and love. Let us begin by facing—
TWO PERPLEXING QUESTIONS
The question of temptation. We are troubled, at the outset, by the words “God did tempt Abraham.” In modern English the word “tempt” has acquired the meaning of “enticing in the direction of evil.” The difficulty is easily averted if we substitute, as the Revised Version does, the word “prove.” “God did prove Abraham.” Or taken still with Moffatt’s translation, “God did put Abraham to the test.”
There is the question of the morality of the test. This is a more difficult question to answer. As we read the story we feel that the test was not fair, that it ought not to have been asked. Read through the text slowly, “take now thine only son, whom thou lovest.” Think not only of the love, but of the promise centered on Isaac. What of a God who would be the one to say, “Take the son of your love and promise, and slay him as a sacrifice?” There is nothing irreverent in asking such a question. Indeed, it ought to be asked and faced lest we libel God, as we do when we suggest that those we dearly love, we love more than Him. Is there an answer to the second question?
I think that there is. For one thing, let us read to the end of the story. “All is well that ends well,” we say. Reading on to the end we find that this is not the story of a human sacrifice, but the story of the arresting of a human sacrifice. Now our judgment is that God never intended that Isaac should be slain. But that is not a final answer. Abraham thought his son was to be offered on the altar.
THERE WAS NOTHING IN THE CUSTOMS OR CONSCIENCE OF THE TIME AGAINST SUCH AN OFFERING
This story must be read in light of the times in which it is set. In our day, if a man slew his son he would be hanged. He would avail nothing to say in his defense that the deed had been done at the bidding of a verse or vision. But in Abraham’s day a man had the absolute right of life and death over his son. It was a common custom to offer one’s firstborn as a sacrifice to one’s god. There would have been no conscience against the act and Abraham would have been commended for it. It is probable that the Patriarch’s intended act was suggested by the local customs. Maybe Abraham thought that he ought now to do for his God what his neighbors did for their idols. But we must go further still. It seems to me that the greatest fact to consider is that—
ON MORIAH THE OFFERING OF HUMAN SACRIFICES IN THE NAME OF GOD RECEIVED ITS DEATH BLOW
You never read again of any man of God feeling that he ought to slay and offer to God his son or daughter. God finished this inhumane business there. And how? By teaching Abraham that he intended him to offer his son, not as an outward act, but in the realm of the spirit and the will. On the platform of the knowledge and morality he had attained, God met him and taught him and his descendants that the sacrifice of sons and daughters in the material sense was not required. God did move him to offer Isaac to Him in order to show at the conclusion that Isaac belonged more truly to God than to his earthly father. For all time men knew, or ought to know, that what God requires is a living sacrifice in the realm of the spirit, a living body consecrated and not a dead body consumed. Now that we have moved into the realm of the spirit and the will, we can—
LEARN A LESSON IN OBEDIENCE OF FAITH FROM ABRAHAM
What a story of absolute trust and obedience this is! We frequently sing “Trust and Obey,” but think of what it meant to Abraham—so trusting and obeying God that he was willing to surrender what was his dearest and best. Your Moriah is the height to which you climb when you are willing to surrender to God what you hold most dear at the call of God. Now that is not, as already suggested, in the course and material sense, but in the realm of the spirit and the will. God may be asking you to sacrifice your cherished, secret ambition. He may be asking you to give up the child you wanted to keep at your side to comfort your old age or to succeed you in the business you have brought up.
Some years ago, there was a missionary play, “Farley Goes Out.” Mr. Farley, a well-to-do tradesman, thought it was one thing to know a missionary and to collect money to send somebody as a missionary, but when his own son said, “I must go out, Father,” it was another matter. Following that thought we ought to—
LEARN A LESSON FROM ISAAC ON MOUNT MORIAH
We are in danger of forgetting that Isaac was not a child, but a young man able to carry the wood and help build the altar. Abraham kept from him, as long as possible, the fact that he was not to sacrifice but to be sacrificed. At last the truth had to be told him and he did not resist or turn away. He suffered himself to be stretched on the altar and saw the knife. He was a willing sacrifice. And there are times still when God asks, not for something we use, but for ourselves: all that we have and are. God asks us to give ourselves completely over to Him. Can you truly sing: “Ready for all thy perfect will, my acts of faith and love repeat, till death thy endless mercies seal, and make the sacrifice complete?”4
AN ILLUSTRATION THAT GATHERS UP THE TWO LESSONS
In the closing hours of the year 1885, a young man with his prospects in the Civil Service attended a watchnight service in Clapham, London. He was Sam Pollard and he knelt in that service and pledged his life to Christ for service in China. There was one obstacle left: his mother would not give him up. In the selfsame hour, she was kneeling with her husband in a church service at St. Just in Cornwall. These moments were filled with thanksgiving and confession, with the surrender of wills and the dedication of lives. The mother learned through her agony. “At last,” she says, “as the old year was leaving and the new year entering, I said ‘Lord, I am willing.’”
That was a modern Moriah. For the mother, it meant giving a mother’s all. For the son, it meant toil far from home among the Miao people in faraway China and a grave in the Shimenkan Mountains. When we come to our Moriah may God give us the grace to be as willing and obedient. I began by saying that there is one more poignant hill of God than Moriah. Let us turn there now.
MOUNT MORIAH AND MOUNT CALVARY
Side by side, does not one foreshadow the other? Can you think of Abraham offering up Isaac and saying, “God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son”? God did what he asked of Abraham. Calvary finishes Moriah. When they stretched Jesus on the cross, no angel intervened. When they drove the nails in his hands no hand stayed the hammer. There was no substitute. Jesus was the Lamb of God—slain. When you come to your Moriah and are asked to sacrifice your dearest and best, or to give yourself, remember what God gave and Jesus offered. I beseech you brethren, by the mercies of God that ye present yourselves a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God which is your reasonable service.
4. This is the rarest of all Methodist hymns. The title is “O Thou Who Camest from Above” and the lyrics are by Charles Wesley, but the tune is by his grandson Samuel S. Wesley.
“THE GLORY OF GOD IN THE FACE OF MAN”—Genesis 33.10
(Preached forty-seven times, including James St, York 6/13/34, Pleck 8/1/37, and Nottingham 9/7/42)
Genesis 33.10 “I have seen thy face as though I had seen the face of God.”
Unless that is simply a prettily phrased compliment with a good deal of flattery, it is one of the most staggering and sublime utterances that ever fell from the lips of one mortal man about another. That any man should see the glory of God is a wonder. If we think of that honor being granted at all, we think of it as the high honor which is the privilege of a few saintly souls of surprising holiness, and granted to them only in honor of deep
