[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the River Church podcast. We're all about bringing the life, hope and love of Jesus to everyone around us. For more information, check out our
[email protected] thank you. Good morning.
Be really good if you keep in mind what Ian has been talking about, Josh and Sonja, because it's going to form a bit of a sort of modern day echo to something that we're going to discuss.
But the first thing I need to ask is answer this honestly in your own mind.
When you were a pupil, when you were a student, or maybe you still are a student or a pupil, were you good? Are you good at handing in your work on time?
Now, I have to confess to the church that for some of my studies I have not handed in two assessed essays since January 1984.
And it affects me so much. And I'm not making this up. I actually have anxiety dreams about it. And in my anxiety dream, my tutor is saying, where is this essay? And I'm thinking about negotiating when I can hand it in. And then the other part of me is saying, actually, I don't think I need to hand it in. I think I'm ok, I've got a job, I'm probably going to retire soon anyway. But, you know, exams and tests are sort of stressful, aren't they? And depending on your level of confidence, very stressful or mildly stressful. And what we're going to be talking about today is one of the most stressful tests that ever appears in the Bible.
It's actually, and I'm being really serious here, not doing a joke, it's actually surrounding a divinely mandated, religiously ritualized, attempted child murder.
And it concerns this gentleman here. Now, this isn't an actual photograph, but this is how someone might think Abraham might look.
And the past few months, if you've been with us, you know that we've been going through the whole story of the Bible, starting in Genesis, and we're actually looking at Abraham in four or five episodes. Today is episode four.
When I started back in November, I said that maybe this is the wrong way to think of Abraham.
Melancholy, meditative, wise, looking into the future. And you might remember that I said we should think about him like this, as a rock star. Do you remember that? As a rock star. Now, since then we've had two other talks. It's been really great. We've had Colin give us the talk on, on Abraham and the covenant and the promise that God made to him. And then Jackie, an inspiring talk about how Abraham was an intercessor with God over Sodom and Gomorrah. And today we're going to be looking at this controversial thing that happens in his life. I'm just going to quickly go through why Abraham is a rock star, because I have to confess, nobody, no theological college has come to talk to me about this. So I'm going to just push it again and see where we get to. So he's a rock star because he has a big fan base. And by that I mean if you added up everybody in the world who considers Abraham their spiritual father, you'd get to 4.7 billion people. That's adding up. The Jewish people, Christians and Muslims, they all consider, we all consider him our grandfather in the faith. He traveled with a huge entourage. So as you go around Genesis and you see him move from place to place, he's got livestock, he's got a huge sort of household. He even has an army at one point that comes out. He's controversial, very controversial. And today we're going to look at a particular controversial thing in his life where God asks him to sacrifice his own son.
He's married to a supermodel. Okay? The Bible says Sarah's very, very beautiful. And so Pharaoh wanted her as one of his wives. He, he's very rich. Rock stars was very rich. And he changed his name like rock stars do. He was formerly known as Abraham and he had a child at a late age.
Mick Jagger, in whose house we now sit, had his last child at the age of 76, quite young compared to Abraham.
Now, and I'm doing this as a bit of fun, really, because it's quite easy to mix up all our Old Testament heroes, the patriarchs, if you like. We mix up Noah with Moses and Jacob and Isaac and all those sort of things. And it's important to actually do a little bit of work to find out how it all hangs together.
Because for the last few weeks and months, and we'll be going through this, we're trying to show how the Bible isn't just a bunch of ragtag random stuff.
And anyone unfamiliar with the Bible might think that, because if you pick up the Bible randomly and just stick your finger in anywhere, you're quite as likely as to come up with God saying, smite the Amalekites or Judas hanging himself.
Or it's saying, honor your father and mother or love your enemies. And so it can seem like a random collection of miracles, myths, some people think, and majestic one liners like, you know, love the Lord your God as you love yourself. So it's important to see that it's not really this whole sort of mixture of stuff, but it is a story.
And it's a story that hangs together with multiple themes and multiple plot lines that points to something.
It actually talks about the truth about humanity, which is that humanity is broken. And it talks about the truth about God, which is not that he's some vindictive judge wanting to punish everybody and everything all the time, but he is loving and he wants to fix humanity.
And it can be that. As we go through the story of the Bible, we see some really jarring bits.
We see some things that are quite difficult to get to grips with, but they're the bits we need to pay attention to.
You know, if you watch a film, even the most basic film, there's a lot going on in a film. There's the thoughts of the production company that made the film who want to make some money because that's their business model. There's the thoughts of the actors who maybe want to get a job and win some awards. There's the thoughts of the scriptwriter, what's going on with the scriptwriter message that the scriptwriter is trying to get across. Even the most basic piece of entertainment has all of this going on.
But, you know, if you watch a film from last year and then maybe watch a film from 10 years ago and 20 years ago and 30 years ago, and goodness me, even watch a black and white film, you will notice something.
They all come from a culture that doesn't seem to make any sense the older it is. Are you with me with that? Yeah. So if you watch a really modern film, all makes sense. The more you go back, you think, why haven't they got mobile phones in that film?
And then the really old films, you think, wow, there's some quaint stuff in there. Or you think, actually, that's really problematic the way certain people are treated. And so it's the same when we're thinking about the Bible, think about it as a whole story. The bits that are jarring, the bits that are distressing actually are the most instructive sometimes because they challenge us in the culture where we are now.
So what we're going to do is we're going to read Genesis verses 22, 1:13. We're going to do it in two slides. So if you've got a Bible paper or digital, look that up. And I've asked David if he's going to come and read it to us.
He will need a microphone.
So it's going to be in two Slides
[00:08:31] Speaker B: Sometime afterward, God put Abraham to the test and said to him, abraham, here I am, he replied.
Then God said, take your son Isaac, your only one whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. Offer him up as a burnt offering on one of the heights. I will point out to you.
Early the next morning, Abraham saddled his donkey, took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac, and after cutting the wood for the burnt offering, set out for the place of which God had told him.
On the third day, Abraham caught sight of the place from a distance. Abraham said to his servants, stay here with the donkey while the boy and I go on over there.
We will worship and then come back to you.
So Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac while he himself carried the fire and the knife.
As the two walked on together, Isaac spoke to his father, Abraham. Father, he said, Here I am, he replied.
Isaac continued, here are the fire and the wood. But where is the sheep for the burnt offering?
My son, answered Abraham, God will provide the sheep for the burnt offering.
Then the two walked on together.
[00:09:54] Speaker A: Now, before we go to the next slide, I'm going to ask David a question right now. He knows I'm going to ask this question and he's okay with it.
He knows you're all staring at him, and he's okay with it.
And this question might sound like I'm going to breach data protection laws, but we've discussed it.
David, how old are you?
[00:10:17] Speaker B: I'm going to be 16 next month.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: 16 next month.
Now, when you're looking at David and we won't stare at him for too long because we'll be uncomfortable after a while.
You're looking at probably a younger man, slightly younger than Isaac.
So Isaac was probably 17, 18, maybe in his early 20s.
And the reason I've asked David to do this is so that injects a little bit of reality into the story today because it's possible to read this story like a myth, you know, like one of the Greek myths, like Icarus, you know, put wings on his back, too much wax close to the sudden fell and it's not that. Okay. This story is presented in the Bible as really having happened. Thank you, Doug. Let's do the next slide.
[00:11:06] Speaker B: When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it.
Next, he bound his son Isaac and put him on top of the wood on the altar.
Then Abraham reached out and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven. Abraham. Abraham.
Here I am, he answered.
Do not lay your hand on the boy, said the angel.
Do not do the least thing to him. For now I know that you fear God, since you did not withhold from me your son, your only one.
Abraham looked up and saw a single ram caught by its horns in the thicket. So Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering in the place of his son.
[00:11:58] Speaker A: Thank you. Let's just thank.
Don't forget his birthday is coming up soon.
Now, by any stretch, this is a very weird, a very dark and a very strange story.
If you've been in church a long time or if you know your Bible very well, then the shock of it might have worn off. But it's really quite distressing when you think about it. So what we're going to do today to look at it, we're going to look at this story very quickly in three ways. We're going to use three pieces of glass to sort of review the story.
Because as I said, the Bible is this whole mixture of things that is together that actually forms one story.
Okay? It's not a scientific journal.
It's not an instruction manual. Some Christians say, oh, the Bible is an instruction manual. Well, I haven't really found that to be true. You know, it doesn't really say you can offer fish fingers to unexpected guests or anything like that. Okay. It's more something that we need to reflect on, more something that we need to meditate on, more something that we need to bring ourselves to. To find out what God is saying to us. And so these three pieces of glass is just a technique of doing that. There's other ways of studying the Bible, of course, something you can do on your own or in a group, but it's what we're going to do today.
So the first thing is we look at this story through a sheet of glass as if it's a window. We just look at the story. We just look at it as if we're looking at it through the window and seeing what's going on out there. We don't make any attempt to look at any symbolism, any. Any sort of spiritual lessons it might be bringing. We make no attempt to say, what is it saying to us today. We just look at the story in its own rights because that's really instructive. Then I'm going to whiz around it again very quickly, and we're going to look at the symbolism. Then we're going to say, what Is it saying to us about spiritual matters? What is it saying to us about God's relationship with mankind? What's it saying to us, maybe about history?
And then lastly, we will look at it in the mirror. What is it saying to us about us?
Okay, so let's firstly go through just taking it as if we're looking out of the window and just seeing what it says.
And the reading starts with sometime afterward, God tested Abraham.
Sometime afterward, God tested Abraham.
And so the question is, why did Abraham need to be tested? He's been through so much, surely. And if we've been following the story since the early parts of Genesis, we will know that Abraham wasn't always a holy man.
He was actually a nobody. He was the third child in his family, which in the culture of that time would have made him not that important. He didn't have kids, he wasn't particularly rich, he wasn't particularly religious, he wasn't even poor. Somehow, if there's a qualification, and God just picked him out of, for some unfathomable reason, just picked him and said, through you, history is going to be changed. Through you, the whole course of humanity is going to be changed. And you see, without Abraham, there's no Isaac. Without Isaac, there's no Jacob. Without Jacob, there's no 12 tribes of Israel. Without the tribes of Israel, there's no Moses. Without Moses, there's no scripture, there's no David, there's no Solomon. And then all the way down, Jesus wouldn't have been born in that place at that time. So Abraham, for some reason is made the founder of this faith, going all the way back.
And he discovers, as he answers God's call, he discovers that God is a very different God to the gods of the time.
The gods of the time were just into power and fertility.
But Abraham's God is into honesty and integrity and treating people correctly and hates violence.
And so he's beginning to discover it's God.
And so he gets to a point where these promises are made to him. And the big promise is history is going to be changed.
Jesus is going to come, not put in that particular way, but Jesus is going to come through your family. And that will be because you have a son. Son's going to be Isaac.
And he waits a long time for Isaac. Isaac doesn't seem to be turning up.
So he comes up with this plan, which was culturally acceptable at the time, to father a child with one of his slave girls.
And that goes badly, badly wrong.
But we get to this point where God clears up that situation, Isaac is born. So he's absolutely arrived before this. We read that he's made some peace treaties with people in the area.
So Abraham now has everything that God has promised. He's actually rich now, he's settled, he's got his son, he's got peace, and everything's fine.
Sometime afterward, God tested Abraham.
And there's an echo here maybe of Job, another character in the Bible.
And it was said of Job, the only reason you're devoted to God is because God gives you good stuff.
Now, was it maybe that Abraham had got into this situation? The only reason you're devoted to God is because he's given you all this good stuff. He's plucked you out of obscurity, given you this amazing role in, in the history of the world, given you the protection of this wonderful God. But you don't really feel like you're devoted to him.
And so this story kicks off sometime afterward, God tested Abraham and tells him, asks him to do this completely nonsensical thing, which is to sacrifice his son.
It doesn't make any sense on two fronts. One is just you shouldn't go around killing your children.
And secondly, isn't it Isaac that's going to be the one that ushers in this amazing plan that God has set out? It makes no sense. And in the story, you will see, there's three times that Abraham has to answer, here I am.
So firstly, God says to him, abraham, he says, here I am. Sacrifice your son. A bit later on, they're walking along him and Isaac. And Isaac starts to think, something's a bit strange here. There's no sacrifice.
And he says, father, and he says, here I am.
And then right at the end, before he's able to sacrifice his son, the angel turns up and says, abraham, and says, here I am.
So he's engaged and sticking with the process, going along with what God is asking. And every time he's asked for his response, he answers.
He answers every time.
The strange thing here is what is going on in Abraham's mind now. It says in Hebrews 11, 17, 19 that he thought that even if he killed Isaac, God would raise him up again.
It said that he decided this was going to work. He tried to sort of square the confusion in his mind. Whereas if God is telling me to kill my son, but my son is going to be what ushers in the plan, it must be that God will somehow raise him. And we see it a little bit in the story as well, because he gets to a point with the servants where he says, you two stay here.
We will go on and we will come back. So that sense that God is in this situation, even though it doesn't, may seem to make much sense. And at the end of the story, he's stopped from killing Isaac.
And that actually is really, really important because it's not just he stopped from killing Isaac that puts an end to the concept of child sacrifice in any religion.
He stopped from killing Isaac. And God says, now I know that you fear me, which is a strange thing because God knows everything.
God knows everything. But there's this tension between our free will and what God knows. And we can't really work all of that stuff out. But he says, now I know. Now I know.
So we get to the end of the story where God has proved that Abraham's truly devoted to him. But more importantly, Abraham has proved to himself that he's truly devoted to God and Isaac is still alive.
So that's just looking at it without any sort of attempt to do any translation.
Let's look at it now from the stained glass window point of view. Okay, so a stained glass window. If you've been to old churches and everything, you'll see that they have these wonderful tableaus that try and sort of explain a Bible story in a different way. And this one is in a Scottish church, West Lothian. East Lothian of this particular thing, okay, which is Abraham binding Isaac. And I don't know if we can tell it pretty well there, but there's great symbolism in this picture. Isaac is in blue and white, which is normally how the artist put across purity and innocence. You've got Abraham there with the knife, and then you just see a crown up there which is God the Father, two little feathers, the dove, the Holy Spirit. And then Jesus is somehow in the picture in the form of Isaac there. Now, that's the picture, but it's far richer in the text. Okay, so there's so many things going on in the story of the binding of Isaac that point forward spiritually that we can't cover them all. So I'm just going to pick out three.
First, there's a father sacrificing his beloved son.
That's what's in the scripture there.
Secondly, Isaac is carrying the wood for the sacrifice. He's carrying the wood on which he's going to be sacrificed, which is a forerunner of Jesus carrying his cross.
And get this. This stuff happens 1500 years, 2000 years before Jesus is born.
And it's not that the Bible is all written at the same time. It's not that someone's writing this stuff and saying, here's the binding of Isaac, here's the attempted sacrifice of Isaac. And then on a Tuesday next, they then write the next bit, which is the crucifixion. There are hundreds of years between the two.
Jesus would have grown up in his earthly ministry knowing this story, would have studied it in synagogue.
So it points forward in an incredible way.
And then the last thing I want to bring out is the substitution sacrifice. So it's Isaac who's going to be sacrificed, but he's substituted.
Some other sacrifice is put in the way. And of all the different ways of squaring up the gospel, that is an amazing way of just saying what the gospel is.
Somebody takes my place.
Somebody takes my place.
So many conversations people are having at the moment.
Start with, the world's gone mad.
I hear it a lot from all sorts of people.
And my personal view is the world's always been mad.
And this is a really personal view. I think that some of us have been born into a certain time of history, into a certain bit of geography where for a while there's been peace and relative prosperity. But that's the exception, not the rule.
And the whole story of scripture is that mankind is broken.
We are selfish, greedy, fearful. We love violence. I mean, we absolutely love violence and wars. And we don't just love the violence that comes out of hatred. We love passive violence, setting up kingdoms and forms of government that favor some and oppress others.
Mankind is broken. And we can think about that. And we can think, well, it's somebody else's fault. And we can pick on whoever you like, rich people, powerful people, people in a different category of philosophy, different religion, poor people, whoever.
But we are all complicit.
Now, none of us, even if we became like Jesus overnight, could change the world immediately. But we are contributing to the problem. We are contributing to the problem if we are not like him. And so the gospel is saying that it needs to be fixed, but there is a price that needs to be paid. And that price is paid in the sacrifice of Jesus. It's a substitution. And we see that way back here in this story.
So if anybody gets to that point where they decide with a clear mind, I'm going to follow Jesus, I'm going to commit myself to Him. And it doesn't have to be a transformation that happens with supernatural lights in the sky and everything, just to be a clear minded decision, a commitment to follow him.
The substitution happens. The substitution happens. He then takes on your sins Your fallenness. And we become like him, or we start to become like him.
So the symbolism here, and there's a lot in there, a father sacrificing his son, a son carrying his own wood for the sacrifice, and the substitution that is coming.
And then lastly, the mirror, what is it saying to us in particular?
Well, one thing it's saying, and I know it's going to sound a bit daft me putting this out there, but I need to say it.
No way is this a mandate for child sacrifice, okay? If anybody says, I believe God is telling me to sacrifice my son or my daughter, they are absolutely wrong.
And the reason is nowhere in scripture does this appear after this event.
Jesus never talks about it, that you need to sacrifice children. The apostles don't talk about it and doesn't turn up in the church tradition. And if you think about it a lot, Jesus often brought his teaching from the Old Testament. He would double down on it. You know, Jesus once said it, said that it's written that you mustn't commit adultery.
You shouldn't even look at someone with lust. So he doubles down on things. Nowhere does child sacrifice come up.
So again, I'm going to say again, if anybody's ever feeling this is something that God is asking to do, I'm being very serious here. You are wrong and people are wrong. And any movement that says that that's important and should be done is wrong.
But the other bit of the mirror here is this is the scary bit. Are we going to be tested like this?
Are we going to be tested? This huge test that was put on Abraham, is that something that might be coming to us? And that's quite scary.
I mean, any test, as we were saying earlier, is quite scary. And it seems like sometimes we're tested all through life, aren't we? You know, as soon as you're born, you're weighed and you're measured and you're assessed. That's the sort of test, isn't it? And you go to school and there's milestones and there's sats and all that sort of thing. And if you carry on in education, there's exams, go to work and there's performance appraisals. And some companies now even measure production and performance minute by minute. And so it is scary to think that God's going to do that to us as well. God's going to test us. God's going to bring us that anxiety.
But the way to think about it is, isn't that somebody's trying to catch us Out.
See, the athlete wants to win the gold. And to win the gold, they need to be tested. They need to find out where they're going wrong. They need to find out where they can improve.
The tests that God brings us are to make us, not to break us.
Now, not everything that happens to us is a test, okay? There is suffering that we go through. We just don't know why it is like that.
And I'm not saying that everything is a test. We shouldn't be hard hearted to people who are going through a particular tough time and say, oh, that's a test, you'll be fine. That is not what we're saying here. We need to think about the things that come to us. Is God testing us?
And I think the story here is often put as, what would you be prepared to give up for God? Which is a great challenge and one we've heard about Josh and Sonia. It's a great challenge to meditate on.
I think for today what I want to bring out the story is are we prepared to trust God when things aren't making sense?
If you go back in the story, there's these dramatic bits. There's God saying, sacrifice your son.
There's Isaac saying, what are we doing here, dad?
There's him lifting the knife.
There's the angel saying, don't do it. These are all the dramatic high points.
There's a lot of boring stuff in there as well.
Abraham had to get up, he had to cut some wood. He had to organize a couple of servants, get the donkeys, travel for three days to somewhere God was showing him. So they had to pray to find out where he was going.
And this detail, by the way, is really important because it shows. It's not a myth or a legend.
It's something that is narrative. It's a story that happened.
This detail makes it read more like a police statement than a bit of Greek mythology or something.
And it's through this that Abraham is saying, here I am, Lord. Here I am, Isaac. Here I am, angel. It's through the ordinary parts of this story. Cutting the wood, finding the donkey, logistics of traveling to where he's going. Do you see what I'm saying?
And I think the message I really want to bring out today, that it's not about just what would you give up for the Lord?
But it's more, are we trusting him on a Sunday evening, on a Monday morning, in the middle of the week? Are we trusting him even though the things that seem to be happening to us are nonsensical? And I know I said this when we celebrated our 40th, 40th anniversary as a church, but it's inspirational to know people, and we have many in this church who are trusting God in those tough times, even though those tough times go on for many, many years.
So just think about this again. And I really would encourage you to really think about this story and the hard parts of the story.
The tough sacrifice that Abraham's been asked to make, the way that actually, in the end, that substituted.
And the way that he trusts all the way through.
And then also think about not just what we give up, but what we've been prepared to trust him for in the tough times. Amen.
