All this I judge to have a great character in it. But I will not any longer stay here; for there is still more in this fine life of faith which our father Abraham, through grace, tracked to the very end, holding still the beginning of his confidence.
And here let me say, this life of faith is, in other words, life spent in the power of resurrection. It is the life of a dead and risen man. It is a lesson, if one may speak for others, hard indeed to be learnt to any good effect, but still it is the lesson, the practical lesson of our lives, that we are a dead and risen people. At the outset Abraham, in spirit, took that character. He left behind him all that nature or the world had provided him with. He left what his birth introduced him to, for that which faith introduced him to. And as he began, so he continued and ended, with failings by the way indeed, and that too again and again, but still to the end he was a man of faith, a dead and risen man.
As such an one he had received Isaac, some twenty years ago, not considering his own body now dead, neither yet the deadness of Sarah's womb; and as such an one he now offers him on the altar at the word of the Lord. The promise was God's--that was enough for him. For faith is never overcome. It has divine, infinite resources. The believer fails again and again; but faith is never overcome, or comes short of its expectation. xxii.
This is the way of faith, when Isaac was demanded.[12] And the same overcoming faith we trace in the very next scene, the burial of Sarah. This was the same faith, the faith of a dead and risen man, the faith which had already received Isaac, and offered Isaac, now buries Sarah. Abraham believed in resurrection, and in God as the God of resurrection, the God who quickens the dead, and calls those things that be not as though they were. The cave of Machpelah tells us this. "Earth to earth, dust to dust, ashes to ashes, in sure and certain hope," was the language of Abraham's heart there. His purchase of that place, with all his care to make it his own, to have it as his possession, while beyond it he cared not for a single acre of the whole land, tells us of his faith in resurrection. His treaty for it with the children of Heth is like his words to his servants at the foot of mount Moriah, "Abide ye here with the ass, while I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you." Each of these things bespoke beforehand what he knew about his Isaac and his Sarah. He committed each of them into the hands of Him who, as he knew, quickens the dead. The corn of wheat dying, as he knew, was to live again. The handful of sacred dust, as he knew, was to be gathered again. Death itself was eyed in like victory of faith, as had already been eyed the fire, and the wood, and the beloved victim on the altar. xxiii.
These were the victories of faith again. Faith in our patriarch, after this manner, talked calmly with all circumstances, and won the day over them all in their turn. Beautiful victories of "precious faith"! And they are gained still. Faith still disposes of one circumstance after another as it rises. It meets our own personal condition as "dead in trespasses and sins;" it meets the difficulties and temptations of the way; it meets the last great enemy. Let me not make a wonder of meeting things on the journey, or at the end of it, if I have already met what withstood me at the outset. Faith will go to mount Moriah, or to the cave of Machpelah, if it have already gone out in the starry night with the Lord at Hebron. If it have met death in my own person, it may meet it in my Isaac or my Sarah. One speaks, the Lord knows, of His grace, and not of one's own experience. But still, beloved, let each of us say, Am I not at peace with God? Do I not know that He is for me? Do I not know that my estate of sin, guilt, and condemnation has been met in His grace? Do I not know that I am washed, accepted, adopted? Have I not gone out with Abraham, as in the night of chap. xv., and found relief for my own state by nature, and shall I then tarry on my way, though the trial of mount Moriah await me, or the death and burial at Machpelah? If faith have already met sin, it is to know itself conqueror over even death. Let our souls be accustomed to the thought that the brightest victory of faith was achieved at the beginning--that if at peace with God in spite of sin, we may reckon on strength and comfort from Him in spite of the trials of the way, and on power and triumph in Him in spite of the end of it. Faith which has done its first work has done its greatest work. "If, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by His life." God is glorified in these reckonings of faith. "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?"
It is the power of life over death, life in victory, that faith uses. It was such power of victorious life that Abraham possessed himself of by faith. The sepulchre is empty, and the grave-clothes are lying there, as the spoils of war. The deadness of his own body, the altar of his Isaac, and the grave of his Sarah, were visited and inspected by a risen man, in the light of the faith of Him who is the Quickener of the dead, and calleth those things that be not as though they were.
These are the great things of faith in the souls of the elect. But further still, in this fruitful, shifting history. Abraham, at the end, is seen to hold his first ground, as well as to work his earlier victories. He maintains, through grace, erect and firm, that very attitude which he had at once and at the first assumed, when by faith he hearkened to the call of God.
That call of God had done these two things with Abraham, I might say for Abraham; it had separated him from Mesopotamia, and yet left him a stranger in Canaan. From country, kindred, and father's house he had been withdrawn; but still, in the midst of that land and people to which he had come, he was to be but a pilgrim, dwelling as on the surface of it, in a tent, whatever part of it he might pass through or visit.
This position was very holy. His separation was twofold--separation from pollution, such as he might meet in Canaan; separation from natural alliances, such as he had been born into in Mesopotamia. He was under the call of the God of glory; and such a call made no terms with either the flesh or the world. In somewhat of Levite holiness, he did not know his mother's children; in somewhat of church holiness, he knew no man after the flesh. Nay; beyond even all this, in somewhat of the virtue of his divine Lord, he did not know himself. He was the heir of the land where he was a pilgrim. The promise of God was his, as surely as the call. He knew himself to be destined of divine, unimpeachable purpose, to dignities of a very high order. But to the end he was willing to pass unknown, entirely unknown. He talked of himself to the children of the land only as a stranger and a sojourner. He would pay for the smallest plot of ground which he wanted. He would be nothing and nobody in the midst of them. He never talked of the dignities which he knew, all the time, really attached to him. David, in like spirit, in other days, had the oil of Samuel on him, the consecration of God to the throne of the tribes of Israel; and yet he would be hid, and thank a rich neighbour, in his need, for a piece of bread. These men of God knew not themselves. This was the way of our Abraham; and this was the virtue of Him who, in this same departed, evil world, made Himself of no reputation, though God of heaven and earth.
Blessed virtues of soul under the power of the call of God, through the Holy Ghost! Mesopotamia is left, Canaan is estranged, and self is forgotten and hid! The call of God purposes to do at this day with us what in that day it did with Abraham. It would fain conform us to itself. Its authority is supreme. It is not that country or kindred are, of necessity, defiling. Nature accredits them; and the law of God, in its season, owns and enforces them. But the call of God is supreme, and demands separation of a very high, and fine, and peculiar order. And this was what addressed Abraham when he dwelt in Mesopotamia, the place of his birth, of his kindred, and of his natural associations, and this was what still echoed in his heart all the time of his sojourn in Canaan.