Living by Faith: The Mature Faith of Abraham

While the author of Hebrews has already said a few things about Abraham’s and Sarah’s life of faith in 11:8-12, he brings us closer to the heart of their journey beginning in verse 17. There he draws our attention to that time in Abraham’s life when he grew old and his trust in God had grown very strong. Just then, when Abraham was ready, God gave him what is in my mind the second hardest command in the history of the world, only paling in comparison to the command upon Jesus to willingly take up his cross and die to satisfy the wrath of God and provide the all-sufficient sacrifice for sins. Specifically, God commanded Abraham to take Isaac—his beloved son of promise for whom Sarah and he had waited for twenty-five years and then raised for another fifteen or twenty years—God commanded him to take Isaac and sacrifice him on an altar.

Beloved, this was an impossible command, but by this point in his life, Abraham had walked with God for a long time and he had many experiences with God that caused him to trust God very deeply. Therefore, when the impossible command came, Abraham didn’t even blink an eye. He asked no questions. He raised no objections. He did not hesitate. Rather, he simply and promptly obeyed the Lord.

Now, it does say in verse 19 that Abraham “considered” that God could raise his son from the dead and the Greek word here literally means “to calculate something.” So I do think Abraham spent some time processing what the Lord had commanded of him, but whatever the case may be, the fact of the matter is that we have no record of Abraham resisting God at this time of his life. We do have a record of his resistance at other times, and thus it seems to me that if Abraham had pushed back against God at this point, the Bible would tell us so. Since it doesn’t, we can assume he didn’t.

By this time in his life—he was about one-hundred-fifteen or one-hundred-twenty years old—Abraham knew that God was faithful. He knew that God could do anything. He knew that God would never violate his promises but would fulfill them all. Therefore, despite the difficulty of the command and the seeming impossibility of the situation, Abraham obeyed God and acted out on the world’s stage what is perhaps the most important prophecy of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the history of the world.

After leading him to the crest of a hill to which God directed him, and having affixed him to an altar on which he would soon take his life, Abraham began to follow through with God’s command but when he was only seconds away from doing so, the Lord intervened and provided a ram for the sacrifice and in this way Abraham essentially received his beloved son back from the dead. This experience led Abraham to name the hill where this had taken place, “Yahweh-Yireh” which means “The Lord will Provide,” and it was known by that name for more than twenty centuries, even to the time of Christ. When we look carefully at where Abraham was living and where he might have taken Isaac at that time, it’s most likely that this scene transpired in Jerusalem and, who knows, perhaps even on the very hill where Christ would later make the all-sufficient sacrifice, where God the Father would not pull back his hand but would fatally strike his beloved Son as the once-for-all sacrifice for sins.

Whatever the specifics of the place, the point of this story is clear: Abraham lived by faith in the promises of God to the point that he was willing to sacrifice his beloved son who, humanly speaking, was the path to those promises. And as he obeyed God, he found God to be faithful—all the way to death, he found God to be faithful. And now he rises up with Sarah, his bride, and Abel and Enoch and Noah and all creation, and pleads with us, “Trust in God and in his word, for he will surely do all that he has promised to do. God is faithful and you can put your hope in him!” This is the testimony of Abraham to us today, and Beloved, I pray that we’ll have ears to hear and hearts to receive it. I pray that we will put all our faith in the God who is forever faithful.