God Will Provide (part 2), Genesis 22:1-8

Abraham’s great trial

This evening we are going to consider the greatest trial that God brought upon Abraham. After what we have been considering regarding the difficulty of Abraham’s life, this is saying something.

We spoke last time about the fact that God’s people do not always answer his call with obedience. We considered the example of Jonah. There are other times when God calls and we say, “Oh, yes. I’m coming,” but then we never follow through. The disciples were this way at the arrest of Jesus. They had sworn to die with him a few hours earlier, but they flee when the real trial comes.

I remember a man telling me one time that if he had been alive during the Resolutioner/Protester controversy in Scotland, he would have been a Protester. Well, possibly it would have been so. You would like to think you would have been on the right side, but it’s one thing to think so and another thing to do so. Ahab said to Ben-hadad, “Let not him that puts on his armor boast himself as he that takes it off,” (1 Ki 20:11). It’s good advice.

Abraham is faced with such a trial of obedience in the passage we are considering tonight. Furthermore, he is facing it with full knowledge of what is about to happen. God often keeps from us the nature of a trial we are about to face. It is often better for us not to know what God is going to ask of us. For example, Isaac, of whom much would be asked shortly, knows nothing of what is about to happen. But it was not so with Abraham. Verse 2 says, “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering.”

Abraham obeys

First we want to note that Abraham obeys God without question. In the past, Abraham, at least once, raised objections that seemed obvious to him: “Then Abraham fell upon his face, and laughed, and said in his heart, Shall a child be born unto him that is an hundred years old? and shall Sarah, that is ninety years old, bear?” (Gen 17:17). Moses, when God told him to go back to Egypt and deliver the people, raised many reasonable objections to God’s request.

It is not so now with Abraham. The command must have seemed so far out of the normal range that Abraham was struck dumb with wonder and sorrow. It’s too much for him even to object or ask a question. God is asking a great thing of him: “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest.”

We have friends whose only son was taken from them by violent murderers in a parking garage two weeks ago. I have thought a number of times since then how easily it could have been one of my sons that was killed there. I think that, in the negotiations that possibly took place between the Devil and the Lord, that the Devil may well have brought up one of their names, but the Lord said no. I can’t imagine the grief that would engulf me if that were to happen to us. God sometimes asks great things, and many of us fail to listen when he does. That could be why he often doesn’t give us a choice in the matter.

But Abraham obeys, even though he knows what is going to happen. He thinks of God’s promise, he counts God true, and he surmises that God is going to raise Isaac up from the dead, as we are told in the book of Hebrews (Heb 11:19). As far as we know, that had never happened in history up until then. We know of some resurrections since then, but at the time, no. Abel was killed and died. The godly line of Heber were mostly dead. Isaac was going to die in this ordeal, and not only was he going to die, but his body was going to be burned to ashes. What kind of faith would it have taken to believe that God would raise Isaac from the dead?

Yet Isaac was to be the father of many nations, as numerous as the stars. He somehow had to live through the trial. Abraham remembered the promises and believed them with all his heart, and so he took up his journey, and obeyed.

Abraham continues to obey

The text says that the mountains of Moriah were three days journey from Beersheba, the place Abraham and Sarah and Isaac were living. Abraham had some time to think about what God was asking of him.

They were even carrying the wood for the fire, in case, I suppose, there were no wood at the place itself. If it had been me, I might have gone to the mountains of Moriah empty-handed and hoped there wouldn’t be any wood there. We do that, sometimes, don’t we? “Well, Lord, as you can see, it’s impossible for me to obey you here. The circumstances just don’t fit my gifts and abilities, and I really don’t have enough money to do this anyway, and besides that, I don’t feel all that well this morning—I have something of a cough, and it could get worse if I go ahead with this.” We have no end of excuses for not obeying.

But Abraham prepares. He takes measures. He does all in his power to obey the word of God.

Then the place comes into view. Verse 4, “Then on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off.” It is just here that we often fail. We hope early in the process that it won’t be as hard as it seems. We hope something will intervene to stop it. We hope that the Lord will accomplish his purpose by some other means. But then, the trial is upon us. It’s actually going to take place and we have to keep moving deliberately if we are going to be true to our heavenly Father.

Abraham leaves the servants, as we are told in verse 5, I suppose, because he didn’t want them to interfere with what he was about to do. Normally the leader of a family would say, “Let’s all go, the entire house, including the servants, and worship together.” But this is a unique situation. Observe, from his conversation with the servants, that his faith is intact. He believes Isaac will return with him from the mountain: “I and the lad . . . will come again to you.”

This is how Abraham faces the trial, with intention, with preparation, with faith and perseverance.

Cast your care upon the Lord

1 Peter 5:7 says that we Christians are to live, “casting all your care upon [the Lord]; for he careth for you.”

This must ultimately be the means by which Abraham was able to overcome the burden of this trial. He had to look his confused son in the eye and tell him that God would provide for himself a lamb, the lamb being—as far as Abraham knew at that moment—Isaac himself. In Abraham’s mind, Isaac was the provision. How good was going to come out of this, Abraham really didn’t know, but the best he could come up with was that God would raise Isaac from the dead.

Raising people from the dead isn’t something we can do. Something like that is all completely within God’s province. After all our careful listening, and preparation, and obedience, we must leave the results in God’s hand. God sometimes asks hard things of his most beloved servants. But he is a good God, he is a true God, he is a faithful God, and he will make the final provision.

In verse 14 we have a new name of God revealed, Jehovah-jireh, God provides. As much as we may have thought that it was our own son, our own flesh, our own welfare that was at stake in the trial, we now know that all the time it was God’s own son who was to be the provision for our sins, and the man of sorrows would be the provision for our sorrows.

Isn’t that how God provides? We think he may somehow relieve our temporal misery. We think he might restore our worldly losses. But God provides far more than we imagine—he gives his own Son, not just a ram in a thicket, to save us. We risk nothing to entrust our souls, or our sons, to such a God as this. He has our greatest need in mind, the one which we often think least about, that of our sin and its penalty. And he will certainly take care for all the rest. Romans 8:32 “He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things?”

Abraham, of course, did not have the full picture of all of this, but he nonetheless knew the character of the God he followed. We, with far more revelation, have all the more reason to trust and obey Jehovah-jireh.