Audio As we study our Bibles, sometimes we come across passages that strike us as, well, for lack of a better word, a little weird. We are so far removed from many of the manners and customs of the ancient world that we have a hard time relating to what we are reading. And the stranger the story, the more the critics of the Bible love to use it as a point of contention with Christians. Peter says that the “untaught and unstable” take the “hard to understand” portions of Scripture and “distort” them “to their own destruction” (2 Pet 3:14-16). On more than one occasion, I have found myself sharing my faith with an unbeliever, only have them throw something out about God ordering Abraham to kill his son. In addition to the moral strangeness of this passage of Scripture, it is a favorite among those who accuse the Bible of containing contradictions. They will say, “How can God condemn human sacrifice in one passage and command it in another?” Leviticus 18:21 condemns the sacrifice of infants, and Leviticus 20:2 makes it a capital offense for a parent to offer their infants as sacrifices to the pagan deity Molech. It is a fair question, and one that deserves an answer if we are to give a reason for the hope within us (1 Pet 3:15). Of course, if we are going to answer the question, then we must understand this passage for ourselves, and I suggest that this is something many believers have yet to do.The text before us is not one of problems, per se, but it is one of God’s promise, purpose, provision, and plan. Here we find God’s promises to Abraham coming into fruition, being challenged, and coming into sharper focus as he commits himself to walk with God by faith and obedience. As we see these things taking shape in his life, we come to understand something of God’s promise, purpose, provision and plan for us. And it all centers around the reality that God will provide a lamb. We begin by considering … I. God’s promises cannot be thwarted (21:1-7). In our last study (Genesis 15), we looked at how God established and secured His covenant with Abraham, assuring him that the promises that would come to pass in his life and in his descendants were sure and certain because they rested on God’s faithfulness, and that alone. It was not a bilateral agreement, in which the terms demanded that Abraham do his part and God would do His part. No, God demonstrated that He would do all the parts! While Abraham slept, God proved Himself to be the guarantor of all of His promises. This is of great encouragement to us. The hymnwriter surely described the human race accurately when he said that we are “frail children of dust, and feeble as frail.” If the security of God’s promises rested in our ability to bring them to pass, we would all be doomed! We do not have the ability to hold onto God, but we rest in His ability to hold onto us! And this is how we know that His promises cannot be thwarted. In Chapter 21, we read of God fulfilling His promise to bring forth a son to Abraham. Beginning in Chapter 12, God repeatedly made promises to Abraham about how He would bless him and his descendants, and all nations through Abraham’s seed. But Abraham had no children, and his wife was barren and unable to conceive (Gen 11:30). In Chapter 15, Abraham raised a protest to the Lord, suggesting that since God had not yet delivered on His promise, a foreign born servant named Eliezer of Damascus would be his heir (15:2-3). But God’s response was, “One who will come forth from your own body … shall be your heir” (15:4). Keep in mind that Abraham was 75 years old when we first met him in Chapter 12, and time was ticking. Neither he nor Sarah were getting any younger and both were already well past the age of bearing children. So, in Chapter 16, they devised a plan to force God’s promise to fruition. Since Abraham would father a child according to God’s promise, and Sarah was barren, the plan was concocted for