Bring Us Not into the Time of Trial

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Matthew 6:13; Genesis 22:1-19

Well, looking at this verse of the Lord’s Prayer, the word temptation shows up in most translations of it.  As I mentioned a moment ago, I think the word should be translated as “Trial”.  “And bring us not into the time of trial” would be how I read it. I would like to make my case. So, there is a season of the Church Year that we all know as Lent where the topic of “temptation” comes up.  Lent is the forty days preceding Easter and traditionally it is supposed to be a time of introspection and self-denial that tastes of the Israelites’ wandering in the wilderness and/or Jesus forty days of fasting in the wilderness that culminated with his encounter with Satan.  Traditionally, Lent is to be a season to fast and to pray in an intentional effort to reawaken our sense of reliance on God for everything.  It’s good to undertake such a practice.  Fasting for a day or days at a time does have spiritual benefit.  So also, being more intentional about one’s prayer life certainly has spiritual benefit.  These two disciplines of intentional self-denial, fasting and prayer, have long been beneficial to so many as means of increasing one’s awareness of the presence of God in our lives.    

My rant on Lent is with how tacky some of this self-denial stuff became and how Lent got reduced to being about how we struggle with temptation to sin, which gets defined as carnal pleasure or carnal vice.  It went like this.  You know, someone asks “What are you going to give up for Lent?” and the answer would be chocolate, or coffee, or alcohol.  Some people would go as far as to try to give up smoking.  The idea was to give up your vice, your bad habit, and somehow resisting the temptation to resume that vice before the forty days of Lent was up was somehow supposed to lead to a greater sense of desire for God.  Typically, all that happened was that we became much more aware of how dependent we were on what we were giving up.  Moreover, that Jesus gave up his life in such a horrific way doesn’t seem to jive with our giving up chocolate.

This temptation centered approach to Lent just reduced the intent of Lent to being an exercise in how we deal with temptations to carnality.  It reduced our relationship to God, our practice of faith down to avoidance of those seven deadly sins that the medieval church was so preoccupied with: Pride, wrath, envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, and greed.  It focuses on sin rather than on what God has done.  God through the incarnation and faithfulness of Jesus the Son in the power and presence of the Holy Spirit according to the will and the love of the Father has and is saving his entire creation from evil, sin, and death.  Eternal life is knowing God the Father Son and Holy Spirit and God’s bring us into communion with God’s very self.  To reduce this wondrous new life-giving relationship with God down to how well me, myself, and I resist those things I’m prone to have a bad habit relationship with is more than just tacky.

Temptation is just not the right word.  It’s trial, a trial or testing of where our loyalties lie, a trial of faith.  A trial, not a temptation, is what the Israelites faced as they wandered through the wilderness.  In the harsh scarcity of the wilderness would they stay loyal to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who brought them there in order to prove himself faithful or would they serve the gods of the nations whom their faithful God drove out of the Land before them.  Too often the Israelites chose to serve the gods of the nations.  

It was a trial of identity that Satan put Jesus through in the wilderness when he tried to get Jesus to use his power and identity as Son of God to serve himself rather than God the Father.  Satan’s tests began with “if you are the Son of God”.  Early Christians also constantly faced the trial of staying loyal to Jesus in the context of being persecuted for their loyalty to him.  They lost their jobs, families, friends, homes, communities, and even their lives…they lost so much not just for having beliefs about Jesus but because they were personally loyal to him, a loyalty that came to them as a gift after having encountered him through the presence of the Holy Spirit, an encounter that changed their lives, healed them, gave them hope.  

A trial is having to go through something so difficult that it has the potential to crush our fidelity to Jesus.  And so, this verse in the Lord’s Prayer isn’t that the Father not bring us into a time or place where we are tempted to succumb to carnal pleasures but rather that God not bring us to situations or seasons in life that are so difficult they have the capacity to destroy our faith and hope in Jesus, our love for him, our loyalty to him.  Bring us not into the time of trial.

So, there you go but we’re not done yet.  We have to look at why we would pray that God not bring us or lead us into times of trial.  It seems that would go without saying.  Why would God bring us to or lead us to a trial?  I could understand the second part of the verse where it’s implied that it is the Evil One who brings about trials in our lives and we’ll talk about that next week.  Most assuredly, there is something called Satan out there who loves to try to destroy our relationship with God, but here it seems Jesus is telling us to ask that God the Father not bring us or lead us into those trials.  Let’s sort that out briefly.

The Greek word for “bring” or “lead” is interesting.  It’s a word used for bringing or leading an animal to sacrifice.  This part of the prayer sounds a lot like what God did in asking Abraham to bring his son Isaac to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice him.  Isaac was the means to God fulfilling his promise to Abraham.  God had promised to give Abraham the Land we know as Israel/Palestine and make his descendants a great nation on that land that would be a blessing to all other nations.  The promise seemed impossible from the get go because God made it to Abraham when he was in his 90’s and Sarah in her 80’s.  Short of a miracle, it is all but impossible for people that old to produce children.  Yet God gave them Isaac and the name Isaac means laughter because both Abraham and Sarah laughed at the idea of having a child in their old age.  

So, why would God ask Abraham to lead, to bring Isaac his only son, the child of the promise to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice him.  I cannot emphasize enough the horror of this event especially for the almost teenage boy Isaac and the men who accompanied them.  The jury is out on how Abraham really felt.  The biblical account speaks of Abraham’s unwavering confidence that God would provide the sacrifice, that God would keep his promise.  This sheer confidence kept Abraham from succumbing to the sheer horror of it all and refusing to do as God asked.  Abraham followed through right up to the point of bringing the knife down on Isaac and God stopped him and provided a sacrifice…just as Abraham had been telling Isaac.

So, if I were to try to pull together the drift of this part of the Lord’s Prayer, we’re asking God the Father to not test or not let our loyalty to Jesus be tested by Satan by our having to go through things horrible enough to make us lose faith.  But, we still have to wrestle with the fact that the feathers still hit the fan and the gory part that we have to accept is that God lets them and the purpose of that is so that God can prove his faithful love to us and our faithfulness to him.  I’ll talk more about this next week looking at the Book of Job and the horrible bet Satan and God made with respect to proving Job’s loyalty to God.

For now, let me mention a few things.  Trials happen so how do we respond?  Well, Abraham had full confidence in God and God’s promise to him, full enough to carry through on God’s asking him to seemingly obliterate the promise by making a child sacrifice of Isaac which was a common practise in the surrounding nations of kings who wished to make themselves and their kingdoms great and powerful.  We’re typically not going to be giants of faith like Abraham was when facing trials.  We will have our doubts, our anger, our sense of righteous indignation towards God for letting this “blank” happen.  In my walk I have found that taking time to sit in the presence of God to read the Scriptures and to pray is truly beneficial.  God gets through to us with words of assurance and a sense of his presence with us.   

I’m reminded of when Jesus, just after feeding that huge crowd on five loaves and two fish, sent his disciples out in a boat while he stayed back to pray.  He sat on a hillside and watched as a wind storm came up and the waves battered the boat threatening to kill them.  Jesus walked to them on the water in the midst of that storm.  They thought he was a ghost which only compounded the fear.  But he said to them, “Have courage.  It is I.  Don’t be afraid.”  He got in the boat and calmed the storm.  Don’t be afraid of trials.  God hasn’t forgotten you.  He’s got his eye on you.  He’ll show up when the time is right and the storm will go away.

I’m reminded of the words of Paul at the opening to his first letter to the Corinthian churches.  He says: “For in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind— just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you— so that you are not lacking in any gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ.  He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.  God is faithful, by whom you were called into the partnership of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord (1 Cor. 1:5-9).

I’m also reminded of when Paul talks of how he prayed earnestly, multiple times for Jesus to heal him of this horrible, oozy eye disease that he had.  Oddly, Jesus refused and told him: “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.”  We grow stronger through these trials.  

Again, Paul says, “No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it (1 Cor 10:13).  

When you find yourselves in the midst of trials and struggling to not renounce your loyalty to Jesus, draw close to him and he will draw close to you.  Don’t be afraid, he will strengthen you.  He will in time bring the trial to an end and you will be the better for it.  You will know him better and the trial will have been the vehicle of God to produce in you the fruits of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  Amen.

A Family Calling

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Genesis 22:1-19  

My father and I had some pretty good times together when I was a young.  Dad taught me all kinds of things.  I remember him trying to teach me to play guitar one Christmas morning when I was four or five.  He taught me how to use a hammer and a saw, even a circular saw.  How to frame in a wall and paint a house.  How to mow grass and trim bushes.  He left it to Granddaddy to show me how to butcher a chicken.  Dad taught me how to plant and tend a garden.  He taught me how to fish and the basics of hunting.  

About hunting, the last time we went hunting together became an odd adventure.  I was fifteen.  We did the normal thing.  Before sunrise we drove to Dan’s Camp and walked up the trail on a ridge.  He told me to stand by this tree.  He walked on a way’s further to stand under another tree.  We stood and watched and waited and froze and as was typical for us, the sun came up but the deer didn’t.  Once the trees were glistening in the sunlight he came back and we walked down the ridge trail to get in the car.  We started putting the guns safely back into the car. He took the shell out of the chamber of his shotgun, but forgot to unload the magazine.  When he closed the gun back up a shell unknowingly loaded into the chamber.  With the gun pointed at the ground between us, he pulled the trigger to uncock it and kaboom.  A round of buckshot hit the ground about ten inches in front of my feet.  How I didn’t catch the ricochet is a mystery.  I think we both lost our nerve for hunting that morning.  I did go out a few times with my brother when I was in my thirties.  That was just in case he shot something I could help him drag it back.  But Dad never hunted again after that.    

My father was also a man of faith; though it took losing nearly everything for Dad to come to faith in Christ.  I was probably eleven or twelve when God touched him.  My parent’s divorce had finalized and his work made it so he had to live in another town about a half hour away.  He sold insurance and surprisingly he was able to build his agency up from scratch during separation and divorce and to do so in such a way as to be recognized as one of the most successful agents in the company.  Unfortunately, for something I’ll call a personality conflict with his regional supervisor, they let him go.  He had to start over from scratch with another company.  He was a beaten man.  He told me of a time in the midst of that painful transition with all the feelings of failure, rejection, financial stress, and dysphoria of how he was out for a drive one day and he took a friend’s advice and began to pray.  He said the next thing he knew the warmest feeling of peace he’d ever felt just washed over him and he knew Jesus was real and everything would be okay.  He came to faith.

Looking towards our reading, I don’t want to compare my dad to Abraham and say he had the faith of Abraham or anything like that.  But I will say, and it may not make sense, Dad did not withhold his youngest son, me, from the Lord.  He had faith talks with all four of us, his children.  But with me, he rather strongly encouraged me to pursue what it was that Jesus was calling me to and in my case, it was pastoral ministry.  I guess he saw something in this shy kid with esteem problems that nobody else saw.  He wanted me to do what God wanted me to do because he knew it would be best for me for I would find life, purpose, and hope.

Looking at our reading, Abraham and Isaac, father and son, took a difficult walk one day.  Part of the purpose of the walk, in the end I think, was for God through Abraham to pass on to Isaac the live or die nature of faith that was incumbent in the promise that God had made to Abraham to give him a land and make his descendants to be a great nation that would be a blessing to all other nations.  The faith of Abraham must become Isaac’s too.  The promise God made to Abraham must be owned by Isaac too.  Yet, this promise was not something for Abraham or his descendants to take into their own hands to make happen.  They must let God provide.  That walk was a horrific venture. If it would have happened today, most likely the two young men that accompanied them would have contacted Children's Aid who would have come and removed Isaac from the care of Abraham and Sarah.  Then, once the whole incident hit the papers they would have been branded as delusional religious fanatics and shamed into reclusion. 

But Abraham wasn't delusional.  God had really spoken to him, directly.  It happens people.  God had called Abraham by name and asked him to do something really horrific, sacrifice his own son.  Why?  Was it just a test Abraham's faithfulness?  But then for Abraham to carry through with it.  Just try to imagine how utterly terrified Isaac must have been; Abraham too.  Why was God demanding this obscenely horrible thing?  Why was God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, the one through whom the Promise God had made to him would be fulfilled?

That’s a big question to which we must in the end step back and scratch our heads.  Regardless, there was a point being made here, particularly with Abraham.  Abraham and Sarah had a problem with God’s promise.  The problem was they didn’t trust God to make it happen and rather tried to make it happen themselves.  When they did this, they truly made a mess of things.  Just a couple of examples.  Abraham and his family were nomadic in the land that God was giving them and God hadn’t given it to him just yet.  He had a policy that when they passed into the land of another king of telling the king they told everybody that Sarah was his sister instead of his wife.  He did this so that the king wouldn’t kill him and take Sarah as his own.  If the king believed she was his sister he might still take her as his own, but at least they wouldn’t kill Abraham.  Abraham time and again evidenced that he didn’t trust God to protect him from other kings.  There was also Ishmael.  Sarah, being too old to bear children, didn’t believe God could give them a child through her so she gave her slave, Hagar, to Abraham to bear children in her name.  Thus, Ismael.  

This lack of trusting God comes to a head here with God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.  To Abraham God keeps calling Isaac, “your son, your only son”, which Isaac was not.  Ishmael was still Abraham’s son, his firstborn son actually, whom he had just sent him away with Hagar into the desert wilderness where there was the very high risk of them dying from exposure.  Though it is not noted in the story, there is something to be aware of; Canaanite kings had a practice of sacrificing their firstborn son to one of their gods believing it would make themselves to be powerful kings.  When Abraham sent Ismael off into the wilderness to die of exposure, it was, in a sense, a way for Abraham to sacrifice his firstborn as did those other powerful Canaanite kings who lived in the Land God was promising to give him.  Abraham could make himself a great and powerful king by sacrificing his firstborn and that would make his descendants more likely to become a great nation as God had promised.  

To correct that horrible lack of faith God has Abraham put Isaac on the block.  He takes Isaac on a walk to the place where the Jerusalem Temple would one day stand accompanied by two other men for the purpose of sacrificing Isaac.  Yet, all Isaac and the two men know is that they are going to make a sacrifice.  They are going to worship, but where’s the sacrifice?  In the end, after much obscene horror everybody learns “The Lord will provide.”  Isaac learned his father would have killed him to stay faithful to his God.  He and Abraham both learned that Isaac is the child of God’s promise and God will let no harm come to him.  And, in the very least the way to becoming a great king of a great nation is not sacrificing your children but through faithfulness to God.  I don’t know if that makes sense, but it’s all I got.

Back to my father and me.  When I was sixteen, I went to spend a weekend with my father and for some strange reason he decided to talk to me about the Lord.  In the midst of that conversation, even though I hadn’t been all that churched he asked me if I had ever considered becoming a minister.  Oddly, that was something that had been floating around in the back of my mind but I would rather consider first being a lawyer or doing something in the field of science.  He shared that he had once felt that he might have been called to be a minister, but he didn’t think he was smart enough so he didn’t pursue it.  But also, he felt his work as an insurance agent was like being in the ministry in that he got to visit a lot of people and help them make sure they were protected against catastrophe and that he believed that the insurance business picked up where the church left off in being able to help people recover from major loss.  Dad just wanted to know if maybe I had felt the call.  He didn't push me, but that conversation sprouted a seed that a couple of years later took root.  Once it did, Dad more than anyone else encouraged me. 

I hold my father responsible for instilling in me the notion of pursuing what God was calling me to rather than what I or other people thought I ought to do.  He really was the only one in the family that I could talk to about my calling and not feel defensive or inadequate or like I had lost my mind.  He was a good father to me and what made him good was that he encouraged me to pursue what Jesus wanted for my life rather than just tell me to go figure out what I wanted to do or what I could do to the best of my ability to be successful.  

To reflect upon this a bit, one of the most important life questions parents can discuss with their children and grandparents with their grandchildren is the notion that there is a higher purpose to their lives than just being what they want to be and doing what they want to do.  The United States Army years ago had a recruiting slogan that was as effective as Nike’s “Just do it”.  It was “Be all that you can be…in the Army”. Military service aside, the idea of being all that you can be is pretty prevalent in our culture.  I don’t think it’s at all wrong to aspire to be all you can be as so many seem to lack that aspiration or are just to hopeless about the future to step up.  I just offer the question who or what defines what that all is.  This question is especially pertinent in a culture whose primary source of what it calls Truth (capital T) is what feels true to me from what I gather from social media.  Feeling is not fact.  We, the disciples of Jesus, have a calling incumbent to us that we offer Jesus and his way of the cross as the definition of what that all is.  This requires that we live accordingly so that the Truth we offer as Jesus is credible.

Young people today are growing up in a world that seems hopeless.  They are saddled with problems as big and as complex as this planet and its weather systems getting out of hand because we are addicted to fossil fuels.  They live in a world for which a fitting metaphor of the way things are is  that of the kings of Canaan sacrificing their children so that they themselves, not their children, can have all that they can have.  We want our children to be able to be all that they can be but the world we are saddling them with is ready to implode because we have gone about being all that we can be in very self-serving and might I add hedonistic ways.  (Hedonism is just doing what feels pleasurable to me.)  We haven’t been pursuing happiness.  We’ve been pursuing pleasure.  There’s a big difference.

Anyway, what my father did in pointing me in the direction of seeking what it was that God wanted me to be and do is, I think, a paramount task in parenthood and grandparenthood today.  That there is a peace and a love that surpasses understanding yet heals when it touches us is something we need to encourage our young people to seek.  We can’t force it upon them.  We can’t coerce them into following Jesus.  We just need to share the one we have found, testify to his love and faithfulness, and live accordingly.  The way of the cross leads home.  Amen.