FEB 25 2024 | Genesis: Behind the Curtain S3E5 | “Wood” You Believe It?

Sea Change Church · Genesis: Behind the Curtain · "“Wood” You Believe It?" Pastor Adam Stadtmiller · February 25, 2024
Genesis 27:30–38
Automated transcript. Not reviewed for accuracy.

Here we go. Genesis 22, 6 through 19. Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. And as the two of them went on together, Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, Father, yes, my son, Abraham replied, the fire and the wood are here, Isaac said, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering? Abraham answered, God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son. And the two of them went on together.

When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on the top of the wood. Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son, but the angel of the Lord called out to him from heaven, Abraham, Abraham, here I am, he replied. Do not lay a hand on the boy, he said. Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.

Abraham looked up, and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns, and he went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of a son. So Abraham called the place the Lord will provide, and to this day it is said, on the mountain of the Lord it will be provided. The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time and said, I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore.

Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all the nations on the earth will be blessed because you have obeyed me. Then Abraham returned to his servants, and they set off together for Beersheba. And Abraham stayed in Beersheba. This is the word of the Lord. Amen. Amen. Amen. Well, good morning. Welcome to church. Hope you're having a good time. Man, it was good today so far, right?

I hope I don't mess it up right now because you guys are flowing. It's so good. Hey, if you have your Bibles, open up to Genesis 22, 6 through 18. My daughter has asked me for better sermon titles, and so, would you believe it, Isaac's heavy burden? Read it. Just thought that was good little dad-pastor humor right there. We're at the second part of this story. It's part two of Abraham really living at the apex of faith.

God taking the most precious thing in his life, the thing that he's wanted, the thing that his wife had wanted, Isaac, his son, and asking him to sacrifice Isaac to himself. Now, God obviously had another thing in mind. He didn't cause him to do that, but what he did do was foreshadow what God would be willing to do, which is to send his only son to put him on a piece of wood himself, a tree, and hang him on a cross that we might be saved and would not spare his only son.

And the nature of that gospel is perplexing. It's mind-bending. It's soul-bending. And it is the gospel of Jesus Christ that sets us free. So we see all that happening here. I really couldn't get past verse 6. I really wanted to preach more into this. You could spend months in just this passage. There is so much going on. We're not even going to get to the second point in the sermon. I just continued to work on point 1, so you can scratch out point 2.

You can go back and study that more yourself. I want to challenge you to dive into this passage and what God is doing here. We're going to look at some really interesting things. There's a word I want you to write. It's not in the notes, and it's on the top of your notes. If you write the word catalyst, catalyst. And catalyst, if you're a surfer, you know what catalyst is. If you've ever done any board repair, you take the fiberglass resin, and then you take this catalyst, and it's just a little dropper.

I don't actually even know what it is, but as a kid, I knew that when I put a couple drops into the resin, I had a short amount of time because there was a chain reaction that was beginning in the resin due to the fact that I added the catalyst to it. And the catalyst caused it to harden. Now, you would take it, and you would put it over the surfboard, and it would repair. And if you put too much in there, it could crack, and you kind of had to be a bit of a chemist.

I wasn't so good at that as a 14-year-old. But this catalyst was the thing that changes a substance from one thing to another. It actually changes, oftentimes, the entirety of the nature of the components and causes it to become something other than it is. What I really want to focus on are burdens. And we're looking at Isaac actually having to carry the wood himself, this burden. And in regard to catalyst, I want to say that our burdens oftentimes are the catalyst to God's work in our life.

The burdens in our life are what God often uses our suffering to turn our trials into our triumphs, right? And so what I want to frame this entirety of this message on is to see your burdens in a different way. We can despise our burdens, and sometimes, rightly, the components of our burdens need to be despised. And Jesus, it actually says, that he was on the cross, and he didn't despise going to the cross because he knew it would bring redemption.

So I want to say, if you have burdens in your life, to reframe those burdens, and that's what this passage is about, to reframe those. Because we see Isaac, an entire nation, an entire cosmos, the scripture says, all of mankind is redeemed through the burden that we see that comes through the line of Isaac, right? Because he was willing, through his father's faith, to follow his father's faith, and this is showing the faith of a father, to move on, to carry a burden, and to do it passively like Christ did it as well.

So we have that word catalyst. Here's the point we're going to get to, and then the second one you can get to on your own. God turns burdens into blessings. God, it is the nature of God to turn your burdens into your blessings. And the way in which we handle our burdens, the way in which we hold our burdens, the way in which we partner and co-labor with God with our burdens, is what God uses as a catalyst to turn those burdens into blessings.

And some of you have experienced that before. You've had something that was a burden for your life. How am I going to get rid of this burden? But God begins, he frees you from it, gives you victory through it, or in the midst of it, you're able to encourage others. Good things happen. God works all things for good, it says, for those that love God and are called according to his purpose. Let's go to verse six. God turns burdens into blessings.

Abraham took the wood, that's the father, took the wood for the burnt offering, and he placed it on his son Isaac. Wow. And he himself carried the fire and the knife as the two of them went on together. Now, as I talk to Pastor Jim, Pastor Jim loves to see this story from a different lens. He likes to see it through the way of Isaac. And you can imagine, he says that Isaac is actually going through a major trauma right now.

Obviously, he would be. And he sees Isaac as being, maybe having the temptation to feel he's forsaken by his father, which Christ had the same temptation as well. And the thought to be alienated because of the burden and because of not understanding what his father is doing in that exact moment. We see that. I think this is what Satan wants to do with burdens. Once again, talking to burdens. Satan wants you to feel alone in your burden.

He wants to separate you from God, that you don't see God in the midst of it. And when we're oftentimes in our burden, I think at the beginning, at the initiation of a burden, or sometimes in the midst of it, it goes up and down, we feel forsaken, forgotten. Where is God in this peace? And as we look further on in the scripture, what you're going to see is God is all over this story. He's never leaving Isaac. He's even there in the symbolism of the wood.

He's there in the symbolism of the fire. He's there in the symbolism of the knife. And we'll see that as we go. We see that he's not alone. In verse 6, we see a representation of not only the passion of Christ, which I mentioned a moment ago, but also a metaphor of the Trinity. What do you mean there's a metaphor of the Trinity? The Trinity is the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. And we're going to see how that, first of all.

But first of all, let's talk about this passion first. The first thing I want to say is the passion of Christ is seen in this story. Before we get to the Trinity, let's look at this. You have wood, and then we have fire. We're going to look at those two elements. When it looks about wood, what does wood have to do with this story? Well, wood is talking about a cross. When you have a burden, the Bible, the New Testament specifically, wants you to take any burden and see it as a cross.

Why? Because when we see something as a cross, we step into a relationship and a synchronicity with Jesus. And we partner up with Jesus, who has called us over and over again to take our burdens, to put our burdens upon him, and to come alongside of him, and to be crucified with him, and to carry our cross alongside of him. So here's the first part of the recipe. When you have a burden, see it as a cross. When you have a burden, see it as a cross.

And when you see it as a cross, see yourself walking alongside Jesus with that burden as he carries his cross. Satan wants to separate you from the message of Jesus. He wants to separate your cross, that you were crucified out on a hill by yourself. Scripture doesn't say that. Scripture says, I have been crucified with whom? Good. Facts. That I have been crucified with Christ. So the first thing we want to see is we see this wood.

Let's see that your burden, the thing you struggle with, the thing that's difficult for you, as the wood. And what is that wood? Here it's just some firewood, because we're in the Old Testament and we're still making sacrifices. The cross hasn't come in yet. But this wood, the wood of the sacrifice, which is consumed by God, would, through a catalyst of Christ be turned into a cross of which we can come alongside Jesus ourselves.

I'm going to get a couple of verses to show you that. One's out of Matthew. Jesus says, then Jesus said to his disciples, I love that, whoever wants to be my disciple, circle my disciple, must, underline must, deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow me. You've heard of initiation rites, right? And we don't really, they were bigger early on in the college scene. The initiations and the hazing and all that, not so popular these days.

But Jesus has an initiation rite that comes with membership into something. And that membership that you step into is being his disciple. It says when you pick up your cross, if you pick up your cross and you follow him, it says that in so doing, you step into a membership of Christ, which is more than a membership. You step into becoming a disciple of Christ. Disciples carry crosses. That's it. Now, obviously, this is metaphoric.

Some people were crucified in Jesus' time. And when Jesus was saying this to a, you know, early first century crowd, I think they understood it a little different than we do. And I think people in different parts of the world understand it different than we do. But whatever the burden, Jesus is saying, if you want to be a disciple, you pick up your cross. I say one of the best things you can do with your burdens is to pick them up and say, Jesus, I want to be your disciple.

Turn this burden into a blessing. Let this be a proof of my discipleship. You know, you would see people, if they were hung on a cross for being Christians or tortured by the lions or whatever it was in Romans, in the Roman period back in antiquity, what it would say, it would be proof as they carried that burden that they were followers of Jesus. Your burdens are your credentials of being a disciple of Christ. I love that.

The other one is this in Galatians 2.20. I have been crucified with whom? With Christ. I no longer live. But Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. There's that word faith again, right? That's that word. It says that Abraham's faith was reckoned to him, credited to him as righteousness. And that faith is now being passed down through Isaac, who could feel alone in his burdens, right?

Who believes enough in his father to have a 117-year-old man tie him up. Think about it. He's a young man. There is something, and I talked about the Trinity here, about having a father you can trust. Fathers are not interchangeable. God would desire that every human being has a loving father. And you see that here in Isaac, who's willing, like Jesus trusted his father in submission to go to the cross, to have a father whom he can trust, and he has faith in this moment.

And you can see the faith of the father being transferred through the lineage, through the genealogy to the Son. You see, as we live, our children inherit. Let me say that again. As we live as parents, our children inherit. The way in which you live will be an inheritance to your children. And I'm not talking money, houses, and homes. The way in which you have righteousness and integrity. And so we see that Abraham was the kind of man, as he said, remember, after years had passed last week, we said that?

In this time of the passing, there was a catalyst happening in his life. He had stepped over from liminality, from that place of transition, into stability. And in that place, he had become someone that his son could look at and say, you know what? My dad's got this. You see, I think it would have been traumatic. And I think Jim's right that it would have been traumatic. But I have a feeling that the faith of the son that was passed down through the father of all faith, as it says, I believe in Hebrews 11, transcended the trauma.

You see, faith will oftentimes transcend our trauma as we carry our burdens. And so we see that there. You see, that's foolishness. The world, if you were to ask the world, I don't want burdens. We do everything we can to escape our burdens. We move into distraction. We move into addiction. We just want to go to another trip. We just want to fill our lives with something. Anything we can do to get away from our burdens, as opposed to picking up our burdens and walking with them until Christ desires to relieve us of our burdens.

It says it's foolishness to the world. This message is foolishness. In 1 Corinthians 1.18, it says, For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who want or perishing. But to those who are being saved, it is the power of God. You see, that's how your burdens become power. Do your burdens just drain you? Of course they drain you. I get that. We're human beings, right? But if we only focus, and this is what Satan wants to do.

He wants to alienate. He wants to change your perspective. Your burden is just a cross by yourself. There's no redemption in this. There's no power in this. This is just draining. As opposed to saying, no, my burden is God is going to turn this burden into a blessing. He's going to redeem it. He's going to raise me from my cross. Because that's always the end of the story, right? That Jesus is raised from the cross. Isaac didn't hold onto that wood on his back forever.

And Jesus didn't stay on the cross. Satan's gospel keeps Jesus on the cross. Jesus is not on the cross. And God wants to remove those burdens from you. Or have you pass through them in a way until he raises you from those things. So we see the wood. Next thing we see here is another part of the Holy Spirit. We see the fire, right? So we have a father, right? We have the son. We have Isaac. So we have a father and a son.

That's a duality right there. But to move into the Trinitarian understanding, where's the fire? Where's the spirit? Well, the spirit is oftentimes seen as fire. He's not alone. Obviously, he is acting as the son. But he has a father there, and he has the spirit of God beside him. And the father is carrying the fire. And I love that. Because God carries the fire. Because what does God do? God, it says, is a consuming fire.

We see this fire in Exodus 3-2 with Moses later on in the Old Testament. There was an angel of the Lord that appeared to Moses in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that through the bush was on fire, though it did not burn up. We see this fire, this presence. The fire would go before the spirit of God, would burn like fire. And it would go before the Israelites, wherever they were. The fire would be over God's presence, over the tent of meeting.

I said, wherever there is sacrifice, God is ready as a fire to consume that. Hebrews 12-29, once again, right there near this passage of faith, I believe in Hebrews 11, it says, for our God is what? A consuming fire. Let me tell you what God does not consume. Lack of sacrifice. Oftentimes, we can present our burdens to God as a sacrifice and sacrifice our burdens to God. God, I want to sacrifice this burden. It says, when we sacrifice, when we hold things loosely, it says that God becomes a consuming fire and he falls down upon our sacrifice and we ourselves are consumed for our God as a consuming fire.

And what are we consumed by? Why we're consumed by the spirit of God and we're not burned like a fire, but we're brought to life through the fire of God. That's power. That's power. And that's just a reframing of your burdens, right? Once again, Satan wants you to obviously see your burdens as your own, that you will be alone. We're going to move in. It says, Isaac, I said a moment again, could have felt forsaken. Billy Graham has a quote.

And we have our Billy Graham event on the 9th. I want to challenge you. You just drive down there, I think it's at 7 o'clock, down at one of the arena, North Island Federal Credit Union on the 9th. I'm going down. It's going to be amazing. We can go down as a church and just hear his son speak, but we'll do that. But Billy Graham, his father, Franklin's father, said this when he was speaking about this very idea. Satan loves to whisper lies of isolation and alienation into the ears of believers.

But we must cling to the truth that God is always with us and his love never fails. We must cling to the truth. That's part of this passage we've been speaking about as we've gone through Abraham and Genesis is the promises of God. We spoke about that a couple weeks ago. Holding on to the promises. If you don't know the promise, you can't hold on to it. If you don't hold on to the promise, you'll never know if it's true.

Because you have let go before the promise is answered. If you don't know the promises of God, you'll never know if the promises exist. You will not know the promises of God. And if you don't hold to the promises of God, you will never know if they were true because you will let go before they are proved. And this is the message of God that he calls us on to. And so we see this. Next thing we see that I love is as Isaac, it says that later on that Isaac, let's go to verse, if you will.

Verse 15. The angel of the Lord called to Abraham from heaven a second time. He said, I swear by myself. Because God can't swear by everybody else, so he swears by himself. It says, I swear by myself, declares the Lord, that because you have done this, not withheld your only son, I surely will bless, I surely will bless you, that's good, individual blessing, and make your descendants as numerous of the stars and as the sand on the seashore.

Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies. And through your offspring, that's Isaac, you can put Isaac's name there. All nations on earth will be blessed because you have obeyed me, because all nations will hear about Jesus Christ who come through Isaac. Isaac, through being faithful, I mean, Isaac's amazing here. Isaac becomes a conduit. He becomes a conduit of blessing. He's carrying a burden, but in the midst of carrying that burden, he becomes a conduit of blessing.

What is a conduit? A conduit is something that transfers power or some other substance from one place to another. When we faithfully walk with our burdens and our crosses, God turns us into conduits. You're going to be a conduit of something. You can be a conduit of God's power, as we saw, by partnering with Christ and picking up our crosses and following him and reframing our burdens. Or we can become a conduit of our own desires that we have.

I would say that Isaac becomes the one from whom the blessing is passed and it is reckoned. In Genesis 21-12, it says, But God said to Abraham, Do not be distressed about the boy and your slave woman. Listen to what Sarah tells you because it is through Isaac, through Isaac, that your offspring will be reckoned. God wants to do something through you. Satan wants you to just focus on your burdens constantly. Just a burden, I'm broken, I got all these things, I got all these issues, trauma, da, da, da, da, da, da.

Now, what God wants you to focus on is giving your burdens to him, walking alongside of him, picking up your cross, asking him to redeem that thing so that you can become a conduit for his blessing. You are going to conduct something. And God would have us rather conduct his cross. Like I said, the evanescent nature of the cross is the nature that the crosses pass, burdens pass, and then God moves us to a new place. I love that word, evanescence.

It is something that is limited. Your burdens are limited. Don't give them more power over you than your faith in Christ. Stop giving your burdens so much power. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. It isn't though I lay down. It's though I walk. We continue on and we continue to persevere into that thing. I said we're not going to get to point two. I want to go to some practical takeaways. I've just got one practical takeaway.

I want to finish with a story. I want to encourage you to reevaluate your burden. Ask God for his perspective of your burden. What's God doing with your burden? The scripture is clear that God wants to make the mysteries of the universe known to you. If he wants to do that, the mysteries of his very nature known to you, trust me, he has no problem letting you know why you have a burden. Sometimes it's weight. But he wants you to see it from a different perspective of something that he's doing in your life.

God is perfecting you as we persevere. The scripture talks about perseverance leads to hope. Hope leads to faith. And we move on through that progression. Reframe. Tear the house down. Reframe your burden back up and say, God, what are you doing? What am I learning? God, what have you taught me? Where can this burden take me? What do I need? What tools do I need? Where can I grow? Where can I use this to help other people?

Satan never wants you to see a burden that way. And when you start seeing a burden that way, he'll probably get tired of attacking you with that burden and try to find something new because you've turned the burden into a blessing. And you've turned the persecution into power. I want to say there's a quote from Helen Keller. And before I get to the quote, I want to show you a picture of Helen Keller. Helen Keller is an amazing person.

She was born in June 27, 1880. This is a picture of her with Ann Sullivan. If you know her, she lost everything, basically, at the age of 19 months. She lost her sight and she lost her hearing. Imagine losing that much. And someone came alongside of her, a mentor, Ann Sullivan, and began to teach her through touch on how to express emotions, how to speak, the use of Braille and these different things. She eventually would go on to get a bachelor's degree.

There's a picture here with her bachelor's degree. She is the first person ever to be deaf and, well, the old term was deaf and dumb, but it's deaf and blind, to have a degree of that nature. She wrote a book. She overcame challenges to become a renowned author, lecturer, advocate for people with disabilities. She then began to advocate and become a conduit for different causes. Women's suffrage. She was a pacifist movement, believed in peace, workers' rights, traveled all over the world, got numerous books, and ended up getting the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

There's another picture there. In 1968, she passed away, leaving behind a legacy of perseverance, courage, activism that continues to inspire generations today. She had a quote. This was her quote. Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, ambition inspired, and success achieved. Wow. It's powerful. I want to say God wants to turn your blessings, excuse me, your burdens into blessings, your troubles into triumph, and your trials, he wants to make them your greatest treasure other than Christ himself.

Amen? Let's stand. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. you. Thank you. mana you. mana you. familiar. تم you. mana you.