“Isaac built an altar there and called on the name of the Lord. There he pitched his tent, and there his servants dug a well” (Genesis 26:25).
There is one thing that you will find both in heaven and earth, something which has pretty well gone out of style in our post-Christian world, at least in most circles. It is described simply as an altar. Mentioned well over 400 times in the Bible, altars were places where people met God, where they sacrificed to the Almighty, and made covenants.
When I was a kid growing up, most churches had altars. Some were not much more than a plank resting on two ends. Others had velvet cushions for your knees, and rails upon which you could rest your elbows as you bowed in prayer. Today, however, you are more apt to find an altar in an African jungle or a South American village far from civilization than in the average church. With the exception of liturgical churches, altars are pretty much a piece of furniture to hold a highly polished brass cross or a vase of flowers.
Altars reflect human weakness and need, and someway having reduced our encounters with God to entry in a PDA or a brief thought or prayer, altars as places where you encounter God are—well, let’s face it—not terribly important today. And with the passing of the altar, we’ve also lost the intimacy of a personal encounter with God in prayer, a one-on-one encounter of your old nature with Christ’s sufficiency.
The first mention of an altar in the Bible is found in the book of Genesis when Noah and his family safely disembarked from the ark and built an altar of thanksgiving and sacrifice. The long ocean voyage was over and life was beginning anew.
Abraham also built altars. Following his journey across the barren wastelands of Arabia, he came into Canaan. Moses recorded, “The LORD appeared to Abram and said, ‘To your offspring I will give this land.’ So, he built an altar there to the LORD, who had appeared to him.”
When he went on towards the hills east of Bethel, he pitched his tent, and “there he built an altar to the LORD and called upon the name of the LORD” (Genesis 12:7,8).
Isaac and his son Jacob also built altars, just as father and grandfather had done. When the tabernacle and the temple were built, both had altars which were attended by the priest, where men met God and God revealed Himself to humankind.
Greg Fisher tells about building an altar at the Namirimbe Guest House in Uganda where he was serving as a missionary. When his wife’s chest cold wouldn’t go away and a high fever set in, he feared that she was sinking into pneumonia, and with every hour the situation worsened. “She was getting weaker, and her breathing was labored,” he vividly recalls. He says, “For the entire night I called out to God on her behalf. I realized this was an attack of the Dominion of Darkness to keep us from establishing a ministry here in Kampala.
Margaret’s bedside became an altar to the Living God. That bedside became the place where we entered into a new phase of relationship with God. A place where God met us. A place where we renewed our determination to be obedient to God’s call to Uganda. It was a simple bedside that became an altar.”
An altar is where you meet God. It can be as you kneel beside a rock in the woods, at your bedside, in the quietness of your home, a closet, or beside the chair at your desk at the office. The where isn’t important. Doing it is the vital thing. You can make an altar anywhere as you lay your life open before him and meet Him.
Resource reading: Genesis 12
