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Sermon for Sunday, June 29, 2008
“When You Have to Climb Mt. Moriah”
Genesis 22:1-14
William Styron wrote a powerful novel about a young Polish girl who arrives in New York City following the war as a survivor of the Nazi death camps. Styron’s story is based on a real woman who emerged out of the death camps and became a refugee, sent first to Sweden and later to New York, where she tried to begin life again. Styron first wrote of her in the “New York Times” and later developed the story into a fictionalized account that became best selling novel and then a movie.
When Sophie arrived in New York she was so physically devastated that she was near death, even months after liberation from the camps. At the heart of the story are the hidden secrets of a woman haunted by the Nazi holocaust.
In the darkness of that time there were certain “games” played by the Nazis to torment those who entered the death camps. In Styron’s book, the real life game of choosing which of her two children must die was depicted in stark and frightening terms. At the train station, Sophie is told that she can only keep one of her two children. She must decide, on the spot, which of her children will be sent immediately to the gas chamber to die. She must say the words, identifying which child will live and which will die, or she will forfeit the lives of both. It is gut wrenchingly obscene.
The stories like “Sophie’s Choice” were in fact true. In the war, of the six million people executed by the Nazis, two million were children. There is a museum in Jerusalem dedicated to one of the children in the famous Spiegel family of Los Angeles that they had to give up. I tried to watch the movie through, but could not. I cannot imagine the evil that conceived of such a torment.
I wonder if Abraham felt some of that torment.
God told Abraham to go up a mountain called Moriah. Mountains are big in the Bible, places where people go in order to be closer to God. Abraham was told to sacrifice his only son. Before that day Abraham thought his God was different than other gods. Remember Genesis 12, Abraham’s God had made a promise to him to give him a son through which all the nations of the world would be blessed.
Frederick Buechner observes, “…with one possible exception, there has perhaps never been a birth more longed for and rejoiced in than Isaac’s. Sarah was in her nineties when an angel told her that after years of barrenness she and her 100 year old husband, were finally going to have that child that God had promised them, and their wild and incredulous mirth at this news prompted them to name him Isaac, which in Hebrew means ‘laughter.’” (pg. 53…Peculiar Treasures)
What was happening now was no laughing matter. Abraham thought his God was a God who gave only good gifts. Other gods were always asking for sacrifice. And of course there was no greater sacrifice to be rendered to a god than the gift of a human life. And now his God was asking for his only son. I can almost hear Abraham thinking as he journeyed up Mt. Moriah, “I can’t believe He is like all the others, a god who wants my only son.”
Imagine his thoughts as he trudged up that mountain with the wood on his back, and his blessed, his only son, his unknowing son walking next to him.
“Dad, where’s the sacrifice?” (v.7) There was wood, fire, a knife, but no ram. “God will provide,” said the old man. And then they are at the top of the mountain and that horrible, unimaginable scene unfolds as Abraham ties Isaac down on the rough altar…tying him down like he was a lamb ready for the slaughter, raises his knife over the boy and then God holds the hand of Abraham. A ram appears and is sacrificed in Isaac’s stead.
If this was a test, he passed the test. “You dared to offer your only son to me” and then God provides a ram instead of a son. We find coming out of these pages a man who trusted God even when God appeared to be acting against his promise.
Faith is like that. Faith is commitment, the directing of one’s trust toward God. Whether Abraham believed that the God he worshipped would require the life of his son, we cannot know, but what we do know and can affirm is that the biblical god does not require that kind of sacrifice.
In what could have been his darkest hour, Abraham trusted God. He believed that the “Lord would provide.” He even changed the name of the place to “The Lord will provide.” And this scene out of Abraham’s life ends where it began. Abraham trusted God for the unknown. He believed God would provide whatever was needed for the journey.
God does provide. Do you believe that? God is not going to ask for a human sacrifice to prove allegiance and trust in Him. Some scholars have said that one of the truths from this passage is that it signaled the word that God will not ask for human sacrifice. Abraham’s God was not like all the other gods that he knew about. He trusted the God who would provide what was needed when having to climb Mt. Moriah.
I’ve seen that trust in the lives of believers. They didn’t ask to climb Mt. Moriah, but they had to.
I heard in the testimony of a missionary whose wife was murdered while he was away preaching. He learned that God provides. God gave him the strength to walk through the tragedy and brought him to a place of forgiveness to the one who killed his wife.
I heard from my seminary pastor, John Claypool, whose little daughter died from leukemia. God’s provision came through a loving church and through a faith that taught him life is a gift and the only way through the hurt and pain of a child’s death is to be able to affirm life as a gift.
I’ve heard and seen it in the lives of some of you have had to walk through the valley of the shadow; didn’t expect it, didn’t plan for it and it plowed into your life like a truck into a brick wall…and you said that you knew the lord would provide for you in the worst days of your lives and He has. Family, friends, prayer, cards, notes, food, scripture, music, Griefshare and the provisions go on.
I seen God’s provision in the lives of people who knew that they would soon meet the Lord face to face and the Lord provided for them in that journey with family, friends, love until the gates of heaven opened wide. They knew from the view on Mt. Moriah about that building not made with hands but one eternal in the heavens.
I’ve heard in the words of those who lost their jobs and they didn’t know what the next day would bring and yet you depended upon God to walk beside you…”the Lord provides.”
From those going through a devastating divorce not knowing what the future would hold, but able to trust in God when Mt. Moriah was so high and so tall and so hard.
I believe God does provide us with sufficient grace to walk through life. Abraham did believe that God would provide. I not sure he knew quite how especially when the knife was drawn and his only son was laid upon an altar, but he trusted and God provided.
As he led his son up the mountain, it must have seemed to him a cruel irony. Here was his son, the child that had been born to him in his old age, a miraculous blessing of God who was to be part of a promise to bless all the nations of the world. And now that loving gift was going to be taken away. How could that happen? To be sure the sacrifice couldn’t be that great.
Let me tell you about another climb up a mountain. The Romans used it to sacrifice troublemakers who resisted the government. In one day they crucified 2,000 victims. The mountain was called Calvary. God saw his only son being led up that mountain. There was no wood for the fire, just wood made into a cross.
“Father, where is the lamb? Everything’s here, the cross, the nails, but not the sacrifice. “I will provide,” said the Father. And as the altar was made ready for the sacrifice, the wood was hoisted up high, the hammer pound in the nails and no one said “stop.” No one stopped it and he breathed his last and died.
God passed the test. “I asked God how much He loved me and he stretched out his arms and died.” God promised to love us, to make something out of us, to bring us back to himself no matter how much it cost. God kept the promise, even to death.
One day on a mountaintop, God did that which He would never ask anyone else to do, even his servant, Abraham. He showed the lengths He would go to bless the world. God provided what was needed to get things right between us. The lamb, His only Son was his gift to show His love for us, no matter what our Mt. Moriahs may be like, He promised to provide. He who did not withhold his only Son, but gave him up for all of us…” What a God!
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