Abraham’s life can be considered in terms of the past and the future, but then hemmed in. Even as we are to walk by faith and not by sight, reflecting on giants of the faith is helpful for us. For Abraham, the past included the first great command of God which was to tell him to leave family and homeland (Gen. 12:1-3) and travel to an unknown destination. This land and its destiny had a long history. If we were given a map of the world and asked to select a country that would be the cradle for the unfolding of the scheme of redemption, would we have picked Palestine, the land of Caanan?
The first inkling of its place in the scheme of things is found in Gen. 9:25-27 when Noah prophesies that Canaan, the fourth son of Ham, would be the servant of Shem whose lineage would produce the Saviour. In process of time Canaan settles and populates Palestine and from him there springs several tribal groups that become progressively more and more wicked. It was to this land with its immoral inhabitants that Abraham heads. Initially his family tagged along, whether at his request or not we cannot tell. After leaving Haran and heading south to Canaan only his nephew Lot is with him. We can only imagine what thoughts went through Abram’s and Sarai’s minds as they plunged further south. They had never been there before and what reports had they heard of it? And, of course, there were those thoughts of what they were leaving behind. What dreams had been crushed already on this venture?
Leaving is a part of life. There’s leaving and cleaving in marriage, the leaving of Egypt for the Jews and the leaving of the world and its ways for the Christian. When Israel left Egypt God caused a remarkable demonstration to show them that they had been severed from their past – the Red Sea. 1 Cor. 10 uses that event as an illustration of what happens in baptism. There is the death of the old man, a cutting off from the old life of sin – as if to imply there is no going back.
Consider Rom. 6:17,18,21. Paul asks what fruit did we have in those things? Of course we can choose to go back (2 Pet. 2:20-22), but in so doing we deny the faith. Faith in God puts us with our back to the world and looking forward to the challenges that God will lead us through in the future. And there is a sense of excitement in this:- like in marriage to start a new life and home; like the nation of Israel when they left bondage and became a free nation; so for a Christian it is a new life in a new family. For Abraham, no doubt, there was a sense of excitement and it may have overcome what sorrows there were in leaving his old familiar home and extended family. What will the land be like – flowing with milk and honey? What business opportunities will be there? What will the local inhabitants be like? They say a change is as good as a holiday, and newness and fresh challenges keep us interested in where we’re going.
Well things did go pretty well for him: he got rich and his flocks and herds became so great he and Lot had to separate. We find sometime later (when he rescued Lot from the Babylonian kings) he had 318 male servants. He was quite an enterprise.
But in all this getting and selling his hope was in God and his greatest aspirations were wrapped up in the promises that God had made to him. God had promised to make a great nation of him, and that he would inherit the land he was then a sojourner in. He also told him this would not eventuate for some 400 years (Gen. 15), besides, how could one man inherit an entire country? These promises of a nation and land were subservient to a third element – in his seed would all the families of the earth be blessed. We are familiar with his impatience and the resultant surrogacy of Hagar. He wanted to walk by sight, not by faith. Faith has huge elements of patience needed, in order that we might not run ahead of God (Heb. 6:15).The faithful life has a lot of ordinary days, but hope for the future sustains.
Finally it came to fruition when he was visited on the plains of Mamre by angels informing him that Sarah would have a son in the next little while. You remember she laughed – out of unbelief on that occasion , but she would laugh again later when her son was born and she called him Isaac, meaning “laughter”. God had cut off the past of Abraham and Sarah, and though they could have chosen to return if they wanted to (Heb. 11:15), they chose to patiently wait in this new land of promise, in the midst of sinful tribes. Now the future was all tied up in this little bundle of joy named Isaac. Here was the promised heir and here was the essential link to the great nation that would proceed from his bowels and ultimately possess the land in which he presently sojourned as a stranger.
There was a painful incident a few years later when God tells Abraham to send Hagar and Ishmael away. Abraham loved the boy, but he complied, no doubt, in part, assuaging the pain in the deep conviction that he had erred in fathering Ishmael through Hagar and acknowledging that God was just, but mainly in the fact that Isaac was the son of promise and legitimate heir. Though he would always have a soft spot for Ishmael, his future life would now centre on raising Isaac to be a faithful child of God and worthy heir of the promises given to him.
Gen. 22:1 is an ominous verse – God did tempt (test) Abraham – sacrifice Isaac! God has closed out his past and now it seems that He is about to close off his future. Josephus says that Isaac was 25 years of age at the time, and if that is true, Abraham is now 125 years of age:- there’s no going back to Haran or Ur. And 50 years spent in Canaan? – you might as well say that was a wasted fifty years for all that God said about the future seems to be about to be closed out.
Ever felt that way? God had led you away from things in the past but now you wondered as to what? Job felt this way (9:11; 19:8; 23:8,9). Herein lies the faith of the great man Abraham. Seemingly led into a blind alley and stripped of all that he dreamed of and had every right to expect given the promises of the God he obeyed! If Isaac was, in fact, 25 years of age, how did he break the news to him? He had put him off when Isaac had enquired concerning the sacrificial offering with a “God will provide”, but you can only stall so long.
Josephus records the tradition of that conversation thus: O son! I poured out a vast number of prayers that I might have you for my son; when you were come into the world, there was nothing that could contribute to your support for which I was not greatly solicitious, nor anything wherein I thought myself happier than to see you grown up to man’s estate, and that I might leave you at my death the successor to my dominion; but since it was by God’s will that I became your father, and it is now His will that I relinquish you, bear this consecration to God with a generous mind; for I resign you up to God, who has thought it fit now to require this testimony of honour to Himself, on account of the favours he has conferred on me, in being to me a supporter and defender. Accordingly, you, my son, will now die, not in any common way of going out of the world, but sent to God, the Father of all men, beforehand, by your own father in the nature of a sacrifice. I suppose He thinks you worthy to get clear of this world neither by disease, neither by war, nor by any other severe way, by which death usually comes upon men, but so that He will receive your soul with prayers and holy offices of religion, and will place you near to Himself, and you will be there to me a succourer and supporter in my old age; on which account I principally brought you up, and you will thereby procure me God for my Comforter instead of yourself.
We have no way of knowing just how accurate any of that was. It was no doubt an oral tradition handed down and subject to the effects of “Chinese whispers”. Certainly it runs contrary to the gist recorded in scripture (cf. Heb. 11:19). The scriptures are silent to the utmost concerning this conversation. Whatever words passed between them as Abraham tells his son of what he is about to do is hidden from our gaze. Akin to the conversation between Moses, Elijah and Jesus on the mount of transfiguration concerning His upcoming death (Lk. 9:30,31) – too sacred, too private, too intimate for us to intrude? But the awful truth was relayed – sunk down into the heart of Isaac and he submitted. What great faith in itself (perhaps why there were no great tests in his life like Abraham and Jacob in that he learned obedient trusting faith early), but the Biblical focus is on Abraham in this event for Abraham would gladly have died instead of his son (even as David for Absalom).
What do you do when it seems that God has closed off the past and the future, seemingly leaving you as a naked soul just dangling by a thread? Trust in God. Herein lies the greatness of Abraham’s faith – Gen. 22:5 is a hint and Heb. 11:19 confirms it. God’s promise was in Isaac – it has to be fulfilled by the God who cannot lie. So it was that “there failed not any good thing”. Isa. 50:10,11 is part of the Messianic servant picture and the lesson is that it is better to go into the darkness with God than into the light of your own doing.
Rom. 4:16 says that the Christian is of the faith of Abraham – trust God and do not be afraid.