Genesis 22:1-8 "The Lord Will Provide"

Introduction:

The covenant of the “I will” has the initiating grace of God bringing it to pass in complete and total fulfillment.

When my dad built his house there was an area that he never painted because it was too high off the ground. He didn’t have the ability to get up that high to paint it.

Man is not able to do what God can do. God will leave nothing unpainted on His covenant house. In the end it will all be finished and complete.

No one will slip through the cracks because there is not any to fall through. God uphold it all.

And He commands us to trust Him especially when we are being tested in our faith in Him, to trust in His promises even when we are challenged by trials that seem counter to those promises.

This is the same thing that even Abraham was confronted with when God put Abraham through a test. Look back at your text to verse 1 at what I am calling the Examination:

I. The Examination (1).

We are told here in verse 1 that God tested Abraham.

Remember when you were a kid in school and you had to take test. They were often called exams because they examined the knowledge that you had on the subject at hand.

God is seeking to test Abraham as a way of proving His faith.

This is the idea that God is actually proving Abraham’s faith to be genuine. He had already been declared righteous by faith before God in Genesis 15 at approximately 85 years old and the Covenant sign was given in Genesis 17 when Abraham was 99 years old.

Now if Isaac is about 14 to 15 years old at this time in Genesis 22; that would mean that approximately 30 years has gone by between Abraham being declared righteous by God in Genesis 15 and and the testing of Abraham in Genesis 22.

This is important information due to our understanding of justification by faith alone in the Book of James.

Remember in James 2:24 where James says “24 You see that a person is justified by works and not by faith alone.”

In the previous verses James uses the account of Abraham and Issac here in Genesis 22 to show the works of Abraham as an example of the genuine nature of Abraham’s justifying faith.

Abraham’s faith and the work that James says proved the vitality of his faith were separated by approximately 30 years.

This is how why we believe that justification is by faith alone. Works of obedience are the by-product of true saving faith. Works are the fruit of our justification but faith alone is the root of our justification.

So God’s test is measuring the vitality and authenticity or legitimacy of Abraham’s faith.

This is why we all need to regularly take inventory when it comes to our faith in Christ and how it manifest obedience to Christ, and for Christ in our lives.

Especially when the trials come. Trials in life test the genuineness of our faith (I Peter 1:7). This is why Peter says we should rejoice in trials because those trials reveal whether or not our faith is real saving faith.

Because faith can be superficial. Everyone on the planet exercises faith. It is easy to believe when there are no temptations and trials.

Trials and temptations are so very telling because they challenge us in such a way that we can start playing games in our minds and hearts to the point that the faith we have gets compromised or we can establish loop holes to justify our actions in the trials or the temptations.

For Abraham the test was at the core of the authenticity of His faith in God by measuring the connection of His commitment to obey God with belief in God’s promise.

But at the same time there was something reflected in God’s command that was at the heart of God’s covenant fidelity. Look back at your text to verse 2:

II. The Reflection (2).

God was commanding Abraham to sacrifice his only son Issac as a burnt offering.

Now secularist make fun and attempt to poke holes and ridicule the Bible here in this section.

They often say, what kind of God would command such a thing. Abraham is to go and sacrifice his son Isaac on an altar on a mountain in the land of Moriah?

Notice the emphasis put on the relational component, “Take your son, your only son Isaac whom you love.”

Interesting thing is, is that Isaac was not the only son that Abraham had. There was Ishmael as well but God in his command names Isaac by name.

Isaac was the covenant child that God promised would be born to Abraham and his barren wife Sarah.

Isaac was the son through whom God had promised to make a great nation through and to bless all the nations of the world through.

Lord willing we will talk more about this in detail next Sunday but for now just note that Abraham was to sacrifice his son, his only son, Isaac whom he loved.

This command mirrors the eternal plan of God to bring His covenant to pass to offer up His Son, His only Son, whom He loved on behalf of Abraham and his offspring.

You see Abraham had more than one son but God only has one only begotten Son. This command is reflective of the means by which God would fulfill the covenant that He had made with Abraham.

This is what the secularist miss. They mock God’s command while they have no understanding of God’s eternal decree and His divine means of covenant fulfillment.

I fully believe that Abraham, the man of faith, had much more insight to the link between the command and the promise of God than the secularist does.

Their mouths shall one day be fully silenced.

Christian, faith in the truth of God’s fidelity to His covenant promises is an anchor for us in the face of trials and temptations.

Trials and temptations will float before us the notion that is is withholding something more fulfilling and valuable to our experience of joy and happiness than what we are experiencing in the trial and temptation.

Trials and temptations tempt us to look for ultimate joy and happiness in the world instead of in Christ and the covenant provisions of God to come.

It means that the promise and the fulfillment can be separated by more than 30 years. Because in Abrahams case he never recieved it in this world, he only looked forward to it one day to come to fulfillment because he knew God had promised it.

Hebrews 6:17-18 tells us how Abraham held to such unwavering faith: “17 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, 18 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.”

Two unchangeable things: First being the nature of an oath sworn by one greater than Abraham himself.

And the second unchangeable thing was the character of God, in that it is impossible for God to lie.

It is interesting that the Greek term for test and tempt in the NT is the same word in the Greek language.

You translate it depending on the context and the outcome of what is being referred to or how something is unfolding.

A test becomes temptation when we are led away from hope in the promises and provisions of God by our own fleshly desires for the things of the world.

We trade hope in the fidelity of the eternal God in Christ for the desires of a sinful and temporal world.

We fall for the ancient lie from Genesis 3 that God has short changed us by keeping something good from us.

Conclusion:

Never in a billion years! This table reminds us that God gave us His best and that which is of ultimate goodness when He gave His Son, His only Son whom He loves as a sacrifice for sinners on the Cross.

This is the gospel. This is what the gospel is and it defines the essence of the expression of the love of God to us in Christ.

Christian this table reminds us that the reflection of Genesis 22 is not a trick of smoke and mirrors but an eternal promise being fulfilled to us in Christ.

Unbeliever you can’t even begin to know the love of God without encountering it in the Cross of Jesus Christ. It is where the justice of God meets the love of God poured out in mercy for us. Believe the gospel!

Christian we come to this table to feast upon what God has once and for all time has provided to us in the goodness of His grace to us.

Examine your heart before Him in preparation. Let’s pray.