Gen 22

impossible faith

(genesis 22)

Jason Procopio

Today’s message will be the last in our series in Genesis; we’ll surely pick up the series again at a later date, but even though Abraham is still around for a few more chapters after this, Genesis 22 is effectively the climax of his story.  

We’ve seen several times over the last nine weeks that this book was written for a specific reason, with a specific goal in mind. Jesus tells us that Moses is the author of this book, and we know that he wrote it while the Israelites were in the desert, waiting to go into the land God had promised to give them. So Moses is writing, both to give a history of the things God has done in the world up to that point, and to give a history of the people of Israel itself; but most especially, to strengthen the faith of the people of Israel, that God is faithful and sovereign over them, and to give them their mission as a people, before they go into the promised land. That’s why this book exists.

One reason we preach the way we do here is because we can’t make the Bible mean something for us that it didn’t mean for its first readers. So if we know the goal of the book for them, we also know its goal for us. We have our mission to—to go and make disciples of all nations, through the gospel of Jesus Christ—and this text strengthens our own faith in God’s sovereignty over us and for us, because we clearly see this story echoed in what God did for us in Jesus Christ.

And rarely is that goal clearer than in Genesis 22.

In chapter 12, God came to Abraham and called him to take his wife, his nephew, and his belongings, and to go to the place where God would show him. He promised Abraham that he would make him a great nation, that he would give him a son in his old age, and that through this son, and the line of descendants that would come through him, all the nations of the earth would be blessed. God made a covenant with Abraham and with his descendants after him, that he would be their God, and they would be his people. He did all this before Abraham’s son ever came.

This is the promise Abraham had clung to for years. God put Abraham through several different tests of his faith over the course of those years; some of the tests, he failed miserably; others, like the test we saw last week, he succeeded. Through these tests, we’ve seen Abraham’s faith growing over the course of this story—his trust that God would do what he said he would do, and that what God commands him to do is good. 

But today, in Genesis 22, his faith will be put to the ultimate test, because God will command him to do something which is, by all normal measures, wicked. 

Impossible Command (v. 1-2) 

It’s important to note the parallels between what we see here in chapter 22, and what we saw way back at the beginning of Abraham’s story, in chapter 12. Nearly the exact same language is used. 

In chapter 12, verse 1, God says to him,  

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

Here, in chapter 22, v. 1-2, we read:

After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 2 He said, “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 of which I shall tell you.”

In both cases, God calls Abraham to go and do something for which there seems to be no logical reason—a commandment without any basis—and expects him to obey. Now of course what he asks of Abraham here, in chapter 22, is much more difficult, far less romantic. But essentially, here God is completing the cycle. As someone (I can’t remember who now) put it: in chapter 12, God calls Abraham to let go of his past; now, in chapter 22, God calls him to let go of his future. He calls him to literally sacrifice the son God had promised him, and then given him.

And there are two main reasons why this second call is so terrible. The first reason is both theological and cultural. Child sacrifice is what happened in the worship of many false, pagan gods around Abraham (for example, in the worship of the false god Moloch). So God seems to be going against everything he has presented himself to be, by making it seem as if he’s actually just like every other false god.

The second reason is obvious, and purely human. Anyone who has had a child knows the fear of that child dying. For some parents that fear can be nearly paralyzing; for others, it only comes when the child gets injured or sick. But every parent—every good parent, anyway—knows that fear.

Even so, the fear Abraham must have felt here is on a different level altogether—not only would he be afraid of Isaac dying; God has commanded that he be the one to do it. There were a lot of different types of sacrifices in the Bible—you had sacrifices and offerings for worship, sacrifices to atone for sin… The two things every animal sacrifice had in common were: they were always brutal, and they were always costly. You always sacrificed the best of your livestock; the best of whatever you had, and let it go in a way that was completely final.

This is what God calls him to do to his son.

Frankly, still to this day, every time I read these two verses, it turns my stomach. There are no other verses in the Bible—for me, personally—that cause me to doubt more than these two. No verses cause me to question God’s goodness more than these two. God’s asking this of Abraham seems unbelievably cruel. What God asks of Abraham is unthinkable, impossible.

And on top of it all, it simply makes no sense. It makes no sense for God to give Abraham this promise of a son, to finally make good on that promise…and then to ask Abraham to throw it all away. It makes no sense.

We talked about this last week, if you remember. God will sometimes put his people in situations in which there seems to be no upside. Situations in which we naturally say, “No good can come of this.” 

And what we saw was that rather than simply taking that pain away, and finding another way to grow our faith, God uses our pain to strengthen our faith. This pain God uses can come from the consequences of our sin, or the sins of others, or seemingly random events; to that list, we can now add, the pain which comes from obeying God’s commandments—because if we obey, we will come across situations in which it will cost us, it will hurt us, to obey. God uses our pain to strengthen our faith.

I said that last week, and I still stand by it. But I’ll freely admit that it becomes much harder to hear that, and accept it, in a situation like this one. Because here, God isn’t just using pain; here, God is causing pain. This isn’t a result of Abraham’s sin, or anyone else’s; it’s not the kind of difficult (but relatively commonplace) pain that comes from things like cancer, or a car accident. This is an event that came about through God’s own doing—pain that would not exist if God hadn’t told Abraham to do this.

In this case, we see the reason why a little later; but for now, it is simply devastating to think about.

Impossible Faith (v. 3-10)

The author gives us no information about what was going on in Abraham’s mind that night, as he dwelt on what God had called him to do. We pick him up again the next morning. V. 3:

3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. 4 On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. 5 Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.” 6 And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. And he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. 7 And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” 8 Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together. 

9 When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son.

So the first question this text forces us to ask, in v. 1-2, is, Why does God give Abraham such a frankly impossible commandment?

The second question is: Why does Abraham obey him? 

We could make a few guesses. The first would be fear. Abraham knows God’s power, and is afraid of what God might do if he doesn’t obey. This would have been one of the main motivators of those people who sacrificed their children to idols.

Another would be desire—he wants something from God, and feels like he has appease him by sacrificing Isaac. This, too, was a prime motivator of idol-worshippers who performed child sacrifices.

But these things are not what motivates Abraham. The only hint as to Abraham’s mindset we have in this text comes in v. 5. Abraham is instructing the men who have come with him as to what they should do, and he says, 

“Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.”

Already—before he ever goes up onto the mountain—Abraham is convinced that when he comes back down, Isaac will be with him. That is not to say that Abraham knew all the details of how this story was going to play out. Hebrews 11.19 tells us that Abraham thought the sacrifice would probably take place, but that in this worst case scenario, God would raise Isaac from the dead.

How could he believe that?

Because he had faith that God would keep his promise. He had faith that God would not have promised him a son, through whom he would bless all the nations of the world, and finally give him this son, only to take him away now. He didn’t know what would happen, but that God would go back on his word…? That was unthinkable. 

So I hope you can see the shift that has taken place in Abraham. Over the course of this story, we have seen his faith tested multiple times. The first time was in chapter 12, as we saw before, when God told him to leave his home and go to a foreign land. The second time was when he settled in that land in chapter 13, when he called upon the name of the Lord (13.4), and let his nephew Lot take the best territory for himself. The next time (I think) was when he went to rescue Lot in chapter 14, trusting God to grant him victory. (And we see he was rewarded for what he did at the end of that chapter.) 

The next time was in chapter 16, when Sarah (then Sarai) despaired because of her infertility, and suggested Abraham sleep with her servant, Hagar, in order to have a child through her. This test, he failed. He accepted her offer, and had a son, Ishmael, even though it is not what God had intended, and there was strife in his household for years afterward.

The next time was in his intercession for Sodom in chapter 18, when he asked God to spare the city for the sake of a few righteous people who might be there. And even though no righteous people were found, God validated Abraham’s faith anyway, and spared his nephew Lot and his daughters. 

The next text, he failed as well—when he went to Guerar in chapter 20, Abraham feared man instead of God, and nearly lost his wife and his life for his lack of faith that God could protect him in a hostile territory.

And finally, we have the validation of his faith in chapter 21, which we saw last week, when finally God gives him and Sarah the son he had promised them, Isaac. And we see the test of faith in this same chapter, when God told him to fo what Sarah said and send away Hagar and Ishmael, no matter how painful it was, because God would take care of them, and because it is through Isaac that God’s promises would be fulfilled.

So when we arrive here, we see the simple fact that Abraham had experienced too much—both in seeing his faith validated, and in living through the consequences when his faith was lacking—to imagine that God wouldn’t make good on his promises now.

And that is what faith is. Hebrews 11.1 says,  

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. 

Have you ever read that and felt a little out of place, a little wobbly, because when you think of your own faith it’s more like, I’m PRETTY SURE these things I can’t see are true? Would you be hard pressed to call your faith a firm conviction, which says, I KNOW this things are true?

If the answer is yes, then you’re in good company. There is a reason why Hebrews 11 defines faith like this, and then goes on to describe the experience of faith of all of these men and women of God, including Abraham.

Tim Keller has said that faith is “reason plus experience.” Now obviously this isn’t a theological statement; he’s talking about our experience, about what it’s like to live out our faith day after day, over the course of our lives. At some point, you will be set in front of a choice: a choice to obey God or to disobey him. And that choice could be incredibly costly. By nature a choice is rational—it is something you think about, and something you decide. So you will have to decide to base your decision on something—to trust that when God gives us commands, his commands are good. 

At first (emotionally, at least), it will feel like a gamble—it’s not like when you make the decision to jump into a swimming pool. You know that you’ll fall down into the water, and not up, into the sky. So it’s okay to jump. But when you first make the decision to obey God, you’ll have no objective proof that what God said would happen will happen. You’ll have to base your decision on trust. 

However, over time, you’ll have years of experience behind you, and you’ll be able to witness the cumulative effect of seeing how it turned out every time you obeyed. Maybe things turned out the way you thought they would, maybe they didn’t; but you’ll know what your obedience did to you and for you. Your experience will tell you that God is trustworthy, because he has proven himself trustworthy time and time again.

This is what produces mature faith. Mature faith is not blind. Mature faith isn’t simple trust; it is proven trust. It is trust that has validated itself in your experience. And so when it comes time to make a decision again, there is little or no hesitation, because you don’t just trust, but you know, that what God commands is good.

This is the shift that has taken place in Abraham. The faith we see him display here, which would just be impossible to most of us, was possible for him because it was proven; it was tested. God had never given him any reason to think that he would not make good on his promise to him. He had seen God’s faithfulness to keep his promises in the past, and so he had the certainty that God would keep his promises in the future—even if that meant having to raise Isaac from the dead. His faith had been tested in the past, and was now strong enough to withstand the uncertainty of what was waiting for him on that mountain.

So even if he didn’t know exactly what would happen, or how it would play out, and even if he didn’t fully understand why God would call him to do such a thing, he displayed incredible faith, and obeyed.

Impossible Rescue (v. 11-19)

And of course, Abraham’s faith was validated. Remember, we had mentioned the shock of seeing God act like all the other false gods who demanded child sacrifices. Here, we see God flip the script, and in the end prove himself to be the opposite of all those other false gods, because rather than demanding a sacrifice, he provides one.

Let’s read from v. 10 again:  

10 Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. 11 But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 12 He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” 13 And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called the name of that place, “The Lord will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.” 

15 And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven 16 and said, “By myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies, 18 and in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed, because you have obeyed my voice.” 19 So Abraham returned to his young men, and they arose and went together to Beersheba. And Abraham lived at Beersheba. 

Now at this point I think it’s fairly safe to say that if you have spent any time in church at all, you have seen the parallels between what we see here and the story of Jesus Christ; these parallels are unmistakable, and numerous. 

But of course the most obvious one is that when a sacrifice was needed, God provided the sacrifice for his people, in the person of his Son. Sacrifice was what we owed God because of our constant rebellion against him; our constant belittling of his name and his power; our constant desire to be our own gods and rule over our own lives. This is nothing less than divine treason, and we were in a terrible bind, because God’s perfect justice required payment for that treason, and it was a debt that none of us could pay.

So God became a man, joining us in our pain. He took our sin on himself, and absorbed the wrath of God against our sin—the perfect, once-for-all sacrifice for our rebellion. Only a man’s life would be an acceptable sacrifice for the sins of men; and only God himself could ever be perfect enough to be an acceptable sacrifice.

That’s what he did. That’s what God provided. 

Remember when we talked earlier about how shocking it is that God would not only allow, but actually cause this pain in Abraham’s life, the pain of commanding him to sacrifice his Son? We need to see, very clearly, that God never asks anything of us that he is not willing to do himself. In the person of Christ, God was the cause of his own pain—pain we can’t possibly imagine. He created pain for himself by becoming a man and taking our sin on himself and absorbing God’s wrath for us. He asks nothing of us that he was not willing to do himself.

And it is because of this sacrifice that we can say that we are saved by God’s grace, through faith. Christ himself is the validation of our faith. When we place our faith in God and trust that he can and will save us, how does God do it? He provides a sacrifice. He gives us Christ. 

We see all of this in the story of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Abraham didn’t know all of this at the time; but he still saw his faith validated—not only through the rescue of his son by the angel of the Lord, and the provision of the ram, but through God repeating, virtually word for word, his covenant promises to him in v. 15-18. I will multiply you… In your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed… Why? Because you had faith. Because you obeyed. 

You see, that was the missing link that Abraham didn’t have back in chapter 12. That was what has been growing in him this whole time. Look at v. 12 again: 

He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” 

Now of course God is omniscient; did he really not know that Abraham feared him (which is another way of saying that he saw God for who he was)? Of course he did. Of course he knew Abraham’s faith had matured.

But now Abraham knows it too (as do the people of Israel, reading this for the first time). Now Abraham knows that the covenant God had made with him was maintained through the faith God had been growing in him. And he knows that whatever happens in the future, he will be able to do what God commands him to do, because he sees God rightly.

Faith is Obedience is Sacrifice is Worship.

Now if you’re like me, when you read this story, you see this incredible faith of Abraham. He didn’t know what was going to happen, but he trusted God. He said, “We’ll go up to the mountain, and we’ll come back down.”

So we look at this incredible faith Abraham has, or we read Hebrews 11 and see all of these examples of men and women like Abraham and we say, “I want to be like this!” But then we look at ourselves, and think, Well THAT’S not happening! I do have faith, but doing what Abraham does here seems impossible. In fact, doing more ordinary things the Bible tells me to do seems impossible. 

So how do I get there?

The answer is actually in the text itself. If we want to share Abraham’s faith—not just the kind of faith he had, but also the maturity of his faith—we see here everything we need to do.

And the answer is: we worship.

Abraham says something strange toward the beginning of this story, before he ever goes up onto the mountain. He tells the men who have come with him (v. 5):  

“Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship...” 

Now for a long time I thought he was simply saying this because it was the easiest way to keep everyone calm. (If he had said, “I’m going up to offer my son as a sacrifice,” he’d likely have gotten some pushback.)

But when he said he was going there with Isaac to worship, he meant it. And the impact of this event would be felt throughout the entire rest of the Bible.

Where did God send Abraham to sacrifice Isaac? To Mount Moriah (v. 2). Do you know what Mount Moriah would become, centuries later? It would become the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. It was the very location in Jerusalem where one day Solomon would build the temple. This is the location where God’s people would collectively offer—what?—sacrifices.

When we think of worship, we think of what we do here—singing, raising or clapping our hands (for three of you anyway), closing our eyes, praying, etc. When we think of worship, we tend to think of things which feel good, but which actually cost us very little.

But for the people of Israel, the concept of worship is most closely associated with sacrifice. Nearly every time you see someone say they are going to worship in the Old Testament (and much of the New), it means they are going to the temple to offer sacrifices to God.

We see this in the Bible and we sort of brush past it, because we think it’s an outdated idea. Jesus was the perfect sacrifice for us (as we saw before), so we don’t have to offer sacrifices anymore. 

And thank the Lord, that’s true. We no longer have to offer animal sacrifices. But that does not mean the importance of sacrifice as worship has come to an end.

What did the apostle Paul say in Romans 12.1?

I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Can you see it? Merely coming to church and singing songs—no matter how fervently you do it—is not worship. Merely praying is not worship. These things are good—there is a lot of singing, and a lot of prayer, in Scripture—but they are not enough. They’re like the smell that you smell when you walk by a good bakery—it’s great, but how much less important, less vital, less satisfying, is it than going in, paying for the bread and actually eating it?

If any of these things which we typically call worship are divorced from sacrifice—from obedience to God, no matter the cost—they mean absolutely nothing. 

Worship—true worship—is nothing without costly obedience. And obedience is both the proof and validation of our faith. How do we know Abraham had mature faith in God? Because he obeyed. The only reason any of us would accept to lose something that is truly precious to us is because we trust that God will do what he said he would do.

So let’s go back to our question from the beginning: How do we get a faith like Abraham had? 

We obey. Every day, in the big things and in the small things. When obedience is easy, and when God commands us to do things which we find simply unthinkable. Like, for instance, to remain faithful to one woman, or one man, our entire lives, not only in our actions but in our thoughts—not only after marriage, but before.

Or to love him more than our husbands or wives, fathers or mothers, brothers or sisters, sons or daughters.

Or to consider everything we have as a gift from his hand, and think about how best to invest the resources he has given us for the profit of his kingdom in this world.

Or—perhaps most shockingly—to have no other gods before him, nothing else which lays claim to our worship and our ultimate affections.

Can you see now why faith and obedience and sacrifice and worship are really all different parts of the same thing? Why they are all components of the same machine? The only reason we would ever be willing to obey God, and sacrifice something which genuinely costs us, is because over time, we have experienced his faithfulness to us. We have grown to trust him. We have seen him at work, so we don’t just think, but we know, that he is wise, and that he is faithful, and that he is good. 

And these are the same truths cause us to lift our hands and sing to him and pray to him and proclaim, “You are good! You are glorious! You are wonderful!” 

Those words only make sense coming out of the mouths of people who have experienced enough of God to know that they’re singing the truth, because they’ve been obedient even when it was costly, and found that God was faithful.

So brothers and sisters, if you want a faith like Abraham’s, worship. Sacrifice. Obey. Even when it costs you. Because that obedience is how you will see, over time, that God is faithful. That obedience is how your faith will grow, and how your faith will be proven. My prayer for us is that all of us can one day hear God say to us what he said to Abraham: Now I know—and YOU know—that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld ANYTHING from me. And that on that day, he will welcome us home, and give us rest.