RETHINKING RELIGION. Rethinking Trials and Temptations.
Genesis 22:1-18
Grace and peace to you in Jesus’ name, friends. Amen.
We’re starting a new message series this morning that will carry us through the Lent season: “Rethinking religion.” During Lent, we evaluate ourselves. We see our sin, and we come to see, freshly every year, our need for a Savior. In this particular Lent season, we’ll evaluate our attitude toward what we call “religion.”
That word is a hard one to define. People mean different things when they say “religion.” Some people mean “a specifically defined belief system.” Other people mean “a set of spiritual practices.” But the core of religion, whatever people mean when they say that, is a claim about reality beyond what we can touch.
Christians make a claim about reality. We claim that there is one God, who made all things. We claim that humans are naturally estranged from, and at war with, God. We claim that God reconciled us to himself through the death of the man Jesus Christ, God’s own eternal Son.We claim that Jesus rose from death as the guarantee of our own future resurrection.
We also claim that these truths impact the way we live. The existence of a God above us, who created us, impacts our life here on Earth. The resurrection of Jesus changes how we approach daily life. But we daily struggle to apply these truths correctly. The fact that God cares for us and has reconciled us to himself should lead us to live in a certain way. But we often fail to live as we ought. We live as if this world were everything. We live as if God had not promised to provide all we need. We live as if death were the end.
Lent gives us the opportunity to rethink religion. To see where our faith doesn’t connect to our daily lives. To see where we can grow in faith and in love. To repent, to acknowledge our sin before our merciful God, and to ask for his Holy Spirit to strengthen us.
We’re going to start this series by reflecting on our own lives through the life of Abraham. And we learn from Abraham’s life that when someone faces trial and difficulties, it does not mean that that person is not loved by God. We need to rethink trials and temptations.
Our reading from Abraham’s life this morning, Genesis twenty-two, picked up with these words: “Some time later.” We gotta remember what came before this. Abraham has already undergone a life full of trial and testing. He and his wife Sarah had been childless until they were one hundred years old and ninety years old. God made them wait decades for a child. He had promised them twenty-five years before Isaac was born - when they were both already old! - that they would have a child. I can’t imagine. My wife and I had two children by the time we were twenty-six. Abraham and Sarah had to wait nearly that long for God to carry out a promise he’d made when Abraham was already an old man!
Other trials also characterized Abraham’s life. He was called by God to leave his homeland and live as a nomad, wandering with his herds, in a land where he had no property. Then his nephew Lot, who had come with him and was like a son to him, left Abraham. Abraham had a child with his wife’s maid at his wife’s urging, since Sarah had begun to doubt that she was truly going to bear the promised child. This caused - of course - some strife in the family. Eventually, Abraham had to send away Hagar, the maid, and his firstborn son Ishmael. A severe trial for this man who had longed for an heir.
Family difficulties aside, Abraham also faced difficulties outside the home, in society. On one occasion, he and his servants had to go to war against four local kings by themselves. His servants also regularly faced conflict with locals as they cared for his flocks. Two different kings tried to take his wife into their households. And when Abraham once prayed that God, despite their sin, would spare the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, God still burned the cities to the ground with fire from heaven.
Abraham’s life was a mess of family drama, unanswered prayer, delayed fulfillment of promises, and difficulty. And after all of those things, were they not enough, God came to him one night and said, “Your son? Who I promised to you all those years ago? Kill him for me.”
The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that he’d heard far too many sermons sanitizing what happens here. Too many sermons saying, “Sometimes you may need to give up something precious to follow God.” And of course, Kierkegaard knew that the preacher meant, “You should give up sleeping in to be in church. You should make sure you put money in the plate.” But in his book Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard objected, that’s not what happens here! This is not the surrender of some small comfort. A man is being told to murder his son.
Of course, we know how the story ends. And once we know that, it becomes easy to make this into just the kind of story that Kierkegaard heard told so many times. “You may have to give up something you enjoy to follow God.” To be clear, that does not happen in this story. Abraham actually, in the end, has given up nothing. He returns to his wife with their son.
We do learn, from this story, that we should be prepared for anything to be taken from us. We learn that nothing in this life is guaranteed to us. But what do we make of the end, then? When Isaac is not taken from Abraham? Are we supposed to expect that God will let us keep everything we try to surrender? No. God doesn’t make that promise. Even in Abraham’s life, we see that that’s not true. When Abraham had to send away his first son, Ishmael, God didn’t reverse that painful choice. Abraham, as far as we know, never saw Ishmael again.
At times, when we have to surrender something, God suddenly returns it to us, like Isaac. At other times, he allows it to pass from our lives, like Ishmael. And the thing is, we could live with either one of those. If God just said, “Whenever you give something up, I’ll return it to you,” we could work with that! If he said, “What you give up will be gone,” we could live with that too. But what frustrates us is that he won’t give a singular straight answer. He leaves us hanging.
When God calls us to share his Gospel, the good news of Jesus, with others, he leaves us hanging in this way. We give up our time, maybe give up the comfort that exists in a relationship, by introducing the Gospel. God does not make us any promises about what will happen in any particular instance. We may see the Gospel bring someone to faith in Jesus when we share it. We may also walk away feeling like we completely wasted our time and made the relationship uncomfortable.
The call to parent children also works this way. God calls on parents to raise their children in his Word and to model his love in their relationship with their kids. But he makes no guarantee about what will ultimately result in our future relationship with them, or in their own lives.
One last example. When we work, whatever our occupation or industry, God calls on us to do so with honesty, dedication, and humility. But he does not guarantee that we will be recognized for that. He doesn’t guarantee that our coworkers or bosses will like us. If we have our own business, he doesn’t guarantee that honest hard work will keep us from failure. And yet we are still called to sacrifice our energy, our time, our pride, to do the best we can. We just don’t know what will come of it. We never know whether we’re in an Isaac or an Ishmael situation.
So here’s the lesson we do learn. We learn that we need to rethink trials and temptations. In particular, we need to understand that when God tests us, he still loves us. This is hard for us to understand, because it’s not how human relationships work. You should not continually test someone you love. If you argue with everyone you meet, constantly testing them to see if they come to the same conclusions as you, have the same opinions as you, you will have no friends. If you are married, and are always testing and trying your spouse, expect them to file for divorce fairly quickly.
God, however, is always ready to test us. But here’s the difference. When we test others, it’s because we want to find something out about them. We have some question, some uncertainty, about them. God has no such questions or uncertainties about us. He knows us. He knows what we will do. He knows how we will respond in any situation. God tests us not so that he can learn about us, but so that we can learn about ourselves.
Being tested reveals to us how we handle uncertainty. When God leaves us unsure about how something will turn out, we get to see for ourselves what’s in our hearts. Do we engage at work with honesty and dedication when it seems like no one else cares? That shows what’s in our hearts. Every situation where we deal with uncertainty lets us take a look inside ourselves.
God shows us these truths through testing because he loves us. Not to decide whether he’ll love us. That’s why we test others. We want to see whether they’re worthy of our love. But no one is worthy of God’s love. That’s good news! Because if we know that we don’t, and can’t, deserve God’s love, then we can actually be certain that he does love us.
I know that sounds backward. But let me walk through that thought. We learn, through the teaching of the Bible, and through what God reveals about us in tests and trials, that we don’t deserve God’s love. We are sinners.
So with the recognition of our sin, we go back to God’s Word. And what do we find about his attitude toward the undeserving sinners of this world? “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.” What God used to test Abraham, he carried out himself. He did give up his only Son, his beloved Son. Why? Again, “God so loved the world.” There’s no other reason given. No other reason could be given. Just his love.
If I worry that God will only love me if I pass his tests, I will never actually be sure that he loves me. I will always be afraid, because every test and temptation I face in life shows me that I don’t deserve his love. But God does not intend for us to find certainty about his love in our trials and temptations. He wants us to find our certainty about his love in Jesus.
Trials and temptations are not God’s way of deciding whether we deserve his love. Trials and temptations serve to send us back to Jesus, back to his cross, back to that sure and certain promise of God’s forever-love. This is what the apostle Paul means when he writes in our second reading: “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Paul does not say, “God won’t allow these trials into your life.” Paul does say, “These trials don’t separate you from God’s love.”
When you face trials and testing, rethink what it means. It does not mean God doesn’t love you. In fact, it means the very opposite thing. He intends, through our trials, to drive us to himself. To bring us to fresh reliance on him, fresh thankfulness for his mercy, fresh desire to share his love with others. May God grant us this understanding through his Holy Spirit. Amen.