Peace Lutheran Church
Posts Tagged "Genesis"
First Sunday in Lent
February 15, 2024
Video: Click to view
Text: Genesis 22:1-18
Theme: The Lord will provide
Outline:
1. The Lord provides Isaac, Abraham’s beloved
2. The Lord provides Jesus, His Beloved
Grace, mercy, and peace be to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
My dear beloved flock, the text for our meditation today is the Old Testament lesson of Genesis chapter twent-two verses one through eighteen.
Boys and girls, I pray that you are doing well today. What do I have here? I have a lamb. Lambs are used throughout the Bible, usually a person kept lambs as a sacrifice. During Lent, we normally give up or sacrifice small things. We sacrifice our love of chocolate, or Television, or coffee, or soda. Abraham is called by God to offer a sacrifice. Who is Abraham called to sacrifice? What does the Lord provide in Isaac’s place? What does He provide in our place? Ponder those questions as you hear the rest of the sermon. You may go back to your seats and those who love you.
1. The Lord provides Isaac, Abraham’s beloved
It has been around twenty-seven years since the Lord blessed Abraham and Sarah with a son in their old age. Isaac has grown into a strong and handsome man. The Lord comes to Abraham, tests him, and says, God tested Abraham and said to him, “Abraham!” And he said, “Here I am.” 2 He 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. Imagine the pain of Abraham’s heart. He is commanded to take his only beloved son, the son of the promise though which kings of nations will come, and give him to the Lord as a burnt offering. Isaac is not only the one promised to Abraham and Sarah in their old age, and thus very beloved of them. He is also the one that the Lord has promised the Messiah will come from. If he dies, what becomes of Abraham’s salvation? Luther accurately described Abraham’s predicament in these words: “To human reason it must have seemed either that God’s promise would fail, or else this command must be of the devil and not of God.” To Abraham it must have seemed that God’s command was destroying God’s promise.
And what further complicated the situation for Abraham was that God’s command seemed not only to violate a father’s love for his son but to cut off his hope of ever being saved. If Isaac was the link between Abraham and the only Savior he would ever have, how could Abraham cut off that link and hope to be right with God? And how could he ever hope to live with God forever?
After a sleepless night, Abraham gets up in the morning and gets everything ready. He cuts the wood, saddles his donkey, and takes Isaac as well as two servants with them. This is no spur of the moment decision either. Moriah is about a three days journey from where they are. Three days to ruminate over what action he is about to do. Abraham bears it all in silence. When they reach the site, Abraham tells his servants to wait there. Isaac and him will go worship, “And then we will come back to you.” The Hebrew word translated “we will come back” is an emphatic verb form expressing the speaker’s determination. It hints at the answer Abraham had reached to this awful question that was torturing him: “How can a merciful God cut off the messianic line?” Abraham’s faith answered, “If God commands me to kill Isaac and I obey him, then God is simply going to have to bring Isaac’s ashes back to life, and the two of us are going to come back down this mountain.” God’s promise must prevail, somehow some way.
As he bears the wood for his own sacrifice, Isaac realizes the strangeness of what they are doing. He said to his father Abraham, “My father!” And he said, “Here I am, my son.” He said, “Behold, the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” 8 Abraham said, “God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son. We have everything, wood, fire, knife, but the most important thing is missing. Father, where is the lamb? Abraham could have told Isaac the harsh truth, spilled everything from his hurting heart. Yet, in fatherly love, he does not. He simple says, The Lord will provide. Abrahm holds to this, even as he builds the altar, binds his beloved son, lifts him onto the altar, and raises the knife to slay his beloved.
Graciously his hand is stayed. The Lord says, “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.” 13 And Abraham lifted up his eyes and looked, and behold, behind him was a ram, caught in a thicket by his horns. And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. The Lord stops Abraham’s hand and provides a ram as a substitute in place of Isaac.
3. The Lord provides Jesus, His Beloved
A Ram in place of Isaac, what does this mean for us today? Every single one of us are akin to Isaac. We lie bound upon the altar, not by ropes, but in the bondage of our sins. We are born under the power of Satan, under his control. We deserve for the knife to be plunged into us. We deserve physical death, as well as spiritual death in the fires of hell forever.
For our salvation, “The Lord provides.” God sends to us His own beloved Son, Jesus Christ. One beloved even more than Isaac. One beloved by all the host of heaven. Jesus lives a perfect life in our place. He perfectly keeps the Law. As Isaac obeyed Abraham to the point of being bound and placed upon the altar, Jesus perfectly obeys the will of the Father to be abused, bound, and nailed. He asks that the cup be taken from Him if possible. While God provides a ram in place of Isaac, He does not provide a substitute for His own beloved Son. Jesus dies a horrible, agonizing death upon the cross. He is not given a substitute, rather He is the substitute for us. Jesus sheds His holy and precious blood as our substitute bearing the punishment for every single one of our sins.
The Lord will provide indeed. A substitute ram for Isaac. Jesus Christ, His own beloved Son, for us and for our salvation. Can we make similar sacrifices for others in our lives? The one supreme sacrifice for us all has already been made by Christ. Thus the only “supreme sacrifice” we can make to God is to offer ourselves, the entire self (body, mind, and soul; Deut 10:12–13; Ps 51:6, 10, 17; Micah 6:8) and all possessions in full devotion and obedience to God (Dent 6:5; Mt 16:24–26).
Recently in China, the police drove up to the worship service of 600 Christians in a house church, led by evangelist Li Dexian. When they destroyed all furniture and furnishings, the Christians blessed them. When Mr. Li was arrested, he asked them to pray for him. They all dropped to their knees and prayed. The police were amazed that he could have such power over so many people by only saying a word (The Voice of the Martyrs, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, Feb. 1999). Such is the power given Christians who are willing to sacrifice themselves for his sake.
Whole-life sacrifice can be shown in a wide variety of ways. It could be being a faithful wife or husband, a faithful mother or father bringing your children to church even when the world does everything in its power to stop that action. A faithful student learning in spite of bullying and abuse from peers. In some whole-life sacrifice leads some to full-time church or missionary service or allowing a child so to serve. Or this may mean devotion to the service of others beyond the normal call of one’s duties through sacrificial service in one’s occupation, in one’s spare time (e.g., service clubs, church or missionary organizations), in one’s family, in one’s circle of friends, and neighbors, or in the nation or world.
The Lord grant us the strength and faith to sacrifice our very selves in service to others, just as He sacrificed a ram in place of beloved Isaac, and His own beloved Son in our place.
The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, guard and keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.
Ash Wednesday
February 14, 2024
Let now these ashes make their mark, upon our foreheads and our hearts; from dust to dust we see decay that only God can take away.
O Lord may the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be acceptable in Your sight O Lord our Rock and our Redeemer.
As I look our today, I see a lot of crosses. Crosses made with Ash. Why? How does this remind us not only of our mortality, but also of what Jesus Christ has done for us?
Black of ash made their mark upon our foreheads. Why? As a reminder of what we are made from. All the way back in Genesis, when God creates Adam and Eve, He forms Adam from the dust of the earth. He forms Eve from Adam’s rib as a helpmate fit for him. When they sin against God. When they violate the one command that God gives. That command is to not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, they are rightfully punished. Eve is cursed with pain in childbearing. Adam bears the greatest of the curses, because he did not speak up, rebuke the snake, and tell Eve to stop talking to him. Because of Adam, the entirety of creation is doomed for death and decay. For dust you are and to dust you shall return.
A death and decay that extends to us still today. The ashes are not only on our foreheads, but also to mark the darkness within our own hearts. Every single one of us have what we call original sin. The desire to break every single one of the commands of God. Sin that we have inherit ate by the fact that we are humans born of humans. We are sinners. We lie, cheat, steal, and covet. We put other things and people in the rightful place of God in our lives. We are deserving of present and eternal punishment. We are dust and to dust we shall return. Eventually, we will die. We will die because every single one of us has violated the Law of God in thought, word, and deed.
Black, dusty ash to remind us of our mortality. Yet where do these ashes come from? They are made from the palms of last year’s Palm Sunday. This is done to remind us that our King has come, not in the terrors of judgement, but to redeem us. A King who answers our cries of Hosanna, save us! In the most unlikely of ways. While we are deserving of eternal punishment, astray from God, violating His commands. The Creator of the universe enters His creation to save us. The seed of the woman through the womb of the blessed Virgin, Jesus lays aside His divine power, glory, and authority. He assumes the form of a servant. He assumes our sinful dust, yet was without sim, that our sinful black ashy self may be reconciled to God once again.
How is this reconciliation done? Look at how the ashes have been applied to you. They are applied in the shape of a cross. Why a cross? That is how Jesus reconciled us to God forever. By the wood of the cross, we are saved. Jesus saves us by living the Law perfect on our behalf. He bears our punishment when He dies a brutal death upon the cross. He covers our sinful, black dust, with His innocent blood. By dying He destroys death forever. By rising again from the dead, Jesus gives to us newness of life with Him forever.
Black ash to remind us of our dustiness, our sinfulness, and mortality, yet in the shape of the cross to remind us that we are redeemed dust because of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.