Rebecca Stark is the author of The Good Portion: Godthe second title in The Good Portion series.

The Good Portion: God explores what Scripture teaches about God in hopes that readers will see his perfection, worth, magnificence, and beauty as they study his triune nature, infinite attributes, and wondrous works. 

                     

Tuesday
Nov282023

By Faith Abraham, Again

The Testing of Abraham by Gustave Dore

When was the last time you took a test? If you’re a student, your most recent test was probably one to measure how well you learned the subject matter you were taught. Others may have taken their last test to qualify for a drivers license or professional license. I think the last test I took was the one to become a Canadian citizen.

Most tests are meant to measure competence or ability, but tests can also be teaching tools. They can help us discover our strengths or weaknesses. And sometimes we learn from the mistakes we make and come away knowing more after a test than before it. 

In the last two pieces in this series on the faithful people commended in Hebrews 11, we discussed Abraham’s faith. His faith wasn’t perfect, but he did trust God to fulfill his promises, and he stayed faithful during some difficult trials. Before we leave Abraham, we need to discuss one more episode from his life, a time when God gave him a test.

Here’s what Hebrews 11 says: 

By faith Abraham when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death (Hebrews 11:17-19). 

Do you remember this story? God told Abraham to sacrifice his young son Isaac as an offering to the Lord, so Abraham took Isaac and two servants and set off for the place of sacrifice. When they neared their destination, Abraham told his servants to wait “while I and the boy go over there. We will worship” he said, “and then we will come back to you” (Genesis 22:5).

At the place of sacrifice, Abraham prepared to offer his son to the Lord, but the moment he took the knife to kill Isaac, the angel of the Lord stopped him. “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him” (Genesis 22:12). In the end, Abraham did not sacrifice Isaac, but by being willing to do so he passed what must be one of the most difficult tests God has ever given a human being. 

According to the author of Hebrews, Abraham was willing to obey God’s command because he still expected to walk away from the place of sacrifice with a living and breathing Isaac beside him. I must confess that for many years I read this story and thought Abraham was being deceptive when he told his servants that he and Isaac would both be returning to them. But the author of Hebrews took Abraham’s statement at face value. Abraham, he said, was convinced that if he sacrificed Isaac, God would raise him from the dead. 

How did the author know what Abraham was thinking? He knew it because he was an attentive reader and a careful thinker. He knew Abraham’s life story well, and he put two and two together.

Remember, this particular test wasn’t the first one God gave Abraham. Before God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, he had already asked him to trust him in some difficult circumstances. When God told Abraham to leave his home in Haran for an unknown destination, he was asking him to leave his past behind and trust God for his future. When God asked him to keep on believing that he would give him an heir even though both Abraham and his wife were very old, he was asking him to continue to trust his future to God even when God’s promise to him seemed impossible to keep.

By the time God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, Abraham had already learned a few important lessons. He knew that God always keeps his word, even when it requires him to do things that seem impossible (Genesis 18:14). He also knew that God would only fulfill his promises through Abraham’s miracle son Isaac (Genesis 21:12). None of his other children would do. 

So even as Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac, he was sure Isaac would come out of the sacrifice alive because a living Isaac was necessary for God to keep his promises. Abraham reasoned that God, who called into being a living baby from Sarah’s dead womb (Romans 4:17,19) could also call his dead son Isaac back to life in order keep his word. 

And he was right—or at least mostly right. Isaac did return from the sacrifice alive, but God didn’t accomplish this in the way Abraham predicted. After the angel of the Lord stopped him from killing Isaac, Abraham looked up and saw “a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns” (Genesis 22:13). Isaac returned with Abraham because the Lord supplied a ram to replace him on the alter. The ram was killed and Isaac lived.

Are you a bit uncomfortable with the idea that God told Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac? It helps to keep in mind that God’s command was a test. He intended for Abraham to be willing to sacrifice his son, but he never intended for Abraham to actually complete the sacrifice. When he gave his command to Abraham, God already planned to provide a ram to sacrifice instead of Isaac. When he told Abraham to sacrifice his son, God meant for things to unfold exactly as they did.

One of God’s reasons for giving this test was to confirm Abraham’s faith, both for his benefit and ours. Abraham’s faith, attested to by his obedience, was an example for those who lived after him. The author of Hebrews used the story of Abraham’s testing to strengthen the faith of those who first received his letter, and we can use it to strengthen our faith, too.

What’s more, Abraham’s testing and God’s response helped establish a pattern of substitutionary sacrifices that would later be formally instituted in Leviticus and finally fulfilled in Christ. God intended the near sacrifice of Abraham’s son to foreshadow the true sacrifice of God’s own son.  

I can’t help but think that God also meant for the near sacrifice of Isaac to foreshadow Christ’s resurrection. Since Abraham was determined to sacrifice Isaac, we might say Isaac was as good as dead. “[S]o in a manner of speaking,” the author of Hebrews argues, “[Abraham] did receive Isaac back from death.” Following the faint outline traced by Isaac’s return from near death, God the Father received back his Son from actual death by way of actual resurrection. 

Do you think when Jesus taught that Abraham “saw [my day] and was glad (John 8:56),” he was referring to this story? Did God use this test of his faith to also teach Abraham? Did he use it to point him toward Christ’s future work of salvation? 

The bottom line is that Abraham’s obedience to God’s command flowed from his faith—or, to put it another way, what he believed about God gave him the power to obey. The author of Hebrews used the example of Abrahams’s faithfulness to encourage his readers to maintain their allegiance to Jesus during their trials. (And “trials,” by the way, is just another way of saying “tests.”) If they, like Abraham, believed that God would keep his promises no matter what, they would be able to persevere in faith during the persecution that would come. If they believed God possessed resurrection power, they would be able to face the possibility of dying for their faith with courage, knowing that just as he had raised Jesus, he would also raise them. 

The same principle applies to us. It’s what we believe about God that empowers steadfast obedience—and, for those of us who live after the time of Jesus, it’s what believe about him, too. 

Do you really believe that God always keeps his word? That he has unlimited power even over death? Do you believe that God raised his son Jesus from the dead, and that all who are in the Son will one day be raised with him? Do you believe that Jesus is a powerful savior? That “he is able to save completely those who come to God through him” (Hebrews 7:25)? 

Then let what you know keep you trusting in God’s promises and Christ’s sacrifice, the sacrifice to which the ram that substituted for Isaac pointed. If you do, God will one day raise you to eternal life, just as he promised.


Previous post in this series:

Sunday
Nov262023

Sunday Hymn: Thy Mercy, My God

 

 

 

Thy mercy, my God, is the theme of my song,
The joy of my heart, and the boast of my tongue;
Thy free grace alone, from the first to the last,
Has won my affections, and bound my soul fast.

Thy mercy, in Jesus, exempts me from hell;
Its glories I’ll sing, and its wonders I’ll tell;
’Twas Jesus, my Friend, when he hung on the tree,
Who opened the channel of mercy for me.

Without thy sweet mercy I could not live here;
Sin soon would reduce me to utter despair;
But, through thy free goodness, my spirits revive,
And he that first made me still keeps me alive.

Thy mercy is more than a match for my heart,
Which wonders to feel its own hardness depart;
Dissolved by thy goodness, I fall to the ground,
And weep to the praise of the mercy I found.

The door of thy mercy stands open all day,
To the poor and the needy, who knock by the way.
No sinner shall ever be empty sent back,
Who comes seeking mercy for Jesus’s sake.

Great Father of mercies, thy goodness I own,
And the covenant love of thy crucified Son;
All praise to the Spirit, whose whisper divine
Seals mercy, and pardon, and righteousness mine.

—John Stocker

Wednesday
Nov222023

Theological Term of the Week: Biblical Hermeneutics

biblical hermeneutics
The art and science of interpreting the Bible.
  • From scripture:
    Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved, a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of truth (2 Timothy 2:15 ESV).
  • From The Chicago Statement on Biblical Hermeneutics:

    Article XXV

    We affirm the necessity of interpreting the Bible according to its literal, or normal, sense. The literal sense is the grammatical-historical sense, that is, the meaning which the writer expressed. Interpretation according to the literal sense will take account of all figures of speech and literary forms found in the text.

    We deny the legitimacy of any approach to Scripture that attributes to it meaning which the literal sense does not support.

    Article XVII 

    We affirm the unity, harmony and consistency of Scripture and declare that it is its own best interpreter.

    We deny that Scripture may be interpreted in such a way as to suggest that one passage corrects or militates against another. We deny that later writers of Scripture misinterpreted earlier passages of Scripture when quoting from or referring to them.

    Scripture yields two basic principles for its own interpretation. The first is that the proper, natural sense of each passage (i.e., the intended sense of the writer) is to be taken as fundamental; the meaning of texts in their own contexts, and for their original readers, is the necessary starting-point for enquiry into their wider significance. In other words, Scripture statements must be interpreted in the light of the rules of grammar and discourse on the one hand, and of their own place in history on the other. This is what we should expect in the nature of the case, seeing that the biblical books originated as occasional documents addressed to contemporary audiences; and it is exemplified in the New Testament exposition of the Old…
    The second basic principle of interpretation is that Scripture must interpret Scripture; the scope and significance of one passage is to be brought out by relating it to others. Our Lord gave an example of this when he used Gn. ii.24 to show that Moses’ law of divorce was no more than a temporary concession to human hard-heartedness. The Reformers termed this principle the analogy of Scripture; the Westminster Confession states it thus: “The infallible rule of interpretation of scripture is the scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any scripture, it must be searched and known by other places that speak more clearly.” This is so in the nature of the case, since the various inspired books are dealing with complementary aspects of the same subject. The rule means that we must give ourselves in Bible study to following out the unities, cross-references and topical links which Scripture provides.

 

Learn more:

  1. Compelling Truth: Biblical hermeneutics — What is it?
  2. J. I. Packer: Christians Can Understand the Word of God
  3. Jared Jeter: What Is Hermeneutics?
  4. J. I Packer: The Interpretation of Scripture
  5. D. A. Carson: Must I Learn How to Interpret the Bible?
  6. J. I. Packer: Hermeneutics and Biblical Authority
  7. Daniel Wallace: The Holy Spirit and Hermeneutics

 

 Related terms:

Filed under Scripture


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