Can I really trust God with what is most precious to me?
Notes
Transcript
Do you have what you need? Do you have enough?
Back in 2006, Clive Hamilton wrote this book called Affluenza and in it he diagnosed Australians with this disease where, no matter how wealthy you are, you never feel like you’re well off.
And there’s some intriguing stats in that book. He said even though Australia is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and even though we’re among the wealthiest people in history, 62% of us believed we didn’t have enough money to buy what we need.
What we need, not what we dream of, just what we need.
Now, it’s true the economy was different back then - it was a lot better than now. This is pre-GFC, low inflation, the height of the minerals boom. In that good economy, listen to this, in 2006, the people in the wealthiest 20%, that’s people who are not struggling by any economist’s definition, half of these wealthiest 20% thought they did not have enough money to buy what they needed.
That’s affluenza. No matter how much you have, you never feel like you have what you need.
And affluenza reflects the fact that the culture we live in shapes us much more than we care to admit. So much of what we believe about the world, about what to expect in life, about what we need in order to have a good life is determined by where and when we grew up. We like to think we’re all individuals, but in Australia, our culture has trained most of us to think that even when we are wealthy, we aren’t, even when we have everything we need, we don’t, and even when we could afford to be generous, we can’t.
Now, the stats show that Australians with an active Christian faith tend to be more generous than others. But, we would be naive to think that we are totally immune to the affluenza floating around in the community. What do we do when God asks us to give away things that we think we need? And why would he do that?
I’m going to pray that as we look at Genesis 22, we’ll see there’s good news for both those questions.
Pray
Now, not just then
Now, not just then
State
Do you love me now, not just then?
Show
When God speaks to Abraham in Genesis 22, they’ve had 30-40 years together. God had called Abraham friend. My friend. My partner. Every time God had spoken to him, more than 30 times at this point, his words had been life giving.
But here? God says to his friend, take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love and take him to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will show you.
Can’t be right can it?
Can you imagine how loved and wanted Isaac was?
Abraham and Sarah had gone 75 years without children. You can imagine the struggle they went through to reconcile themselves - ok, we’re not going to have children. 75 years to work through the sadness and learn to bear it. But then God says, you guys are going to have a child! I’ll give you heaps of descendants, more than you can count, and I’ll give you a son, and all the world will know about you through your descendants.
What a headspin!
But then God kept them waiting for another 25 years. Abraham’s is just asked to trust this promise. And then after 25 years, when Sarah is told that it’s about to happen what’s she do? She laughs! Yeah right, me, 89 years old having a boy? At my age? How ridiculous!
But sure enough, Isaac is born and he is called laughter, that’s what the name means. God has brought laughter into their lives.
And God says to them both, this son, this laughter - he’s the one. Those promises I made about a family, and nations and all the earth being blessed - all of those promises live in him.
What a precious child.
And then God says, take that son, your only son, the one whom you love, the one full of these promises, and offer him to me as a burnt offering.
It’s so strange, eerie even, that Abraham doesn’t try to argue here. We’ve seen him respectfully argue with God before, back in chapter 18. He doesn’t here. We’re not told why. We just learn in verse 3:
So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him.
They walk for three days. That’s three days to think about it. Three days to imagine it. Three days to try and find an excuse, to question God - he can’t really mean it can he? Three days to bang his head against this impossibility of what he’s being asked.
Because, it doesn’t make any sense. Why is God going to destroy his own promise? It’s not like there’s any wiggle room - God said Genesis 21:12 which we looked at a few weeks ago, the promise was not going to be through any other son - it was through Isaac, and Isaac only. Take Isaac, and kill him.
You can’t bring those two things together. If Isaac dies, Abraham and Sarah’s laughter dies too, but so do God’s plans to redeem and save the broken world. Jesus himself is a descendant of Isaac. God has bound himself to it. And he’s now telling Abraham to kill his plan.
Three days to think about nothing else.
And then in verse 5, they arrive.
Show
Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you.”
Explain
Some commentators think he’s telling a bit of a fib here - it’s possible. We’ve seen Abraham is a man who regularly lies. He might be God’s friend but he’s a flawed person, like everyone God chooses to work through except Jesus.
Maybe he’s lying. Or maybe he thinks, if God can bring life out of a pair of geriatrics like me and Sarah, he can bring it from anywhere - even a dead boy!
We aren’t told. But Isaac speaks up at this point.
(V7) Dad, we’ve got the wood and fire but where’s the lamb?
Show
Isaac would’ve worshipped with Abraham before. He knows it involves slaughtering a lamb, placing it on the wood and cooking it in the fire.
And he says, we’ve got everything except the most important part!
Dad, where’s the lamb?
Dad?
Here’s the other thing Isaac knows: in his world, children get sacrificed. We know from ancient sources that it was commonly practiced.
And Abraham looks at his son, whom he loves, and says ‘God will see to it’.
Explain
Why this test? What is the point of putting Abraham and Isaac under such enormous strain?
It’s because Abraham needs to learn to trust God with the present, with the most precious things he has, not just with the big picture stuff. Abraham needs, and we need to see that God is not just in the life insurance business. He’s not just the God of history and eternity, he’s the God of now. He’s not just the God of nations and legacies, he’s the God of families, and the every day.
Unless we know that he will see to the intimate stuff as well as the big stuff, we will end up substituting something or someone else for him.
As Tim Keller really helpfully points out:
Until this point, the Abraham’s meaning in life had been dependent on God’s word. Now it was becoming dependent on Isaac’s love and well-being. The centre of Abraham’s life was shifting. God wasn’t saying you can’t love your son, but that you must not turn a loved one into a counterfet God.
But it’s possible to do this with anything. We might pray the Lord’s prayer, asking God to give us our daily bread, but then we act as if we need to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps. That’s why we can never stop working. That’s why we’re on our emails at 1am, and again at 6am. It’s why we have the laptop open at dinner. It’s why we attend zoom meetings from our beach holidays. Our work is our Isaac. The thing we love more than anything. The thing that we trust, more than God.
We may trust God for our ‘salvation’ - a big abstract theological term - but when it comes to the daily stuff of relationships, what we really trust is the attention and affirmation of others. That’s why we spend so much time telling stories where we are the hero, why we work so hard in front of the mirror, why we give so much attention to making people ‘respect’ us, why we worry so much about the possibility that someone isn’t particularly impressed by us. Our image is our Isaac. Our only one, whom we love. More than God.
And the truth is, God will test us, his friends, his partners, he will ask us, are you be willing to let go of it? Will you let go of your Isaac, and let me see to what you need. Or has this good thing - work is good, family is good, relationships are good - has this good thing become the thing you love most, and trust most right now?
Restate
God tests so that we would trust him now, today, with the things that are precious to us here, not just lean on some commitment we made to him back then, and not just file him away like some life insurance policy.
Transition
God tests us, to show us that we can trust him in normal, everyday, real life, not just when life is ideal.
Real, not just ideal
Real, not just ideal
Illustration
In 2017 I moved to Belrose, which is on the Northern Beaches. We were expecting Lucas our eldest to be born within the month and until that point we had been living in Newtown, literally 2 minutes walk from RPA hospital. All our appointments had been there and the plan was, that’s where he was going to be born. Newtown would’ve been simple. Belrose is 24km from RPA. Theoretically it’s possible to do the journey in about 15 minutes - that’s getting every green light, with no traffic, no road works, and taking no wrong turns.
But if we had planned for the ideal, Lucas might’ve been born on the Harbour Bridge.
State
And yet, so often in life, we confuse the ideal with the normal. We confuse need with want, as Affluenza shows us. And we end up endlessly frustrated and hurt that life isn’t smooth and that the world doesn’t work the way we want.
When Isaac is born, it feels like that should be the end of the story. If it were a Disney movie, it’d be the ‘and they all lived happily ever after’. Isaac would’ve grown up, Abraham grown more wealthy, his family would’ve walzed into the land God promised, walked up to cities and been handed the keys and finally died at the age of 803.
But the real world has traffic. In the real world, no matter how safe we may feel now, everything could change tomorrow.
And what God is doing for Abraham and us is refining our faith so that it will work in the real world, not just the ideal one.
Show
In verses 9-12, After Abraham tells Isaac, God will see to it, he builds the altar, binds his son Isaac, lays him on top of the wood. And he picks up the knife and raises it ready to bring it down when God calls out to him, twice so he can hear it,
‘Abraham, Abraham! ‘Don’t 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.’
This was never about harming Isaac, it was always about helping Abraham. This was never supposed to end up with a child sacrifice - in fact it sets up a precedent that runs throughout the whole of scripture - that God hates child sacrifice.
No this whole test was about helping Abraham to see whatever life throws at him, God will see to his needs. However far from ideal life is, even when it seems like our future, our hope, the thing that we need more than anything in the world is threatened, God will see to it. God will provide what we need.
Explain
Clive Hamilton in Affluenza pointed out that its easy for us to confuse wants with needs. But that’s just the author of Genesis says in Genesis 3 - even when God does give us abundance - we are so easily tempted to think that he’s stingy, and that we don’t have enough, that he’s not giving us what we need.
This is why God tests his friends so that our hearts will trust him, not just when life is easy - it rarely is - but when life gets real.
It comes up again and again in the bible. Deuteronomy 6, God tests the Israelites in the wilderness so that they’d learn to rely on him. 1 Peter 1, the apostle says that following Jesus means suffering trials, “so that the genuineness of your faith-being more precious than gold…may be found to result in praise and glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed.”
The apostle James says
My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance;
And when you get endurance, it leads to maturity so that you lack nothing.
God tests us, refines us, purifies us, so that we can face life when it is real, not just ideal.
Apply
Because if your faith can only cope with life at its ideal, sickness will destroy it. Like nothing else.
If your faith can only cope with life at its ideal, a church full of sinners will destroy it.
If your faith can only cope with life at its ideal, the loss of your Isaac will destroy it.
But if your faith is refined, tested, purified, then nothing will shake you. You may get rattled, upset, disappointed. You may get knocked flat on your back, but none of it will rock you to the very core. Because even if your health fails, your career tanks, your dreams vanish, and your reputation is mud, you will know, deep in your heart, that God will see to it. God will provide what you need.
That’s why God tests us.
Transition
He teaches us to trust the giver over the gifts.
Giver, not just gifts
Giver, not just gifts
Show
What does God say after telling Abraham not to harm Isaac?
Genesis 22:12 (NRSV)
“now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”
Explain
Fear of God means having a deep respect. It’s that attitude that wouldn’t dream of treating God casually. It’s that attidude that wouldn’t dare act as if God is some kind of cosmic butler, where we can ring the bell for room service if we want him but send him away when we don’t want to be disturbed. And if he isn’t performing to our liking we can have him dismissed and get a better one.
No, fear of God, the kind of thing attitude Jesus has and tells us to immitate, the kind of respect and trust and love the bible says is the beginning of wisdom, that is what God’s tests aim to produce in us.
Because nothing else is worthy of it. Nothing else we trust can withstand the pressure. Nothing else will give us what we need.
And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.
Over and over again the bible has this one consistent message: if you put your hopes, your trust, in anything but God, you will be disappointed. If you try and get your ultimate meaning in life from anything in this world but God, it will disappoint.
Why is the bible so anti-idolatry? It’s not because God has this fragile ego, that he needs our love and attention - we saw last week - he doesn’t need anythign from us. No, the bible is so anti-idolatry for our good, not his.
If Abraham put Isaac in the place of the true God, it would’ve created an idolatrous love that would’ve smothered Isaac and strangled the relationship. We’ll see this play out later when Jacob, Isaacs son plays favourites with his chilidren.
Likewise, if we put work in the place of the true God, it creates an idolatrous love that means we end up sacrificing everything, our health, our time, our relationships, our sanity, our sleep, all for what? So our epitaph says ‘he spent a lot of time at the office’?
God tests us and warns us against putting anything else in his place, because he is the only thing where, if we worship, we won’t be consumed.
What does the apostle Paul say in Romans about this God of Abraham, the God who tests his friends?
“We know that God works all things together for good to those who love him.”
And he goes on in verse 32
He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?
Do you hear the echo of Abraham? God tells him twice ‘you did not withold your son from me’.
God did not withhold his own Son, for us.
If he did that, do you think he’s not going to give you all sorts of other good things? Things you need.
If you don’t have something now, God is still working for your good. If you don’t have something now, if he is testing you, if you don’t have some Isaac, some source of laughter, some good, precious thing, some thing that maybe everyone else has but you feel like you’re the only one who misses out, if you don’t have the thing that everyone else says is necessary - 100% required for life to be good or God to be good, he is still working things for your good.
He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?