Is there a Ram in Your Thicket?

Is There a Ram in Your Thicket? (June 26, 2005)

“And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son.” Genesis 22:13

One of the biggest problems today in our churches is biblical illiteracy. It used to be that if you had a title with the words “ram” and “thicket” everyone would know what that meant. Many would know the English translation from the King James of “the Lord will provide” – “Jehovah Jireh”. No longer. Biblical illiteracy is at an all time high. I've noticed that on the TV show “Jeopardy” any category having to do with the Bible is the last chosen.

The story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of his son – Isaac in Jewish and Christian understanding, Ishmael in Muslim understanding – is one of the great stories in world religions, it has had an incalculable power and effect wherever it has been told.

This story was crucial to the 19 th century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who built his whole theme of “the leap of faith” of this story, faith flying in the face of evidence all around.

The late Presbyterian theologian John Leith said both the Scriptures and every page of John Calvin assume the immediacy of God's activity in the world, God's beneficial provision for us in times of trial, his providential care – and this is perhaps the biggest challenge to Christian faith today where many people in a post-18th century Enlightenment age assume exactly the opposite, that the world is unfriendly, that if there is a God He simply made the world and went away and left it to its own devices and that it is absurd to say he cares for the individual, no matter what Jesus said. That, said Dr. Leith, is the big dividing line and the big challenge for Christianity.

In both testaments in the Bible Abraham is the great figure of faith. He could have stayed behind in Ur of the Chaldees and not taken any risks, but he and Sarah followed God's call, risking all, going from their own country to a land they did not know. They were, in that sense, not unlike many people in this church who have left all to come to a new land. Your journey is like Abraham's, full of faith, faith in God, faith in themselves, faith in the future. And all of you can attest in your own ways that God does provide.

The philosopher Thomas Carlyle said, “A man lives by believing something, not by debating and arguing many things.” This was Abraham. He believed something, and he took the risk. He went out not knowing where he was to go. The leap of faith.

Then, as we heard two weeks ago, in their old age he and Sarah were promised a son. They thought the idea was hilarious. It was so hilarious that Sarah, listening by the flap of the tent, laughed out loud. She later denied she laughed, but she did indeed laugh. So did Abraham. It was such a sketch that when their son was born they named him “laughter”. Isaac.

Now in today's story God threatens to undermine the whole thing by calling for the sacrifice of Isaac. Here we are in a murky area of an ancient time when people practiced this sort of thing. There is a development of religion and faith in the Bible and not everything is of the same high plane. We should certainly not make this story out to say that God condones human sacrifice.

Alas, too often there have been terribly misled people who have done that to both adults and children, thinking they were doing God's will – one thinks of the horrible sight of the carnage in Jamestown, Guyana, or later in Waco, Texas, or the daily reports from Baghdad of terrible bombings with innocent lives, often of children, as the result, and all done, we might add, by people who felt they were “doing God's will”. This story can be so twisted to support that kind of awful thinking.

The right way to take this story, this story of faith to be sure, is to focus on the ram in the thicket. When I take the Confirmation class to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and we stand before a Titian or Caravaggio, I always say look for the ram in the thicket. It's always there. The ram stands for the gracious provision of God. In Christian art the ram is a symbol for Christ, the sacrifice slain in our place.

Like Abraham we are sometimes called to accept what we cannot fully understand. Woodrow Wilson, who was a Presbyterian and the son of a Presbyterian minister and grew up in a manse, became president of Princeton before becoming governor of New Jersey and then President of the U.S. during World War I, said “My life would not be worth living if it were not for the driving power of religion, of faith, pure and simple. I have seen all my life the arguments against it without ever having been moved by them. These are people who believe only so far as they understand. That seems to be presumptuous and sets their understanding as the standard of the universe. I am sorry for such people.”

The faith of Abraham is the faith of one who believes that God will bring good out of apparent evil and defeat; he will provide a “ram in the thicket”. In the New Testament the “ram in the thicket” is the resurrection of Christ. Like Abraham, Jesus in Gethsemane was in a position of having to choose, and he chose the Promise of God, and he put himself in his heavenly Father's hands. In his teachings Jesus said clearly that not a sparrow falls from the tree without his heavenly Father's knowledge, that even the hairs of our head are numbered, and he truly cares for us. Then he himself underwent the ultimate test but God raised him from the dead. God did provide in a powerful and earthshaking way.

Leslie Weatherhead wrote: “When I see Him nailed to a cross and yet looking up into the face of God and calling God ‘Father', I find myself saying over and over again that there are things I cannot understand, there are things which would seem to contradict the loving nature of God; but, if Jesus says that God is a Father, and if Jesus can leave His life in the Father's hands and be certain, by faith, that all will work out well in the end, I can leave my life to Him, and I can commit to His capable hands the lives of others and get them, even in the hour of darkness, to hold on in the dark.”

This week one of the persons who has been with Billy Graham in Flushing Meadow is Jimmy Carter. In his best selling book “Living Faith” Jimmy Carter talks about how crushed he and Roselyn were in 1980 by his defeat. They had so many plans for his second term, but they all seemed derailed by the hostage crises, the energy crisis, and other events out of his control. Then on top of that they learned from their financial advisors that their warehouse business in Georgia was broke and that they were nearly a million dollars in debt. This was a test, a test of their Christian faith. But through prayer and determination they made it through. God gave them a new vision of what they could do in the world, especially through Habitat for Humanity, they had something new in which to pour their energies. And they came through the financial problems fairly quickly. They never gave up their faith in the providential care of God, through thick and thin.

We had a man in this church years ago named Powell. He was withdrawn and did not go out of his way to mix with others. But he loved to come here to worship. He had numerous health problems including emphysema, then he lost his job at Macy's, and his world seemed to be caving in on him. He came to see me and we would talk and pray and we'd have lunch together at Tony Roma's in Kew Gardens . Then one day he called to tell me he had received an inheritance of $1 million from an aunt in Virginia . A little later he said he wanted to air condition the church, which he did, and today we are very happy for it. Not long later he died in his apartment. He and I had eaten together twice that week.

In many ways his life was sad, but faith was a great consolation for him and there is no doubt that when he needed it, there was a ram in his thicket.

The Lord did provide.