I gave the following message at the First Congregational Church, Rochester, WI, January 21, 2024
I’m going to talk about Abraham today and I’m going to
start with the lyrics of a song, not a hymn, but a song Bob Dylan wrote in 1965....
God said to Abraham, kill
me a son.
Abe said, man, you must
be putting me on.
God said no. Abe said
What?
God said you can to what
you want to, but
Next time you see me
coming, you better run.
Abe said, where to do you
want this killing done?
God said out on Highway
61.
Okay, so I used this because it’s fun, but also to show
not only how famous Abraham’s story is that even a not so good Jewish boy from
Minnesota knew his Old Testament well enough to write a protest era rock song about
Abraham. But also to show how easy it is to get stuff within the story
wrong. Dylan got the killing part right, but he missed something important
about God. Anyway, Abe’s story starts a long
time before the killing incident, so we’ll start with a brief review.
Abraham, one of the Old Testament patriarchs, is often said to be
the biblical example of faith. Born almost
2000 years before Christ, Abraham did a lot of traveling under God’s direction,
but didn’t start until he was already an old man. When he was 60, he left his
home in Ur to go to Haran because God told him to “Leave your country and go to
a land I will show you. I will make of you a great nation.” He didn’t know
where he was going but he believed God, so he did it. Fifteen years later, when Abe was 75, God
sent Abraham to Canaan. God said, “I will give this land to you and your
descendants” and this was harder to believe because Abraham and his wife,
Sarah, had no children and he couldn’t figure out how, at their age, that was
going to work. He didn’t understand, but Abraham still did it. A year later, after
he took his family to Egypt to avoid a famine and returned to Canaan, God said
again, “I will give this land to you and your descendants.” This time, Abraham
spoke up. He asked God how in the world he was going to do that because he
still had no children. By then, Abe’s wife Sarah thought God might need some
human help, so when Abe was 76, Sarah told him to sleep with her handmaid and
sure enough, Abraham had a son, Ishmael, but God was not distracted by that. Ishmael
was not the promised son. Finally, 24 years later, when Abe was 100 years old, after
they’d waited 40 years and Sarah was 90, she finally had a baby by Abraham –
Isaac. Isaac was the promised child. Isaac would be the future of the Hebrew
people. They were overjoyed. Their belief had been rewarded. Abraham, through
Isaac, WOULD be the father of a great nation.
This is how Hebrews 11 summarizes
the story: By faith qAbraham obeyed
when he was called to go out to a place rthat he was to
receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was
going. 9 By faith he went to live in sthe land of
promise, 10 For he was looking forward to vthe city that
has wfoundations, xwhose designer
and builder is God. 11 By faith ySarah herself
received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she
considered zhim faithful
who had promised. 12 Therefore from one man, and ahim as good as
dead, were born descendants bas many as the
stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.
So far, so good.
Then when his son Isaac was 33
years old and in the prime of his manhood, God told Abraham to kill him. After
all the moving and waiting, God was asking Abe to do the one thing that would
make all God’s promises impossible. He for sure didn’t want to do it. He loved
his son. But he also wanted to obey God. It didn’t make sense to kill Isaac,
but it hadn’t made sense for God to send him moving from place to place either
and God had made all of that work out. Everything had happened so far exactly as God promised. So Abe would
kill Isaac to obey God and God would after Isaac was dead, make him, through
Isaac, the father of nations. He just didn’t know how God would do that. So Abe
went, not to highway 61 but up to Mount Moriah, to do the deed. He took His
son, and a rope, and tied him to an altar meant for sacrifices. And Abe raised
the knife.
This
is what we’re going to talk about today. We’re going to talk about what Abraham
did and why he did it. We’re going to talk about how Abraham believed and who
he believed in. And we’re going to talk about how it would look for us to have
the same kind of faith.
The
thing about faith is that it
doesn’t exist in a vacuum. A person has faith in SOMETHING. Faith doesn’t exist
apart from the object being believed in. In order to have faith at all, we have
to have a clear picture of the thing believed. And then, because of what we
believe, like Abraham, we DO something.
For
Abraham, he believed God was his sovereign King and he acted like it. He
listened and obeyed. He also believed God was trustworthy. God had promised the
birth of Isaac against every common sense and delivered on his promise. God had also promised him that Isaac
would be his inheritance and his gateway to a nation of descendants. Abe, standing
on Mount Mariah with the knife in his hand, didn’t know how God was going to do
build a nation from his descendants if he killed his only son, but he knew that
somehow, God would do it, just like he’d done everything else.
Now
we have to figure out who WE believe God is. Think about it a minute. Answer
the question for yourself. Who is God? Complete the sentence - God is blank.
Then fill in the blank.
How
many of you thought God is Love? You’re not alone and there are lots of
similar ways to express that love: faithful, good, kind, steadfast just.
the
Bible agrees:
1 John 4:16
God is love, and
whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
Listen closely. That’s not only a definition, It’s an
instruction. It tells us to do something. It tells us, that if we love, we must
abide.
· So, if God is love, we abide in Him. That means
staying close. It means remembering God in everything we do. It’s making sure
he has a chair at every table, a seat at every meeting. It’s whispering to him
like pillow talk in prayer. It’s holding hands with him while we walk. It’s spooning
with him in sleep. It’s staying so close to Him that he’s like an extension of
ourselves and we couldn’t walk away even if we wanted to.
· If God is love, we also expect and accept
forgiveness for sins. Abraham never knew Jesus, but this kind of love was the
reason Jesus was born and died. This love is God’s assurance that there’s
nothing we can do, as long as we love Him, that’s irredeemable and even when it
seems like we’re lost beyond God’s reach, we’re not. It’s having confidence
that God never acts out of anger or revenge, regardless of how it looks from
our point of view. This is what Dylan got wrong. God doesn’t threaten us with
destruction if we go wrong. He forgives.
·
If God is love, we are loyal and forgiving not
because a person earns it but because God is. We give the kind of love He
gives. We treat everyone as equals because He created us all and we are equal. We
look past our differences to our similarities. We act humbly and inclusively,
not boasting or excluding anyone. Anyone. We’ve all heard about the tax
collectors and prostitutes Jesus hung with. If God is love, we take care to recognize
our own tax collectors, our own prostitute. They are there, waiting for us to
love them. I was recently reminded that people who treat us badly often do it
because they are afraid of being hurt themselves. We look past our prejudices
by always ascribing a worthy motive to someone else rather than judging them. We
think good of them, not ill. That’s what loving someone else as we love
ourselves means.
God is a
lot of other things, too: omniscient (all knowing), omnipotent (all powerful),
eternal, sovereign (in charge of everything), and of course, holy, but the idea
of transferring our understanding of who God is into action is the same for all
of these cases. This is the kind of faith Abraham had. And, in a
perfect world where we can do all of this, we would, too. However, what really
happens can look quite different.
Faith in action can be hard. It was for Abraham, too, because faith is more than knowing God exists. Understanding that God exists is a starting place waiting to be made into flesh and blood. Real faith is built in individual communion with God.
Like
Abraham. He didn’t tell anybody what he was going to do when he took Isaac to the mountain. He didn’t tell Isaac, or his
wife, not anybody. Abe’s act was not a public one –It was a one on one
interaction with God. He didn’t expect Isaac to survive. He expected him to die.
Abe didn’t know what God would do after Isaac’s death, but knew He would do
something.
Isaac
was Abe’s whole world and future. He was the promise. In Abe’s willingness to
kill him, Abe gave his everything to God. He resigned all his plans, all his
future and that of his people into the unknown. Why? Because he believed. And
because He believed, he trusted because if God is love, we also trust Him. We
behave with confidence in whatever circumstances come, no matter how they look,
remembering that God always – ALWAYS-has our best interests in mind. If the
circumstances are hard, we know that the difficulty is good either for us or
for someone else or both. If the circumstances appear to be evil, we remember
that Jesus came to have victory over evil, so no evil can confound God’s plan. We
don’t worry about what we don’t have or what
we want to happen or spend a lot of time trying to make things work out our
way, but instead letting God arrange them his way.
The
thing is, God doesn’t always, or even often, leave easily recognizable
signposts saying “Here I am” and as a result, we spend a lot of time guessing,
and sometimes getting it wrong. And that’s okay, because God is love, remember?
It’s not about getting things right every time. It’s about wanting to. It’s
about leaning into God all the time and looking for Him right there with us,
because He is most likely to show up in places we least expect Him, like in a
burning bush or on Mount Moriah, taking the knife out of our hand.
God,
because He is unimaginable, lives in the place we can’t imagine and He reminds
of this us every time He does something we didn’t think of or don’t want to happen.
God lives in the unthinkable because He Himself is unthinkable. When He tells
us not to fear, it’s not because nothing scary will ever happen. It’s because
our plans are the only ones that will be upset. His will not.
But
when our plans are upset, what happens? We worry. We’re afraid. We can’t sleep.
When the unexpected comes, it takes us by surprise and confidence in God isn’t
always our first response. So when it’s not, then there’s something in the
adage Fake it Till You Make It. It works. Abraham did it. If we’re scared, behave as though we
are not. If we irrationally worry, do what we should. We disarm our fears not by
running the other way but by entering into them, grabbing them and shaking them
until they reveal the damage they are doing. Making them show their real face. Does
that take courage you don’t think you have? You bet it does.
One of my favorite stories is about the a Chinese Christian mystic named Watchman Nee. He was considered a holy man and one night, while he was just hanging out smoking his pipe in his living room, a demon appeared on the staircase. Now the demon was doing scary, demony things like growling and snarling and cursing him. After a minute or two, Nee stood up, walked over to the demon, looked at him and said, "Oh, it's only you." He was scared when he did this, of course, but the demon didn't know that. All he heard was Nee saying, "I know who you are. You can't hurt me because I know who God is." The demon had no defense against
Nee’s faith.
Remember,
God only brings us what we’re supposed to have. He means us good, not harm.
It’s a trust fall. Did you ever try one? To stand in front of someone and just
lean back and let go without asking first, without looking to see if they’re
paying attention, and just collapse and see whether they’ll catch you. It’s an
amazing experience, and God wants us to do that with Him. Every time. We can
fall into His arms with complete confidence regardless of our fears and reservations
because that is the only way to faith, the only way to find out how magnificent
God really is.
Remember
that God asked the worst, the hardest thing of Abraham and Abe walked right up
to it and he raised the knife over his son. Do you think Abe’s hand wasn’t
shaking? I’m willing to bet it was. He does the same with us. God gives us
situations we don’t like and puts the knife in our own hands and asks us what
we will do next. When we have the faith and courage to raise it, he will say,
see! Look what I am doing. I am making all things new in a way you could never
have imagined.
To
God, unexpected change cannot unmake His plans. To God, death cannot unmake His
plans. When we act according to what we believe rather than how we feel, God
meets us there, hands out to catch us, because we know who He is. He is love,
and he is just, and he is sovereign and he is holy. When we reach back to him
in return, we find, like Abraham, that God moves His heaven and his earth to give
us faith and bring us rescue. That is Jesus’ story. That is Abraham’s story. It
is meant to be our story, too. May it be.
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