The Paradox of Faith

Introduction

“Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you shall be saved.” These were the words of Paul and Silas to the Philippian jailer in Acts 16. In them, we see the simplest call of the Gospel, the condensed explanation as to how one may know God and have eternal life in Christ Jesus. But what about that word believe? What does it mean? In Greek, it is the verb form of the word faith and literally means have faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. But what is faith? As Protestants, one of our distinguishing beliefs is that justification is by faith alone. This frees us from the doctrine that salvation is somehow bought or earned by good works. However, most Protestants, indeed most Christians, have not taken enough time to study this simple word faith. With faith alone we breathe a sigh of relief from the works of the law, and yet if we understood this word truly we may feel our gut twist and our breath taken away. If we think that salvation by grace through faith means an easier way to salvation, perhaps we have not really grasped what faith was. Abraham was not called to live according to a strict regiment of rules in order to inherit the promises of God. If he had been, his life may have been much easier. Instead, he was called to a life of radical faith, faith which drove him to reject everything in his life and follow God in hope of great yet unseen promises. Faith that, paradoxically, called him to sacrifice even the promise itself in order to receive it.

In our study of the Gospel of Matthew, we have come to the pivotal moment in which Peter confesses Jesus to be the promised divine King of God’s people. Before we go to that text, let us look at what is perhaps the most iconic story of faith in the entire Bible and allow ourselves to consider the radical, personal, sacrificial, and in the words of Soren Kierkegaard (whom I will be referencing often in this sermon) the absurd nature of faith in this most climactic story of the man who is called ‘the Father of Faith’. In doing so, let us seek to grasp its true nature, and hold ourselves to it so that we may possess the reality of the promises we have in Christ.

The Call to Radical Faith

Things were good for Abraham after his treaty with Abimelech in Gen 21. God had shown his faithfulness by giving Abraham peace with the Philistines among whom he lived near Beersheba. In Gen 12, God had called Abraham, telling him to leave his family and country and go to a land that God would show him. No other details were given except that in response to his faith God would give him great promises of a dynasty and a kingdom, and that through him all the world would be blessed. Abraham responded in faith, and so he was justified by faith in God’s sight. After this, God had waited and let Abraham feel the long years and barrenness of his wife’s womb and the deadness of his own body before giving him the son of promise, through whom the promises would be fulfilled. This was Isaac. Gen 17:19 is a very important text to remember in today’s message.

Genesis 17:19 ESV

God said, “No, but Sarah your wife shall bear you a son, and you shall call his name Isaac. I will establish my covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for his offspring after him.

In our text today we are told that God tested Abraham. While James 1 tells us that God tempts no one, he does test us. The difference is that temptation has the purpose of causing you to fall into sin. In testing, however, God displays the quality of a person’s faith and challenges it to grow. It is sinful to test God, since this can only be done from a place of unbelief. God has no reason to be tested, but we do since we are born sinful and faithless.

The test is hard for us to understand. God commands Abraham with the same words he used back in Genesis 12 when he first called him to leave his family and home and go to the land God would show him. Here, God commands him to once again leave his family and go to the mountain God would show him, but this time to kill his son, the son of promise, and burn the body as an offering to God.

While anyone who is familiar with this story can see it is a difficult one to read, I think we often try to avoid the difficulty here rather than engage it. The author wants us to be disturbed and filled with suspense. Out of context, this command is not only confusing but also immoral. If anyone else said that God told them to do something like this, we would rightly call the police and have them taken to a mental hospital. But context is important here. Abraham is hearing the same call from the same God who has been with him all this time. The same God who made the promise; who after decades of Abraham growing old with a woman who couldn’t have children, promised that in one year he would have a son through Sarah. The promise came true, and as we saw in Genesis 17 God gave a further promise that through Isaac all of God’s promises to him would be fulfilled.

So this isn’t merely a test against Abraham’s fatherly love, although it certainly is that. But beyond that is that the command to kill Isaac contradicts God’s promise. He has promised Abraham with a blood oath that Isaac was the promised child. What a feeling of security he must have had now, after waiting for so long, the son was finally born. But now God is telling him to sacrifice him as a burnt offering on a mountain.

Seeing all this shows us the nature of the test. Abraham’s life had been one of waiting for promises that he never saw take place, and now finally one of those promises has become a visible reality. He has a son, against all hope, and he feels more secure in God’s Word than ever before. Isaac is no longer held onto by faith, but also by sight.

This takes us to the point I want to drive at today: the nature of faith. What God is asking Abraham to believe, in light of his earlier promises, is that Abraham will kill his son as a burnt offering and receive him back from the dead. The NT author of Hebrews explains this in Hebrews 11:17-19

Hebrews 11:17–19 NET

By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac. He had received the promises, yet he was ready to offer up his only son. God had told him, “Through Isaac descendants will carry on your name,”and he reasoned that God could even raise him from the dead, and in a sense he received him back from there.

The Dutch Christian philosopher Soren Kierkegaard points out in this an aspect of faith that we often do not think about: this kind of faith is utterly absurd. Faith does not make sense. That is not to say faith is without reason. Abraham had reason to believe that God was faithful and loved him because of his care for Abraham and the covenant promises God had sworn to him on his own life. The past faithfulness of God does give Abraham reason to believe God, which is important since it is possible believe someone who is not worth trusting. Reason tells Abraham that God can be trusted; however the command itself is absurd. How can Abraham possibly be expected to believe two contradictory things: one, that Isaac will die by his own hand; and two, that Isaac will survive and become the father of God’s people. There is no way that reason can reconcile this, it is a paradox beyond explanation.

So what we see here in this test of faith is the call to go beyond reason. Abraham cannot rationally explain or anticipate how God will bring Isaac back to him, he must simply believe it. This balance between reason and faith is explained in Hebrews 11:1

Hebrews 11:1 ESV

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

Assurance and conviction are both very confident words, yet based in something that is impossible to verify scientifically. The reason here comes not in the content of the promise itself, but in the one who gave the promise. He who has been faithful in every way has promised something absurd. We have every reason to trust him, but the thing itself is unlikely if not impossible in our minds. How can Isaac die and yet live to bring about a new generation of God’s promised people? Faith inevitably brings about a paradox that we are unable to reconcile. If we could reconcile it, if we could figure it out or prove its ultimate end reasonably and scientifically, we would not need faith. Faith is a confidence in what, by all human reason and experience, is impossible.

The Lonely Journey

What stands out greatly in this text is Abraham’s silence as well as the pace of the story. The author builds suspense as we see him rise early, saddle the donkey, cut the wood, and so on. These details slow us down as we read to really take in this weight of all that is going on. Abraham’s silence, however, is painful to witness. He has no one to talk to about this, for no one could possibly understand. He has three long days in which his mind is doubtless at war. If the command were to sacrifice Isaac right away, he may have done it in the moment without thinking, just to get it over with. But these three silent days are days in which his mind must grapple and struggle with what he is being asked to do and to believe.

Kierkegaard uses the image of two characters to illustrate the difficult position Abraham is in. One he calls the Tragic Hero. The tragic hero is someone who sacrifices much, perhaps as much as Abraham stands to lose, and does it all for reasons that morally make sense to us. He risks his life and everything he cares about to do the right thing. Everyone who hears of the deeds of the tragic hero celebrates his commitment to righteousness and justice at great cost to himself. The tragic hero is a good man in the eyes of all. The other character, however, is known as the Knight of Faith. The Knight of Faith also looses much, but not for the sake of doing the right thing. In fact, it would be very hard to justify Abraham’s actions here if we judged him based on objective morality alone. No, he acts on faith, on the unexplainable command of God. Faith and morality are not the same thing. Ask a person who has no faith to read this story and see what they think of Abraham’s obedience. They will not celebrate his faith. They will at best see Abraham as delusional and at worst see him as a monster. Every moral fiber of our being screams out to us that this is a horrific thing to do. How can this be right? That is the difference between being a good person and being a person of faith. A good person fulfills the law in every way and their righteousness is seen and praised by others, even if they do it in the purity of their heart. A person of faith, however, is applauded by no one. He is silent as he goes about his task which contradicts everything he knows about life, about himself, and about God.

But he does it, he does obey and we could go on into the significant details of the rest of the story. His obedience tells us that strong faith, stronger than any man that had ever lived, exists in Abraham after decades of exercising that faith. What he has done is taken two things which he has experienced and which contradict one another.

The first is his lived experience. What he has seen and witnessed up to this point in his life. Experience tells him that death is final. It tells him that Isaac is the promised child, as God said. It tells him that a father ought to love and protect his son. It tells him that God is merciful and gracious to him.

The other is God’s calling to offer Isaac as a burnt offering to God. To take his only son, the promised child, the one he loves and murder him even though God has promised that he would be the father of God’s people.

How can these two things be reconciled? At this point, the promise seems completely unattainable. It had before they had Isaac, and now even more so. The risk here is great: it is at this moment he stands to lose everything. If he fails, his relationship with God will never be the same. If God fails, he will have no son, no hope, no future, and no faithful God to turn to. There is no way to go through with this without the greatest risk. And yet he obeys. Why?

We see a similar formula for testing throughout the Scriptures. David had the promise of being anointed king of Israel, and yet in Psalm 142 he is weeping alone in a cave while king Saul seeks to kill him. The paradox is clear. There is the promise and there is the present reality. According to reason, there is no way David will receive the promise. He ends in Psalm 142:7

Psalm 142:7 (ESV)

The righteous will surround me,

for you will deal bountifully with me.

David does not pretend that the paradox doesn’t affect him, it does. He doesn’t pretend that he feels fine with it. His spirit faints within him, he says. There is no place for him to run and no one cares for his soul.

Sometimes we can act like faith means pretending that the struggle doesn’t exist. We tell ourselves just trust God and never let the hurricane of emotion inside our hearts reveal itself. David does, and not just in this Psalm. He wrestles with his doubt, he confesses it freely and openly. In the dark, doubt grows into unbelief. If you hide your doubts and pretend that you believe God, you are not walking in faith. Instead, you are lying to yourself and to God.

Faith is the result of a struggle. Its when you take the paradox, the contradiction between God’s promise for the future and your reality now, and see them for what they are. You then, knowing the absurdity of it from a human perspective, choose to live in the reality of the promise rather than in the limited reality of your own experience. You know the promise that Christ will never leave you, but you feel so far from God. Everything in your life seems to indicate this. You know the Bible is God’s promised truth, but the miracles and events seem so unbelievable to you. You know that heaven is your home, but that home is completely outside your experience and finding a place in this world feels more important, more real. Jesus tells you that if you lose your life you will find it, but in your experience those who lose their life lose it. What will you do?

Obtaining the Promise

Faith is not pretending that you don’t feel scared. Jesus promised the disciples peace right before his arrest and execution. Did the disciples feel peace then? Quite the opposite. Even Jesus in the Garden and on the cross felt far from the Father’s care. But that is by design. At some point, your faith and your worldly experience and reason must collide and there must be a struggle out of which only one wins. We fear this struggle because we are afraid of loosing our faith, but I’ll tell you this: you are much more likely to lose it if you don’t struggle. People who walk away from the faith are typically those who struggle with doubt in secret. Israel means one who struggles with God. Faith is a wrestling match between an unexplainable promise and all that you’ve ever known and experienced about reality.

So where does the peace come in? It comes in at the moment when you are convinced by the promise and willing to live with the absurdity of it. Abraham, the Father of Faith, went up that mountain believing two contradictory things: My son will die by my own hand, but my son will live according to the promise of my God.

That is where there is peace. Embracing the absurdity of faith, knowing that no reason can justify it. You have reason to believe God, but the promise itself seems completely far-fetched. But you know that God is faithful, you’ve seen his faithfulness to others and you’ve seen him faithful to you. You’ve seen how he was faithful to Abraham, even at this instant when the angel stopped his hand and the ram was provided for the sacrifice. You know that Jesus came and died to forgive your sins. There is no way to explain your faith to one who doesn’t have it, because faith decides to look at the powerful faithfulness of God as greater than the impossibility of the promise.

As a Christian, you are not called to be the tragic hero, but rather the Knight of Faith whom no one can understand except other Knights of Faith. We are those who hold to this faith and act obediently to line up their whole life with the reality of the promise receive it, just as Abraham received Isaac.

Conclusion

The brother of Jesus, the Apostle James, writes in James 1:2-4

James 1:2–4 NIV 2011

Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.

Last week we saw the dangers of weak faith, and now we see the high cost of a strong faith. There must be testing. There must be time in which God feels far away. Times in which doubts and fears strangle you and you are not able to pray more than the words, Lord help me! It may be a question regarding the Bible that you cannot answer, or a feeling of doubt that maybe you are not really saved, or an experience that leaves you asking, where was God when that happened?

I urge you, do not hide those fears and doubts under a masquerade. That is not the way to grow in faith and those doubts will come back at your weakest moment. They must be dealt with honestly. Read the Psalms and you will see how David prayed in times of trial, not with the show of great trust as if his troubles didn’t trouble him at all. No, he told God how he felt. Feel the brokenness in Psalm 6:2-3

Psalm 6:2–3 NET

Have mercy on me, Lord, for I am frail! Heal me, Lord, for my bones are shaking! I am absolutely terrified, and you, Lord—how long will this continue?

He wasn’t even able to finish the final line there, but in his trouble he is stuck and only able to say, how long? Do you feel the struggle in this? He told God that he felt abandoned. He told God about his tears. He told God how scared he was. This is not a lack of faith anymore than the athlete’s sweat and heavy breathing could be called weakness when they are running the race with all their might.

Tell God you are scared. Tell God you are struggling to understand. Tell him you are finding it hard to believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Tell him that its been months or years since you felt close to him. Tell him how hard it is to pray. Tell him everything! Hold the promise in one hand, and hold your experience in the other and recognize the paradox. Recognize how the promise seems impossible. Then you choose: will you shrink back into the fear of what seems to be real, to what you can understand and see; back into unbelief? Or will you choose the absurd, the unbelievable, the unreasonable? Will you look at the promise of God and say, despite how impossible it seems, I know that I will see God’s promises. That will be my reality when this world of shadows has passed away. That is a peace the world cannot give which Jesus promises us, and the world cannot take it from you. You will never be able to explain it to them, but it will be there. You can hold the contradiction up to God and trust that he will resolve it. Abraham believed God’s promise so that, despite God’s command to kill Isaac, he knew he would walk down that mountain with his son at his side. It was absurd, he knew that. But his faith was deeper than mere reason. He did get his son back. He passed the test. That day Abraham believed in the resurrection and he saw it and was rewarded.

That is the commitment God calls you to. This is how you grow in faith. It is hard, it is disturbing, it will undo you and break you down. Persevere through it with your eyes on the absurd promises of a faithful and powerful God and you will see those promises come to reality. When the storm is over, meditate on the promises. Think about them. Live like they are true, for they are more real than all that reason, science, and worldly experience can present. There you will find the peace of Christ, peace in leaving the paradox in his hands to be worked out according to his own glory.

In my own walk in faith, the hymn Jesus I My Cross Have Taken has become dear to me. Let me close with one of it’s precious verses:

Go, then, earthly fame and treasure Come disaster, scorn and pain In Thy service, pain is pleasure With Thy favor, loss is gain (see the paradox) I have called Thee Abba Father I have stayed my heart on Thee Storms may howl, and clouds may gather All must work for good to me