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Exegetical theology: The “Sacrifice” of Isaac. Part 3: A Glimpse of God’s Heart
At the “sacrifice” of Isaac in Genesis 22, God gives us a glimpse of his own heart. More than anyone else in history, Abraham’s experience brought him closer than ever (albeit still infinitely far away) to understanding the heartbreak and destruction God himself would endure when he offered his own Son as the great sacrifice to rescue the world.
What God commanded Abraham to do was unthinkable! It was child sacrifice, an evil injustice the Lord detests and forbids (e.g., Deuteronomy 18:10; Leviticus 20:2-3; Jeremiah 19:5). Throughout the Bible, God consistently demonstrated his disdain for any who sacrificed their child. It was an abomination. And yet, long before giving the law to Israel on Mount Sinai (including the prohibition against such crimes against children), God commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, only to thwart his act of obedience right before the knife fell.
In essence, through this dress rehearsal for Calvary with Abraham and Isaac, God was saying, “No one is to ever sacrifice their own child—ever! No one, except for me.”
The night before he died, Jesus prayed to the Father with such affection and harmony that could only be known by the eternal Father and the eternal Son. He spoke of the love the Father had for him since before the creation of the world, and he asked that all who believe in him would be with him and would see his glory (John 17:24). The only way for us to be in that heavenly glory with him would be for Jesus to be the substitutionary sacrifice. The Father must unleash his just wrath for our sins. To spare us, he let the knife of his judgment fall on his own Son so that we can go free.
The narrative of Genesis 22 demonstrates how agonizing this experience was for Abraham. How his heart must have broken with each step that led him closer to the place the Lord would show him! Though it was horrific, Abraham got just a glimpse of the agony God the Father and God the Son would experience at Calvary. In ways we cannot fully understand or explain, somehow the Trinity faced cosmic separation and brokenness as the Father turned his back on his one and only Son, unleashed the full brunt of the punishment our sins deserved (2 Corinthians 5:21; 1 Peter 2:24), and offered up as the ultimate sacrifice the one he so perfectly loved from all eternity.
How could such perfect love and unity within God willingly face such horrific sacrifice, separation, and pain?
This is God’s heart. A heart that is willing to be cosmically broken and grieved.
For us. All for us. This is how God loved the world. Sacrifice that would hurt him the most.
So we can go free. So we can be with him forever.
As horrific as Abraham’s experience was, it was just a glimpse. But what a glimpse into the heart of God!
Kurtis Wetzel is a pastor at Cross of Christ in Boise and Nampa, Idaho.
Systematic Theology: Quick Review: The Three Genera of the Personal Union
Who is Jesus? He is true God and true man. He has two distinct natures. And yet these two natures are so closely united that they cannot be divided in his person. This relationship is described as the personal union of the two natures of Jesus Christ. To elucidate and defend these truths, Lutheran dogmaticians have categorized three genera, or types, of passages that speak about the two natures of Christ and the relationship between those two natures.
“You killed the author of life.” (Acts 3:15) – The Genus Idiomaticum
Everything that is true of the one nature of Christ is true of the other nature of Christ, as well. Therefore, it can rightly be said that God got tired. God felt emotion. God grew in knowledge. It can also be said that Jesus, who was born of Mary, is eternal. Although he is the Son of Man, he is from heaven. No matter what you call Jesus, no matter what you ascribe to him, all his names and all his actions fully apply to the one person of Christ. The names and acts are interchangeable in the two natures. This aspect of the personal union is described as the genus idiomaticum.
“In Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form.” (Colossians 2:9) – The Genus Maiestaticum
Nothing can be added to Christ’s divine nature because it already possesses everything. Christ’s human nature has nothing to contribute to the divine nature of Christ. The divine nature of Christ, however, makes the human nature of Christ majestic. The divine nature adds omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, and honor to the human nature. This aspect of the personal union is described as the genus maiestaticum. However, this does not annul the fact that the human nature now fully possesses all these divine attributes. Rather, the human nature possesses the divine attributes by the reception of a gift. The divine nature possesses those divine attributes essentially.
“The blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.” (1 John 1:7) – The Genus Apotelesmaticum
Because many have stumbled over the biblical truths stated in the first two genera, they have muddied the practical application of these truths. The practical application is the third genus, the genus apotelesmaticum. According to this genus, both Christ’s human nature and his divine nature contribute something to each of his acts. Each nature contributes that which is characteristic to each. For example, any miracle Jesus performed illustrates this third genus. Christ’s divine nature contributed his ability to heal the sick, to give sight to the blind, and to raise the dead. His human nature contributed his ability to touch the sick, to make mud and put it in the blind man’s eyes, and to take the dead girl by the hand. We see the great practicality of this third genus most clearly when we consider Christ’s work of redemption. Christ’s humanity contributed his ability to die. His divinity contributed the ability for his death to count for the salvation of the whole world. The contributions of both natures are essential for our salvation.
In the following passage, Martin Luther doesn’t use the term genus apotelesmaticum. Nevertheless, he is certainly speaking beautifully about the practical comfort found in this genus. In his commentary on John 14, Luther wrote:
As has often been stated, all this makes it possible for us to withstand the devil and to vanquish him in the hour of death and at other times when he terrifies us with sin and hell. For if he were to succeed in persuading me to regard Christ as only man who was crucified and died for me, I would be lost. But if my pride and joy is the fact that Christ, both true God and true man, died for me, I find that this outweighs and eclipses all sin, death, hell, and all misery and woe. For if I know that He who is true God suffered and died for me, and also that this same true man rose from the dead, ascended into heaven, etc., then I can conclude with certainty that my sin was erased and death was conquered by Him, and that God no longer views me with anger and disfavor; for I see and hear nothing but tokens and works of mercy in this Person.[1]
Rev. Shane Krause serves at St. Paul’s Lutheran in Onalaska, WI.
[1] Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, Vol. 24, Sermons on the Gospel of St. John Chapters 14-16, American Edition, p.108.
Historical Theology: Early Lutheran Martyrs, Part 3
The past two months we have looked at three of the first Lutheran martyrs—Hendrik Vos and Jan van den Esschen, burned at the stake on July 1, 1523, and Hendrik van Zutphen, tortured, beaten to death, and burned on December 10, 1524. There were others we are not covering in detail in this series. For instance, we know that Caspar Tauber, a merchant in Vienna, was beheaded for his associations with Lutheranism on September 17, 1524, and his corpse was then burned. (When the executioner removed Tauber’s red hat, Tauber told him to take it and wear it in his honor.) Also, a bookseller named Johann, connected to the Cordatus family, was executed in Buda (now western Budapest) in Hungary in 1524 for selling Lutheran books. There were others whose executions escaped the notice of the broader public, though not the Lord’s notice.
One such execution that initially escaped broader notice was that of Georg Scherer in Radstadt in the Archbishopric of Salzburg (now Austria) in 1528. We know of him only because Matthias Flacius printed his “final confession” of faith in 1554, in order to encourage “the persecuted Christians” in the Archbishopric of Salzburg in the aftermath of the 1553 provincial synod of Mühldorf. Flacius was a master of obtaining obscure or otherwise hard-to-obtain documents; his publication of Scherer’s confession is but one proof.
From the confession, apparently recorded as part of interrogations during Scherer’s imprisonment, we learn that he was a secular priest for nine years before joining the Franciscan order. (A secular priest has not taken the vows of any religious order.) He became a Franciscan, thinking that “God had endowed [him] with what was necessary for that life,” but found himself badly deceived on that point. Around 1525 he left the order, partly out of disgust with the monks’ envy, hatred, quarreling, and hypocrisy, and partly moved by Reformation literature.
After preaching the gospel in Radstadt for a time, he was arrested and condemned. His sentence was eventually commuted from burning to beheading, although his corpse was still to be burned. Arriving at the site of his execution, he said a bold prayer to God and then declared publicly to the spectators, “As surely as I will die as a Christian for the word of the Lord, so surely I will give a sign.” After being beheaded, he fell on his belly and lay there “as long as it takes for a person to eat an egg.” Then his body slowly turned over onto its back, the right foot positioned over the left, the right hand over the left. When the authorities and spectators saw this, they were astonished and buried his corpse instead of burning it.
Scherer’s memory was resurrected after the archbishop of Salzburg finally banished all the Lutherans from his territory in 1731, resulting in an exodus of more than 20,000 people.
For Further Reading
Contemporary German account of Caspar Tauber’s arrest and execution
The Final Confession of Georg Scherer, with a preface by Matthias Flacius (English)
Oliver K. Olson, Matthias Flacius and the Survival of Luther’s Reform (2002), esp. pages 200–201.
Rev. Nathaniel Biebert serves at Trinity in Winner, South Dakota.
Practical Theology: The Church that Preaches Sin & Grace
I have served in a variety of places throughout my 15 years of ministry, from Wisconsin, to Texas, and now Colorado. Each place had its own challenges and opportunities for ministry and its own view of church. Colorado is the first place I have served where church isn’t “a thing” and where churches are so few. I don’t mean that there are just a few WELS churches and plenty of other denominations. There just aren’t a lot of churches in Colorado, period. Attending a church isn’t part of the culture in Colorado.
In Texas, lots of people attended church or at least claimed they did. When I lived and served in Wisconsin, there were many WELS churches close to one another. I assumed that solid preaching and ministry could be found in all parts of the United States. I thought growing up, naively, that most people went to church or had that as part of their culture. However, now that I am in Colorado planting a church, I meet a lot of people who do not or have not ever attended a church. Many do not care about churches or look at them in a negative way.[1] Some even move to Colorado to “get away from church,” as one lady said to me. Unchurched people are everywhere. The unchurched are one of their primary audiences of church planters, who are sent to reach the lost.
However, the lost are not just those who have never believed in Christ, but also those who have stopped going to church or have left their church for a variety of reasons. There are plenty of people in my community who are dechurched (left the church for one reason or another) or are “little churched” (they rarely attend a church). That has opened an opportunity for our church’s ministry.
We take for granted that sin and grace are just part of preaching and the DNA of a Christian church. Sadly, that is not often the case. That is prevalent in my area where people associate “church” with little biblical substance or a very moralizing message from the pulpit.
Enter Tony and Suzy, who attended our church several times before deciding to join our Bible 101 class. They had a Baptist and Catholic background but had not found a church home for many years. As we went through Bible 101, Bible classes, and worship services, they commented again and again. “I didn’t know there was still a church in our area that shares sin and the Savior Jesus.” Sin and grace, what a novel concept!
Tony and Suzy are not the only people to comment on that. We have several families who are part of our congregation today because our preaching and worship centers around sin and grace. They were relieved to find a church that “still talks about Jesus as the Savior.” They found comfort in the life-saving gospel so clearly revealed in Scripture. As a result, we lean into that in how we talk about our congregation. It is front and center for guests, as it should be. We do not pretend to be something we are not, but rather, proclaim Christ as the only way to salvation.
The whole experience reminds me of Paul’s words to Timothy.[2] What can we learn from this?
- Be preachers of sin and grace. Our congregations will have mission statements and taglines. All well and good. However, they will never replace the necessity of proclaiming salvation through Christ.
- The one thing the human soul needs is to hear the depths of its lostness and the completeness of its salvation in Christ. That will never change.
- Lean into who we are as Christ-centered, confessional Lutherans. There are many in our towns and cities who think church has become or is just a place for political rhetoric, moralizing pep talks or worse. We can show them a better way!
Rev. Jeremy Belter serves at Living Stone, a mission church in Arvada, CO.
[1] This is a growing, continuing trend in our country and not just Colorado as this article reiterates. Has the rise of religious ‘nones’ come to an end in the US? | Pew Research Center.
[2] 2 Timothy 4:2-5