Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian in NYC, is perhaps the most balanced pastor, theologian, cultural critic and evangelist in the American scene today. His newest book, Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope that Matters
, is no exception to his approach. The book addresses what its subtitle says: the counterfeit gods of money, sex and power, and he does this through the biblical idea of idolatry. It is timely, it is pastoral, it is theological, and it is profoundly missional. I am looking forward to reading this book.Keller has become a preacher's preacher and a pastor's pastor.
After an opening salvo that sketches the big picture, Keller dips into the Abraham offering Isaac scene to describe what is at hand in our world today:
Abraham, like so many, wanted something deeply: a son.
Abraham's son is promised so Abraham can become a nation and bless the nations.
God gave Abraham what he wanted, and getting what you most want is not always best.
Furthermore, after giving the son God -- and here Keller has to fill in some lines of what was going on in Abraham's head with some psychology -- tested Abraham's love for God: Does he love God even more than this promised son who alone could be his heir?
So Abraham, in an act of trusting God, takes Isaac to the brink of sacrifice and God steps in to provide for Abraham -- God provides a substitute.
What do you think of seeing this story as a display of surrendering our deepest wants to God? What can we learn from this approach to the story?
Keller skillfully interweaves what we want most -- our Isaacs, our deepest desires, things that become our idols, our counterfeit gods -- with the central obligation that God wants us to love God most. In the same interweaving, God provides a substitute to accomplish his designs for the world. The firstborn child in the ancient Near East was often forfeit, or given in sacrifice, in order to atone for the family. So two things happen in this test: Abraham is tested and God's means of provision is revealed.
God provides that sacrifice: God not only led Abraham to see that loving God was most important, God provided a sacrificial ram instead of his son and (I don't see this in Keller) thereby replaced the ancient Near Eastern tragic religious belief of child sacrifice with animal sacrifice -- and then Keller's emphasis is that this sacrifice of a ram indicated in advance the substitutionary sacrifice of God's Son who would break out of the cycle of death in the resurrection. The promise to bless the nations through the birth of a son, Isaac, becomes an event where the true Son who will bless the world is revealed.
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I know he is not popular around these parts but when Mark Driscoll preached this passage he pointed out that Isaac was not a little boy who was oblivious to what was going on, as we often think he is when reading the story.
It is possible that Isaac was in his late teens to early twenties in which case he would have been stronger than his dad and the one who allowed his Father to hover above him and nearly kill him. It does the story a disservice to not think that Isacc was more aware of what was going on than we realize he probably was.
I remember reading this story when I was a boy and asking, "What kind of God would ask a father to kill his own son, his only son?" Over a quarter of a century later, the answer came to me, "One who did offer his only son in love for a beautiful and horrible world." This helped me. However as RJS alludes to at the beginning, this is a troubling passage, capable of leading to the creation of a monster god, one I met time and time again in the land said to be haunted by Jesus. It is this horrific visage that has made it so hard to believe that God could truly love someone like me. I have been helped some by a teaching that suggested if we viewed this story in the time it was writen, we could see that it was not regressive, but progressive in that it pulls that whole culture forward from the monster gods to one who would provide a lamb in love instead.
I would like to know exactly what it means to "surrender our desire(s) to God." How do we know if we've done that or not? Does "surrendering our desires" mean that we try to not have those desires? That we no longer pray for what we desire? And related to that, how do we know if our desire is one that we have sacrificed to God and that God has given back?
Some of this talk about surrendering desire sounds more Buddhist than Christian. (In Buddhism desire is at the root of all suffering.) Doesn't Christianity teach that our desires are not wrong, but that they must be ordered? Is there a difference between an ordered desire and a surrendered desire?
And how does "surrendering our desire" fit in with things like vocation, where your desires or the things that give you joy give you a clue as to the work God has called you to?
Can someone help me out with this?
What if in surrendering what is most dear to us, God reveals Himself more fully? In this case, God reveals to Abe that he is NOT like other ANE gods. If Genesis is a book of beginnings, Abe and rest of the patriarchs are "beginning" to know what the God who called Abe is really like, and thankfully the God of A, I & J is drastically different than Chemosh et al.
MatthewS (#22)
Good points - I don't have time right now to really dig deeper into this, although I would like to. I think that the point of a story in scripture though - and esp. in Genesis - can go beyond the story line and there may be a level that needs context to be understood in a complete sense.
So the straightforward context is God demands Isaac, Abraham obeys, God provides a substitute. Perhaps the true significance is that Abraham is willing to sacrifice even his "only" son, his dearest possession, if God demands - but I think that there is more to it than this.
It seems likely that the purpose is more a subversion of Abraham's culture and thinking - and by extension all of Israel's. The episode establishes something critical about the nature of God and His interaction with His people, an interaction and relationship very different from anything Abraham would have expected.
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