Genesis 22:6-14

Hey, welcome back, friends.
Thanks for being with us on this Wednesday as we continue with what is
one of the signature texts and one of the really profoundly difficult texts of
the book of Genesis,
Genesis, the sacrifice of Isaac.
And we,
in yesterday’s session, if you haven’t seen that,
I think it might be worth starting there.
Yesterday’s session, we laid a little bit of the groundwork for this text.
And today we continue with probably the
more familiar part of the story,
though there are some things in this story that I think
maybe can be new or at least we can read without thinking of.
So I’m going in today in verse five of chapter 22.
And I’m sorry,
verse six of chapter 22,
and we’ll start there.
“Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac,
and he himself carried the fire and the knife.
So the two of them walked on together.
Isaac said to his father, Abraham, ‘Father,’
and he said,
‘Here I am, my son.’
He said, ‘The fire and the wood are here,
but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’
Abraham said,
‘God himself will provide the lamb
for a burnt offering, my son.’
So the two of them walked on together.” So this is one of those scenes
that is kind of poignant with the things that aren’t said,
the kind of unspoken nature
of some of the things in this scene of the text.
These two go on.
Now, we often have the impression that Isaac is a very young child here.
That may not be accurate.
It may be that this is a young man.
He’s clearly able to recognize that there’s an animal missing.
He’s done this before,
or at least he’s familiar enough with the circumstances to say,
“Hey, where’s the lamb?” And as they walk together,
he carries the wood.
So he’s
got some strength, some physical ability.
You know, it’s possible that we’re talking maybe even an older adolescent or
a young teenager, perhaps.
Anyway, as they walk on,
he has this question.
“I see the fire,
I see the wood.
Where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” And in the
intro to this question,
Michael, I think the most interesting thing here is that
though they walk together,
and I think this tells us
what the author wants us to see because they walk together and he says,
“Father,” and Abraham answers,
“Here I am, my son,” and we’ve seen this exact language in the beginning of the passage.
Now,
clearly he knows where he is.
They’re walking together.
I think that has
very much more to do
with the way this story is told than what’s happening in the actual conversation.
Right.
So
fundamentally,
what we have here is a series of nods to the mystery of what’s happening,
and these are all intentional.
So you have the one who’s ostensibly been called to be the offering
carrying, physically bearing, the fuel for what that sacrifice would be,
sort of a kind of,
in this case, he doesn’t yet know that he’s been called to be the sacrifice.
So there’s a unknown
to the character that exists in that.
There’s this call to Abraham,
which mimics the call that God
has been making over and over again,
not just to Abraham,
by the way.
This has been happening
throughout the Old Testament,
and the characters specifically though,
Abraham has responded over
and over again, “Here I am.”
He says the same thing to his son.
I’m right here.
There’s a,
once again, an emphasis upon the presence of Abraham,
the faithfulness of Abraham, that God is,
or that Abraham is true to his word.
He’s true to his son,
the promise of the covenant.
And then, of course, you know, Clint, I mean, I think the thing that sticks out in this section as well is,
Abraham says that God will provide the Lamb.
Is the Lamb metaphorical?
Is the Lamb literal?
The question of what Lamb are you talking about,
Abraham?
What is the nature of your faith here?
Is purposely not teased out?
We don’t know what Abraham means,
and that’s part of the mystery of this text.
It’s really fascinating.
You know, again,
we hear Abraham answer Isaac
with the exact echo
of the way he answered God.
God called Abraham.
Abraham said,
“Here I am.”
Now he says that as
well to his son.
Can he be faithful to both?
Can he be faithful in both roles?
What is required of
him in his calling to God and in his calling to his son,
his calling as father?
And then,
Michael, you make a really interesting point,
the picture of what each person carries.
You have Isaac with the wood,
Abraham with the fire and knife.
It may be reading too much in,
but what we have in that is the things that will be consumed,
the sacrifice and the wood,
the passive things
versus the things that will do the consuming.
The knife will take the life of the
sacrifice, and the fire will consume the body of the sacrifice and the wood.
And so we have here that
split that really characterizes the polarity of this story,
the two sides of this story,
and then exactly right,
God will provide.
Is this
a statement of faith?
Is this a declaration from
Abraham that I’m not worried?
Or is this a way of not
telling Isaac exactly what’s happening yet?
A lot happening there,
a lot of profound questions that don’t have great answers.
We will continue then, verse 9,
“When they came to the place that God had shown him,
Abraham built an altar there.
He laid the wood in order.
He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top of the wood.”
Yeah, let’s stop there.
You know, again, historically we see that it’s easy to think that
Isaac is easily subdued,
that he’s a small child and that Isaac lays him there.
There are some who suggest that Isaac may have
shown a certain willingness,
a certain fearlessness in this.
Clearly, if he is large enough and strong enough to carry this bundle of wood,
he could have put up some fight.
And how that ensues,
we don’t know.
But he is, it’s all prepared.
He is bound.
There’s a wonderful statue or painting, I think,
called “The Binding of Isaac” in which
Isaac is
almost the size of Abraham and he kneels down, submitting himself
both to father and to the God who is calling his father to do this.
We don’t have that answer,
but it is a profound moment.
So, Michael, anything to add there?
No, no, let’s just keep going.
“Then Abraham,” verse 10,
“Then Abraham reached out his hand,
took the knife to kill his son,
but the Lord’s angel called to him from heaven and said,
‘Abraham,
Abraham,’ he said, ‘here I am.’
He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him,
for now I know that you fear God,
since you have not withheld your son, your only son,
from me.’
And Abraham looked up,
saw a ram caught in a thicket by its horns.
Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up
as a burnt offering to his son.
And then Abraham called to place,
‘The Lord will provide,
as it is said to
this day, on the Mount of the Lord,
it shall be provided.'”
Here we have the part of the story that
we know, the part of the story that,
to some extent, makes the rest of the story bearable,
that God provides an alternative.
He sees that
Abraham is apparently willing to go through with this,
that he is
on the very verge of doing as God has commanded,
and he’s called to stop.
And again, he answers,
“Here I am.” And then God says very,
or the angel says a very interesting thing here,
“Now I know that you fear God.” And now we connect back to that first
verse where it says that he was going to be tested.
He has now passed the test.
Something unknown
is now known.
Now, we can have all kinds of arguments about how could God not know,
but in the way the text is told,
this is the way that it comes to pass.
We did not know
the ultimate result,
not only about Abraham, but about God.
What would Abraham do,
and what would God do?
And now, as we end the story,
we end with a known quantity,
a man who is willing to be
faithful despite the most bizarre and difficult challenge,
and a God who will provide and is faithful.
And these are now the things we know.
It’s a messy road to get there,
but it ends up
being a very powerful destination.
Yeah, so the temptation maybe here has a couple different
orientations.
Maybe one temptation is to look at a text like this and to say you’re overthinking it,
right?
This is just simply a story about God asking a guy to do something that they both
kind of knew was just a test of faith.
It was never going to go that way.
You’re taking this too seriously.
Ultimately,
Clint, it’s all about what you just said that fundamentally is about
just showing us a text like this is just showing us that God is the God who keeps promises,
and Abraham is the kind of person who’s willing to be faithful to God,
to do what God says.
That I think is a really superficial reading of the text.
There are so many undercurrents here
of questions like why does Abraham leave his servants behind?
Why is it just him and Isaac?
Why these symbols of who carries what?
Why is it that they get up there?
And it’s not
a lamb as we heard it called before,
but now it’s called a ram.
What’s the significance of that?
Has God provided something more or better or different than what would have been asked for
in the first place?
These are all legitimate questions that have been asked,
by the way, for thousands of years first by Jewish scholars and then taken up by Christian scholars in the
generations after Jesus Christ.
This story compels us to see that in the narrative telling of God’s
encounter with people, there is as much question and struggle and doubt and wrestling as there is
if we’re honest about our own experience.
Not the kind of experience where God asks you to give of a child.
I’m allowing the reading of the text in that vein to step back to see some of its
spiritual teaching for us,
but I do think that there’s a legitimate lesson in that there are
sometimes when we are seeking to be faithful that the path ahead is not as well lit as we would like.
It’s merely
about making the next step to the place of provision,
even sometimes in the course
of what seems to be perilous circumstances,
and it is the God who we discover who provides
meets us in that place.
And if you’ve ever had that life experience of coming into a moment of
supernatural provision where where God has indeed been faithful and it becomes clear to you in that moment,
there’s a kind of holy experience in that,
a kind of mountaintop experience,
a really even an altar-ish kind of experience that’s being described here.
And so therefore it’s fitting
actually and it’s understandable why Christians later turned to this text and saw this having
deep spiritual import on our understanding of what God was doing with Abraham and then later
what God was willing to do with himself,
with his own son in Jesus Christ.
Of course he stops
Abraham’s hand, but God never stops the death of Jesus.
And so that connection gets made
and Christians begin to interpret this story through that lens as well.
But you know I just
be careful to not come to a story like this and let some of these uncomfortable
tensions dissolve for you.
I think the story is more beautiful because of them.
And if you’re willing to live with all of it together,
you’re going to find that there are far more answers
than you might think with all the questions that are presented here.
This is a really
divisive story, not in the sense that anyone fights about it,
but in the sense that we’ve
really historically gone one of two very different ways with it.
And one of those
ways is to simply point at Abram and say this is the epitome of a person who’s called to do a hard
thing, that God asks them to give everything,
to give it all.
And we’ve treated Abram as a model
of faith in that.
And yes,
Michael, I think even a forerunner to an image that we see in the New
Testament of God offering his own Son, Christ,
for us.
And then on the other side of the fence,
we have looked at this and said, “This
text is troubling and hard and brutal and
offensive.
This is a God who tests a father by asking him to kill his son and
maybe worse,
a father who seems willing to do it.” And people on both sides have tried to minimize the other.
And I think
if you’re willing to stand in the middle and wrestle with both of the elements,
to wrestle with both of those
realities, this is one of those stories that you begin to understand
why some of the best biblical scholars in history have just said this is one of the hardest texts there is.
It is embarrassing and maddening and angering and beautiful and profound and
comforting all at the same time.
And not very many things can pull that off.
And this story, I think, is maybe the epitome of that kind of text in the Old Testament,
certainly in the book of Genesis.
Yeah, I think this has the same kind of troubling force to it as Jesus has recorded in the Gospels
of saying, “Who is my disciple but someone who gives up their mother,
their father, their brother?” I think the word is hate,
their mother and their father, right?
This language of rejecting one’s
family for Jesus, this is troubling language.
The Christian church struggles with it.
I think there are moments in the text where we’re confronted
with very, very difficult allegiance
questions.
Ultimately,
what is your allegiance towards?
Who is the one who stands in the top priority?
Maybe the thing about this story that’s most disturbing is it’s not didactic teaching,
it’s in narrative form.
It presents a person who stands at the moment before giving up the most
important thing in his life,
who happens to be his living son,
and that person is answering that
question before our eyes.
And that’s a– it’s astounding and it’s troubling.
I mean, there’s no way around that.
I don’t want to keep repeating a theme,
but I want to encourage you
that one of the key,
I think, interpretive skills that you can bring to Scripture
is a willingness.
I would even use the word humility to say that it doesn’t always need to
fit.
It doesn’t always need to reconcile into a Disney-esque kind of happy ending.
This story doesn’t resolve into a beautiful
major chord.
It’s got a lot of different chords at the ending
of it, and in fact,
you know, there are some scholars who point to things that come and say
that this may have permanently damaged
Abraham’s relationship with Sarah.
This may have a long
tale in the family.
We’re not going to be able to say that that’s speculative,
but the idea that
this has a long tale in reality,
but yet this story is told in a way that offers us a kind of
glimpse into the kind of person of faith that Abraham actually was,
and there’s something compelling
and astounding and also troubling about it.
Yeah, it is the kind of story that really,
I would say, be very cautious of people who express supreme
confidence that they understand this story.
I think this story has such depth in it that we cannot with high degrees say
that, yeah, we have this one figured out.
We know what this one means.
This one is
best, I think, best received with quiet, somber humility
and trying to listen to some of what it
says in spite of what it also says.
Because, Clint,
who would stand before the face of God and dare
God to test their allegiance or to test their faith?
I mean, who would have the composure
or the soul or
the substance to do that?
None. There’s no creature that could stand before the
Almighty God and say,
“Test me.” And we see a man at the juncture of the deepest form of that test here.
It’s a fundamental misappropriation of what we see happening between Isaac,
Abraham, and God
in this moment for us to walk into it with confidence,
know it all kind of spirits.
I mean, none of us would feel that kind of confidence if we could identify in the moment with these characters.
And so those who interpret it with that kind of confidence,
they should be met with suspicion.
Right.
And then we will cover a little bit of this yet tomorrow without trying to rehash
much of it.
But do keep in mind that,
as we’ve said, these are also national stories.
So in light of the fact that Israel looks upon neighbors who sacrifice children,
this again, at the end of
the story, is a story about how God is not that.
The testing language is troubling.
Abraham’s willingness might be troubling.
But ultimately,
God does not allow,
nor does God condone,
nor does God require that of His people.
And we leave the story knowing that, ultimately.
Friends, that’ll be the last word for today.
Thanks for being with us.
We look forward to
seeing you tomorrow as we wrap up this week and we’ll wrap up this theme here in the Old Testament.