Father Abraham (Old Testament Figures) (Amy Cogdell)

Hope Chapel’s walk through the figures of the Old Testament jumped this Sunday from Noah to Abraham, and it changed hands: Matt Ryniker handed the pulpit to Amy Cogdell, who has spent the last two years, as she put it, “kind of lost in wonder, contemplating Abraham.” She has a book to show for it — My Father Abraham, written the previous year — and the message opened with a reading from it, delivered in a darkened room by Kevin Daniel before she stepped up to preach.

Thirteen chapters of Genesis is more than one Sunday can hold, so Amy narrowed to two: Genesis 15 and Genesis 22. Those two chapters, she said, hold two gifts entrusted to Abraham that are essential to our salvation — covenant and fatherhood.

What follows tracks her argument in order. Every section heading carries a timestamp link back to that moment in the recording.

About these notes. They were drawn from the recording and then rebuilt against Amy’s own sermon manuscript, which she supplied. The rule followed throughout: what she preached stands as the record. Her manuscript has been used to repair garbled audio, fix spellings and citations, and confirm her intent — never to replace her spoken words with her written ones. Where she wrote something she did not say on the day, it is quarantined in its own section, From Amy’s Written Notes, and labelled as such.

A Reading in the Dark

▶ 1:08:43

Matt warned the room that the sermon would begin with a reading rather than a sentence — something “artful,” he said, a way of approaching God speaking to Abraham. The lights went down. What followed was a meditation addressed directly to God, not to the congregation.

Amy’s manuscript names the reader and the staging: Kevin Daniel, reading with a slide of Genesis 12:1–4 displayed behind him. The text is Amy’s, from My Father Abraham; the voice was his.

It set the scene by subtraction. A voice, and that was all — except the stars and the trees. Creation was the only witness. No books, no rules, no religion. Legends, yes: a distant past in which God walked with men, sacrifice perhaps offered to powers unseen. But no examples, and no teachers, for the man God chose. “It had to be that way in the beginning,” the reading said — a walk led purely by the Spirit — and it named that as the beginning of salvation history and a foretaste of its end, when we will have no need of teachers because we will all know God directly.

Then it began to wonder aloud. What did God see in Abraham that moved Him so — enough to speak to him in human words, to entrust him with a promise dear to His own heart, to seal him with His friendship? Something similar, the reading guessed, to what He saw in Mary. Was it awe? Humility? Longing? How do You choose those to whom You open Your thoughts?

And what was it like for Abram the first time — when he realized that the One who called the universe into being was calling him, when that voice cried out from eternity and landed in Haran, upon him? It must have been electrifying, exhilarating, terrifying and consoling all at once. God’s voice is power and glory; it transcends human imagination. When we hear it our souls are shaken — “or rather they are plowed, laid bare and tested.”

Those who hear must respond, and the choice is simple but weighty: we will believe, or we will doubt. Those who dare to believe receive an eternal seed, which takes root in the soul — a seed of the same stock God gave to Abram.

The reading noticed how gradually God works. He spoke to Abram many times before releasing the great seed He had promised Eve in the garden, the seed that would grow into His own family tree — because before Abram could bear the weight of that promise, he had to trust the voice. “You are kind to Your prophets that way, introducing Yourself slowly, mindful that we humans are dust.” He gave Moses a burning bush before a pillar of fire. He fed Elijah with ravens before lifting him to heaven in a whirlwind. He showed Jeremiah a simple tree before revealing the boiling pot of destruction. He sent an angel to prepare Mary before overshadowing her Himself.

With Abram, the reading suspected, God began more slowly still — because He was doing an entirely new thing: choosing a people as His witness on earth. Abram knew Him as Creator, as God and Judge of all. But Isaac would know Him as the God of his father. Jacob would know Him as the God of Abraham and Isaac. And every man afterward would know Him as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

The reading closed on that humility: “I am astounded at such humility, that You would choose to be known by the name of men! You love this name, I think, for You are a Father Yourself.” Fatherhood is the joy from which God’s action springs; it is the end for which the world was made; it is the mystery into which He called Abram and his descendants.

Two Years Lost in Wonder

▶ 1:13:52

Amy named the source: the reading comes from the book she has written, My Father Abraham. Two years of contemplation had left her circling two questions. What does it mean for God to take a man as a friend? What does it mean for Him to lay hold of a people as His possession and inheritance?

Abraham, she pointed out, is one of the very few figures in Scripture called a friend of God — and he is the only Jewish man whom Gentiles can rightly call father, because God changed his name to Abraham, meaning father of many nations, and because he is a spiritual father to everyone who believes in his seed, Jesus the Messiah.

With the exception of Moses, she said, Jesus refers to Abraham more than any other Old Testament figure — twenty-six times in the Gospels. (She added the words “by name” at the pulpit; the manuscript reads simply “26 times in the gospels Jesus mentions Abraham.”) Amy has come to believe that emphasis is tied to Jesus’ love for the Father. Because Jesus knew He was the seed, the fulfillment of the promise to Abraham, He also understood His Father as a person who has friends — and who keeps His friendship with an undying love, for God is the God of the living and not of the dead.

She admitted how much she was leaving out. Abraham’s is one of the longer narratives in Scripture, spanning thirteen chapters — a very human, relatable story of faith and doubt, jealousy, hope, fear, pain, valor and love, with Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, Isaac, Lot, the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah, the mysterious Melchizedek arriving to bless Abraham, and even Pharaoh making an appearance. “It’s all a wonderful story and I highly recommend you go home and read it all.” But time was short, so: Genesis 15 and Genesis 22 — covenant and fatherhood.

Abraham Is a Type of the Father

▶ 1:16:25

She started with fatherhood, and with a distinction the series had already been building. Scripture is full of men who prefigure Christ — the congregation had met Adam and Noah already; Melchizedek, Moses and David belong on the list too. But Abraham is a type of the Father. “In this respect he is unique in Scripture.”

Then the hinge of the whole message. When God looked down from heaven and found a man He wanted to bless, out of all the riches and glory and honor He could have poured on His friend, the greatest gift He could possibly imagine was the gift of a son — and that is because a son is what is closest to the Father’s own heart.

◆ In her manuscript the sentence carries one more clause: the gift was “a promised son, born in freedom of his wife Sarah” — the Hagar-and-Sarah distinction Paul draws in Galatians 4. She let it go at the pulpit.

The love between the Father and the Son burns at the core of the Godhead, Amy said. It is His being — the love of Father, Son and Spirit. If all the material universe were to vanish tomorrow, the Father’s relationship with His Son would continue; the Trinity would go on perfectly happy, complete in the love of its persons. But the universe will not cease, and we will not be wiped away in a moment of anger, because God has extended His love to us. He intends to make us true brothers and sisters of His only begotten — and He has communicated that fatherly love by binding Himself with promises.

Which is the bridge to the second half: God’s fatherhood is expressed in His faithfulness, and His faithfulness is expressed most clearly and most explicitly in covenant. (Written: “expressed in both love and faithfulness.”)

Before the Covenant: Famine, Egypt, and Empty Hands

▶ 1:18:30

A quick review of how Abram arrived at that night. God called him out of Haran with “come to a land that I will show you, which I will give you” — and he went, with his wife Sarai. Shortly after they arrived in the promised land there was a famine. “Probably rather confusing,” Amy noted: they are finally there, and they have to leave.

In Egypt, Abram told Sarai she was so beautiful he feared the Egyptians would kill him to take her — would she please say she was his sister. Sure enough Pharaoh was captivated and took her; God intervened, Sarai was saved, and the family was sent out of Egypt very rich.

And then the years passed. Abram still did not possess the land. He had no offspring. That was the situation when the Lord spoke to him again, as He had in Haran.

The Verse That Lets the Gentiles In

▶ 1:20:34

Amy put the next verse on the screen and had the whole room read it out loud with her.

This verse, she said, is one of the most important in all of Scripture — and it is especially important to Gentiles, because it shows us how we enter salvation.

Remember when Abraham lived: before the law. He could not fulfill the law as an act of faith or righteousness — the option did not exist. Amy was careful here not to let that become a slight against the law. The law of the Lord is beautiful, converting the soul; the testimony of the Lord is right; all of it is righteous and glorious. It was a sign given to Israel as a wonder for the nations, and keeping it was for Jews an act of faith and worship. But Abraham himself could not participate in the feasts or the sacrifices of the Mosaic law. He was saved in exactly the same way we Gentiles are saved — by believing the promise of God.

Paul, she noted, goes further in Galatians: the promise to Abraham was in fact the gospel in seminal form. “I love this verse from Galatians” —

The Crazy Kind of Love God Has for His Friends

▶ 1:22:21

This is where the message stopped being an argument for a minute. “I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to think of Abraham as my father. I cannot tell you how happy I will be the day I am received into Abraham’s bosom.”

It must totally blow Abraham’s mind, she said, pointing around the room — to see me, and you, and you, and you: all the daughters and sons of the nations born to him thousands of years after he died, born because we believe in the Savior born of his line. “It makes my heart beat hard” to picture our Father God sitting next to Abraham, laughing with joy, showing His friend how far beyond anything he could have asked or imagined He has fulfilled — and is still fulfilling — the word He spoke.

Because on the day God called Abram, Amy said, he had no idea that God Almighty was going to entrust to him the lineage of His only begotten. “Who would dare to fathom that? Who could imagine that? What audacity could ever ask for that?”

“Oh, brothers and sisters, this is the crazy kind of love that God has for His friends.” And — she pressed — that is the same crazy kind of love and honor He is bestowing on us. She read 1 John 3:1 with her own adjective wedged into it: “Behold what manner of crazy, insane love it is, that we should be called the sons of God — and that is what we are.”

A Covenant Cut in Half

▶ 1:24:03

Abram already believed, and God was already moved by his belief. “God is moved by our belief. It touches Him. It touches Him when we believe things that we cannot see.” Abram was already righteous in His eyes — and yet God kept the conversation going. Amy’s reading of that: as God spoke, the Holy Spirit was burning in Abram’s heart, stirring up faith, so that he would ask for a sign. “How shall I know that I shall possess it?” Abram asks. God wanted the question. He wanted to give a sign. He wanted to enter into covenant — to write His word in stone, as it were, for generation after generation to ponder.

And He wanted something more: to draw Abraham further into the promise, into the mystery of the salvation He was going to work through Israel — a foretaste of a new covenant that was coming. Not to replace this one, Amy stressed, but to push us further into His heart and His plan.

God’s answer looks strange: prepare animals for sacrifice. Up to this point in the Old Testament there had been no prescribed sacrifices — nothing God had asked for specifically. Cain and Abel offered sacrifices; Noah offered a sacrifice; but what they brought seems to have been up to the giver. Here God is doing something different — telling Abram exactly how to prepare it, the way He would later do in great detail with Moses. Amy thinks these particular animals point toward the sacrifices of the tabernacle, and that the two birds speak of the redemption sacrifices that would be made for Jesus when He was presented in the Temple worship. And the arrangement is unusual: split in two, with a kind of aisle or passage running between them.

Waiting Was the Hallmark of Abraham’s Faith

▶ 1:27:00

“What I find even more fascinating than the sacrifice is the way God made Abram wait.”

He waited all day, driving birds away, not knowing what would become of the carcasses. Amy let the psychology of that sit. Did he wonder whether he had heard right — all of this had come to him in a vision, after all? Maybe I imagined it. Maybe I got it wrong. And God was in no hurry to put him out of that suspense.

Waiting, she said, was the hallmark of Abraham’s faith. He waited and waited and waited for the fulfillment of God’s word — just as the Jewish people waited and waited and waited for the Messiah, just as we wait and wait and wait for Jesus’ return.

“One of the primary lessons we learn from Abraham is that faith is largely a matter of waiting. So let us not grow weary in waiting.”

Terror and Great Darkness

▶ 1:28:17

When God finally did show up, He came in a way completely unfamiliar to Abram. Instead of speaking words of promise, He plunged him into deep darkness — a soul-shaking terror he would never forget.

That, Amy argued, was a gift. It was an encounter with the fear of the Lord, in which Abram was undone — like Moses before the burning bush, or like John, who fell like a dead man before Jesus in Revelation. The fear of the Lord was a seal on Abram’s heart, an assurance that he was not hearing voices or having delusions.

But this particular darkness, she believes, held another purpose too. It was a share in a mystery of salvation not yet revealed.

A Rehearsal of the Exodus, Centuries Early

▶ 1:29:50

Amy’s claim: the darkness Abraham experienced when the Lord made covenant with him was a foreshadowing of the darkness that would cover Egypt on the night of the Passover — terror covering the land as the angel of death passed over the houses of Abram’s descendants. And terror gripped the Israelites again as they stood at night on the banks of the Red Sea with Pharaoh’s army in pursuit.

That night of darkness and fear was the beginning of Israel’s identity as a nation. It was the night they saw the Lord’s deliverance. It was their first step toward home — their first step toward the fulfillment of the promise given to Abram concerning the land.

Why read the covenant as a prophetic — or, her word, proleptic — play of the Exodus? (The word is hers exactly; it appears in the manuscript.) She listed the visual signs: the darkness; the separating of the animals, like the parting of the sea; the smoking pot passing between the carcasses, which calls to mind the pillar of fire that led Israel through. But the clearest indication of all, she said, is what God says outright.

God Himself is referencing the enslavement in Egypt and the Exodus. He is, Amy said, drawing Abraham into mystical participation in an event centuries away — letting him experience the darkness, the passage, the mystery ahead of time, in a veiled way.

A Type Is Not a Literary Device

▶ 1:32:08

The early church fathers, she said, teach that we Christians also share in the mystery of the Exodus — backwards, through our baptism. Or to put it the other way around: the Exodus points forward to our baptism. Immersion in water is a sign of passage from spiritual death to life, from slavery to sin to the freedom of children — like Israel’s passage through the sea. So all of God’s people, past, present and future, Jew and Gentile, are caught up into one glorious story of salvation, typified in the Exodus.

God orchestrated that event with drama, light and sound, she said, so that our flesh and blood could grasp the glory of salvation. He was there with His people in the fire, blowing back the waters. Hundreds of thousands — perhaps well over a million — sons and daughters of Abraham stood breathless on the shore, decked out in gold jewelry, watching in wonder as God claimed them as His own. “It was the most awesome, dreadful, astounding spectacle human history had ever seen up to that point.”

Then the sentence she wanted underlined: “A type is not a literary device. It’s not a cool thing that authors use. A type is a physical, flesh-and-blood participation in a spiritual reality.” Every time we enact one of these types — communion, baptism, the feasts of Israel — we tie ourselves to the type, to the story, to the spiritual reality behind them. “Does that make sense?”

“What a mind-boggling statement — and I am not going to try to unpack that. I’m just going to leave it at that.” Christ was the rock. It is very close, she noted, to Paul saying the gospel was preached to Abraham: Christ is the center of all human history. All who believe are joined together in Him and through Him.

Covenants That Build, and an Ending That Looks Like the Exodus

▶ 1:34:49

All the covenants of God point toward Christ, Amy said — not invalidating one another but building on one another, unfolding new dimensions of God’s glory. The covenant with Noah revealed His mercy. The covenant with Abram set in motion the human lineage of His Son. The Mosaic covenant revealed the glory of His righteousness and wisdom. All of them anticipated and made way for the new covenant in Jesus’ blood.

But even the new covenant under which we live awaits its final fulfillment — and that fulfillment, the end of salvation history, will hearken back to the Exodus once again. The sky will be darkened. Terror will strike the hearts of men. The waters above the earth will be parted, and we will be caught up in the sky to meet our Lord.

“Amen. So do you see how the glorious day of the Lord mirrors the Exodus? It’s a drama which serves as a type of salvation.”

The Binding of Isaac, Seen Through the Wrong End of a Telescope

▶ 1:36:47

Back to Genesis, and to the more famous of the two stories: Abraham’s test — or, as the Jews call it, the binding of Isaac. This one, Amy said, is even more fundamental to our understanding of God’s redemption.

She confessed she wrestled with it for years, and asked whether anyone else had. “It is a difficult story.” Her fear ran two ways: that God would one day ask something so terrible she couldn’t do it and she would fail the test — and, underneath that, a fear of loving people too much, in case God took them away.

“But I was looking at the story through the wrong end of a telescope.”

The correction: this is not a story about what God demands of men. It is a revelation of what He gives to men. It is a prophetic drama illustrating the love between God the Father and God the Son — the love that undergirds the law — and a revelation of the sacrifice that would ultimately fulfill the law. We need the drama, she said. We need human stories to grasp the emotions of God, to understand His thoughts and His motives, because He is far above us. It is why Jesus told so many parables: to make the Father known.

Amy is convinced the binding of Isaac is held eternally close to the Father’s heart, eternally remembered in heaven, because it portrays the Father’s role in salvation — a role so dreadful and astounding that it has only one type. There are many types of Jesus. But the Father has asked only one prophet in all of history to play His part in the story of salvation, and that prophet was Abraham.

Your Son, Your Only Son, Whom You Love

▶ 1:39:03

By Genesis 22 the long-awaited son has arrived. Isaac is, in fact, an older youth or a young man by this point. Abraham and Sarah are at peace; their faith has been vindicated; they have seen the fulfillment of the part of God’s promise they had to live to see. They trusted that possession of the land would come in time, and they were satisfied. And then God spoke to Abraham again — just as He had in Haran, and on the night of the covenant.

Amy stopped on the phrase and made the room hear it: your son, your only son, the one whom you love. This, she said, is the first time the word love appears in Scripture. And God knows exactly what He is saying — because He has a son, an only son, whom He loves, who is in fact one in being with Him.

She thinks Abraham heard something in the call — urgency, perhaps even tenderness — because unlike before, he did not question and did not plead. “This time he simply obeyed.”

The fire pot appears again here, Amy noticed — the same image as the covenant night. Abraham climbs the mountain holding the fire; Isaac bears the wood on his back, carrying it like a cross. Taken together, she said, we have an image of the Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as the fire — moving in unison toward the mountain of sacrifice.

God Will Provide for Himself the Lamb

▶ 1:42:08

“God will provide for Himself a lamb. Here is the other key verse from the Abraham narrative — crucial to the gospel.” Providing for Himself a lamb is exactly what God did in sending His Son as an atonement for our sin.

The sacrifices prescribed through Moses were, as Paul says, a tutor — a visible sign of the cost of our sin. But the blood of goats and rams cannot fundamentally change our nature. Only a sacrifice originating from God and given by God can truly transform us into children of God. And so, before the foundation of the world, Father and Son — in complete unity of heart — agreed that the Son would become God’s sacrifice. Jesus would be the lamb God provides, the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world.

Not a Test of Worth — an Entrustment

▶ 1:43:34

“Brothers and sisters, God was not asking Abraham to undergo some terrible trial to prove his worth. He was not asking Abraham to prove his obedience in order to receive his blessing. No. He was entrusting to Abraham something inestimably precious — something so close to His own heart. He was asking His friend to walk in faith through an agony of darkness which would foreshadow the crucifixion.”

And Abraham could not be told the end of God’s intention before setting out, because the agony had to be real. He had to enter the pathos of the story. He had to be in pain — in order for us to see the Father. “Does that make sense?”

What the Father Suffered

▶ 1:44:24

It is easy, she said, to imagine the Father disengaged from the suffering of the crucifixion. Matt has often pointed out how we picture Him turning away from the Son — or sitting in heaven, impassive, knowing it will all turn out fine. The accuser would like to paint the Father as an angry tyrant demanding blood. Satan would like us to see Him as cruel.

“But in reality, God has given us that which He did not ask of Abraham. He did not spare His own Son — the one He loves more dearly than we can know.” (Written, with one more clause: “because of His love for us.”)

Being human, we can relate on some level to the suffering of Jesus on the cross. We understand physically what that torment would be. We understand the pain of betrayal and denial. We can even imagine a love willing to die on another’s behalf. We can imagine Mary weeping at the foot of the cross. “But can we imagine what it would be like to give our own son to that suffering?”

Amy’s conclusion: the Father suffered more than Abraham suffered, because of the depth of His emotion and the fullness of His union with the Son — something beyond anything we have yet experienced in our flesh. We don’t know what it means to be one in being with another person. We cannot sacrifice another person without violating that other’s being; for us, such a sacrifice would be murder. “And this is why the story has to play out first, before the law.” (Her manuscript gives the reason she left unstated: “what God asks of Abraham would be strictly forbidden by the Law.”)

And in the picture of Isaac — in the strength of his youth, standing before his father, allowing the ropes to cripple him, allowing himself to be placed on the wood — we have an image of the trust and love between our heavenly Father and His only begotten, who desire the very same end: that we would be saved.

By Myself I Have Sworn

▶ 1:46:49

That Abraham was willing to trust God that far, without understanding, moved God’s heart deeply. Amy described the answer from heaven as overflowing with love — and, she believes, with a kind of divine gratitude.

Then a detail Amy clearly loves. Years later, when the Israelites were established in the land, God chose this very place — Mount Moriah — as the site of His temple: the place where He would establish His name, the place He chose to dwell in the midst of His people.

“That’s how much He loved Abraham. That’s how much this act of faith meant to Him — that He was always right there. This is how much He can love a particular man.”

Closing: A Familiar Verse, Read With Abraham in View

▶ 1:48:12

Amy prayed it back before she closed it: Father, I am so grateful that You take men as friends. I am so grateful that our faith can touch Your heart. I am so grateful that You love us with an undying love. I am so thankful that You did not spare Your only Son. And then, personally: “I cannot wait to meet Abraham. I cannot wait to embrace him as a daughter.”

She asked the congregation to stand and confess the mystery of the faith in light of Abraham’s witness — a verse everyone in the room knew by heart, which she said she now sees differently for knowing Abram better. She looked for the slide. “Is there a slide for this? … Ah, okay — well, there’s not, so let’s do it this way.” They said it together from memory.

That missing slide cost the sermon its written ending. Amy had prepared a version of the verse with Abraham threaded into it, and it is printed in full in From Amy’s Written Notes below. What the room actually said was the verse plain.

Carrying It Into the Week

If the message has one practical edge, it is the one Amy named outright: faith is largely a matter of waiting. Abram spent a whole day driving birds off carcasses without knowing whether he had heard God correctly. That is closer to most of our weeks than the mountaintop is. The instruction isn’t to manufacture certainty; it’s to keep driving the birds away.

The second is a correction worth sitting with. If you have read Genesis 22 the way Amy used to — as a warning that God may one day demand the thing you love most, so love carefully — then the whole story is running backwards. It is not about what He takes. It is about what He gave, and about a Father who did not stop the knife when it was His own Son on the wood.

And the third is simply an invitation to reread. Amy covered two chapters out of thirteen and said plainly that the rest is worth your evening. Genesis 12–25 is where Sarah, Hagar, Ishmael, Lot, Melchizedek and the rest are waiting.