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That's connectwithskip.com. Now let's get into today's teaching from Pastor Skip Heitzig. The Lord tested him, but notice he tested him after these things.
Men and women of God, this is so important and so precious. There was a period of time where God prepared Abraham for this test. God didn't give him the test until he was ready, until he was prepared for it. Now we don't know how many days. It says in verse 34 of chapter 21, Abraham stayed in the land of the Philistines many days.
We don't know how many days. We don't even know how old Isaac is at this time. Some believe he's about 10 years of age.
So that would be about a seven year time difference, seven or eight. Others say he was a teenager. Josephus, in his writings, said he was 25 years old. Isaac was 25 years old.
Some even push him up into the 30s. 33, some suggest, when this happened. But enough time had passed, and I don't know what the days were like, but since they were down in Beersheba, I can only imagine the child was weaned. There was now peace in the family. As he grew up, that little child, probably Abraham and Sarah and Isaac took walks.
I don't know how long they could walk being 100 years of age, 120 now, 110, whatever. But they talked about God's goodness and about God's faithfulness. It was a period of rest and it was a period of preparation before God pulled this heavy test. Keep that in mind because some of you are afraid of what the Lord might allow. And you see somebody else going through a trial or you read about Abraham and you think, I could never do that. I could never have that kind of faith. I could never handle it that way.
Well, maybe not now because you're not prepared. Abraham could and he did because he was prepared. God prepared him for that.
There's an old Yiddish proverb that says, God sends burdens, but first God sends shoulders to bear those burdens. He had prepared Abraham for this and it was a test. So he said, here I am. Now here it is. Verse 2. Boy, I don't think we'll finish this chapter. 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, which I shall tell you.
So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, took two of his young men with him and Isaac his son, split the wood for the burnt offering and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. Wow. Pause on that for a moment. I'm a dad. I have just one son. This speaks to me in a very unique way.
I look at this and I thought I couldn't do this. See there's a dilemma Abraham has and here it is. The promise that God made to Abraham and Sarah required that Isaac live. I'm going to give you a son and it's going to be the son of a promise and I'm going to make you the father of many nations. And it was a promise not only of a son, but of nations that would come and population like the stars of the sky and the dust of the earth. So the promise of God that God had made required that Isaac live. But now the command of God requires that Isaac die. It was a contradiction to him.
It didn't make sense. But it says in verse 4, he went up to do it. Now don't get hung up on the whole idea of God commanding human sacrifice and how could God do this?
First of all, I'll say this. God is not requiring anything of Abraham than any of the other pagan religions at that time required. Number two, God didn't let him go through with it. He stopped him from doing it so he didn't want a human sacrifice.
And number three, when the law is finally developed under the Mosaic economy, it will be strictly forbidden to offer a child. The real issue is whom do you love more? Now you trusted me before you had the child and you loved me, Abraham, before you had the child.
I made you the promise and you believed me. Now you have the child. Now do you love that child more than you love me? Are you willing to love me and demonstrate love for me if it cost you this?
It's a heavy issue. When I was dating, well, I'll just say this. So when I was a single, I was a flaky young man. Wishy-washy in my decisions and my commitments and I had asked Lenya to marry me and she said yes and we were planning our wedding and then I had second thoughts and I got cold feet and I wasn't sure and so one night she could see that something was ailing me and like the angel from heaven, Skip, what ails you? And I said to her, now we're already engaged, to be perfectly honest, I don't think I can go through with this.
I'm not quite sure that I have a love for you that would be the kind of commitment that this would require. That was very difficult for her to hear because I had said I loved her and now it sounds like I'm saying I don't love you, I don't think. She looked at me and said something I'll never forget. She said, let me tell you something. If I'm not God's best and highest for your life, I don't want to marry you. I love you so much that I want whoever is God's best and highest to be your wife and if I'm not that one, I love you enough to not do it. And I looked at her and I thought, wow, I want to marry this girl.
What a flake I've been. But she was in a sense with her own Isaac doing the same thing. If God wants me to give you up even though we're engaged, I want God's best and highest for your life and if I'm not the one, then go. Abraham got up, saddled his donkey, took his entourage with him. Now verse 3 and verse 4, it says on the third day Abraham lifted up his eyes and he saw the place of far off, Mount Moriah. There's nothing said about the emotion of Abraham. I can only guess.
You don't need to write about it. He was heartbroken. He was grieved. I'm sure he didn't get sleep the night before. He tossed and turned and he was thinking on his bed.
I don't get it. All those years of waiting and the promises and what am I going to tell Sarah? But he goes in obedience. On the third day he lifted up his eyes and he saw the place of far off and Abraham said to his young men, stay here with the donkey. The lad and I will go up yonder and worship and we will come back to you.
Did you hear that? We're going to go and we will come back. Not we're going to go and I'm going to come back alone because he's going to be dead. He said something by faith, didn't he?
Even though God said take your son, your only son and offer him up. He says we're going to go and we will come back. The night before something happened in Abraham's mind, in his heart on that bed on which he was lying in that tent. He was thinking it through. He was calculating thinking it logically through and his mind hit upon something, gave him the answer. He fought through the logical premise of the character and power of God. You say, Skip, it didn't say that.
How do you know that? Well, we're told the answer to that in Hebrews chapter 11. I've marked it, you can turn to it or I'll just read it to you. It's only three verses. Now listen to this, here's the book of Hebrews in the New Testament giving comment on the Old Testament. By faith, this is Hebrews 11 verse 17, by faith Abraham when he was tested offered up Isaac and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son of whom it was said, in Isaac your seed will be called.
Here it is. Concluding that God was able to raise him up even from the dead in which he had also received him up in a figurative sense. You see the word or do you hear the word concluding? It's the word in Greek, logizami.
It means to compute, to calculate, to logically reason through to a conclusion. The night before all I can imagine based upon this in Abraham's mind he was thinking this through and he was thinking God gave me a promise. He made a promise to me and my wife that we're going to have a son.
It was impossible. Here's the son. God has been faithful. Now God is requiring that I kill the son. Either that means that God is erratic, fickle, false, and can't be trusted.
And yet I have never known in my experience God to be fickle or false or erratic or unable to be trusted. Therefore the only conclusion I can come up with logically is that if I put a knife into that young boy's heart there's going to be a resurrection. If God is able to miraculously give my wife and I a son, if I kill him since all of the hope, all of the promise, everything is predicated upon the life of this child according to God's promise, there's going to be a resurrection. God's going to raise him up from the dead. That's what it says, concluding that God was able to raise him up even from the dead.
You're listening to Connect with Skip Heitzig. Before we return to Skip's teaching, the question of God's existence has serious implications from his presence and participation in our lives to the reality of life after death to the basis for human morality. And in his book, Is God Real?, Lee Strobel, former atheist and legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, weaves together the latest evidence from a range of brilliant scientific and philosophical minds to answer the most consequential question of all time. This resource will equip you to address your own doubts and respond to others' questions about God with confidence. We'll send you a copy of Is God Real?, along with two messages Strobel preached on this topic at Calvary Church, as thanks for your gift of $50 or more to reach more people with God's love through Connect with Skip Heitzig.
Go to connectwithskip.com slash offer or call 800-922-1888 and request your copy when you give. Now, let's get back to Skip for more of today's teaching. Here's what I want to point out to you. What do you do when you're faced with something illogical? Here you have a command of God or you're faced with something and it's just the way things are going in your life. It just seems so illogical.
You put it together logically based upon the character of God and what you know to be true about God. And then, like Anne-Camille said, how will you know unless you jump? Jump.
Jump. I love the story about the grocer who had a son. Now, in those days in the south, the grocery stores had a basement, a cellar, a trap door, and so the trap door was open. The ladder was down. It's dark down there. The grocer, the man was getting some supplies and his son walked in the store and saw the door open. Now, from where the grocer was down below, looking up with the shaft of light, he could see his son because of the ambient light in the room. But the son, because of the light where he was, he couldn't see in the dark cellar his father, but he could hear his father's voice. Hello, son. Hello, dad. I'm up here.
I know. I can see you. Well, I can't see you.
Well, that's okay. Just come on down. Just jump. I'll catch you. I can't jump, dad. I can't see you.
Doesn't matter. I can see you. And you know me. And you know I love you. And you know I can catch you.
So jump. So the boy finally did, but it was not based upon what he could see, but what he knew about his father. It was logical.
It was smart. So Abraham concluded, God is able to resurrect my son from the dead. And so he goes and he says, we're going to go yonder and worship.
And like Arnold used to say, we'll be back. Because he believed God would resurrect his son. Isn't that beautiful? There's another key here. It says, we will go yonder and worship. This horrible experience and sacrifice became an act of worship. You know, if we could learn to turn the hard situations of our life into altars of worship, where you just pause. Oh, this is so difficult. What a horrible day I'm having.
Pause right there. Lord, you give and you take away. Blessed be your name. Too often, we gaze at our circumstance and we glance at the Lord. If you could learn to gaze at your Lord and glance at your circumstance, it won't overwhelm you.
You get overwhelmed when you just glance at the Lord, but gaze at your circumstance. Look at that. It's impossible. Can't afford it. It's horrible. Okay, boom.
Do that. In fact, maybe that's a good definition of worship, being preoccupied with God. We're going to go worship.
We'll be back. So Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering, laid it on Isaac, his son. 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 am I, my son. He gets that a lot. And he said, look, the fire and the wood, but where's the lamb for the burnt offering?
He didn't know anything about that. Abraham said, notice the faith again, my son, God will provide for himself, or as some translations say simply, God will provide himself, the lamb for a burnt offering. So the two of them went together. They came to the place of which God had told him. That's Mount Moriah. 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 he took the knife to slay his son, but the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven, 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 the thicket by its horns, so Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up for a burnt offering instead of his son. And Abraham called the name of the place, Yahweh Yireh, or as we often say Jehovah Jireh, as we mispronounce those words, the Lord will provide, as it is said to this day, in the mount of the Lord, it shall be seen, or it shall be provided. This is strikingly similar to another incident in the New Testament, a drama that took place on exactly the same mountain, where Abraham offered his son, almost, is where God offered his son, not almost, but in reality and in totality.
Same mountain, peak, same place, exactly. Now we get hints of that in verse 2, God says take your son, your only son. Now wait a minute, how many sons did he have by now?
Yeah, we've counted two. But here God says take your only son, because he was the son of promise, not the son of the flesh. In fact, what does it say in Hebrews? He's called his only begotten son. Take your only begotten son, that's what God is recognizing, the son of promise, not the son of the flesh. He says take your son, your only son whom you love. Remember the rule of first mention, we've gone through it a lot in Genesis. This is the very first time in all of the Bible, the word love is used. And what kind of love is it? The love of a father for his son as he is about to sacrifice him on Mount Moriah.
Ooh, very interesting. If you go to Jerusalem today, Mount Moriah still runs through the old city of Jerusalem and it comes to a peak just outside the gates of the city and then it goes back down slowly. The very peak of the mountain itself just outside the city gates was known 2,000 years ago as Golgotha, the place of the skull, the place where Jesus Christ died for our sins on the cross. Not only that but verse 4, something else. On the third day, Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place afar off. On what day? The third day. The third day he walked up and the third day he was about to kill his son and the third day the angel stopped him. So for three days, in the mind of Abraham, his son was dead. For three days he believed, I'm going to kill my son, I'm going to kill my son, my son's going to be... So for three days he was dead. It wasn't until the third day that he was stopped. Third day there was in a sense a whole new lease on life because the angel stopped him.
Very, very, very interesting. And then again, oh yes, in the mountain of the Lord verse 14, it shall be provided. I see that as a prophecy.
Now here's the difference. You have Abraham almost putting his son to death. You have God definitely putting his son to death for the sins of the world. One is the shadow of another.
One is the shadow of another. I'm sure that when Abraham lifted up that knife, it's as if all of heaven paused in awe. Look at how a man loves God. But when God killed his son on Mount Moriah, all of heaven gasped, see how God loves mankind to do that. His only begotten son whom he loves. We don't have time to go on.
Wish we did. In the mountain of the Lord, it shall be provided. In the mountain of the Lord, it shall be seen. The cross of Jesus Christ did not take God by surprise.
It was the plan of His from the beginning, from the foundation of the world. Christ is called the Lamb that was slain from the foundations of the earth. It is interesting that what God does in His Word gets twisted as time goes on by other groups. For instance, the Muslims believe that it was on Mount Moriah where Abraham almost killed his son Ishmael, not Isaac.
They insert that into the story. Not only that, but on this very mount, the very temple mount itself, it is the third holiest site this day to the Muslims. After Mecca and Medina comes Jerusalem. Mecca is where the Kaaba is, the sacred stone. That's where the pilgrimage takes place.
That's number one. The mosque of Muhammad in Medina is number two. Why Jerusalem number three? Well, in the Quran, in their chapters called Suras, in Suras 17 verse 1, it says, Blessed be Allah, who has taken his servant, that is Muhammad, by night from the sacred mosque to the farthest mosque.
That's all. And so over time, people said that must be Jerusalem. Even though Jerusalem is never mentioned in the Quran, did you know that? Because it says the farthest mosque, over time they thought, I wonder if that could mean the place where the Jews worship in the temple and later on the Christians, Jerusalem. So there's a mosque on the temple mount today called Al-Aqsa, the distant or the farthest mosque. And there they say, is where Abraham was transported by Allah in that night vision according to Sura 17 verse 1. And so today on top of the temple mount where the temple once stood is a mosque and it is under Islamic occupation at this time, even though Jerusalem is under the occupation of the Jewish nation.
So it's a very interesting tension and when we're there in eight weeks, you'll feel some of that interesting tension. But you'll also be able to stand on and see the peak of that Mount Moriah where Jesus Christ died for your sins and my sins. On that very mountain, the Mount of the Lord, it shall be provided and it was provided. God provided the sacrifice once and for all to save anyone who would believe in Him by faith.
We're glad you joined us today. Before you go, remember that when you give $50 or more to help reach more people with the gospel through Connect with Skip Heitzig, we'll send you Lee Strobel's book Is God Real? And two of his sermons on the same topic preached at Calvary Church to help you answer life's most consequential questions about God's existence. To request your copy of these resources, call 800-922-1888. That's 800-922-1888 or visit connectwithskip.com slash donate. For more from Skip, be sure to check out the many resources available at connectwithskip.com slash store. Come back next time for more verse by verse teaching of God's word here on Connect with Skip Heitzig. Make a connection Make a connection At the foot of the crossing Cast all burdens on His word Make a connection Connection Connect with Skip Heitzig is a presentation of Connection Communications, connecting you to God's never-changing truth in ever-changing times.
