How do we know if love is genuine? We live in a world where many people are disillusioned and disappointed regarding love. People profess life-long love, but in so many cases love evaporates in a fairly short space of time. The book of Hosea speaks about love which is like the dew that goes away early.

Love needs to have that quality of durability, the sort of love that evaporates like the dew is not really worth calling love at all. Love must be reliable and dependable. The love we want, and the love we should be giving is love that stands the test. That’s what we need in our human relationship, that’s what our communities and societies need.

But love is also the basis of our relationship with God. The first and greatest commandment is to love God. We have been looking at the story of Abraham, the friend of God. Abraham’s relationship with God was on the basis of covenant love. Abraham has learned to trust and obey God.

God had blessed Abraham. He had made him rich, He had promised blessings on his descendants, and after long years of faith and waiting, he had given to Abraham and Sarah their own son Isaac. But there is a danger in any relationship of thinking what you have is love, when really all you have is a mutual benefit relationship.

If we only worship God because of what he gives to us, we have little more than a business arrangement. You cannot really call that love. At best it’s only cupboard love, the childish love that only shows affection when there’s a reward in view. Sadly a lot of people never grow out of that immature understanding of love.

The real test of love is if your love is faithful when there’s no reward. Will you still love if it brings you pain and disadvantage? That is the crucial thing. That was the question regarding Abraham. How much did he love God? Genesis 22 tells us that God tested Abraham.

What God wants of people, is that we love him above all else. The problem is that we have a tendency to take the good things that God gives us, and we love the gifts more than we love the one who has given them. God’s most precious gift to Abraham was his son Isaac. He had waited years for the boy to be born. Isaac had bought happiness and laughter to Abraham and Sarah in their old age. How they would have loved him.

But now God says to Abraham ‘take your son, your only son, Isaac, and sacrifice him as a burnt offering.’ What a blow. I cannot think of a worse bombshell for anyone to have. What would it do to Sarah? What about God’s promises that Isaac would be the ancestor of a great nation? What mental and emotional anguish Abraham must have gone through. God’s request made no sense at all; it contradicted all that God had promised Abraham regarding the covenant and his hopes for the future.

But yet Abraham knew that it was God’s voice, God calling him to trust as he had often done before. So Abraham obeyed. Taking Isaac, along with the necessary supplies and servants he sets out to the place God has directed him. It was something that Abraham had to bear alone. There was no one that he could confide in, no one else who would have understood. It was an encounter between himself and God.

Three days travelling, and he sees the place. Abraham leaves the servants and the donkeys and goes on with Isaac carrying the firewood. Abraham takes the torch to light the fire and the knife to slay the sacrifice. Isaac asks ‘where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ What can Abraham say? ‘God himself will provide the lamb.’ In spite of his perplexity, in spite of the pain, Abraham still trusted God’s goodness and faithfulness.

But still no provision arrives. They arrive at the place of sacrifice. Abraham lays the wood for the fire. Then he ties Isaac’s hands and lays his only son on the altar. There is no mention of protest or struggle, there must have been a strong bond of trust between father and son, and willingness in that little boy to put his hope and trust in God. Abraham lifts the knife to make the sacrifice.

God’s messenger speaks. ‘You have done enough Abraham. Do not harm the boy. Now I know that you fear God because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.’ Abraham at last had learned to trust God completely. God is not a God who wants to coerce and torture men and women. God does not want the human race made in his image cringing in terror before him. But God does want us to trust him.

Abraham had passed the test. He trusted God. Not just when there was a rich reward, but also even when God’s way entailed pain and loss and sacrifice. God knew that Abraham was trustworthy. He could be trusted to be a good steward of God’s covenant promises. He would not dessert or change allegiance when the going was tough.

God is generous in his blessings today, but God still also tests people. The New Testament makes that clear. ‘Now for a little while,’ Peter tells the early believers, ‘you may have to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith- of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire- may be proved genuine.’ (1 Peter 1 v 6-7).

God calls Christians as he called Abraham to trust him. God in his wisdom is at work to grow our trust in him and our love for him to the point where they stand the test. As we learn to trust more, so we can be people who can both receive God’s blessings and give his blessings to others. Sometimes those tests that God sends to us can be lonely experiences.

Sometimes we fail the test. Abraham had not always done so well in the past. He had not always trusted God to provide for him or protect him; instead he had relied on his own schemes and plans. Sometimes we react like that when tests come our way. We can be slow to make the grade. But if we have come to God through Christ, God persists with us as he did with Abraham. God’s tests are not to trip us up, they are not there to give God an excuse to condemn or punish us but to help us to learn and grow.

Something else that this passage teaches us is that when we trust God, he provides for us.
God provided Abraham with a sacrifice. God is the all-sufficient one. We find time and again in the story of Abraham’s descendants, in the Old Testament story that God provides.

Christian testimony time and again witnesses to this fact. God may not provide the extravagant desires that his children sometimes have, but he is the all-sufficient one who provides sufficient for our needs.

God was good to Abraham. He gave him back his son. You could ask what was the point of the whole exercise? When Abraham returned to Beersheba with Isaac had anything really changed? It was still the same family, same home. But yet this experienced had confirmed Abraham as the friend of God in a fallen sinful world. God’s covenant with Abraham had been finalized. God’s message to Abraham here on Mount Moriah are the last recorded time that God speaks to him. Abraham’s descendants would prevail against those who would oppose them.

Through Abraham’s offspring all the nations of the earth will be blessed, because Abraham has obeyed God. Mankind had been alienated from God through disobedience. But through Abraham’s obedience God’s blessing is going to come again to all mankind. Something marvellous but mysterious had taken place in the divine scheme of things through Abraham’s act of faith.

Yet having thought about this story, we have to acknowledge that there are some who face trials that go beyond what Abraham was called to do. The world remembers today millions who were called upon to walk the path of love and sacrifice, millions for whom there was no reprieve. They paid the price. There were many whose love stood the test, they laid their lives upon the altar.

There are millions in our world today who will still feel a grief and the loss of sacrifices made. There may be those of you here who will in your heart of hearts feel that the story of Isaac seems trite and shallow and irrelevant to your sorrow. The only way that we ultimately can make sense of our world is to move forward one and a half thousand years.

Mount Moriah became the temple mount in Jerusalem. In the fullness of time another beloved son came to that mountain. The descendant of Abraham whom had been sent to bring the blessing to all the nations, the blessing promised by God in his covenant with Abraham. That beloved son was Jesus. On that same mountain he made some profound claims. On that temple mountain he proclaimed ‘I am the light of the world’. In an upper room near that temple he proclaimed ‘I am the way, the truth and the life, no one comes to the father but by me’.

The day after he made that claim he was led as a sacrifice up a nearby hill. For God’s son there was no reprieve. His blood was shed. God knows the reality of our grief. But God has shown us that the sacrifice of love is never in vain. In Jesus he demonstrated that in the end love triumphs over evil and death, Jesus rose from the dead.

We have been thinking about Abraham’s journey. Ultimately God calls us all to make a journey of faith. God calls us to come to him through his son Jesus. It is as we make that Journey of faith, as we let go of our doubts and fears and bitterness and come in faith to God that we can become what we were created to be, children in harmony with a heavenly father, restored to a right relationship, forgiven, accepted and loved.
 

Amen.

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