This morning we are going to continue our series on God with us and we're gonna do that by looking at Genesis chapter 22. It's a remarkable, one of my favorite passages of scripture. It's so interesting, it's so vivid, it's so challenging and I trust that God will bless us as we consider his word this morning. So please look there with me if you have your own copy of God's word. And I'll read for us from Genesis chapter 22 beginning in verse one. This is the word of the Lord. After these things, God tested Abraham and said to him, Abraham, and he said, here I am. 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. So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him and his son Isaac. And he cut the wood for the burnt offering and rose and went to the place of which God had told him. On the third day, Abraham lifted up his eyes and saw the place from afar. Then Abraham said to his young men, Stay here with the donkey. I and the boy will go over there and worship and come again to you. And Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son. And he took in his hand the fire and the knife, so they went both of them together. And Isaac 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? Abraham said, God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son. So they went both of them together. When they came to the place of which God had told him, Abraham built the altar there and laid the wood in order and bound Isaac his son and laid him on the altar on top of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham. And he said, here I am. 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 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. So Abraham called the name of the place the Lord will provide. As it is said to this day, on the mount of the Lord it shall be provided. And the angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time from heaven and said, by myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies. And in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. because you have obeyed my voice. Let's follow the reading of God's holy word. Let's pray that he would bless it this morning. Heavenly Father, please bless our time this morning. We pray that you'd give us ears to hear your word and hearts to receive it. And Christ, may your name be exalted this morning. None of my words, but may only your words be proclaimed. And it's in your great and powerful and awesome name that we pray, amen. The series we've been going through, we called God with us. Of course, that's the name Emmanuel, and that's the name that's given to our Lord Jesus when he's born. He is God with us. In the title of this sermon, we called God with us promised. Last week, we considered how God was with us, but was lost due to sin, but not forever. And right away, God gave us this promise that he would send a savior who would undo everything that had been done. that he would right every wrong. That was the promise given, and now this morning we're gonna consider that promise in more detail. And we're gonna do that by focusing on this story of Abraham and Isaac in Genesis 22. But let's recap just briefly, how did we get to this chapter? How did we get to this point in the story? God gave the promise of the gospel, the first proclamation of the gospel in Genesis 315. I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring. He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. This is part of the curse he gave to the serpent. This is the promise of the gospel that there's an offspring who's coming who's going to undo the curse of sin. And since that point in history, the search has begun for this offspring. We've been waiting for this offspring. Who is this one who will come who will undo everything, who will defeat sin, who will crush the serpent's head? And that brings us to Abraham, who God calls out of the land of Ur, and he gives this covenant of promise. He reiterates this promise to him. He gives and makes this covenant that God would make Abraham into a great nation, and that all the nations of the earth would be blessed through him, and in particular, through his offspring. We see that theme here. But there is only one problem. Abraham and his wife Sarah, They were without children. She was barren. Great nations require people, but there was only the two of them, and they were now in their old age, so how could this happen? How is God going to do this? Abraham cries out in Genesis 15. He says, God, you've given me these great promises, but I have no children. I have no heir. The heir to my inheritance is a servant, Eleazar of Damascus. I'm childless. If I were to have died today, he would be the heir of all that I have. Abraham's cry to God is summarized, Genesis 3.15, he says, behold, you have given me no offspring. There's that great theme throughout all scripture of offspring. God, where is this offspring that you have promised? So God responds to Abraham in Genesis 15. God says, behold, the word of the Lord came to him. This man shall not be your heir, Your very own son shall be your heir. And it says that God brought him outside and said, look toward the heaven and number the stars if you're able to number them. Then he said, so shall your offspring be. And it's recorded to us that Abraham believed the Lord and the Lord counted it to him as righteousness. Abraham would bear a son. He would bear the offspring, and in this offspring would come the people more numerous than all the stars. Abraham believed it. By that faith, it was counted to him as righteousness. So God makes this covenant with Abraham that this will be true. He passes through the pieces in Genesis 15, signifying that he is going to fulfill this covenant and all its obligations. So all this happens, but then we're still waiting. Abraham was 75 years old when God first called him. And then in Genesis 15, like we just read, he was 85 years. He was 85 years old when God made that covenant with him, and now, Abraham, he's 99 years old. He's been waiting years for this to happen. He's not getting any younger, not getting any more likely to be able to bear children. And God again now comes to him in Genesis 17 and he reiterates the promise. And God says to him in verse seven, I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your offspring after you. God reiterates the promise, and then he gives them the sign of circumcision, which is the seal of this great covenant promise. And finally, God tells Abraham, a year from now, when you're 100 years old, that is when I will visit you again, and you will bear the child of the promise. Sarah will bear you a son in her old age. well beyond the years of any ability to bear children, but what is impossible for man is possible with God. And so that next year, Isaac is born. He's the promised offspring. He's the child of the covenant. He's the son of Abraham. Isaac's name means laughter. Isaac's birth brought great joy to Abraham and to Sarah in their old age. But more than just the the common joy that comes from parents receiving a child into their family. Even more than that, he was the son of the promise. Isaac was the symbol of God's deliverance for his people, the offspring that was promised all the way back in Genesis 3.15. Abraham, he knew those promises. Those were the stories of God's people passed down from generation to generation, that this world is messed up, this world is not the way God created it to be, and he's promised that he's gonna fix it. through this offspring. And that's what Isaac symbolized for Abraham. That's what Isaac represented. If he was not the promised offspring, he was certainly the one through whom the unbroken bloodline would connect to the promised offspring. So with that background in mind, we come now to our passage in chapter 22, and we understand with even more detail The absolute despair that Abraham must have felt when he received these words from the Lord. The sorrow he must have felt that was going through his mind, but then also the absolute wonder and majesty of God's providence and his deliverance for his people. In this story then we see God with us promised. That's what we see. Specifically, we see that Christ, who is Emmanuel, he is promised for us in this passage in three different ways. There's three ways that we see Christ promised for us, at least three. There's so many here, and we read, there's so many things we could talk about, we don't have time to go through all the beautiful typology and all the ways that this story points us to Christ, but we'll highlight three of them this morning. We see Christ promised for us, first, in the love of Abraham that he had for Isaac, Second, in the obedient sacrifice of Isaac. And third, in the blessing that God gives through Abraham to all the nations. So we see those, Christ's promise for us in those three things, the love, the sacrifice, and the blessing. That's what we wanna look at this morning. First, we see the promise is seen in his love. The promise of Christ is first of all seen in the love that Abraham has for his son. God spoke to Abraham in verse two. He says, take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love. Each of those phrases should hit us. It's like being weighed down by an unbearable weight and then someone's adding even more weight on top of that and even more weight on top of that. If God was just to say, take your son, Abraham would have known who he was talking about. God had no need to repeat himself here. He had no need to remind Abraham of who his son was, but God repeats. He says, take your son. Your only son. Your only son whom you love. It's painful. Must have felt to Abraham like a knife stuck in his back and then with each phrase, God's twisting it a little more. Why does God use this repetition? It seems like God is adding insult to injury. Hey, you know that son, the only son that you have? You know the son that you love so much? Why is God doing this? And if we ask that question, it begs the question itself of why God put Abraham to this test at all. Why did God put Abraham to this? Why would he rub salt in the wound by reminding Abraham of how much he loves Isaac right before commanding his execution? Why would God do this? Well, we know that God is not pleased with human sacrifice. So that cannot be a reason. God is not pleased by that. We also know that God does not tempt anyone nor himself is ever tempted to do any evil. There's no wickedness in God so that can't be the reason. God was not being vindictive. God was not being mean here. What we're left with then is that God is at once, in this moment, testing Abraham's faith and his promises. He's doing that while at the same time proclaiming and strengthening Abraham's faith and our faith through this visceral picture of the promise of Christ. That's what God is doing here. So how do we see Christ promised for us in this passage? Well, in the first place, it's through the repetition of phrases that God just spoke to Abraham. Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love. In these words, God is pointing us beyond Abraham and Isaac and he's sending us to see the fulfillment in Christ. We've been working our way through the Gospel of Mark. We started that this fall. We're gonna pick it back up in January. We've been working our way through it. We've already seen the fulfillment of this. We saw it in the first chapter of Mark where Jesus is baptized and a voice declares from heaven. It says a voice came from heaven and it says, you are my son whom I love and with you I am well pleased. Later in Mark, in chapter nine, Lord willing, when we get there, we'll see the story of Jesus when he's transfigured before Peter, James, and John, and the same voice is heard again. It says, this is my son, whom I love. Listen to him. This is the Father's love for his son. This is his only son. We look at that wonderful, famous, well-known verse, John 3, 16. that God so loved the world that he gave his only son, his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life. So when God calls Abraham to take his son, his only son, whom he loved, God was not simply calling Abraham to obedience, but God was declaring something about himself, actually. God was making a promise about who he is and what he was going to do. This is the promise of Christ seen first in all of it in the love that exists between the Father and the Son. So in this story of Abraham and Isaac, we get to see a glimpse of the inner working of the triune God from eternity past. He's so determined to save you and me. But they have this inner Trinitarian love, the Father, Son, and Spirit that exists together. God is love. and the persons of the Godhead, they love one another with this eternal, perfect love. And yet the Father so loved the world and so loved you and me, this is the mystery of the gospel, that he sent his Son into the world. It's as if the Godhead, he's saying to himself that I will take my Son, my only Son, whom I love, and I will offer him as a substitute I will offer him as a sacrificial lamb, and I will do this for the sake of my people. So that's the first thing we see, the promise of Christ first seen in the Father's love for the Son, Abraham's love for Isaac, reflecting this greater love that has existed before all time. The father loved the son. Abraham loved Isaac. But that love did not stop Abraham from being obedient to God's command. That brings us to the second thing we want to see. That the promise of Christ is seen also in the sacrifice. This is the second thing we see. And the key word I want us to hold on to, or to picture here, is the word withheld. So hold on to that word withheld as we consider this passage. To withhold something obviously is to keep something back, it's to spare something, it's to keep something for yourself. And Abraham by faith and in obedience to God, he did not withhold his son from him, but willingly did what God commanded. So we see this twice in verse 12 and verse 16, this word show up for us. You have not withheld your son, God says. Verse 16, God again, he swears by himself because he has not withheld your son, your only son. How could Abraham do this? How could he be so confident in the Lord? Well, he did so because he believed in the promises of God. His son Isaac, he's still a young boy at this point, but he's old enough to understand what's going on, he's old enough to ask questions. So he's looking around and he's carrying the one on his back, he sees the fire as well, the flint and whatever they're gonna use to make the fire, but there's no animal, they didn't bring any animal for the sacrifice. So of course, it's natural, he'd be curious. He asks his father in verse seven, where is the lamb for the burnt offering? So in verse eight, Abraham answers. He says, God will provide for himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son. Do you think Abraham had tears rolling down his face at that point? How could he say that? How could he be so confident in God? Well, the author of Hebrews helps us out here. He tells us that it was by faith that Abraham did this. In Hebrews chapter 11, it says that by faith, Abraham, when he was tested, he offered up Isaac, And he who had received the promises was in the act of offering up his son, of whom it was said, through Isaac shall your offspring be named. He considered that God was able even to raise him from the dead. From which, figuratively speaking, he did receive him back. Abraham was so rock solid confident in God's promises. So he did not spare his own son. He did not withhold Isaac from God. He trusted in God's providence that the Lord God, that he would provide. And how does God provide? How did God provide? How did he provide the lamb for the burnt offering? It's not simply in this one moment where God providentially provided that ram caught in the thicket. But we've already seen that this story points us to Christ. That God provided the sacrifice because he did not withhold his very own son from us on the cross. And just as Abraham's son carried the wood of the sacrifice, so too our heavenly father was pleased for his son to bear his cross and carry it up the hill. The spotless lamb of God. This is what Paul tells us in Romans 8.32. Paul tells us that he who did not spare, that's our word to withhold, he who did not withhold his own son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? What could have cost more to the father than his very own son? What could be more costly to him? Jess and I are having a baby boy. We're so excited for that, God's blessing. And already, we just love him so much. And there's nothing that we wouldn't do for him. I know parents feel that way. Even if you don't have kids, you understand that feeling of that close familial love. You wouldn't wanna give up your parents. You wouldn't wanna give up your siblings. Maybe some of you might wanna be willing to trade or to let go of your brother or your sister maybe. But the idea that we would have to give up our son for anything, for anyone, I don't think I could do it. I know I couldn't do it. I never would do it. There's nothing I would do But this is what the Father has done for us. This is what God has done for me, personally. How could he have done this? After everything that I've done, after all the ways that I've messed up, doesn't he know who I am? Doesn't he know that I'm not worthy of this? Maybe you're asking yourself those same questions. See, but this is the beauty of the gospel. It doesn't make sense, but it's true. Do you believe it? That God has seen how you are unworthy. You're unworthy of His grace. That's what makes it grace. There is no merit. There is nothing that you could do. Yet the Father loves you. How do you know the Father loves you? How can you be sure that the Father that he loves you in this way. How can you believe that the gospel is true? Here's how you can believe it. Here's how you can know that it's true. Because God has sworn it. God has sworn that it is true. Verse 16 says, by myself I have sworn, declares the Lord. because you have done this, you have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you. This is what God says to each and every one of you. If you are in Christ, God says, by myself I have sworn, I have not withheld my only son from you, I have given him for you, and I will surely bless you in him. God has sworn it by himself. Again, the author of Hebrews helps us so much here. In chapter six, in verse 13, It says that for when God made a promise to Abraham, since he had no one greater by whom to swear, he swore by himself, saying, surely I will bless you and multiply you. He's quoting here from our passage in Genesis 22. So not only does God give us the promise, but he also takes an oath by his own name, the name that is above every name. There's no one greater than God. God is the greatest being in all the world. which already makes his promise perfectly true. God cannot lie, God cannot go against his own nature, so when he promises to do something, that promise is going to happen. But God is not content to let us wonder. God is not content, out of his great love for us, to doubt his promises, so he adds a second thing on top of the promise, which is his oath. But there's a problem, as it were, because there's no one greater than God that he can swear by. So he swears by his very own name. He swears by it in order to certify, in order that we might have confidence in his promises. The only being possible by which he can swear is his very own self, and that's who he swears by. So Hebrews goes on to say in verse 18 that so by these two unchangeable things, there's these two unchangeable things. There's the promise that's unchangeable because God cannot go against his nature. God can never tell a lie. So that's already unchangeable. That's already enough for us. But God wants us to be confident. So he also gives us another unchangeable thing. And he swears an oath by his own name. The name that he's jealous for, the name that is above every name, the name that can never be, he values his name. He will never let his name be besmirched or to be slandered. So he swears by his own name, so that by these two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, Hebrews says, I love that description for the Christians, by the way. He doesn't say so that you might have encouragement. He doesn't say so that we, the church, might have encouragement, but he describes us as we who have fled for refuge. We fled to the refuge of our Lord and our Savior, our rock and our Redeemer, that's who we are. We're in need of refuge, we're in need of strength. We flee to Christ, we have this strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us. What is that hope? What is the hope that we have? Our hope is that this same God who did not spare his own son for us, He's also going to graciously give us all things. Our hope is that the gospel is true. Our hope is that Christ is the sacrificial lamb. He's forgiven our sins. He's atoned for our sins. In Him we have forgiveness. In Him we have life and life everlasting. He's blessed us in Christ. That is our hope. That's the promise of God with us. It's seen That promise is seen in Abraham's love for Isaac, that promise is seen in the sacrifice of Isaac, and thirdly, we just mentioned it, that promise is seen in the blessing that comes through this son who is sacrificed. Let's look at this final thing, we'll close with this. Verse 15, Genesis 22. And read this for us again. The angel of the Lord called to Abraham a second time, and said, by myself I have sworn, declares the Lord, because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven and as the sand that is on the seashore. And your offspring shall possess the gate of his enemies. And in your offspring, here's the key, In your offspring, we could say through your offspring, shall all the nations of the earth be blessed. That's the promise. Christian, you are. The blessed offspring of Abraham, because you are in the offspring who is Christ. This is the offspring of the woman who is promised in Genesis 3.15. That is Christ. That is God in the flesh. That is God with us. That is Emmanuel. That's who he is. And so whatever it is that you're going through this morning, whatever it is that is plaguing you during this season, whatever it might be, you can know that God is with you in those things. Whatever they are, God is with you. There's loneliness, there's pain, there's death because of sin, there's loss and hardship, anxiety, grief. All these things, those are all true. All of them are happening all the time. We live in a broken world. But it's not the way that God has created us to be. And in Christ, all of these things, all of them must give way to the one who is greater than them all. Because what we have and what you have in Christ is blessing. What you have available to you through the offspring of God, who is Christ, is the one who blesses all the nations of the earth. That includes you, that includes me, that includes all of us, those who are in Christ. All of scripture points us to who Christ is and to all of what Christ has done. So today, as we consider God with us from the perspective of Abraham, we've seen how the promise was given to him, which ultimately points us back to Christ. And on this side of the cross, we look back at how Christ, he is the fulfillment of all these promises, this great promise. He is the offspring of Abraham. He is the one whom the father loved, yet the father did not withhold him from us. And if he did not withhold his son from us, how will he not graciously give us all things? If you are in Christ, if you have put your faith in Christ, then you are blessed with every spiritual blessing. You've been justified, you've been declared righteous, you've been adopted as his sons and daughters. To you belongs the riches of his kingdom. All that he has belongs to you. So as we close this morning, that's our point of application. That's the one thing we need to take away from this. that Jesus is the one who has promised for us. He is God with us. Make him your all in all. Look to him always. Rest in him, trust in him, love him, the one who has first loved you. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, Our words fail us as we try to give you the thanks and praise for the salvation that you offer to us through your own son. You have loved him in eternity past, yet out of your love for us, you sent him to suffer and to die. How can we understand this great love that you have for your people? It's so hard for us to understand. It's incomprehensible, yet we do know it, and we recognize it, and we see it. and our dear Savior, Jesus. So we pray that you would help us to understand it more and more each day by your own spirit working in us, that you would be pointing us always back to Jesus, the Son of God in the flesh. He is God with us. Thank you, Jesus, we pray in your holy name. Amen.