Genesis 22:1-18
Think about someone right now whom you would consider a friend. You are more than likely thinking about someone with whom you have some significant shared experiences, or whose life experiences are similar to yours.
The closest friends we have tend to be people like this. Those common experiences serves as a bonding agent for the friendship, and for a mutual understanding within the friendship.
This is why friendships are often formed and maintained between those who grew up together in the same town, or who went to college together, or who served together in the military.
Your friends are basically the people who can understand you, because they have gone through the same kind of things you have gone through. Accordingly, they are able to look at the world in a way that is very similar to how you look at it.
What should we think, then, of a statement that St. James makes in his Epistle, about the friendship that existed between God and Abraham? He writes: “The Scripture was fulfilled that says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness’ – and he was called a friend of God.”
How could a mortal man like Abraham be a friend of God? God is vastly different from Abraham in the nature of his being.
God is eternal, almighty, and all-knowing. Abraham, by comparison, was limited in every way – in his knowledge, and in his power.
So, Abraham, was not God’s peer, or his equal, in regard to these things. But still, Scripture calls him a friend of God.
What common experience did Abraham and God share, so that their relationship could be described in such terms? Let’s look at today’s Old Testament lesson from the Book of Genesis. There we may find an answer to that question.
Because God is God, and stands above Abraham as Abraham’s creator, the friendship that Abraham had with God was a friendship that God bestowed on Abraham. Their friendship was planned out by God.
It did not take shape in the way that many of our human friendships begin, through the happenstance of two people getting thrown together in the same class at school, or in the same army unit or navy crew. Instead, God is the one who caused Abraham to have the kind of experiences that would give Abraham a certain level of commonality with God, and with God’s own experiences.
When God tested Abraham’s faith by telling him to sacrifice his son Isaac, God was giving Abraham just such an experience. God was enabling Abraham to become his friend. The Lord said:
“Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you.”
Abraham was certainly surprised by this request. It would no doubt have seemed to him to go against everything he would expect from God. It would have seemed to be going against God’s own nature.
The God of Abraham was not like the false gods of the pagan nations, with their thirst for the blood of human sacrifices. The God who had called Abraham to follow him, and who had promised Abraham that he would give him and his wife Sarah a son, was a God of life, not a God of death.
Any parent – indeed, any decent human being – can understand how difficult it would have been for Abraham to obey such a command. We would certainly not want to be in Abraham’s sandals.
But Abraham’s readiness to obey the Lord demonstrates that he was willing to admit that maybe there were a few things about God, and about God’s plans for the world, that he did not fully understand. So, he trusted in the Lord, believing that the Lord’s will is always good, and he set out to do as God had directed him.
Abraham prepared the wood that would be needed for the sacrifice, and then went with his son to the place that God had designated. We pick up the story there, as the Book of Genesis records it for us:
“So Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife, and the two of them went together. But Isaac spoke to Abraham his father and said, ‘My father!’ And he said, ‘Here I am, my son.’ Then [Isaac] said, ‘Look, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?’ And Abraham said, ‘My son, God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering.’ So the two of them went together.”
“Then they came to the place of which God had told him. And Abraham built an altar there and placed the wood in order; and he bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, upon the wood. And Abraham stretched out his hand and took the knife to slay his son.”
It’s difficult even to read this story without getting emotional. What a painful experience this must have been for Abraham.
Even if he believed that God was able to raise Isaac from the ashes – which he did believe – slaying his son, and offering his body as a sacrifice to the Lord, would certainly have been the most difficult thing he would ever have to do in his life. The agony he endured, in such a severe test of his faith, is almost incomprehensible.
But Abraham passed the test. He demonstrated his willingness to offer up even his own son in death, according to the inscrutable will of God, and according to the necessity of what God had laid upon him. vBut then, at the last minute, God stopped Abraham from following through with his intention. At the last minute, he spared Isaac. At the last minute, he spared Abraham. We continue reading:
“But the Angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ So he said, ‘Here I am.’ And He said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the lad, 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.’”
“Then Abraham lifted his eyes and looked, and there behind him was a ram caught in a thicket by its horns. So Abraham went and took the ram, and offered it up for a burnt offering instead of his son.”
Abraham now had his son back. And God now had a friend.
Abraham, through his own experience, now knew what it was going to be like for God, many centuries later, to send his only Son to the cross, to die for sinful humanity.
The story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac has so many parallels to the story of God’s sacrificing of his own Son, under the just judgment of his own law, in order to redeem us. We notice, for example, the statement that Isaac was the one who carried the wood to the place of sacrifice – just as Jesus set out toward Calvary carrying his own cross.
We notice, too, the Lord’s emphatic description of Isaac as Abraham’s “only son.” This really stands out in the text, because we know that from a strictly biological point of view it is not literally true.
Abraham had another son, Ishmael. But Isaac was the “only son” of Abraham as far as the Lord’s special covenant with him was concerned.
And when we read this, we cannot avoid immediately thinking of what Jesus said about himself, as God’s only Son: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life.”
Before the events of today’s text transpired, Abraham already knew that the God he served was – as he himself had said – “the Judge of all the earth.” But Abraham may not have fully grasped that his God was also the Redeemer of all the earth.
And he almost certainly would not previously have grasped the lengths to which God would be willing to go in order to accomplish that redemption.
But now he knew. Now he had tasted for himself something of the experience that God was going to have, when Jesus would suffer and die for the sins of the world.
Abraham knew that in the fulfillment of God’s will, he could not hold anything back. And God, too, would hold nothing back.
God had allowed Abraham to experience just enough of a commonality with what God himself was someday going to experience, so that Abraham could now be, in a very unique way, his friend.
In the Old Testament, Abraham was God’s only “friend” in this sense, because God never again asked another person to do this. Abraham was the only one.
You and I, and indeed all men, have offended God in so many ways. We have transgressed the boundaries that his good and perfect law has drawn for us. We have fallen short of the goals that his good and perfect law has set for us.
God’s holiness cannot tolerate our rebellion. His holiness requires a punishment for sin. But at the same time, his love for us cannot tolerate the thought that all of us would be eternally lost and condemned because of our sin.
The holiness of God requires him to judge sin – your sin and my sin. But the love of God impels him to find a way to judge our sin without thereby also damning us. A substitute for humanity would be needed:
A substitute who would be a true man, to take the place of sinful man under the judgment of God’s law; a substitute who would be true God, so that his sacrifice would be of infinite value, and would cover, once and for all, the sins of all people for all time.
What was needed was what God did, in the sending of his only begotten Son to become a part of the human race, and from within the human race to be the atoning sacrifice for the sins of the human race.
And God the Father did not, at the last minute, hesitate, or draw back from his purpose and plan. He did not change his mind.
St. Peter describes the sacrifice of his Lord in this way: by the hands of lawless men, Jesus was “delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.”
Jesus didn’t walk away from Calvary unscathed, as Isaac walked away from the land of Moriah. Jesus saw it through, all the way to the end: until the sins of the whole world had been atoned for; and he cried out, “It is finished,” and breathed his last.
Abraham learned some very important things about God and his redeeming love for humanity through the experiences that he had in the land of Moriah. More than ever, he learned to trust in God, and to put his faith in him.
And he was justified before God. His own sin was forgiven through his implicit faith in the coming sacrifice of the Son of God – the Lamb of God that the Lord himself would, and ultimately did, provide.
But Abraham is not the only one who can learn something from these experiences. He is not the only one who can benefit from the revelation that God made to Abraham in this way, on this day.
In the lines that come immediately after the verses that constitute our appointed lesson for today, the account continues:
“Then the Angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time out of heaven, and said: ‘By Myself I have sworn, says the Lord, because you have done this thing, and have not withheld your son, your only son – blessing I will bless you, and multiplying I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is on the seashore; and your descendants shall possess the gate of their enemies. In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.’”
St. Paul makes an important observation about this text in his Epistle to the Galatians: “Now to Abraham and his Seed were the promises made. He does not say, ‘And to seeds,’ as of many, but as of one, ‘And to your Seed,’ who is Christ.”
The events that we have been considering today, and the promise that God made to Abraham at that time, truly did point forward to the atoning sacrifice of Christ, and to the promise of forgiveness and salvation that is now freely offered to the world for the sake of Christ.
Through the saving realities that the events in today’s text portray, all the nations of the earth will be blessed by the mercy of God. You are blessed by what God has taught you today, through the experiences of Abraham, God’s friend.
God’s only Son has been given into death for your justification. In his gospel and sacraments, God now bestows on you every grace and blessing that his Son won for you by his innocent suffering and death.
In the same way as Abraham believed God, God now invites you also to believe him, when he tells you that he is at peace with you through the sacrifice of his Son, and that in Christ he will be at peace with you forever.
And when you share the faith of Abraham, and thereby know God as Abraham knew God, then you also share something else that previously was unique to Abraham. In the New Testament, Jesus says to his disciples:
“No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.”
“The Scripture was fulfilled that says, ‘Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness’ – and he was called a friend of God.” Amen.