Let's take a step back and try to catch the whole picture. In the beginning, God speaks, and the world exists in answer. God patiently shepherds the emerging world, his Spirit on the face of what's formless and void. As it's told to us, by careful divisions and decrees he shapes for himself a universal temple for his own indwelling; and in that world, he plants a garden sanctuary in which to install his images. That'd be us. We see the world as represented in the Garden of Delight, a good place full of all things healthful and beautiful and wonderful. We discover there that God is the provider, ensuring in his sanctuary we have everything we need to thrive and to flourish as the kind of creature we are: “You may surely eat of every tree of the garden” (Genesis 2:16). “The LORD is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made” (Psalm 145:9). “When you open your hand,” the creatures “are filled with good things” (Psalm 104:28), the good and needful things whereby we flourish.
But it takes more for a place to be the Garden of Delight. The psalmist also sang, “You open your hand; you satisfy the pleasure of every living thing” (Psalm 145:16). More than just what's objectively good for creatures, for humans, for persons, there's also what pleases us, what we desire to enjoy, what we crave. Some things we desire lightly – maybe I could go for Italian for lunch. Some things we desire more strongly, more centrally – I desire being the husband of my wife. The strongest and most central desires are the desires of our hearts. And just as God is the provider who ensures in Eden that his creatures flourish according to their natures, so he's the lover who ensures in Eden that the deepest desires of our hearts not fail us. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but it's a tree of life when a thing craved comes” (Proverbs 13:12).
Ah, but the voice of temptation hisses softly in, suggesting God is neither; in that darkness, we crave what won't just satisfy nutritionally and please the senses, but also confer divine wisdom on our own terms. The result is excommunication from the sanctuary, exile from the garden. We enter the world we know, thorns and thistles and thwarted thoughts. Here, we suffer evil. One philosopher suggests that you suffer evil either (1) when you lose out on things that are objectively good for your flourishing as a human person, or (2) when you lose out on the desires of your heart, or (3) when, hardest of all, we lose both. And neither is transparent to us: we can misjudge what's good for human flourishing, as many do today, and we can also misjudge what we most deeply desire, since our hearts are hard to know. But even when we do judge rightly in theory, we might think we have it when we don't or think we lack it when we do have it.1 And, of course, we can enthrone as core in our hearts things that are less worthy, like completing a stamp collection, or more worthy, like personal relationships.2
When we first meet Abram, we know little but that he's the son of a father, the husband of a wife, and the father of nobody: “Sarai was barren; she had no child” (Genesis 11:30). That's a suffering, an unhealthy condition of the reproductive system; but how Abram feels about it isn't yet clear. When he hears a divine appeal to change his life and venture forth in faith, he receives many offers: reputation, significance, even the foundation of a new nation conceived in blessing and dedicated to the proposition that this God is faithful (Genesis 12:1-3). We soon find, though, that his heart craves personal safety; yet Egyptian misadventure teaches him that God is faithful to watch over him even when situations become humanly hopeless (Genesis 12:10-20). All this time, he's implicitly taken his late brother's son Lot for a successor, his chance to invest in a future for his family's flesh and blood. But Lot bucks for independence, to be a brother and not a son; they part ways to stave off a feud, though Abram positions himself to watch over him, as God had for Abram (Genesis 13:1-18). It pays off when Abram can ride to the rescue, a warrior mighty to save; his primary desire is no longer personal safety but a loved one, and even witness ahead of wealth (Genesis 14:1-24). Yet his lost brother returns to Sodom.
Only as the LORD pokes and prods Abram, offering him the fulfillment of now-secondary desires, does he open up what his heart really wants: a son of his own flesh. He's heartbroken over the lack of fatherhood to one who can inherit, yet “for years he had already given up hope of a son.”3 Awakening this desire brings Abram's heart's wounds to the surface of his life. But “the craving of the afflicted you have heard, O LORD! You will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear” (Psalm 10:17). Now the LORD can hang on his heart a promise: Abram, I'll give you exactly what you want: not only your own son to inherit, but your seed will become as plentiful as the lights that dance by midnight. Abram believes; Abram grasps the God who says so (Genesis 15:1-6).
Years go by, and as Sarai judges herself impeded, she hatches a slave-surrogate scheme. Abram stretches forth his hand to forbidden fruit, and nine months later he sees the face of his flesh-and-blood, his son (Genesis 16). All in his house might then have quoted: “You have given him his heart's craving, and have not withheld the request of his lips!” (Psalm 21:2). For thirteen years, he's happy as the father of a son. He's obtained the desire of his heart, or so he thinks. That's when God interrupts his domestic bliss with a recruitment speech, to seal the promises and covenant in pain and blood, yet by that fateful cut he'll receive the fruitfulness promised, beyond this false start. With a change in name comes a summon to search deeper in his heart for his desires – not just any son, but one by his lawful wife, to inherit also the covenant, to become ancestor of nations and kings – and so to make Abraham not just any father but a founding patriarch (Genesis 17).4 Oh, Abraham scoffs, protests, conceals – he's convinced he's had the desire of his heart, so this deepening and postponement feel like theft.
To heal that, there comes a surprise visit, a mysterious tutorial in patriarchal justice, and an apparent failure to save the city or his lost brother (Genesis 18-19). But if he can't save a brother, how can he be a father? If he can't plead for a city, how can he found a nation? And how can he entrust his desires to such a Judge? So he flees cross country, acts again the man whose deepest desires are security and prosperity, and fights the desire he wants not to want. Then, as we heard last week, a confrontation by an unexpectedly God-fearing king and a confirmation of his prophetic mission shake Abraham from his self-absorption and self-doubt (Genesis 20). He then finds, as we'll explore further next Sunday, that God proves himself as faithful as Abraham ever believed, at last fulfilling the promise – as Abraham knows as he cradles the son born for covenant and country (Genesis 21:1-4). If we had Abraham's comments here, we'd hear him admit that God gave him the desire of his heart.
Had you asked Abram at age 74 what he most wanted, he might've given you an answer. But I doubt very much he would've said he wanted to be a patriarch whose offspring, especially through Sarah's son, his heir, will grow into nations and will become many kings, inheriting through trials the land promised them by the LORD God, so as to become the saving blessing of all the nations of the earth. Now, at age 100, Abraham knows that's what he wanted most. But he could only know that through a process of discerning his deepest desire, by discovering the incompleteness of those things he'd thought he wanted, gaining a more profound understanding of himself.
That was part of the problem. The other part was that Abraham, as he experienced more of life, actually shifted his desires themselves. Certainly, the dreams I most cherished as a boy – I wanted to be an architect – aren't the same as my highest aspirations now. Experience of life changed my desires, even my deeper desires. So it was with Abraham. Over time, it isn't just that his heart's desire has been more fully exposed; it's that his desires have been stretched and enlarged and redirected. The process over these many years “gives Abraham exactly what he wanted, but in a form better than he would have known how to want it.”5
And that, I believe, is the point of it all. Abraham's now got the desire of his heart, or at least a true beginning to it, on the other side of a quarter-century of heartbreak. God, of course, had the power to make Sarai conceive Abram's son on their honeymoon and sidestep all this; but, for God's reasons, he deferred their hope, allowed their hearts to feel sick, precisely in order to grow a tree of life for them – gradually, patiently, by building this relationship of trust and yearning. It isn't easy or simple, it isn't smooth or gentle, this constant game of promise and delay. It's certainly no fun for Abraham, and it demands a great deal of patience from God, too.6 So why?
God has, in fact, harnessed Abraham's desires for a greater end. God is using Abraham's journey of discovering what's on his own heart in order to remake Abraham's heart, to expand Abraham's heart. As chapter 22 will give us to know, the deepest desire of Abraham's heart won't be just to be the father of his own son, nor just to be the patriarch of nations and the forebear of kings, but to have such things as gifts from the God he trusts and reveres and loves. “The desires of Abraham's heart widen to include God as well as children and patriarchal status,” and God progressively moves himself to the center of Abraham's heart step by step through this journey.7
And that's just as it should be, because by nature we are designed to hunger and thirst for God, to have him as what we want above all, as the “deepest, inbuilt hunger” of our heart.8 It's like St. Augustine confessed: “You arouse us so that praising you may bring us joy, because you have made us and drawn us to yourself, and our heart is unquiet until it rests in you.”9 That's where God is leading Abraham, but not to the exclusion of what Abraham as an individual has as the desire of his heart: to still have and love this son, to still be a patriarch. It's like Jesus said: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added unto you” (Matthew 6:33), now reshaped and woven into a fundamental desire for God which turns everything else into a gift of grace, thus fulfilling our desires even more splendidly when we get them.10
The psalmist has warned us that “the craving of the wicked will perish” (Psalm 112:10) – that, for those who live badly, who set their hearts on unworthy things, and who demand their satisfaction on their own terms and by their own will, their cravings will ultimately be unsatisfied. That's what we saw in Genesis 3's goodbye to the garden. But the psalmist also assures us: “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). In the end, through discovering delight in the LORD over a lifetime, Abraham was positioned to receive the desires of his heart – desires he'd always had but never quite recognized, desires that have now been transformed to become something greater than they had been, desires being fulfilled in ways he hadn't predicted until he had them, and then he knew the goodness of God.
And it's precisely in this – in providing Abraham not only with the things that make him flourish as a human being, but also in granting him the fulfillment of what his heart really desires and comes to desire – that God is able to redeem all the suffering which Abraham has endured along the way, and to make it no longer an evil but a pathway to true joy. Once Abraham believes with delight that the LORD will be faithful to add all these things unto him in God's way and in God's time, then he can look back and see his heart's pains as the labors of childbirth, which only made possible the good and desirable life that lay on the other side, whatever unexpected shape it should take; it will be recognizable once faith becomes sight, once imagination becomes taste.11
I don't know all the details of your story. I barely know the broad strokes of my own! So I don't know how you have suffered, where you've been kept from flourishing or what the deferred desires of your heart have been. You yourself may not know. But I do know this: Delight yourself in the Lord, learn to hunger and thirst for God, and he will give you such things also, in his own time, in his own way, in his own surprise shape. Things you want most in life, what you care most about, are precisely what God has in store for you, as he refines them to be compatible with your flourishing as a person. In such gifts, God will redeem what it took to get you there.
God promises it, because God wants to bless us. “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:11). But he wants that because he is Supreme Goodness, more good than all the other things that please us, and we were made for him. He is training us to discern and refine our deepest desires to center on him, so that, when he gives us what we care about most, he's giving us not just his blessings but himself.
Today, God comes to meet us at the altar. For Christ has given his flesh as true food and his blood as true drink, that we might taste and see that the Lord is the Pure Goodness whereby any and all things are good and lovely and worth wanting. Perhaps only in tasting God do we realize how hungry we've been all along, how heartsick we were without recognizing it or understanding why, and that such appetites were not sent into our hearts to return void, but to be satisfied indeed. Here, is a restoration of communion in the sanctuary of God. Here is grown a garden of delight. Here is the God of Abraham – he wants to feed us, wants to be tasted, wants to incite and train our desires. May we lay here before the Lord our hearts, with all our desires, that he might uncover them, refine them, use them to lead us, deepen our cravings, and be for us a Tree of Life indeed. Amen.
