Will you please pray with me? Let’s bow our heads in prayer.
Our Father in heaven, we have already been engaged in worship and we have rejoiced in You. We have rejoiced in Your forgiveness, Your grace, Your salvation. We have come in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ because there is no other name given under heaven amongst men whereby we might be saved. We rejoice to see one another in the fellowship of the Gospel. We rejoice to sing Your praises and to meet with You. And we ask now, Father, as we come to Your Word, that You will open our hearts. We pray that Your Spirit will be amongst us, taking the things of Christ and making them known to us. We pray that Your Spirit will arrest us. We all need to be confronted with who we are and with who You are; we need to be confronted with Your reality, Your power, Your love, Your grace, and the great promise that those who believe in the Lord Jesus Christ will have everlasting life. Life that begins now – abundant life, fulfilled life, and life that will extend beyond the grave into eternity, life in fellowship with the Lord Jesus Christ. And so our Father in heaven, as we meet these few moments and as we open Your Word, we pray that You will speak to us, in Jesus’ name, amen.
Please take Your copy of God’s Word and read with me, first of all, in the book of Genesis chapter 22. We’re going to read from the beginning to the verse marked 14. And then we are going to read the passage in Hebrews 11. We’re going to read two passages, but we’ll come to that in a few moment’s time.
Genesis chapter 22, from the beginning:
“After these things God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ 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.’ 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. On the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. 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.’ 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. 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?’ Abraham said, ‘God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.’ So they went both of them together.
When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, ‘Abraham, Abraham!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘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.’ 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. 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.’”
And then we’re going to read in the New Testament and the letter to the Hebrews, chapter 11, this great galaxy, this great list of Old Testament saints that are given to us in this chapter to encourage us to persevere in the faith. Hebrews chapter 11. We’ll take up the reading at verse 8:
“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he went to live in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city that has foundations, whose designer and builder is God. By faith Sarah herself received power to conceive, even when she was past the age, since she considered him faithful who had promised. Therefore from one man, and him as good as dead, were born descendants as many as the stars of heaven and as many as the innumerable grains of sand by the seashore.”
And then if we fast forward to verse 17, we take up the reading again:
“By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Isaac, and he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his only son, of whom it was said, ‘Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.’ He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead, from which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back.”
This is the Word of God and we pray together that as we read it and as we think about it, God will open our hearts and make us receptive to it.
Those of you who are perhaps visiting to this congregation today and are totally confused by the accents on this platform, let me assure you, you are in Jackson, Mississippi! But let me also transport you, as I begin what we are going to think about, transport you back to Scotland for a few moments and particularly to Edinburgh airport. And let me talk you through the process of getting from check-in to the departure lounge. You have to go through security, as you have to in any airport, but then there is only one way to get to the departure lounge, and that is to walk through a long shop, a store, and that store sells perfume. You have to walk through the shop in order to get to the departure lounge. I’m not quite sure how that came into being, but that is what you have to do. And there are various different brands. If you closed your eyes and you were led through it, it would be an extraordinary experience because your sense, your smell, the fragrance would change as you made your way through the store from one brand to another to another to another. There’s about twenty of them. Every fragrance is slightly different.
Now I think you can see where this is going. When I read Hebrews 11 it’s like walking through that shop. Every fragrance is slightly different, but there is one thread that is woven through the whole of the chapter and that is the thread of faith. And when it comes to Abraham, we’re stopping to look at Abraham’s life in three particular episodes. You could call it three, slightly different fragrances if you want. The three episodes each illustrate an aspect of Abraham’s faith and I want us to look at these three fragrances this morning.
The first of them is found in verse 8 where we read that, “By faith, Abraham obeyed when he was called to go to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance.” And of course all of that harks back to Genesis chapter 12, we didn’t have time to read it, where God called Abraham to leave everything that was familiar to him and to go to a place he had never been to before. And so we can say that this fragrance was Abraham’s faith seeing the invisible. He saw the invisible. And by the way, every one of these fragrances is a slight paradox. Seeing the invisible is a paradox. And that’s exactly what Abraham’s faith meant. Verse 13 tells us these “all died in faith, not having received the things promised but having seen them and greeted them from afar.” So he saw the invisible. And we’ll come back to that in a few. So Abraham’s faith meant that he, first of all, saw the invisible.
But then, the second episode is found in verse 11 where it came to the promise of a son. And this goes back to Genesis chapter 18 where these two strangers come and they promise that in a year from now Abraham and Sarah will have a son. In verse 11 we read, “By faith, Sarah herself received power to conceive even when she was past age.” What is this? What does this tell us about Abraham’s faith? It means that he believed the impossible. He believed the impossible. It was impossible for anyone of his age or his wife’s age to have a child. And yet by faith, they believed it. So that’s the second thing.
The third thing is this, when we fast forward to verse 17, and of course the best known episode in Abraham’s life where having received the promise of a son, some years afterwards, we don’t know how long, but God told him to take his son, the one that he loved, and to go to a place that God directed him and to offer him up as a burnt offering. He was to kill his son and he was to offer him as a sacrifice. What does that tell us about Abraham’s faith? What kind of fragrance are we experiencing here? Well the fragrance is this – that Abraham did the unthinkable. So three things, three fragrances, three paradoxes, all of them brought about by the faith of Abraham. One of them was to see the invisible, the second one was to believe the impossible, and the third one was to do the unthinkable. Just let’s take a look, a little closer look at these three things and then we’ll close with one or two applications which I hope will be relevant to all of us.
He first of all saw the invisible, and we can’t forget the context. Faith does not operate in a vacuum. It’s not some kind of arbitrary existence. I know that a lot of people in today’s world like to think it is. They like to think, “He’s a man of faith” or “She’s a woman of faith,” but they don’t go any deeper into that. In fact, it’s uncomfortable to go into that because that’s all that is required in today’s world in modern, popular circles. But faith in the Bible always takes place in a context, in the context of the big picture. And it’s wrong even to talk about Abraham’s faith in isolation. Abraham’s faith was a response to God’s proposition to him in Genesis chapter 12. And God’s proposition was this – I am going to bless the world, I am going to bless all nations, and so I want you to relocate because this, the great plan that I have for the world, requires you to leave everything that is familiar to you, the land of Ur of the Chaldeans where you were brought up. We don’t know anything about Abraham before he was seventy-five. We don’t know what he was like as a young man, we don’t know how he came to recognize the voice of God; all of that we have no idea about. But what we do know is that when God told him to go to a place where he had never been before because God was going to do something absolutely astonishing in the world.
Now let me tell you how astonishing it was. This is taking place in Genesis chapter 12, you remember. Up until that moment, God has been responding to the wickedness of this world in judgment, understandably, going all the way back to Adam and Eve in the garden, Genesis chapter 3, where God cursed the ground because of their disobedience and He drove them out of the garden. It was an act of judgment. And then in Genesis chapter 6, where the wickedness of man has escalated to the point of destruction, God sends a flood saving only Noah and his family. Again, an act of judgment. And then in Genesis chapter 11, when in the height of man’s technological progression, he invents the brick and with which he is able to build a tower to displace God, God comes down again and says, “Do you really think so?” and He confuses humanity so that they are forced to spread out all over the world. Up until Genesis 11, God has been acting in righteous judgment, but now He says something that is astonishing. He says to Abraham, “I am going to bless the world.” In wrath, He remembers mercy. He is a merciful God. He is not willing that any should perish but all should come to everlasting life. That’s the Gospel and that’s what He has in mind when He meets with Abraham and when He tells him to go out from his country and go to a land that He would show him because that was the mechanism in which God’s plan was going to play out.
And of course we know how it does play out. In the pages of the Old Testament, it was a plan that was going to involve him having that son of promise, Isaac, and Isaac begetting Jacob and Esau and the twelve tribes of Israel and the sojourn in Egypt and the exodus, Moses and the exodus, and the crossing of the Jordan and Joshua and the judges and the kings and the prophets and the exile. All the way through the centuries, God’s plan is unfolding until it culminates in the coming of the Son of Man, the Son of God, until He comes into the world in Bethlehem and gives His life on the cross as the sacrifice for our sin and rises again on the third day and ascends to heaven. That was how God’s plan was going to unfold in the pages and in the sanctuaries of history. Abraham, of course, he did not know – he knew enough, God showed him enough. Remember how Jesus said, “Abraham saw My day and rejoiced.” That doesn’t mean that he saw every detail, but he saw enough to give him the confidence to commit himself to a life of faith and obedience.
And so of course that didn’t mean that God spared him from all of the difficulties, that sense of isolation that he must have faced from time to time. It doesn’t mean that he had an easy life once he got into Canaan. There was war, there was famine, there was conflict between his herdsmen and Lot’s herdsmen and he had to face a whole lot of trial and difficulty. And yet through all of that, God remained faithful and Abraham lived and died in that faith, not having received ultimately the promise and yet having lived believing that God was one day going to carry it out. So that’s the first thing then – he saw the invisible. He looked for a city with foundations, that’s what we are told.
The second thing is that he believed the impossible. This goes back of course to Genesis chapter 18. You remember having entered into Canaan and having wandered around in Canaan for a while – that was his life in any case. He was a nomad; he lived tents. And yet one day God sent three visitors. There were angels and they came with a purpose. Abraham made a meal for them, he sat down with them, he listened to their message, and their message was this – that a year from now we are going to visit again and you will have a son. You will have a son. And you remember what happened? Sarah, his wife, was listening. She was eavesdropping into the conversation. And you remember what was said? She laughed. Because she looked at her body, she was ninety years old and she was well past – you don’t have to live in the 21st century to know that it’s impossible for a ninety year old to have a baby! You don’t have to be a gynecologist to know that! You’d know because it’s just impossible! And yet, they believed it.
And look at what the verse says. Look at what the verse says. Don’t read it too quickly, otherwise you’ll miss this. It was Sarah that believed it. We’ve been talking about the life of Abraham, but Sarah is included in this list of men and women of faith because she believed the impossible. I find this really fascinating. I find it so encouraging because at some point after these three visitors go away, Sarah must have gone away and she must have reasoned their message in her head. And she must have come to the conclusion that was different from her initial skepticism. And what happened was that as God worked in her heart, that her skepticism was changed to faith. It’s interesting isn’t it, that if the only information that we had was Genesis, we would come away with a kind of low view of Sarah, wouldn’t we? But Hebrews makes it up. Hebrews tells us that afterwards, Hebrews tells us that she came to a different conclusion. In other words, God wasn’t finished with her. He was going to work in her heart. She was going to listen to that message that the angels told her, which was, you remember what they said? “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” And she reasoned all that in her heart and she says, “Oh, how I would love for this promise to be true! And God is telling me that it is true.” She came to faith. She came to believe it. Having started off by being overwhelmed by the impossibility of what God had promised, but then if you only allow yourself to believe the possible, then you’ll never make anything of the Bible. She believed the impossible.
And then lastly, Abraham’s faith meant that he did the unthinkable. This goes back to Genesis chapter 22, the chapter that we read, and that moment when God said to Abraham, “I want you to take that son, yes that son, that one, not the other one, that one, the son who you love, and I want you to take him to the place that I am going to show you, and I want you to put him to death and offer him up as a sacrifice.” Now I’m sure that many of you have read this passage many, many times and you’ve ruminated on it, you’ve thought about it, you’ve wondered about it. It begs a question, doesn’t it? Yes, we know that it was the testing of Abraham’s faith, but was that it? Is that all? It begs the question, “Why in the world would God ask Abraham to take the son that he loved and to put him to death and offer him as a sacrifice? Why would He do that?” It’s the most unthinkable, it’s the most bizarre, it’s the most horrific command that God could ever give to anyone. And we all recoil, don’t we, when we read it. It’s the most uncomfortable chapter. And we’re meant to recoil, we’re meant to feel that sense of horror.
Now I’m old enough now to have heard all kinds of explanations as to why God asks – I’m not going to go into any of these; there’s no time. But the only conclusion I can come to is to understand Genesis 22 in the light of the whole of the Bible, the whole of redemptive history, and in the light of what God was ultimately going to do as the promise that He made to Abraham unfolded in the life and the death of Jesus Christ. And as it unfolded at Calvary, where the Father and the Son, the beloved Son, went together to the place of execution and sacrifice. But except this time, there was no intervention, there was no change, there was no salvation for this Son. “He spared not His only Son, but delivered Him up for us all.” That moment would become the heart of the Gospel, the moment when “He who knew no sin was made to be sin for us so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” God is aiming at this particular moment all along.
And so why did this happen in Abraham’s life? Because as Abraham’s life unfolded and as his son grew up and they had children and they would become a defined race, and that race was defined by their father, Abraham. You remember what they said to Jesus – “We have Abraham as our father.” That was their identity. He was their origin. But it wasn’t just Abraham as a person. It was this event. It was going to become part of their DNA as Israelites. They would have this burned into their conscience. This was their history. And so when the disciples, after Jesus was raised from the dead, when they began to share the Gospel and they began to tell the story of how Jesus was the Son of God and how it was necessary for Him to die on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins, it would have resonated, at least to some extent, with the Jewish people who were prepared to listen. The one thing the Jewish people did not want to hear was anything that was so different from anything that they had become accustomed to that they couldn’t believe it. But it wasn’t. This was part of their heritage. They could recognize the story because it was in their scriptures. Abraham’s faith meant that he was prepared to go through this horrific experience believing that God was going to work it out for His own particular purpose.
So three things, three things – Abraham’s faith meant that he saw the invisible, it meant that they believed the impossible, and it meant that he did the unthinkable. A couple of applications as we close. Applications are absolutely necessary. This chapter is all about application. In fact, the whole of the letter to the Hebrews is about application. The idea behind it is that here is this church, they’ve been converted as Hebrews, as Israelite people, as Jewish people, and as time is going on, the temptation is creeping in to fall back, to forsake their commitment to the Gospel, to forsake the Gospel itself. And that’s why Hebrews is so helpful for us today because we all face the temptation. We may not have been converted from Judaism – some of us may have been, but for the most part, at least for my part, I was converted from a secular world, a world that I suppose knew very little about the Gospel and the world, the kind of modern world that we live. So let’s look at how this chapter helps us as we persevere in trusting the Lord Jesus Christ.
First of all, let’s go back to the context in which Abraham lived. And the fact that Abraham’s faith meant that it was prospectively looking to the fulfillment of God’s promise one day in Jesus Christ. Now we are different; we are living 4,000 years beyond Abraham, but we are able to look back and we are able to see how God has fulfilled His promise, particularly in the person of Jesus Christ. And yet, God has called us to be men and women who live in that same obedience, not having seen what God has prepared for us but believing in it, confidently, because God has said it. God has placed us in a particular time in history. He has placed you where you are in your family, in your place of work, me in my place of work. He hasn’t placed me 100 years or 200 years ago. He has placed me now. I am to live in obedience and in faith, listening to His Word. But sometimes, like Abraham, we can feel a sense of isolation, especially when the whole world seems to have a different story. And as time goes on, sometimes it gets to us, doesn’t it? That was what was happening to the church that the writer is writing to.
Let me just be personal for a few moments’ time. I came to faith in Jesus as a young teenager, 11 or 12 years old. I was brought up in a Christian home. My dad was a minister. My mom, who was probably the most godly person I have ever come across, a living example of what it means to live every day for Jesus, she led me to the Lord. But then since that time, despite having to face many of the typical temptations that any teenager has to face, my life can be described as pretty much vanilla. Not very exciting. And I believe that God has led me from year to year, from decade to decade. I have married a great wife. I have a lovely family and God has been good to me. And now, as I enter into seniority, do you know the voice that I hear regularly in my ear? “How do you know all this is true? You know, you have wasted your life. Look at all the things you could have done if you hadn’t committed your life to Jesus. And what if you’re going to close your eyes for the last time and it’s going to be nothing?” I get that thought quite a lot. What do I do? What do I do?
That’s exactly where these Hebrew Christians were. That voice that sows the seed of doubt into your mind, and especially when you feel that sense of isolation. Well, the first thing I do is I start preaching to myself and I go back to where we were last Sunday, to the empty tomb. The reality of the empty tomb, the Jesus of the empty tomb, the Jesus who is the most extraordinary person in history, the cross in which the Son of God was made to be sin for me. I go back to the Bible. I go back to the examples. And that’s why this chapter was written – to give example after example of men and women who lived in faith, albeit in the Old Testament, but they trusted in the Word of God. They heard it. They received it. They gave themselves to it. Come what may, they committed themselves to it and God was faithful to His promise.
Another takeaway is that if all we had was what was believable, then faith wouldn’t be required at all. Is it any more impossible for a son to be born to a ninety year old woman than for the dead to rise? Is it any more impossible? No, it’s just as impossible. God is the God of the impossibilities, and that’s why Jesus’ life was littered with miracle after miracle after miracle – to reinforce His person. We are talking about God and His promise. “Is anything too hard for the Lord?” If God says, “I am the resurrection and the life, he who believes in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live. And he who lives and believes in Me shall never die” – I don’t know how that’s going to happen, I don’t know how God is going to bring it about, but He said it. He has promised it and He is God. Nothing is too hard for Him. He will bring it to pass. And so therefore I can completely trust in Him, knowing that even when it comes to my final breath, He will see me over the border and into His presence. And that promise holds for all of you trusting Him. I hope you are trusting in Him today. I hope you are men and women of faith, but I’m also talking to someone, and for you, you have never come to faith in Jesus, then come. Listen to Him. Listen to His invitation. This is Jesus inviting you to come and to rest in Him and to find salvation, eternal life.
There’s one more thing I want to close with. I want to, I’ve said that in time of doubt we go back to the Bible, we go back to the Jesus, we go back to the God who is always faithful to His promise. But the point of Hebrews is about fellowship. Fellowship, the church, the company of believers, is a resource, a means that God has given for our strengthening, particularly in times of weakness and in times where we have to face doubts about who we are as God’s people and what God has done, the kind of doubt that I often have to face, and I am sure you are the same. Fellowship is absolutely essential. How many of you have read the letter to the Hebrews and noticed this – the number of times that the writer says, “Let us” – “Let us do this…” That’s the whole point of Hebrews. “Let us draw near.” That’s the answer to doubt. “Let us draw near” with a true heart and full assurance of faith. We are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed but those who move on with the Lord and who take His promises and live in them. “Let us hold fast,” he says, “to the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful.” You know, we are at such an advantage because we can look back over the centuries and we can see how God has actually fulfilled His promises – the promises that Abraham never saw. So we have all the more reason to rest in what God continues to tell us.
But then, and I want to finish with this, the writer says, “Let us consider how to stir one another up to good works. Let us consider how to stir one another.” We have a collective responsibility towards one another, to encourage one another, to say to one another, “You’ve got to keep going. You’ve got to keep looking to Jesus. Let me read this passage. Let me pray with you. Let me help you. Let me tell you about my weaknesses. Let me share with you what I go through so that we can do this together.” That’s the fellowship of God’s people. God’s people in this generation and then God’s people in the past tense – Hebrews 11.
I’m sure that many of you have read The Pilgrim’s Progress. Pilgrim’s Progress is a great story, isn’t it, of how Pilgrim, he discovers the weight of sin on his back. He starts reading the Bible and the weight gets more, it gets heavier and heavier. He starts hearing the Gospel and he goes on the road that leads him to the cross. Eventually at the cross, his burden falls off his back. And then it’s the story of his life beyond the cross and onto the Celestial City. And he has to face many, many dangers, and there are pretty horrific and frightening scenes – the valley of the shadow of death and the battle with Apollyon and so on and so forth. These are not the most frightening things. Do you know what the most frightening thing of Pilgrim’s Progress is? It’s a place called The Enchanted Ground. And it happens just before he gets to the Jordan River. Shortly before he gets to the River of Death they have to go through. And Hopeful is with them. Do you remember what happens? They go into the Enchanted Ground and Hopeful says, “I am so exhausted. I just want to sleep.” And Christian says, “No way. You are not going to sleep!” And Christian forces him to stay awake. He says, “Don’t sleep, because if you sleep that’s it!” And Hopeful turns and says, “If it wasn’t for you, I would have been lost.” They go through it together because they know of the fellowship of the Gospel.
That’s what Hebrews is all about. That’s the inspiration that we are to draw from Abraham and it is an inspiration that God will use to strengthen and encourage us as we face every day in Jesus, waiting patiently for His promise to unfold, but it will. Let’s pray together.
Our Father in heaven, we thank You for that promise, the promise that is Yes and Amen in the Lord Jesus Christ. Give us to hold fast to it today. Give us to lay hold on Your Word. Give us to lay hold on each other, to help each other, to encourage one another so that by so doing that we will see the invisible, so that we will believe the impossible, and so that in the unthinkable, the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, we will have rest, forgiveness and eternal life. In Jesus’ name, amen.