SPEAKER_01 0:10

Good morning. I hope all is well. Today we're taking a look at Genesis chapter 22, verses 1 through 19. And I've titled today's message as the Logic of Faith. Logic of Faith. Let's take a look. God tests Abraham in this passage. Verse 2. God said, Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you. So hearing this, Genesis records Abraham rising early, he does not delay, and he and his servants and his son Isaac, they travel to Mount Moriah. Now Isaac carries the wood. And then Isaac asked the question that pierces the heart. Verse 7, and Isaac said to his father, Abraham, My father, he said, Here I am, my son, Abraham said. Now Isaac said, Behold, the fire and the wood. But where is the lamb for a burnt offering? And Abraham responds, Verse 8, God will provide for himself the lamb. And at that final moment, as Abraham raises the knife, the angel of the Lord stops him. Verse 12. He said, Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me. And then God provided a ram, and Abraham names that place that the Lord will provide. Now what's really happening here, at first glance, this feels like irrational obedience, perhaps even a blind obedience. But scripture itself gives us deeper insight. Hebrews 11 9 in the New Testament tells us he, that is Abraham, considered that God was able even to raise Isaac from the dead. Raising uh Isaac from the dead. What did Abraham do? He considered. That's the word. He considered. The Greek word translated as considered or reasoned in some versions is logisomi, where we get the English word logic. Hence the title of today's message, The Logic of Faith. Now Abraham was not acting blindly, in other words. This denotes a deliberate intellectual conclusion based on evidence. In this case, the evidence of God's past faithfulness. So this morning we're asking this question, one question, and that is, what does it mean to consider? What does it mean to consider in our faith? So the first point that I would raise is that to consider means remembering what God has already been doing. Remembering what God has already been doing. So it's looking at the past. So Abraham's obedience did not begin in Genesis 22. It wasn't a random act. It began decades earlier. God had spoken to Abraham and God had led him, and God had preserved him. God had miraculously given him Isaac. Now, of course, Abraham's faith wasn't always stellar. Consider the deception in Egypt, trying to hide behind his wife Sarah. And Abraham was about 75, 76 years old back then in Genesis chapter 12. And the Hagar situation. Same thing that he did with um the Egyptian king, once again trying to sell trying to preserve his own life by selling out uh and hiding behind his wife Sarah. And Abe Abraham was about a hundred years old by this time. And this was in Genesis 20. So by the time that we reach Genesis 22, Abraham is about a hundred and twenty years old or so, and has a history with God. So when God speaks, Abraham is responding to a God who has been so faithful all of those years. All of those years, especially marked by Abraham's failures. You see, faith then is not irrational nor emotional. It is rooted in factual memory. It says, I have seen who God is, I have seen what he has done and he has been doing, and therefore I will trust him. Based on the past, the proven record of God, I will trust him even here. Now second, to consider means holding on to God's promises, God's promises, even in seeming contradictions. So if the first point to consider means remembering what God has already been doing is to look at God's past record, his proven record. To consider uh means, in a second point, is to look at the content of uh God's character, the content of God's promises. Now let's take a look. Genesis 21, verse 12. God had already made a promise. Through Isaac shall your offsprings be named. Now God commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac at the very center of God's promise. Now that this creates a tension, this creates a contradiction. God's command seems to contradict God's promise. So what does Abraham do? Does he reject the command? Does he abandon the promise? No. He's reasoning things out, but he's not limited to his reasoning. He's not limiting God to his own logic. He uses logic and reason, for sure, but Abraham does not make reason and logic the absolutes. This is very important. So Abraham holds on to both. Hebrews tells us that Abraham reasoned. If God has promised that his covenant will come through Isaac, then even if Isaac dies, God must raise him. God will raise him. Now, this is not irrational. This is deep theological reasoning, logic. Faith does not deny the tension or the contradiction, it lives within it. And it says, I do not fully understand this moment, but I trust that God's promises will stand. And lastly, to consider means trusting God's character above one's understanding. So when Isaac asks, Where is the Lamb? Abraham says, God will provide. That is the heart of faith. It is not blind obedience, but a confident trust in who God is. Abraham knows something about God. God is faithful and God is just, God keeps his word. So even when the situation is unclear to Abraham, he trusts God and God's character. This is the logic of faith. Not that I understand everything, but that I know the one who does, therefore, in every circumstance, I will trust him. Now we must not stop at Abraham, because Genesis 22 is ultimately not about Abraham only, it is about the ultimate Abraham, the truest Abraham of all, is about Christ. Notice the parallels. Isaac is called the beloved son, and Isaac carries the wood up the mountain, as Christ carried the cross up to the Mount of Calvary. Isaac is offered by his father, but there is one crucial difference, and that is in Genesis 22, God stops Abraham, but at the cross, God does not stop. Romans 8 32 says, God who did not spare his own son, but gave him up for us all. Abraham said, God will provide, and at the cross, God did. Jesus is the true Lamb, the true sacrifice, the sacrifice that Isaac never became, Christ fully became. So now when we talk about faith, we're not trusting in the abstract. We're trusting in the God who has already proven his love at the cross. So what does this mean for us? We're not Abraham. God is not calling us to sacrifice our children literally. But this is uh what we see in Genesis is a unique moment in redemptive history. But we do face moments where God's ways seem confusing, uh contradictory even, and God's timing feels delayed, and God's providence uh see feels hard. And it is in those moments the question is, will we treat faith as irrational or will we see it as deeply grounded trust? Faith is not closing your eyes, faith is saying, I may not fully understand what God is doing in every situation, but I know who God is. So Genesis 22 does not teach us to abandon reason, it teaches us to anchor our reason in God's revelation and God's character. Abraham's faith was not a leap into the dark, it was a step forward based on everything he had already seen of God. So we have even more. We have the cross, we have much more than Abraham had. We have the resurrection, we have Christ.

SPEAKER_00 11:03

So we can say with greater even greater confidence, the Lord will provide simply trusting, trusting when my faith is small, trusting Jesus, trusting as trusting as Jesus, trusting him, trusting Jesus and I lead up the spirit into this while healing trust in Jesus.