whatsoever (like murder your son). Yet, Kierkegaard says uh, uh—I can’t do that—that is utterly absurd. And to make his point he tells a story.
He depicts a Christian pastor preaching on this story with Abraham and telling his congregation that the moral of story is that no matter how seemingly bizarre God’s command is, if you do it then you show that you are in obedience and really have faith in God. One of the members of the congregation is particularly inspired by the pastor and says, “I am all in. And he goes home and says, “I am going to be like Abraham and kills his son.
He was locked up and everyone in the town condemned him, including the preacher and Kierkegaard says, “If that man was condemned for what he did, then why wasn’t Abraham.” What Abraham did was absurd and criminal. It was attempted murder. He should have been locked up.
Kierkegaard said—this isn’t a good story, it is a wretched story. He read it as most modern people do—that God was calling Abraham to murder his son. But he wasn’t.
Here is one critical thing that Kierkegard and most moderns miss: Abraham would not have heard God’s command as asking him to murder his son. Rather, God commanded him in v2 to “sacrifice Isaac as a burnt offering.” Sacrificing your firstborn son and murder sound similar in our culture—they were 2 very different things in the ancient near eastern context. Why?
John Levinson, a Jewish scholar and professor of Ancient Near East at Harvard, wrote a book called The Death & Resurrection of the Beloved Son, explaining why most modern people, including Kierkegard, miss this distinction. He gives 2 reasons: First, as an American, you read this text individualistically b/c you come from an individualistic culture. But Ancient cultures were family-oriented. Your actions didn’t just affect yourself, but your whole family was impacted by what you did.
Second, there was something called the law of primogeniture that was as accepted in Ancient Near Eastern cultures as democracy is in America. In all ancient near eastern cultures—not just among the Israelites—but in every culture the firstborn son got all of the inheritance. This was an agrarian world and wealth was measured largely by land and animals, so to divide up the families land among 12 brothers would be to diminish the power and status and success of the family. So the firstborn son got it all to keep the family’s status and he had to function as a benefactor to the rest of the family
In our story God uses these 2 culturally accepted principles to communicate to Abraham & the others about his character--how he can be both just (and deal with out sin) & gracious (and not destroy us) at the same time.
What God says to Hebrews over and over is that he has a legal right to the life of the firstborn. You see this in the Passover—The firstborn’s life was forfeited and the family was spared. After the Passover, God reiterates this notion in Ex. 22, Numb 3 & 8. Life of firstborn is forfeited unless you redeem it and a payment is made. Why does God have a legal right to the life of the firstborn? Well, the ancients would have understood this b/c they knew that the firstborn functioned on behalf of the entire family. They would have understood what God is saying, which is this: there is a debt of sin that the family owed—not just the person.
Adam, the firstborn son sinned, and the family of Adam had a debt of sin as a result. Ancient cultures got this—that the actions of the firstborn, either good or bad, impacted all of them. Eastern cultures still understand this today. In an individualistic American culture, this is foreign to us.
Not Abraham. See what amazed Abraham and others in Genesis was that God never called in this debt that their family owed. God always allowed a lamb or some animal to be offered up instead, and they all knew that the debt of sin was being carried over. Sort of like our national debt right now—we just keep delaying payment and carrying it into next year.
Until God calls Abraham to offer up his firstborn and Abraham’s heart must have sunk. At long last, God was calling in the debt of the family’s sin. Abraham didn’t think this was an absurd request or even unjust, rather he knew that the time for justice had come. Tim Keller puts it this way, “If Abraham had heard a voice that said, “Go kill Sarah, then I’ll know you obey me, Abraham would have never done it.” He wouldn’t have done it—this would have been murder. Abraham would have known that he was hallucinating and that this wasn’t God speaking to him. Rather, when God says “Abraham, offer up your firstborn,” Abraham realized that God was calling in his debt.”
So Abraham’s question wasn’t, “Why is God asking me to do this?” But rather “How is God going to make good on his promise to bless all the nations through Isaac if he has to offer up Isaac to pay for the families sin? Let me put it another way. God’s glorious promises didn’t seem to match up with life. Can’t you identify with this?
You read the Bible and you see all of these wonderful things promised to Christians. Love, joy, peace, patience—and yet I find myself in depression. An eternal inheritance that can’t perish, spoil, or fade, but I can’t pay the rent. A God who says asks for anything in my name and you’ll have it, yet you ask and get nothing. Sometimes, the promises of God don’t seem to match up with the reality of life.
In fact, Abraham’s reasoning is laid out in Heb. 11 in the hall of fame of faith in verse 17, “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.” Abraham has learned from his failures. He says, “I know God has promised this, and while I don’t know the details, God will come through, even if it means that God must raise him from the dead.”
So, we have seen the reality of the test, the difficulty of the test, and now let’s consider the goal of the test. Why does God test us?
(3) The Goal of the Test
See, my friends, this takes us to the 3rd point of tests—the goal of the test. The goal of God’s test is answered in our story but also in I Pet. 1: 6-7, “In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7These have come so that your faith—of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire—may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Tests come so that your faith may be pure and genuine. Like gold in the fire, stripped of anything besides Jesus that you choose to put your faith in. Genuine faith is faith in Jesus. Period. The only way you get this is through tests.
Everything you put your trust in besides Jesus will be stripped away from you. Your wealth will be stripped. Your career will be stripped. Your sex appeal will be stripped. You family will be stripped at some point.
Abraham’s faith, after all the tests, has been stripped of self-trust, and is proved genuine. You see, in v 14, where he names the mtn where his test took place, “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.” Did you hear that—on the mountain, in the test, IT will be provided. I love that. For Abraham, “it” Abraham was finally immovable in this truth. That is where God wants all of us. He will provide. He will come through—in the most unlikely ways, at the most unlikely times. Here me in this. God wants you to know that whatever test you are facing—He will provide, someway, somehow. You’re task--Trust him.
(4) The Hope to Pass the Test
But if you are like me, you still have one question. What hope do I have to pass the tests that I will face? It took Abraham quite a few tries—what if I am like him in his early days and never really get it. Well, you’re hope to pass the test isn’t in Abraham, but it is the one to whom Abraham points. Think about it. God called Abraham to place wood on his one and only son and climb up Mt. Moriah. He was calling in the debt of sin owed by Abraham’s family. Abraham’s one and only son, his firstborn, would pay it.
But, in the end, he stayed the hand of Abraham and said, “I will delay the payment once again.” This was gracious, but was it just?
Here is how it was just. See long after Abraham, God would place a piece of wood on his one and only son and ask him to climb the very same mountain. Calvary, my friends, was in the range of mountains known as….you guessed it….Moriah. On this same mountain,
God’s one and only son, his firstborn, went to pay the debt for God’s family, for Abraham’s family.
And this time the hand of justice wasn’t stayed. It came down on Jesus, the one and only son—the firstborn, to pay the family’s debt of sin. John 3:16 says it well, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only son.” Gave his one and only son—not murdered, but offered him up as a sacrifice to pay the debt of the family’s sin.
See the hope to pass the tests you are facing is found in the one who never failed. Jesus passed the test of sin. Jesus passed the test of death. And He promises to you, “I am with you. I will provide. I will make a way.” Trust me.
The way to a great life, one that counts, begins with trusting Jesus, and it continues with trusting Jesus.
