Genesis 22:1-14
When I was a teenager, I used to go with my church youth group to camp. We went to a beautiful place called In the Oaks, which was an Episcopal camp near Asheville, NC. It had originally been the autumn home of a wealthy family who only lived there for about a month each year, when the leaves turned colors. The main house was where the staff slept, and there were cabins all around in the woods. There was a big field perfect for softball games or volleyball, an Olympic size swimming pool, a bowling alley, and full-size basketball court. (I told you the family was wealthy.)
One summer the youth director paired everyone up and told us that we were going to go on a trust walk. One person would wear a blindfold and the other person would follow a trail marked by flags through the field and into the woods. The blind-folded person had to trust that the other person would make sure they didn’t trip over a tree root or rock, or step into a hole, or walk into a branch. When we completed the course, we would trade places and go back over it again. It could be hard to trust, depending on whom you were paired up with. And some people did trip and fall or walk into low-hanging tree limbs. But it was a great exercise and taught us how hard trust really is.
These days, with so much fear and apprehension due to the pandemic, it can also be hard to trust. We want to trust that other people will follow social distancing in grocery stores or the pharmacy, but we see that some people do not. We want to trust that if someone has been exposed to the virus, they will self-quarantine, but we have no way to prove that they do it. We want to trust our elected officials to give us accurate information and responsible guidance about what is safe to do, but we wonder when we get different information and guidance from different sources.
The story about Abraham and Isaac found in Genesis 22 is a story about trust. It is a story about Abraham’s trust in God, and it is a story about Isaac’s trust of his father. It is a difficult story, a story we find hard to understand, a story that makes us question the character of God. And yet, it is a story that we can learn from.
Abraham had waited a long time to have this child. God had promised Abraham and Sarah that they would become parents in their old age, and it had finally happened. The promise that God had made of Abraham becoming the father of a great nation depended on this child. Isaac was everything to Abraham. But then one day, to test Abraham, God instructed Abraham to take his son and offer him as a sacrifice to God. We wonder, What kind of God would ask someone to do that? But this was the ancient world, where people expected their gods to demand blood sacrifices, and other peoples practiced human sacrifice. Abraham wouldn’t have found the notion of human sacrifice so astonishing as was the notion of offering up Isaac as the sacrifice. If Isaac was put to death, then how would God fulfill his promise of making Abraham the father of a great nation? It takes at least one descendant to start that process!
To our amazement, Abraham immediately made preparations for the trip to the mountain. He packed up supplies and loaded them on the donkey, selected two servants to go along, and got Isaac, and they began their journey. On the third day, they got close to the spot designated by God. Abraham told the servants to wait there, and then pay attention to what he said next: “WE will worship and then WE will come back to you.” Abraham was supposed to be offering up Isaac as a sacrifice on the mountain, but he says “WE” will come back to you. He must have trusted that God was not really going to demand Isaac’s life, but would make some other provision for the sacrifice. He must have believed that God would not take his son away from him.
As Abraham and Isaac set out up the mountain, Isaac was understandably curious about how they were going to make a sacrificial offering without a lamb, and he asked his father about it. Abraham told him, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.” Again, we see Abraham’s trust in God to provide another way for him to make the offering than to actually sacrifice Isaac. He believed in God’s goodness and in God’s promise, and he trusted that, even if he did not know how it would happen, God would provide.
Abraham and Isaac reached the place for the sacrifice, and Abraham built an altar. He arranged the wood on the altar. And he tied up Isaac and placed him on top of the wood. Then he got so far as to draw out his knife, ready to kill his son. I’ve always wondered what was going through Isaac’s mind! But just at that moment, an angel called out to Abraham and told him not to kill Isaac, because now God knew how much faith he had in God, since he did not withhold from God his son. When Abraham looked up, he saw a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. So he set Isaac free and then offered up the ram as a sacrifice to God. And Abraham named that place, “The Lord Will Provide.” He trusted God, and his trust was rewarded.
I would like to think that my faith is as strong as Abraham’s, that I trust God as much as Abraham did. He was so confident in God’s care and God’s faithfulness to his promise, that he passed this test of his faith. I know I do trust God with my life, but it’s hard to imagine what I would do if God asked for the life of a loved one to prove my faith. Would I trust in God enough to know that God would provide, or would I cling to my loved one and refuse to take that chance?
Trust is hard. It takes a strong, time-tested faith. Trust in any relationship is hard. But how do we learn to trust our spouse or partner, our parent, our child? We have trust because of our past experience. If that person has proved trustworthy and faithful in the past, then we trust them to be worthy of trust in the future. It is based on our relationship with that person. And our trust in God builds in the same way. We trust God because we know that in the past God has proven to be trustworthy. God has provided for us in the past, so we know that God will provide for us in the future. We have confidence based on that trust.
Thomas Obediah Chisholm was born in a log cabin in Kentucky. At the age of 16, he began teaching school, despite his own lack of education. He became a Christian at age 27 after hearing the evangelist H. C. Morrison. Chisholm’s health was unstable, and he experienced bouts of illness which kept him from working. He did everything from journalism to selling insurance to evangelistic work. Through all the ups and downs, he found a special meaning in Lamentations 3:22-23: “His compassion fail not. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness.” He wrote 1,200 poems and hymns, but perhaps the most famous is “Great Is Thy Faithfulness,” written in 1923. It became popular around the world when it was used by George Beverly Shea during the Billy Graham Crusades. Its words continue to inspire and uplift believers:
Great is thy faithfulness, O God my Father,
there is no shadow of turning with thee;
thou changest not, thy compassions they fail not;
as thou hast been thou forever wilt be.
Great is thy faithfulness! Great is thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see;
all I have needed thy hand hath provided;
great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!
