The Story Part 2 - God Builds A Nation

In between two of the most important archaeological sites on Orkney – The Stennes stones and the Ring of Brodgar, there’s a narrow strip of land called the Ness of Brodgar. And for the past ten years, experts have been painstakingly uncovering what’s probably the most significant Neolithic site, not just on Orkney, but in the whole of the UK.
 

What they’ve found, over a site that’s as big as five football pitches, seems to be a huge temple complex with a series of discrete ceremonial buildings, and a protecting wall that’s ten feet high and encircles the entire site.

 

For generations, historians and archaeologists have puzzled over the purpose of the standing stones on Orkney. Now they’ve got even more to be scratching their heads about.

How much they’re going to glean from the rubble remains to be seen, but the sheer scale of these developments is a measure of how seriously our ancestors took these religious rituals; and sacrifice of one kind or another was almost certainly a part of what went on in these hallowed places. 

That’s how the ancient world was – and that’s the world in which this disturbing story of Abraham preparing to offer Isaac as a sacrifice took place. But more of that later.

We’re on Chapter 2 of the story and if you were here last week you’ll remember that the story begins with a God who creates, and who creates human beings with a special endowment of consciousness – an ability to think and choose and love which mirrors his own. In that sense, like no other creature, we are made in God’s image. Made so that we could enjoy him and be with him for ever.

 

But according to the story, our ancestors chose badly. They made the same mistake that all creatures with a conscious self are prone to make. They placed themselves and their desires at the centre of things and pushed God to the margins. And so sin enters the story, and with it comes a breakdown in our relationship with God.

But for all that, God’s intention doesn’t waver. He still wants to be with us, even though our choices have made that more difficult. He determines to find a new way to make himself known and restore our relationship with him. And that’s where today’s story begins, because this new way involves God forming a people to whom and through whom he will make himself known to the nation

As he says to the people of Israel later on through the prophet Ezekiel – “They will know that I am the Lord, when I show myself holy through you, before their eyes”.

God’s plan is to form a nation. So what better place to start than with an elderly couple who can’t have kids and live in a far away country where they worship other gods?

 

Hardly the most likely candidates! But this is the start of a trend. Time and again we’ll find God choosing the least likely candidates for the job. Why? So that people will be in no doubt that it’s God who’s really in charge.

He chooses Moses to deliver Israel from Pharaoh, even though he’s a useless public speaker.

He chooses Deborah to lead her people to military victory, even though she’s never wielded a sword.

He chooses Matthew as a disciple, even though tax collectors are universally despised.

And he chooses Paul as an apostle, even though he’d been instrumental in persecuting churches and killing Christians.

 

From very early on in the story, we start to discover that God can and does use anyone to accomplish his purposes. And rather scarily that ‘anyone’ includes you and me.

So the call comes to Abram and Sarai – “leave your homeland, your people and your father’s house and go to the land I will show you. I will make you into a great nation, and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you”.

 

And this is crucial – right at the beginning of Abram’s story there’s this promise that through him all the nations, not just some, will be blessed. We need to carry that thought with us, because the next few chapters of the Story are going to be very bloody in the Lower Story.

But in the Upper Story, God’s plan from the beginning, was that all the nations would be blessed through Abram’s offspring. And that didn’t mean his son, Isaac, or his grandson, Jacob. But the one who generations later would be born in a stable in Bethlehem and who – in time – would become known as the saviour of the world.

We’re only in chapter 2; we’re two thousand years before Mary and Joseph and shepherds and angels. But already we’re being pointed toward Jesus. He’s the one to whom the story is already bending.

So with God’s promises before them, and in spite of their age and their infertility, Abram and Sarai set out for the promised land together. As the apostle Paul wrote, many years later, Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. In other words, he trusted God and that made him right with God.

 

Now those of you with a good memory will remember all the ups and downs of this story from last year. But in the end, many years after they left Haran, a son called Isaac was born to Abraham and Sarah. And it’s just when they think things are finally working out that the story takes another unexpected turn.

 

“Abraham” says God. “Take your son, your only son whom you love – Isaac – and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain that I will show you.”

It comes out of nowhere. Only it doesn’t, really, when you think about it, because the world Abraham lived in was one where sacrifice to the gods was a way of life. It was common to all ancient cultures, and I want to talk about that in general terms for a few minutes before getting back to Abraham and Isaac.

No-one can say when or where the practice of sacrifice began, but it doesn’t take much imagination to guess how it all started.

The ancients lived at the mercy of the rainfall and the sunshine and the turning of the seasons. If the rain didn’t fall, they had no crops and they starved. If the sun grew too hot, their crops withered, and they starved. It was a short step from that to the belief that there were powers who chose whether to send rain or not. Whether to make the sun shine, or not. And those powers, they thought, must be appeased. So they would make offerings, of crops or animals, to keep the unseen powers happy.

But here’s the insidious thing about any unregulated sacrificial system. And remember that Israel’s, in later years, was closely regulated. In a unregulated system, how do you know when you’ve given enough?

If you have a good year, you’d better offer a bit more in thanks to the gods to recognise their bounty. You end up giving more.

And if you have a bad year, maybe the gods are angry at you for some reason. Maybe you didn’t give enough last time. So now you need to give more.

 And if you give more, and the rains still don’t come, maybe that’s a sign that they’re still angry, and that you still haven’t given enough. So you have to give more.

 So before long, things ended up in a vicious cycle. If things go really well- need to offer more. If things go poorly – need to offer more!  You never knew when you’d given enough. And this produced a deep anxiety in the primal psyche. You never know where you stand with the gods.

“I’ve offered everything I can except what we need to live on! What else can I give?”

That’s the point at which they upped the ante.

 Some would cut themselves to show how serious they were.

I’ve given everything I can – all I can do now is harm my body.

Cybele was a fertility goddess worshipped in the near middle east. The centre of Cybele worship was the town of Sardis in modern Turkey and at her great festival male devotees by the thousand would go the whole way and seek her favour by castrating themselves and offering their bodily parts as sacrifices on her altar.

 As recently as 1487, Aztec records show that over 80,000 human souls were offered up in four days at the re-dedication of the great temple in what is now Mexico City. They were seeking the favour of the gods of war and agriculture through human sacrifice.

And in the Hebrew Scriptures we read about the pagan god Molech who demanded the sacrifice of the firstborn. The worship of Molech was common in Caanan, and Caanan was the land where Abraham had settled – he would have known all about it.

Maybe now we’re beginning to understand why, when this command to sacrifice Isaac comes to Abraham, he doesn’t stop in his tracks and question it as any sane person would today. This – in his culture – is how the gods are. They demand everything. Is his God any different?

Well on Mount Moriah, he finds out just how different his God is. Molech might require child sacrifice, but Abraham’s God doesn’t. Abraham’s God provides.

As the old man and his beloved son had made their way up the hill, Isaac had been confused. “We have the fire and the wood, Father, But where’s the lamb for the sacrifice?”

“God himself will provide the lamb”

And indeed he did – and still does.

The prophet Isaiah tells us that that descendant of Abraham we spoke of, the one who would be a blessing to all nations, was led like a lamb to the slaughter. God himself provided the lamb. We might even go so far as to say that God himself was the Lamb – the eternal son of God offering himself up for your sake and for mine.

Our ancestors placed more and more on the altars saying – is this enough, is this enough, is this enough?

Christ put an end to all of that by offering himself on the cross for your sin and mine, and saying ‘it is finished’.

Nothing more needs to be offered. All we need to do is accept his self-giving with the profound gratitude that it deserves.

In the ancient world, people would lay the most costly thing they had on the altar to appease the gods. But our God is different. Because he loves us, our God provides.

“This is love” says the apostle John. “Not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins”.

What greater offering could there be, for your sin and mine, than the life of Jesus Christ?  Could God have done any more to show us the extent of his love and his desire to be with us? Because, as we said last week and will keep on saying, that is what this story is all about.

Years after Abraham, the prophet Micah wrote these words which have stayed with me from the first time I read them and which felt especially relevant today.

With what shall I come before the Lord and bow down before the exalted God?
Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?
Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I offer my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.

The Lord doesn’t require thousands of rams, rivers of oil, or our firstborn children. He never has and he never will.

What he does require is the one thing we find even harder to give. The humility that recognises our need of a saviour.