Altars: When Following God Requires Sacrifice
August 27, 2023
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Genesis 22:1-8
1 After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 2 He said, “Take 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.” 3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. 4 On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. 5 Then Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you.” 6 And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. And he took in his hand the fire and the knife. So they went both of them together. 7 And Isaac said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” 8 Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” So they went both of them together.
You can take the life of a man or a woman—a godly man or a godly woman—and hold up the life and spin it around. You can look at the life from various angles, in different situations, different circumstances, different times and seasons. And you’ll see even in a godly man or woman moments of doubt and depravity of such abundance that you question whether he or she has ever had anything resembling a saving encounter with the living God. No one born of God, we think, could blow it so badly.
Yet in other moments, as you examine the life of the same person, spinning him around and observing other situations, times when his faith and resolute obedience to God are so fierce and so raw that we may be tempted to think that if God required of us the same measure of faith and obedience, well, we better just walk away. It is just too much to ask.
This is Abraham’s story. And this is our story.
Let’s pray as we begin.
“Dear Heavenly Father . . .”
Twelve weeks ago, at the beginning of our summer sermon series, I said that the man called Abram, who became Abraham, is a big deal. Worldwide, around four billion religious people from the three biggest monotheistic religions trace their roots through him. Four billion people. Abraham is a big deal. This is precisely what God promised him he would be. In Genesis 12:1–3 we read,
12 Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”
“I will make your name great,” said the Lord. And the Lord did. Four thousand years after Abraham’s death, we still talk of him and his greatness and his legacy of blessing.
We’re drawn to that idea of greatness. We love great movies and books, great athletes and musicians, great military generals and humanitarians, great presidents and educators and missionaries. We love greatness. But how did God make Abraham’s name great? Following God on the path to greatness involved altars. And altars involve sacrifice.
God makes altars and sacrifices the path to greatness because God knows something about greatness that we often forget. Greatness is a dangerous blessing. Oh, it’s a blessing, or it can be a blessing, but greatness, along with all the other blessings that come from God, can often become the greatest idols. And idols destroy us.
An idol is something we give affection and allegiance to more than God. And in this way, the blessings of God are not safe. They can become safe. For us to enjoy them, something has to change. We have to change. Abraham had to change. And few things change us like altars and sacrifice.
This could all sound abstract, but I’ll give you an example of the dangers of blessings. In Pennsylvania we require minors to pass tests and complete sixty-five hours of supervised driving before being allowed to drive by themselves. Why? Because vehicles are blessings. And they are dangerous. A vehicle can become safe, but other things must also happen for a vehicle to become safe, for a blessing to become an actual blessing.
I’ll give you another example. I’m sure several people here this morning are praying to God for his financial provision. You have school loans coming due, your credit card debt is building, you have unpaid hospital bills, and so on. You need a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. Great. Pray for that. Work toward that. Great. Seek God.
But what happens tomorrow if you receive $100 million? Is that a blessing? “Sure is!” you say. Really? What makes you different than the infamous people who won the lottery and almost immediately destroyed their lives? The blessing of a great amount of money was not a blessing to them. What makes you different? Maybe you are different. Maybe you are different than other people who have won the lottery; you can handle it.
You see, this proves my point. If something must be different about the person to enjoy blessings, then it proves that blessings require us to change. To experience a car or $100 million dollars or great musical talent or great beauty or athletic talent or children or whatever blessings you could think of, then for those blessings to be blessings, we first have to see them as potentially dangerous.
We must keep remembering that something has to change for us to experience great blessings as blessings and not as idols. And one of God’s most common ways of causing us to be shaped into the kind of people who can enjoy blessings rather than be destroyed by blessings, is the way of altars, the way of sacrifice. This is Abraham’s story. This is our story.
1. The great sacrifice of Abraham, vv. 1–8
Our passage this morning opened with the line, “After these things God tested Abraham” (22:1). “After what things?” we say.
Well, we’ve skipped a few things, haven’t we? A few weeks ago when we were in chapter 17, the man we called Abram all summer long finally became Abraham when God changed his name. His name changed from something like “father of many” to “exalted father.” And within a year, Abraham and Sarah have the child of promise named Isaac. He’s born in chapter 21, which we didn’t cover. We moved on to finish before the summer is over. But it all happens so quickly, for us and Abraham. The chapter 21 heading in our ESV Bibles says, “The Birth of Isaac,” and the heading for chapter 22 says, “The Sacrifice of Isaac.” Again, it seems to us as it would have seemed to Abraham: no sooner is Isaac born than he will be sacrificed. After twenty-five years of waiting—Bam, there’s his child. Then just as quickly—Bam, the child’s life seems at risk.
Look with me at 22:1–3,
22 After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 2 He said, “Take 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.” 3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him.
In a way, God has been preparing Abraham all his life for this moment. As difficult as it can be for us to understand, God has blessed Abraham through altars and sacrifice. Early in Abraham’s life, throughout his life, and near the end of his life, Abraham makes altars. I’ll mention the ones we’re told about.
After the Lord first appeared to him, we read, “So he built there an altar to the LORD” (12:7). In the very next verse, he travels further to the land God was showing him, and he builds another altar. “From there he moved to the hill country . . . . And there he built an altar to the LORD and called upon the name of the LORD” (12:8).
After this, Abraham fears that Pharaoh will kill him to take his beautiful wife. That doesn’t happen because God intervenes. And after leaving Pharaoh, Abraham needs to recalibrate. We read, “And he journeyed on . . . to the place where his tent had been at the beginning . . . to the place where he had made an altar at the first. And there Abram called upon the name of the LORD” (13:3–4). Later in chapter 13, he builds another altar. We read, “By the oaks of Mamre . . . he built an altar to the LORD” (13:18).
These altars, along with the three-fold sacrifice of leaving his country, kindred, and father’s house, have caused Abraham to know that great blessings from God are wonderful. But he knows that blessings from God can be dangerous if he is not related to those blessings by being rightly related to God.
When we come to chapter 22, we of course come to the biggest altar of them all. Listen to what Timothy Keller says about this altar in his book Counterfeit Gods. “If God had not intervened, Abraham would have certainly come to love his son more than anything in the world, if he did not already do so. That would have been idolatry, and all idolatry is destructive” (page 13). Keller is saying that if Abraham’s highest allegiance would have been to protect his son, it would have become destructive to him. That is, the blessing of God was potentially dangerous. If Abraham began to love the blessings from God more than God, then all those blessings would not have been blessings. If Abraham became great, but he didn’t love God more than his own greatness, then his greatness would not have been a blessing to him or the world.
This is not so hard to imagine, is it? We’ve all seen parents who so love their kids, who so love and sacrifice for their children that their love actually becomes warped and weird. In these homes, if a child doesn’t overachieve, then the parent is not just unhappy and sad, but the parent is devastated. The same can happen in a career. When our careers or a certain relationship become not simply good things but ultimate things, the blessing of a great career, the blessing of a great relationship, the blessings of money, or the blessings of great talent ultimately become destructive. When blessings are ultimate, they are dangerous. But when God is ultimate, blessings can be blessings.
And the way God gets Abraham to know that he knows that God is ultimate—what this passage later calls “fearing God”—is the way of sacrifice and altars.
I’ll read those lines from Keller again but read what comes next. “If God had not intervened,” Keller writes, “Abraham would have certainly come to love his son more than anything in the world, if he did not already do so. That would have been idolatry, and all idolatry is destructive.” Then he adds, “From this perspective we see that God’s extremely rough treatment of Abraham was actually merciful. Isaac was a wonderful gift to Abraham, but he was not safe to have and hold until Abraham was willing to put God first.” It could look like God is crushing Abraham, but he’s actually saving him.
I listened to a few sermons on this passage, and one pastor said, “Good news. You’re not Abraham.” Then he added that if we were in this story, we’d probably be Abraham’s second cousin or some neighbor who lives nearby. “God will never ask this of you,” he told his church. I 100% agree. God will not ask this of you. Good news.
Also, good news: God certainly commands this of us—at least in principle. He does this because he loves us.
Turn with me to Mark 10. It’s in the New Testament. In the pew Bibles it’s on page 794. This is the story we call the rich young ruler. I’ll start reading in v. 17.
17 And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 18 And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” 20 And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have kept from my youth.”
This is strange. We have Jesus here saying that if you want to be with God forever, do stuff. Is thatwhat he’s saying? Or is he playing into this man’s false conception of salvation as doing stuff? I think he’s doing that. No one more than Jesus knows salvation doesn’t come from our doing stuff but his doing stuff, like the cross and resurrection. And on this ground, Jesus, like a good counselor, pokes this man’s heart to expose his real idol, to expose his real allegiance.
Notice what comes next in v. 21. Put your finger on the word love.
21 And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” 22 Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions. (Mark 10:17–22)
This man’s ultimate allegiance was not to God but to his money. And therefore, rather than money being a blessing to him, money was dangerous to him. Money controlled him. The thought of losing his money crushed him. He was going to have God forever in eternal life, but that wasn’t enough. He wasn’t fitted to enjoy money rightly because he was not yet rightly related to God. And so, his great money was not safe. And Jesus put an altar in his life as an opportunity to truly bless to him. That’s how Jesus is.
In this way, that rich young ruler was kind of like an Abraham, or really an anti-Abraham. God will not ever tell you to offer your children as burnt offerings. That was unique and specific in the same way no one is ever an Abraham. But God does love us so much that he will cause us through altars and sacrifice to remember that while blessings are blessings, blessings from God are also dangerous—unless something changes in us, unless we become rightly related to God in our highest allegiance and deepest devotion.
In Christian terminology we call this conversion followed by sanctification. To become rightly related to God is to recognize that we are sinners who need Jesus as our savior. It means to trust him and love him, even as he has loved us by taking away the punishment for our sins. We need to be converted.
And when that happens, God himself takes up residence within us, and we start to become more and like him. He changes us as we follow him. Just as all summer long we’ve seen God change Abraham. This is sanctification, the process of beholding more and more the beauty and lordship of Jesus. It’s the process of fearing more and more the Lord in the right ways. It’s the process of having our highest allegiance and reverence and awe in God.
And because God loves us so much, he’s committed to seeing you follow him along the path of altars and sacrifice. Admittedly, it hurts. “Sometimes,” as Timothy Keller writes later in that same book, “God seems to be killing us when he’s actually saving us” (Counterfeit Gods, 20). This is Abraham’s story and our story.
So I should ask the question, is there something God is telling you to put on the altar? Is there something in your life you are unwilling to put on the altar of worship to God? Has something taken the place of your highest allegiance to God?
It might not mean that you should now love that blessing less—like you stop loving your family or career or something else. Abraham didn’t stop loving his son. But he had to love God more. What might that be for you?
2. The great provision of God, vv. 6–8, 9–14
Well, this story is famous not only for altars and sacrifice. This story is famous for God’s provision. Not only do we see the call of Abraham to sacrifice; we also see the great provision of God.
When Isaac and Abraham walk to toward the mountain, Isaac says, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” (22:7). Then Abraham responds, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.”
As people get older, they sometimes collect sayings that they go back to again and again. They have sayings that become mottos, sayings that become “words to live by.” Abraham’s word to live by was “The Lord will provide.” And just as Abraham told his son this, it happens. In the very moment Abraham goes to offer his son, the angel of the Lord appears, saying,
“Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.” 13 And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called the name of that place, “The LORD will provide”; as it is said to this day, “On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided.” (Gen. 22:12–14)
The Lord provided, so that’s what Abraham names the mountain.
We read this story and we have all kinds of questions. If you have questions, you’re not alone. I’m with you. I’d suppose four billion people read this story have some questions about Abraham and God. But, we must note, this same Abraham, the real Abraham, the one who experienced this story, when it came time to tell people forever what he learned about God, he did not name the mountain, “The Lord Will Be Cruel.” He did not name the mountain, “The Lord Will Steal Your Joy.” No, he named the mountain, “The Lord Will Provide” because that’s what he learned more deeply and what he wants you to learn from this story. For all the questions he surely had himself and expected others to have, what he wanted people to know, what he wanted strugglers or doubters to know, is that the Lord provides.
Maybe that’s the line you need to hear this morning. You already feel like you’re on the altar. You feel squeezed. You feel stretched. You need to hear, “The Lord will provide. Just keeping following him. Just keep trusting him. Our God is the God who provides.”
And maybe you’re around people who need you to tell them this. Maybe there are people around you who you need to look them in the eyes and say, “I don’t know how, and I don’t know when; it may be in eternity. But the Lord will provide. Stay faithful.”
Abraham could never have known all the ways the Lord would provide for his people. But he saw it and knew it in principle. And the way that God most provides for his people is when God sacrificed his own son Jesus. I’ll talk more about that briefly before communion. This is our second-to-last sermon in the Abraham series. I’ll be preaching, and we’ll come back again to this passage to talk about Abraham’s eyes of faith. But that’s next week. I’ll invite the music team forward so we can have a time of response through singing before we share in communion together. Let’s pray. “Dear Heavenly Father. . .”
Sermon Discussion Questions
Why is Abraham’s statement in Genesis 22:5 particularly significant?
The call to sacrifice Isaac may be perceived as unloving and inconsiderate. How is God’s command actually merciful to Abraham?
Idols enslave. How may have Abraham’s idolatrous love for Isaac enslaved him if it had gone unchecked? What would have been the consequences for both Abraham and Isaac?
In what ways is the story of Abraham and Isaac a foreshadowing of the story of Jesus Christ? Read Romans 8:31–9. How do Abraham and Isaac remind us of the Father’s love for us?
As long as Abraham never had to choose between his son and obedience to God he could not see that his love for Isaac was becoming idolatrous. Can you recall a time when you had to make a choice between God and another good thing? What was the outcome? [Note, these questions have been borrowed from a friend of Benjamin’s while he was at another church.]
