Jo Vitale [00:00:35] So welcome to the podcast where we invite you to Ask Away. Hi, everyone, welcome to Ask Away. I'm Jo Vitale, and I'm so glad that you could join us for this episode. Typically, I would be here hosting with my husband, Vince, but he is in the middle of a very hectic travel schedule, so you have me representing the Vitales today. But I'm glad that your here, and the purpose of this podcast is really just to engage with the questions that you or your friends or people in your life might be struggling with. We all have questions at different seasons of our lives. There's nothing shameful about that, but there can be something very meaningful about not keeping them to ourselves, but sharing them with others and gaining a wider perspective. And so Vince and I are here not to offer perfect answers, but just to come alongside and help you think through the questions that other people may be putting to you, or even things that you're deeply wrestling with yourself in this current season. So please do feel free to send those questions in. You can find out at the end of the episode where to send them to. We would love to hear from you. It's really our joy and privilege when you guys trust us with the things that you're going through and we don't take that for granted at all. Now, today's question that we're going to be looking at-- well, two questions, really. Do you believe that God is good? And then secondly, do you believe that God will be good to you?  

[00:01:59] I ask those two questions like that because sometimes I find even in my own heart that I might have a different instinctive answer to those two questions. When it comes to question number one, for some reason I find it easier to say, yes, theoretically in principle, theologically, I do believe that God is good. But it can somehow feel a little bit harder to bring that down to ground level and to say, yes, I also believe that in my life today, in whatever season I'm in, in whatever I'm going through, that God it's going to be good specifically to me. And then perhaps to take it a step even further, which I've been thinking about more and more recently, perhaps a third question to tackle on here would be, do I trust that God is going to be good to the people that I love? One thing I've noticed about myself, and actually it really came to the fore when I had kids, was that even though I had this deep, deep faith and trust in God for my own life, I found it so much harder to entrust him with the lives of my children, to trust that he was going to be a good God, not just to me, but that he would answer the prayers I had for my kids. And that if I trusted God with their lives and to be the one in control of their lives instead of me being the one in control their lives, I had a much harder time handing that over to him. So that was an interesting thing to learn about myself. But it's tough, isn't it? It's one thing to say, yes, I believe in God. But what about when someone you love is given a serious health diagnosis like my brother was last summer, and something that he's currently battling with very seriously right now? Is God still good then? And do I trust that he is going to be good not just to me, but to my brother? And we live in a society that increasingly determines what is good by what feels good. There's so much of the time we think with our feelings. So how then should we respond when our good God ask something of us that at the moment of decision feels unbearably bad, that feels costly, that we know other people we love might not understand and possibly could even feel offended by.  

[00:04:09] Will he be good even if we can't see how it's all going to work out yet? Even if in the moment where we decide to follow his lead, it feels more like a step towards death than life in that moment of surrender to him. Those are the kind of questions that I want to grapple with on today's podcast and I want to invite you into this question with me through a particular lens of scripture. And in particularly, I want us to look today at a chapter of the Bible, Genesis chapter 22. If you have a Bible, feel free to open it up if you're not driving or something like that as you're listening. But there are two reasons why I want to tackle this question through the lens of Scripture. Firstly, because I know that many people have a hard time reading, wrestling with, and making sense of the Bible and particularly the Old Testament and how as Christians some of these ancient stories and laws relate to us today. I was listening to a podcast the other week when a critic of Christianity said that one of his greatest problems with the Christian faith is just how closely bound up it is with Judaism and the teachings of the Old Testament. I'm sure that many of you have heard that same objection or felt the same objection yourselves. That if the God that I'm supposed to worship today, the God of Jesus Christ is the God of the whole Bible, the God of the Old and New Testament, then is this really a God that I can call good from beginning to end? And secondly, I want us to dig into this particular text today, not only because it's very relevant to this question that we're asking around God's goodness; it's the one that directly tackles that question. But also because out of the many passages in the Bible that people can have a hard time with, this is one that is frequently cited as so problematic that I reckon it would make most people's top 10 list. And it begins with these words. Sometime later, God tested Abraham. He said, Abraham, 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 I will show you.  

[00:06:15] Even with over 31,000 verses in the Bible, these words stand out as some of the most harrowing. Along with many other critics, one of the most vocal has been Richard Dawkins, who's pointed out that by the standards of modern morality, this disgraceful story is an example of child abuse and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defense. I was only obeying orders. On a surface reading, I think it's easy to see why he gets there, isn't it? If we're honest, who among us hasn't felt deeply troubled by this text? It came up in my kids Bible the other day when we were doing bedtime Bible reading, and it raised a lot of questions. We had a lot discussion that evening with my five and seven-year-old about this text. But among other questions that I think it raises for us is in commanding Abraham to do this, is God saying he's okay with child sacrifice? And is this text evidence that the Bible endorses the kind of faith which expects that even if God tells you to do something evil, you should do it? We hear these horror stories, don't we, of people justifying murder because they had voices telling them to kill someone or when terrorists cite religion as a justification for slaughter. Is this exactly the same kind of logic that we're finding here in this text? And what about Isaac? Isn't putting a young child through this experience an example of horrendous abuse? All of these questions and more go through our heads when it comes to reading this particular passage of scripture and all of them lead back to the fundamental questions that we began with. If this is how God acts in the world, can we really call him good? If this the kind of obedience that he asks of us, can we ever trust that he's going to be good to us and to the people that we love?  

[00:08:06] So as a starting point, I just want to highlight that we need to be careful not to read ourselves into ancient stories that are specific to an individual and their personal journey with God at a unique moment in history. We love to do this, don't we? We read some ancient story of a biblical hero or villain, and we immediately put ourselves into the plot and think, well, how does it directly apply to my life today? But sometimes we can get into trouble when we do this because we assume that if God did it then, he could do it again tomorrow. But that's just not the case. Not so at all. And part of the reason for that is because the Bible is a story of unfolding revelation. There are certain lessons that God, at different points in history, wants to impress upon his people certain aspects of his character and how he's going to relate to us that he sometimes teaches in a very dramatic way in a particular person's life. Precisely because it's so important that he wants that lesson to stick. And he doesn't have to reiterate the same lesson again and again. He actually wants people to know something unique and true about him that will never be forgotten. And this is the kind of story that we're talking about with this example of Abraham and Isaac. Which is why, to answer the question, would God ever ask me to do something like this? Actually, the answer to that is a clear, resounding no. You never have to question that. As we'll see, this interaction is actually intended to answer that very question definitively and permanently. You'll see that in a little bit. One notable difference between us and Abraham is that when these events occurred, they occurred at a time in history when Abraham received the instruction without the benefit that the rest of us have of being able to look to the rest of the Old Testament and see that time and again, child sacrifice is condemned. You see, we have context for this.  

[00:10:00] When we read this, we already know what God thinks about it because of our long history. But Abraham didn't have the law codes to consult. He hadn't heard God railing through the prophets against the practices of surrounding faiths that were sacrificing their children on mountain tops to their gods. He hadn't seen God's judgment be brought to bear against his own people when they later started adopting some of those same. Practices, Abraham doesn't yet have any of the precedent that the rest of us have to know that this is so contrary to the heart of God. That there is no world in which God will be okay with Abraham actually sacrificing his son as some kind of act of worship to him. Instead, Abraham is living at a time in history when it is hardly outside the realm of possibility that whichever gods you worshiped might just require such a gruesome sacrifice as this. So all Abraham has to go off in this moment is his own experience of his relationship with God over a century of following him and all the things that that has taught him. So part of the question as we come into this passage is, is that going to be enough? Like has Abraham seen enough of the character of God and what he's really like to trust him in a situation like this? I mean, surely if ever somebody had caused to question the goodness of God, it was Abraham in this movement with a life of his son on the line, not even his own life, but his son's life. Is God still good and is he going to be good to them? And yet it's notable to me that the extreme difficulty of what God is asking for in this passage is not lost on God. It's not as if God is just up there detached and oblivious to how painful this is and what the cost is that Abraham is wrestling with when he hears God issue this command to him.  

[00:11:56] Because if God had just wanted to command Abraham, the Hebrew would read ka, meaning just take your son. And that's often how it's translated in our Bibles. But actually, in the original Hebrew, the word that God uses is ka na. And it's the addition of na here, which turns the word take from a command into a plea. It literally actually means, "take please or take I beg of you, your son." We also see the depth of God's empathy in the way that he speaks of Isaac as your son, your only son, the one you love. Actually, this is the very first time that the word love appears in the Bible. And I find that absolutely striking that when love is first introduced to us in this way, even defined for us, it's defined through this particular story and the love of a father for his only son. The very son he's been asked to give up. You see, far from dismissing or downplaying Abraham's feelings, God is openly acknowledging, even as he makes the request, just how extreme the cost is. There's something to his words that says, I know what I'm asking of you. I know how significant this is. Even as I speak these words to you, I understand just how serious this is and how painful. So God's words to Abraham, they're actually a deliberate mirror of the first time when God called Abraham, and I think this is on purpose as well, when God originally said to him, go by yourself from your country to the land I will show you. You see, back then, God was asking Abraham to give up his past for the promise of a future. But now, in this moment, it seems as if God is even asking him to give up on that future, the very future that God had promised him. But what's so striking to me about these two parallel encounters that come decades apart in Abraham's life is how dramatically different Abraham's response actually is.  

[00:13:55] I'm indebted to the work of the philosopher Eleonore Stump here who's written a really insightful book called Wandering in Darkness. So I recommend that you check out that book if you want to read more about her exegesis of this particular story, but she is the one who really makes the point strongly that actually the first time that God asked Abraham to go by yourself to the land Abraham and Sarah have already been married long enough that it seems unlikely they're ever going to conceive. And so rather than just going by himself, Abraham brings his nephew Lot with them as an insurance policy, just in case he needs someone to take on the role of foster son as a sort of adopted son and someone who can inherit after him if they never have a child. And then once he and Lot then depart ways, the text actually notes that Abraham goes on to adopt his own household steward, Eliezer, as his heir, which is further proof that actually Abraham, despite these huge promises from God that he's going to give him descendants and he's going to bless him and he will have a child and he'll have a future legacy, Abraham doesn't actually believe that. Instead, he feels the need for a backup policy, first Lot, then his household steward, and then later on still, when he's still disbelieving that God's going to come through for him, Abraham then finds a workaround, in this case where he conceives a child with his wife's maidservant, Hagar. And lastly, even when God reiterates after that, no, the promise is going to be with your wife, Sarah, she will be the one who bears the promised child that I've told you time and again you're going to have, Abraham's response rather than being grateful, is to complain that he wishes God would just fall in line with his own plans and bless his other son, Ishmael, rather than waiting on the child of the promise. So, in other words, what we see in Abraham's life is that on multiple occasions the God who made the universe has specifically promised Abraham that he will give him a son. He will be good to him. And yet at every point, Abraham has a backup plan, a plan B, just in case God doesn't come through for him.  

[00:15:59] See, I find it fascinating, in the Bible we often hear this label put on Abraham that he is the father of faith. The New Testament speaks of him in those terms, but actually the story of Abraham's life before he arrives at that point is the story of a man struggling to believe that God will be good to him in keeping his promises. This faith journey is worked out over decades and it's interesting isn't it when we look at our own lives and what we see evident, are we people who believe God's promises or are we also always like Abraham, expecting him to let us down? Where in your life do you have a backup plan just in case God doesn't come through? Today is God your plan A? Or is he your plan only? Is everything riding on God or have you made other provisions just in cases he doesn't comes through? What's interesting to me is that finally it seems after over 100 years-- so for those of us who are struggling to get there, guys, we still have time-- it takes nearly a century until God finally becomes Abraham's plan only, the one he's actually trusting in and believing on his promises. And I think that is the difference between us remembering Abraham as someone who God used despite his lack of faith and remembering him as someone who will forever be known as the father of faith. None of us are actually promised a tomorrow, are we? So I just want to encourage you, don't end today with God as your provisional plan. If he's not your only plan, then this is something you really need to engage with him about. And that's what Abraham did finally in his life, without further hesitation, we're told in Genesis 22 that after God has given this plea, after he's asked Abraham to take Isaac to the mountain, early the next morning, Abraham got up and loaded his donkey, he took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. And when he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering he set out for the place God had told him about.  

[00:18:02] See, at last Abraham is trusting in the goodness of God, so much so that even when his son Isaac asks him in what has to be one of the most awkward father-son conversations in all history, "Where is the lamb for the burnt offering," this time Abraham doesn't have a plan B; instead, he only has one answer to give his son, Isaac. God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son. Everything is being staked on what God will or won't provide. And it's the same faith that sustains Abraham every step of that three-day, 40-mile journey to the mountain, can you imagine? It's the faith that leads him to tell his servants to wait for both of them because he and Isaac will be coming back from the mountain together. See, I find those details in the text so interesting because it seems that one way or another Abraham expects to return with his son, even if that requires that God raise him from the dead. And this is an interpretation that Hebrews chapter 11 actually confirms when we're told that part of what was going on with Abraham in this moment is that he who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, "It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned." In other words, it's through Isaac that all these promises are going to come true. And note that this isn't an irrational or blind faith as it's often caricatured because we're told in Hebrews chapter 11 that Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead. And so in a manner of speaking, he did receive Isaac back from death. Now, why does this matter so much? Because I think often people get confused by what this story is really about. Unlike Dawkins is claiming, this is not a celebration of a faith that would condemn people to the gas chamber under the justification of simply obeying orders. This is not a celebration of the kind of faith that would fly people into buildings. This is not a celebration of a faith that says, God, I will follow you even if you're not good. Rather, it's about a faith that says God, I will follow you because you are good. I believe that you're good with my whole heart. I believe it.  

[00:20:27] For Abraham, it's about a journey of decades and decades of testing God and turning from God and making other plans aside from God and time and again finding God to be the only one who is trustworthy, the God who kept his promises, the God was faithful to Abraham even when Abraham was not faithful to him until finally he has learned something of who God is. That he's strong enough to sustain him. Even in the face of something that on the surface seems to fly against what he knows of God. For Abraham, this is not about worshiping a God who breaks his promises after all of that is about to break his promise, but it is about trusting God to keep his promises. God, if you said it, then I believe it. Even if I don't get how it's going to work out right now, I still stake everything on your promises. So for the Abraham, the test of faith was not whether he would cause the death of his son, but whether he believed God for the life of his Son. Abraham did believe God, and it was credited to him as righteousness. Reflecting on this passage, Eleonore Stump observes that the faith that makes Abraham the father of faith has its root in Abraham's acceptance of the goodness of God. That if he obeys God's command, Isaac will go on to live, to flourish, and to have descendants. And so he wills to stake his son on God's goodness. I just think, wow, what an astonishing picture of faith this is, a faith strong enough to stake not only your own life on, but the lives of the people that you love. As someone who regularly goes around sharing the gospel with people, I've had to really wrestle with this question over and over again. Like, do I believe the gospel enough? Do I truly believe this is such good news that it's actually true enough to ask people to accept it as truth, even knowing that actually in every instance, one way or another to accept the gospel is going to cost people a great deal.  

[00:22:36] Jesus is clear, isn't he, that anybody who follows him has got to take up their cross. And one way or another, following Jesus will lead to life, but it requires sacrifice and death on the way, the death of many things that we have made held more dear than God that we then have to surrender to put him first. If I invite a Muslim to follow Christ, then I do so knowing fully that that may well cost them the relationship with their family. And that's the case with so many other people as well that accepting Jesus often leads to pain in one way or another, because people don't always understand. And so do I believe that this is true, that God is good, so good, that the gospel is such good news that no matter what that decision may entail, it will be worth it because God will not only be good, but he is going to be good to them. He is going be so good to them that whatever you may have to lay down in this life will be gained a hundredfold, and not only in this life as well but in the life to come. That God is worth it, that he's so good, that he will be so good to you, that he is actually worth it. One of my old friends is an Anglican priest who lives in Northern Nigeria in a region where Christians even now, and for a very long time, they have been frequently killed by Boko Haram terrorists. And for him, being a Christian has meant having to prepare his three boys for dying as Christian martyrs from a young age. They had to speak with them about if terrorists ever come to our home and they threaten to kill us, this is how we pray and this is what we say in that moment. Had to prepare them for it. But then a while ago, his conviction was put to the test when he was driving in a car with his three sons and they became trapped on a narrow road with a mob of angry militants coming towards them. They'd just burned down and attacked a church, and they were riled up with weapons in their hands.  

[00:24:36] And as he saw them coming down this narrow alleyway, and he had no way to back up and get out of there, there was no way around, and this pastor friend of ours described how he instinctively reached out and turned down the stereo, which was blasting Christian worship songs, and then he immediately pulled off his clerical collar so that the mob coming towards them wouldn't see that he was a priest because he had his boys in the car, and he was terrified for what would happen to them. Then, only for his eldest son who was seated next to him in the front while the other kids were asleep in the back, to ask him, "Daddy, don't you want them to know that we follow Jesus?" Our friend was so convicted in that moment that he reached down and put the collar back on and just realized, well, I say that God is good and I trust him with my own life, but in this moment I haven't been trusting that he is going to be good to us no matter what, and his own son had to be the one to remind him of that. And so he put the collar back on, he turned the stereo way back up, and they drove slowly through this crowd, this angry mob who were coming towards them with weapons, but who somehow miraculously didn't even look at them. He says it's like they didn't see the car; it didn't register for them. And they went right through that crowd and the mob went off and they were able to actually get to that church where a friend of theirs had been under attack and was in hiding and they were able to help rescue him. What a story. And what about those of you who have children or grandchildren, you do believe in God's goodness to such a degree that you would willingly trust God with His plan for their life, no matter what and no matter how hard it may seem.  

[00:26:12] I look back on my own life and how when I was 18 years old before heading to college, my parents very graciously just let me head off for seven months to go and live in Uganda to do missions work. Wasn't the most dangerous place in the world at the time, but it wasn't the safest either. But they were just trusting that God would take care of me, even though it was at a time where I couldn't text them regularly. There was internet, maybe like once a week. I could get to an internet cafe to send them an email. But they had no way of really knowing or getting regular updates. They were just entrusting that God had called me and that God will take care of me even when they couldn't. And now that I have my own kids, I think, wow, that's some bold faith right there to trust God with your kids like that. Like, do I have the faith to entrust God with my children in the way that my parents entrusted me to God for my own life? And that's really the heart of the question, isn't it? Is this a God who you can entrust your children to and that he's going to be good to them no matter what happens in their life? Because atheists and critics, they would disagree. They would say this story is evidence that you can't trust God with your children because Abraham and Isaac is a story of child abuse committed by God who favors child sacrifice. And so often the narrative of Abraham is presented to us as kind of the heroic struggle of one man with the life of a young child hanging in the balance. And what I want to do right now is just question whether that interpretation is actually the most accurate reading of what the text is actually saying. Because whenever an action is repeated three times in close succession in the Bible, it's like waving a flag for our attention, saying, hey, there's something important here that I want you to notice. And three times within this narrative, we are told that the two of them, Abraham and Isaac, are making this journey together. And such a degree of emphasis suggests that there's an intentionality in the act that goes beyond just a physical journey shared and instead is pointing to something of deeper significance, to a journey of faith that they are also walking together.  

[00:28:18] We already know from the text that Isaac was old enough to be fully aware that the lamb for the sacrifice is conspicuously absent. We're also told that it was Isaac himself who carried the entirety of the wood for the sacrifices up the mountain on his own back. In other words, this is implying that he is the one who had the strength to do it, perhaps even more so than his father, Abraham, who by this point we know is very old. Now, given the amount of wood needed to burn hot enough and long enough to consume a whole burnt offering, this wouldn't have been a small feat. It's not like a couple of twigs we're talking about here, but this was an act requiring considerable strength. And the Hebrew word used to describe Isaac as a boy, Nahar, is also the same word used throughout the Book of Genesis for a young man, including Ishmael at age 18, Benjamin at age 22, and Joseph at around 30 years of age. So for these reasons, far from assuming as I think many commentators do that Isaac must be a young child, Jewish tradition actually frequently speaks of him as a young adult. Given Isaac's strength, it's also striking that the elderly Abraham faces no resistance even while binding a son who, it sounds like, could have outmatched him in a fight. Likewise, the fact that after this event, Isaac didn't show any resentment but rather experiences a lifelong closeness with both his earthly and his heavenly father, all points to the conclusion that rather than this being a helpless victim in this moment, Isaac himself is a willing participant of faith in this act of obedience to God, that Isaac too had the belief in God's goodness to such an extent that he would walk this journey, climb that mountain and voluntarily submit to being bound. That far from this being the story of the God of Abraham alone, this story is where we begin to see just why he's called the God of Isaac too, that Isaac too is believing with his father that the Lord himself will provide.  

[00:30:24] Nor is the story in any way an affirmation of child sacrifice. In fact, it is the exact opposite. When Rosa Parks wanted to protest segregation on public transportation, she didn't do it by avoiding riding the bus. She did it by going right to the place of injustice and making a public statement of defiance. There was something about that act that was more memorable, more defiant, stronger, and etched in our collective national memories precisely because she went to the very place where injustice was happening, and that was where she stood her ground and did something radically different. And if God wanted to protest child sacrifice so fiercely and uncompromisingly that it would establish a precedent forever, in the collective memory of his people, then what stronger way to do that than to take Abraham and Isaac up the mountain to the high places where sacrifices were made and to confront them with the full reality of the horror of this act, of just how awful it was, and then at the last moment to provide another way, a better way, a substitute. And if someone thinks, well, God should have just communicated this differently, he should have made it a law, like, why do it in this way? I do think it's worth noting that God found a way that was so effective that 3,000 years later, we still have this story etched in our memory, this permanent reminder to us that the God of the Bible would not allow us to do as the other nations did to sacrifice our children. That unlike every other religion, being right with God is not about us providing a sacrifice for God, but about God providing a sacrifice for us. And to this day, it is said, on the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided.  

[00:32:18] Dawkins calls this a disgraceful story of child abuse. And he likens Abraham's behavior to that of the Nazis. But I think he has completely missed the point. That this whole story is about God's protest about injustice. This is his definitive statement of who he is, of what he's like, and that he's not a God who would ever ask this of us. But that he's a God who we can trust precisely because he would rather give up his own life for us and sacrifice for us on our behalf than ever ask us to sacrifice in this way for him. That is not the kind of God he is. And if we wonder, well, how could he ask this of Abraham and Isaac? How could he do that to them specifically in this moment? I think we just have to remember that this doesn't happen in a vacuum, but this is like a century of a story of Abraham's life of learning to trust God to such a degree that he has built up evidence of who he is, that Abraham was perhaps the only person who could go on this journey with God precisely because he was the only one who had enough confidence and faith to be able to say, hey, it's not even crossing my mind that this is actually going to happen because I trust God's promises. I trust his goodness now to such an extent that I know he will make a way. And therefore I know this isn't going to happen. Instead, I'm just trusting in who he is and I know that I'm going to see his goodness displayed even through a moment like this. And so here's a challenging question for us as the church. How often are our affections towards scripture as influenced by the caricatured and uninformed readings of critics and general comments that we read online as they are by seriously studying and meditating on the word of God? When we allow the opinions of other people to dictate the way that we feel about God and his word? Why is it that we're letting people who don't even know the Bible tell us how to read our Bible? Why is it we let those without faith rewrite our stories of faith? Why is that we've become so vulnerable, so shakable to everybody else's opinion online that we're not letting God Himself lead our perspective and our opinion of who he is? Why is it that his revelation comes last for us rather than first when it comes to questions like this?  

[00:34:38] At an open mic event a number of years ago, a Christian actually walked up to the microphone and he asked us the question, do you think we should remove the Bibles from our churches in order to reach atheists? Absolutely not. The real problem is that far too often we've already left critics remove the Bibles. We've let them wield the Bible against us rather than standing by it with confidence, letting them tear out difficult passage after difficult passage until what remains isn't even the same thing anymore. I'm just so convicted after all these years of my own testimony with the Lord of digging into scripture, of wrestling with these hard texts and passages that if we want to remember God's goodness, then actually what we need is more, not less of God's life-giving word. Not a thin reading that skims just enough of Abraham and Isaac's story to conclude that it's one you should avoid and do everything to not engage with and just bury your head in the sand and pretend it's not there and don't ever read it to your children and just skip over it. But rather a deep reading, a deep wrestle of engaging with God in these hard, earnest, real places of raw faith. The kind of deep reading that then has us saying, you know what, I actually hope my friends bring up the most challenging passages in the Bible. I hope they bring up Abraham and Isaac because I'm ready to tell them about a man who, in his old age, finally reached the point of figuring out what it looked like to trust in God's goodness. I'm ready to tell him of the beautiful partnership of trust between a father and a son, and I'm ready to tell about a God who stands against the evil ways that we sacrifice one another to appease false idols. I'm ready to tell them about the only God who provides for us and a God who always, always keeps his promises that he will be good to us. A God who kept his promise to Abraham that through his descendants, all peoples on earth would be blessed.  

[00:36:37] For many years later, we encounter another father and his son, his only son, the one whom he loved. A father and son who set out on a journey together. A journey that took Jesus up a mountain, with the Father pressing on, even in the face of grief, who did not spare his own son, but gave him over for us all, and with his son as a willing participant, declaring no one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. A son who even carried the wood for the sacrifice on his back, until finally they reached the place of provision, where crowned with thorns, like a ram trapped in a thicket, this beloved son, the lamb of God, offered himself as a sacrificial substitute, fulfilling the promise God made to every single one of us that if we put our faith in him, if we trust in his goodness, then we too shall live. For there, on the mountain of the Lord, it has been provided. I just want to end with reading you those questions again. Today, do you believe that God is good? Do you believe he will be good to you and to your loved ones? Are there areas in your life where you've been wrestling, where you have been struggling to trust in His goodness? Perhaps there's a scripture that you've been avoiding because you've been afraid to dig into it, because you'd been worried what if it's as bad as people say? What if the critics are right? Well, today I just want to challenge you. Know God better than that. Get to know the God of the Bible better than that so that rather than being shaken, the very passages that used to throw you can become places where you actually get excited to dive deeper because you know that that's where the gold is actually found, that there will be treasure there that you are going to have something that will be revealed to you about the heart and the character of God. That even if you don't fully understand everything, you'll be able to say, wow, far from the rumors being true, I'm actually discovering that God is better than I thought, that he's a God who is just a God, who is fair, a God who is loving and above all, a God who is good. Always infinitely perfectly good. And a God who no matter what is going to be good to you. 

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