Giving Up What is Most Precious
Adapted from Treasures of Faith
Sharon and Chuck Betters
Today’s Treasure
By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had received 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 raise the dead, and figuratively speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death.
Hebrews 11:17–19
The Greek word for “reasoned” is logisamenos and implies a calculated or computed reasoning. Abraham reasoned, but not blindly. He reasoned that Isaac’s existence was a miraculous fulfillment of God’s word. God had also promised Isaac would have descendants. Yet to obey God meant Isaac would die before he had established his own family. The “old Abraham” would have taken Isaac and run to a safe place, concluding God was mistaken about this need for a sacrifice and he, Abraham, would just have to “reinterpret” those instructions. The transformed Abraham, a man now of deep and mature faith, knew God could not go back on His Word.
There had never been a resurrection, but Abraham’s message to the servants who accompanied them to Mount Horeb was clear:
Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.
Genesis 22:5
We can only imagine the wrenching emotion Abraham must have felt as he sadly approached the place chosen by God for this dramatic exhibition of his faith and Jehovah’s faithfulness. On the mountain, Abraham built the altar, arranged the wood, and bound Isaac. When Isaac questioned his father as to the whereabouts of the sacrifice, Abraham replied: “God himself will provide the lamb” (Genesis 22:6, 8). As Abraham raised the knife to slay this young boy, his own dear son, God’s angel suddenly intervened: “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” the angel said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son” (Genesis 2:12). The wording here— “you have not withheld from me your only son”—suggests this angel may well have been the preincarnate Christ.
God had promised, “All peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” And Abraham had concluded, “God is sovereign—I can trust Him.”
By God’s sovereign will, the fires of Abraham’s life had burned away the last vestiges of his unbelief. Because of the promises of the covenant, true faith fixed this man’s eyes on what was yet to come, enabling him to give up to God the one thing most precious to him in all the world: his one and only son. Abraham would name the mountain “The LORD Will Provide” (v. 14). Abraham believed the God of life would resurrect his son, Isaac. In so doing, Abraham anticipated, though “through a glass darkly,” the coming resurrection of God’s own one and only Son. Indeed, it was in that same mountain complex many centuries later, God sent His Son Jesus to die on the cross. God did indeed provide the sacrifice.
Abraham’s encounter with God and his search for the promised city eventually set him free from his love affair with this world, his dependence on shortsighted, quick-fix, expedient living. Though casual readers might conclude that Abraham spent his life looking for sons and a place to settle down, the writer of Hebrews assures us, by his deliberate placement of verses 13 through 16 in Hebrews 11, that this is not the case.
LIFE-GIVING ENCOURAGEMENT
Abraham eventually learned the land promised to him was not composed of sand and dirt—a property to be claimed during his time here on earth. Instead, he sought “a better country—a heavenly one,” and so, too, should we. As a result, Abraham spent his life as a stranger and pilgrim on this earth (Genesis 23:4). Abraham learned to hold the “things” of this world loosely, even the loved ones so precious to us. For though wealthy enough to build a city of his own, he knew such a city could never compare to what God was preparing for him and his descendants. He saw his destination from afar (Hebrews 11:13) and longed for the place of God’s continual presence. God used purifying fires to burn away Abraham’s disbelief and self-sufficiency, revealing in the process God’s own great and everlasting faithfulness after the pain and smoke had cleared. This story is not so much about Abraham as it is about God’s faithfulness to equip men and women to travel the paths He has laid out for them.
In the same way that Abraham lived in two worlds—the physical world and the world of promise, the world to come— God calls the readers of this marvelous book of Hebrews to the same journey. Like Abraham, we too will stumble and stray; we may fall into deep sin or perhaps just make dubious and disreputable compromises; we will look for shortcuts and end-runs and quick fixes when the way marked out for us by God just seems too difficult. We will both make mistakes and deliberately disobey, and at times the difficulties we face will threaten to overwhelm us. But Abraham’s God is our God; His promises to Abraham apply to us as they did to him (Galatians 3:29). Only by embracing the promise of the eternal city of God and His continual presence can we really hold life loosely—as Abraham learned to do—and surrender to God all that is most precious to us. We will live as strangers here on earth, always on the move, always heading toward our real “home.”
Remember Sarah’s question to the angel and the angel’s response? This question that confronted Sarah looms for us as well: Is anything too hard for the Lord? The tension of life is this: It is by grace that we learn to live both in a broken world and in God’s glorious, healing presence at the same time. Such a life is marked by a living faith, unbolted from our deadly and destructive love for this world and the “easy answers” it seems to hold out to us. Such a faith frees us to live, to love, to serve, and to share, as we journey here on earth, until we come at last to God’s eternal city of rest—until, in other words, we come home. (Adapted from Treasures of Faith, pages 96-101)
PRAYER
Lord, our hearts swell with gratitude when we remember each day brings us closer to our destination – Heaven, our true Home.
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Sharon W. Betters is the author of Treasures of Encouragement, Treasures in Darkness, co-author of Treasures of Faith. and co-author with Susan Hunt of Aging with Grace, Flourishing in an Anti-Aging Culture. She is Director of Resource Development and co-founder of MARKINC.org, a non-profit organization that offers help and hope to hurting people. Sharon enjoys quality time with her husband, children, fourteen grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.
Contact Sharon with comments or questions at dailytreasure@markinc.org.