“God demands faith fully surrendered, willing to forfeit everything to trust and obey.” Dr. Jordan Neil Rogers (preaching on Genesis 22)
Genesis chapter 22, a chapter of which you are all generally familiar, challenges our notions regarding faith, as God asks Abraham to offer up his very own son Isaac, as a sacrifice.
Faith is often short-changed, not given its full due. For some, faith merely means a mental acknowledgement of facts. For others, faith is one-directional, only ever gaining, never releasing. This is prosperity Christianity, where God only gives, and never makes any demands.
But faith that pleases God, faith that befits the righteous, faith that can be rightly called faith involves complete and wholehearted trust in God that he is good, that his demands are best, and his procedures right, and then acting in alignment with such belief.
Those with such faith are willing to depart from anything, if God requires it, and take that which is most precious and give it to God for proper handling.
Abraham is such a man of faith. In fact, no other OT character receives as much credit for being a person of faith in the NT as Abraham. It is declared of the righteous that we live by faith. If that is the case, we would do well then, to learn from Abraham, the man of faith. The passage begins.
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