Our text for this morning is a very difficult text; a perplexing and troubling story for many people on several levels.  The story of Abraham and his near sacrifice of his only son Isaac has raised a lot of questions for Bible readers throughout the centuries.  Would God really ask someone to do such a thing?  And if God knew that in the end Abraham wouldn’t have to go through with it, isn’t that putting Abraham through unnecessary emotional trauma and anguish and agony?  And why is Abraham seemingly ok with it?  Why would he even agree to such a thing even if it were a direct command from God?  If someone today says they heard the voice of God and it told them to kill, we would say they are mentally deranged; they are disturbed and should be locked up and in treatment. 

          I do believe that when God wants to communicate something like this, He makes it plain.  I believe Abraham knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was God speaking to him and telling him to do this.  Abraham was not dreaming; he was not delusional; he was not imagining things.  If God is all powerful, He has the power not only to convey His message, but also to convey the fact that it is indeed He who is conveying it.  He speaks to Abraham who is spiritually mature and prepared to receive this from God—Abraham knows this is God’s will that he do this.  Which brings up many questions, as we said.  He is sure this request is from God, which makes it all the more hard to understand.  Sure, it was common back then to believe that gods required and desired human sacrifices.  People would be used to that, Abraham would be familiar with it, but not from this God, not from the God of Abraham.  This God explicitly condemned human sacrifice.  Hence the tension and the anguish that Abraham must feel when asked by God to sacrifice his only son. 

          Abraham must be thinking: “Why?  Why would I do this?  Haven’t I been told not to murder?  Haven’t I been graciously granted a son from God in my old age and my wife Sarah’s old age?  Is not he the only hope that God’s promise will be fulfilled?”  God has earlier promised Abraham and Sarah that they would bear a son Isaac and God would establish a covenant with him as an everlasting covenant for him and his descendants after him.  Now God is asking Abraham to kill the one and only hope that he has for this promise to come true?  And then there is the more psychological aspect of it obviously.  How is a person to sacrifice his son?  How is a person to kill someone he loves?  How is he to betray his wife, ruin his marriage?  I mean, if this won’t ruin a marriage, what will?  We get no indication that Abraham tells his wife what he is going to do.  How is he going to explain this to other people? 

          The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote a book on this Abraham and Isaac story called “Fear and Trembling.”  Fear and Trembling includes four different retellings of the story, each with a slightly different viewpoint.  In the first version, Abraham decides to kill Isaac in accordance with God’s will.  Abraham convinces Isaac that he’s doing it by his own will, not by God’s.  This is a lie, but Abraham says to himself that he would rather have Isaac lose faith in his father than lose faith in God.  In the second version, Abraham sacrifices a ram instead of Isaac.  Even though God spares Isaac, Abraham’s faith is shaken because God asked him to kill Isaac in the first place.  In the third version, Abraham decides not to kill Isaac and then prays to God to forgive him for having thought of sacrificing his son in the first place.  In the fourth version, Abraham can’t go through with killing Isaac.  Isaac begins to question his own faith due to Abraham’s refusal to do what God commanded. 

          In the rest of Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard examines his four retellings of the story of Abraham, focusing on the religious and the ethical.  Kierkegaard claims that the killing of Isaac is ethically wrong but religiously right.  Kierkegaard also uses his retelling of the Abraham story to distinguish between faith and resignation.  Abraham could have been resigned to kill Isaac just because God told him to do so and because he knew that God was always right.  However, Kierkegaard claims that Abraham did not act out of a resignation that God must always be obeyed but rather out of faith that God would not do something that was ethically wrong.  Abraham knew that killing Isaac was ethically wrong, but he had faith that God would spare his son.  Abraham decided to do something ethically wrong because having faith in God’s good will was religiously right.

Kierkegaard argues that his retellings of the story of Abraham demonstrate the importance of a “teleological suspension of the ethical.”  Teleological means “in regard to the end.”  If you are hungry and you eat something with the goal of no longer being hungry, then you made a teleological decision: you acted, by eating, so as to achieve the end of no longer being hungry.  Abraham performs a teleological suspension of the ethical when he decides to kill Isaac. Abraham knows that killing Isaac is unethical.  However, Abraham decides to suspend the ethical—in other words, to put ethical concerns on the back burner—because he has faith in the righteousness of the end (or telos) that God will bring about.  Abraham’s faith that God will not allow an unethical telos allows him to make what seems to be an unethical decision.  Abraham puts religious concerns over ethical concerns, thus proving his faith in God.

Kierkegaard argues that Abraham’s faith in God was a faith that God wouldn’t really make Abraham kill Isaac.  If Abraham had not had enough faith, he would have refused to kill his son. Abraham’s faith allowed a teleological suspension of the ethical.  Kierkegaard uses this story to illustrate strong faith.  Abraham’s faith was tested by God, and Abraham passed the test.  Kierkegaard would argue that if Abraham had only been willing to kill Isaac because God ordered him to do so, this would have demonstrated obedience, not faith.  Instead, the Abraham of Kierkegaard’s retelling is willing to kill Isaac because of his faith that God won’t actually make him kill Isaac.  This sounds like a paradox, or an inherently contradictory situation.  However, the seeming paradox highlights the distinction between faith and belief.  Abraham has faith that God won’t make him kill Isaac, but that doesn’t mean he believes it.  To believe something is to be assured of it; to have faith requires the possibility that you will be proven wrong.  If Abraham genuinely believed that God wouldn’t make him kill Isaac, the sacrifice would be no kind of test.  However, Abraham cannot be fully assured that his son will be spared.  He must have faith that Isaac will not die, even though he believes that he must kill him.

          We are told that God does this to test Abraham.  When God tests, He test some value, quality, or attribute by stretching it to its limits.  In most cases, He is testing one’s faithfulness.  God tests us, He does not tempt us (James 1:13).  Satan tempts us in order to make us fall; God tests us in order to confirm our faith or prove our commitment.  God has previously asked Abraham to do things that might entail significant emotional trauma.  In chapter 12 of Genesis, God told Abraham, “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.”  God does promise to make him into a great nation and bless him and be with him, but it is still a difficult thing for Abraham to do.  But he does it.  The difference here however is that God does not really intend for Abraham to make the sacrifice.  It certainly stretches the normal parameters of a test to require obedience to a command that is in some ways repulsive and contrary to the nature of the one making the request. 

          God’s purpose is to see what Abraham is prepared to give up—or to make Abraham realize for himself what he is willing to give up.  This story does strengthen Abraham’s faith in the end.  It shows God was justified in picking Abraham as the recipient of the covenant promises.  The story shows us a picture of a father’s pain in sacrificing his son, as God eventually did in offering up Jesus.  And it does show that God does not want and in fact despises human sacrifices.  As Abraham is about to kill Isaac, the angel of the Lord stops him and says, “Do not lay a hand on the boy, do not do anything to him.  Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son” (vs.12).  Some point out that this sounds strange because didn’t God know beforehand what Abraham would or would not do?  I believe He did, but we must differentiate between knowledge as cognitive, knowing something to be true and knowledge as experience—experiencing it to be true firsthand.  We can agree that God knew ahead of time what Abraham was going to do.  But there is ample evidence throughout scripture that God desires us to act out our faith and worship regardless of the fact that He knows our hearts.  God wants us to pray even though He knows what we are going to say and may already have the answer in motion.  He wants us to praise Him even though He knows how we feel. 

          This request from God is different though.  Every other sacrifice God had asked Abraham to make was balanced by a promise that, in a sense, made it worth his while; there was something to lose but more to gain.  Here, however, there is nothing to gain.  No promise balances the loss.  No covenant offers motivation.  In fact, it is not only his son that he is putting on the sacrificial altar; it appears to be the covenant and its promises as well.  God is demanding in effect that Abraham kill the promises that God has made.  And so this is a test of obedience and trust and faith.  It asks whether Abraham’s trust is really in God, and not simply in what God has promised.  Abraham has built altars before and sacrificed to this God, when God renewed the promises.  Is he willing now to build an altar and sacrifice the promises themselves, embodied in his son, in order to demonstrate his unswerving trust in the God who stands behind the promises? 

          Has Abraham’s faith been motivated by personal gain or simply by his love for God?  Up until this point, one is not really totally sure.  Maybe Abraham himself does not know for sure.  This test allows the patriarch to demonstrate to himself, to Isaac, to the world, but most of all to God that his faith is not driven by what he will receive out of it but by his commitment to God.  God and God alone motivates his faith—he is willing to give up all that he stands to gain, all he loves, al he hopes for.  Notice that Abraham does not have a knee-jerk reaction to God’s request.  God is nice about the request and actually gives Abraham  three days to think about it as he is traveling there.  Of course it’s also three days to agonize over things as well.  But Abraham is not able to push himself through it quickly before he feels it.  He can’t say, “O.K., let’s just get this over with right away and process it later.”  For three days he has to live with the haunting idea of what he is going to do.  For three days he must live in the confusion about how God’s covenant promises will be carried out now.  For three days he can try to rationalize some other course of action and talk himself out of doing what he has been asked.  This transforms his response from a reaction to a decision. 

          How do we apply this narrative to our lives?  The test for us is not whether we would be willing to lose one of our children.  It’s not whether we love our children more than God or whether we will trust God with our children.  The test for Abraham and for us seeks to discover the motivating factor in our relationship with God: is it God Himself, or is it the benefits He provides and the hope He offers?  For Abraham, his benefits and his hope were tied up in the covenant and therefore tied up in Isaac.  This is the type of test that is set before Abraham: Are you willing to follow God if there is nothing in it for you?  So where is our hope?  In God Himself as He is, or in God’s benefits or promises?  Would you give up eternity for God?  In the 1970’s a popular Andre Crouch song explored this question.  The song asked what motivates us to serve God.  “Is it just for heaven’s gain?”  The chorus says it all: “But if heaven never were promised to me; neither God’s promise to live eternally; it’s been worth just having the Lord in my life—living in a world of darkness He came and brought me the light.”  Would we give God a chance if there were nothing in it for us?  Would we give God our lives if He gave nothing back but Himself?  I believe it was Mother Theresa who said, “You can’t say Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you’ve got.”  Is Jesus alone enough for us? 

          I want to close this morning by looking at one other important part of this story, and that is what it foreshadows.  You know how some people say, “I wouldn’t ask anybody to do something that I wouldn’t do myself?”  Maybe your boss has said that to you: “I wouldn’t ask you to do anything that I wouldn’t do myself.”  The implied meaning is that I am in the same boat with you—and you are hoping that it is true.  That they have done it or will do it.  We can look at God that way also—He doesn’t ask Abraham for anything more than He asks of Himself.  “Take your son, your only son Isaac whom you love…sacrifice him there…”  Well, God’s one and only son whom he loved is also sacrificed on a hill.  As they are on their journey to the mountain, Isaac asks his father, “where is the lamb for the burnt offering?”  Imagine what is going through Abraham’s mind: “you’re it, son!”  He tells Isaac: “God Himself will provide the lamb.”  God does provide the lamb for the offering.  And then He provides another for a final sacrifice on Calvary.  Jesus is the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.  Hebrews 9:26-27 says: “But now He [Christ] has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of Himself.  Just as man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many people; and He will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for Him.”  God did provide the sacrifice—for Abraham and Isaac and for us also.  Praise God.  Amen.