“Then God said, “Take your son, your only
son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there
as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.” (Gen 22:2)
All prayer
is really - seen from an objective viewpoint - is dialogue with God. We who know Him, who have met Him in Jesus
Christ, want to speak to Him and to hear Him speak to us. We know the value of pouring out our concerns
to Him, and the value of hearing His Voice.
To hunger for more of such divine dialogue is a holy desire, and
something to be stoked into a burning passion in each of our lives. The trouble is that when we do so, we’ll hear
God call us to a greater depth of relationship with Him. That wouldn’t be hard at all, except it
means we need to trust Him more, and love the things this world gives us
less.
One of the
hardest chapters to read in the Bible – not only for those with little faith,
but for all of us – is chapter 22 of Genesis.
Here we read in verse 2 of God’s command to Abraham to take Isaac – his
natural son and his only son, now that he’s sent Ishmael away with Hagar – and
to sacrifice him on a remote mountaintop.
God’s description of what He is asking Abraham to do is indicative of
the degree of difficulty involved. “Take your son” - though Abraham would surely object that all
can be sacrificed, but not his SON. “Your only son”- one can almost hear
Abraham’s thinking, “but he’s my only son – Ishmael is gone and I have no
other”. Indeed, how could God Most High
ask a man do so such a thing? To
sacrifice his son – and all fathers of substance love their sons – surely God
knows how much Abraham loves his son? “Whom you love”, the Lord adds.
Much has
been written about the drama of that moment and the emotion of that moment. They easily eclipse that of verse 1. But it is in verse 1 that a powerful lesson
is to be learned, for it is in verse 1 that the drama begins. “Some
time later God tested Abraham. He said
to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” he
replied.” What that tells us is that
God’s test of Abraham came through prayer.
We’ve
already seen how hearing God’s Voice will sometimes include hearing difficult
things. It was by hearing God’s voice
that Noah found out that everything he every knew was about to change, and his
world was ending. Surely that is a hard
thing to hear. But that’s God’s ultimate
will, and what can we do about it, but obey?
Perhaps this is an even harder thing to hear – that God would purpose
for you to put that which matters more than anything else to you on the line
for Him. And it might be better understood
if verses 15-18 came before verse 2.
But that’s not God’s character.
Not, ‘do this and look what you’ll get in response’, but merely, ‘do
this’. He is worthy to be glorified no
matter the cost to us. Just because He
told you to. Without the world changing
– maybe even without the world noticing.
The Lord leaves Abraham with that tension for the whole time between
verses 2 and 15. What feels like an
eternity of wrestling with doubt is just a few verses in God’s book to refine
faith.
Of course,
God’s character is also that He eagerly desires to bless His children, much
more often than we would choose to bless our children, and in infinitely
greater ways than we could ever bless our children. God’s promise makes Abraham the father of all
His children of faith – right down to you and I and everyone we ever reach for
His Name. And if Abraham's obedience has resulted in so much blessing for him and for us - how much more, Christ's obedience. For He did what He could not bear for Abraham to do. Amen.
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