Abraham started out as Abram, a good man seeking to follow the G-d of heaven and earth with whom he had a personal and intimate relationship. Abram married his half sister (Idk...social norms were different back then I guess.) Sarai who was apparently the most beautiful woman ever born (or all the other women alive were quite ugly, who knows) and they started a life together. Abram is given a promise from G-d that he will bear a son and his descendants will be as the stars in the heavens for number...only fly in the ointment is that for all of her beauty Sarai apparently cannot bear children. Years go by and this lack of offspring does not dim the love between the two, however it becomes apparent to both of them that this promise surely cannot be true. It's not happening and surely G-d must have meant something else. G-d reassures Abram a second time that he will be given an heir and all of the earth will be blessed from his line. And this time when G-d tells Abram He even shows the depth of His intentions by making a covenant with Abram basically stating that if He does not fulfill His end of the bargain, He should be as dead animals left bare for a sacrifice. (That's right...the G-d of heaven and earth deigns to promise a mortal that if He does not fulfill His promise, Abram can consider Him as nothing more than a dead animal. Seems like that should be enough to reassure Abram right? But Abram is human just like you and I, and decades are passing with no promise fulfilled and every passing day makes that promise less and less possible in human eyes.)
Time goes by and Abram makes multiple decisions out of fear and his own understanding of what must be right. (Not the least of these is the decision that his successor must come from Sarai's maid because it's not biologically possible for Sarai to bear children.) Angels come out of nowhere and yet again the promise is repeated to Abram, and G-d Himself speaks to Abram to reassure him and gives both he and Sarai new names. They will now be Abraham and Sarah, the beginning of a people who will fill the earth and bring a blessing upon all mankind.
Still more time passes, but finally...after DECADES of waiting. Decades of wondering if G-d would accomplish this promise, if it could even be possible, if he had misunderstood, why he couldn't just make a successor his own way since it seemed clear the promise given would never come. After decades of poor decisions, missteps, repentance, family anguish, financial success and waiting (albeit sometimes impatiently). His G-d fulfilled the promise given so many times in so many ways. Sarah conceived and bore him Issac. Abraham loved Issac as only a father longing for decades for a promised child could. Issac embodied everything that was his promised future. All of the physical and financial success, all of the hopes for descendants, everything he had ever hoped or dreamed of was balanced on the shoulders of his beloved son Issac. And this is where chapter 22 comes into play, what Abraham's trials for all of those decades had been leading up to. The climactic question that G-d had slowly built up over time.
Do you trust and love me enough to give it all back to me?
The Test of Free Will
At the beginning of chapter 22 we find Abraham a wealthy man who is happy beyond measure. You could say he has been rewarded for his faith and belief in G-d by the advent of the birth of his son, but I do not see it quite that way. To me the birth of Issac was the beginning of a test that Abraham had been given multiple times throughout his life. Sometimes he passed, but more often he failed it. The test of his free will. When faced with trusting in the almighty G-d to make a way when there seems no possible way, would he choose to rely on what he could not see/understand or would he choose his own way that seemed more reasonable and possible to his human mind? Each time the test had been given his future and happiness lay in the balance, and often he acted out of his fears and human nature to pick his own way over an unknown way of even the one true G-d.
Now here he was an old man, possibly thinking he had finally achieved what he had so long hoped for and so often disbelieved. But what we often see as the resolution of a story, G-d sees as the middle or even the beginning because He sees that our hearts still are not proven to fully belong to Him. We still don't trust His will over our own, His blessings over our desires, His future over our plans. This is where I believe Abraham was at the fateful beginning of chapter 22, still in the middle of his story and still waiting to serve G-d first with all that he had.
And so it was that G-d asked Abraham, not for something important as a proof of his will, but for EVERYTHING that he held most dear. G-d asked Abraham to take his beloved and promised son. The son who signified his happiness and his promised future, the son that G-d himself gave to him...and sacrifice him as an offering to Him.
Now scholars debate the meaning of this story quite a bit. They question whether it was literal or figurative. They try to diminish or explain away the horror of the almighty G-d asking someone to kill another innocent person as a human sacrifice to prove allegiance to Him. I am not going to muse on those things, because honestly I believe those questions are roadblocks that trip us up and hide the true importance of this history. I want to discuss what Issac symbolized to Abraham and what I better understand about my relationship with G-d through this story.
What Will I Sacrifice?
In Psalm 51 we are told that the sacrifices of G-d are a broken spirit, that a broken and contrite heart will not be despised by G-d. My spirit is my will and it must be my own choice to break it and freely give it to G-d. He will not ever force it from me.
In the account of Abraham let us consider what Issac symbolized to him. He was taking his only son, his beloved promise given to him by G-d, the one set to inherit all of the worldly goods he had worked so much for, the only hope of a succession coming from himself and his loved wife Sarah...and he was faced with the choice to kill every possible future happiness with no explanation or reassurance as to why or to yet again rely on his human understanding and decide for himself that G-d couldn't possibly be asking such a huge sacrifice He must have meant something else.
Have you ever stood there? Have you ever stood alone faced with that long awaited promise, everything you ever hoped for and never expected staring you in the face and the very G-d who made that promise and provided it...calling you to willingly give it all back to Him with no explanation beyond, "because I asked for it"? Maybe it literally means EVERYTHING to you and your future happiness, maybe you even know without a doubt that it was promised to you by G-d and therefore it should rightfully belong to you but He is asking you not only to give it back to Him but to cut it open in his presence and let it burn away until there is nothing left. No more hope, no more blessing, no more future...not even a new promise that all will be restored.
Think about that one thing you have been promised. Perhaps you have obtained it, perhaps you are still waiting for it, perhaps you are unsure it is coming but you believe you have been told it will. Name it to yourself and carry it to the top of the mountain of sacrifice in your heart. That new house you have been scrimping and saving for, that job you have worked yourself to the bone for, that success in finance that you are going to use for good, that long awaited for child, your health or the health of a family member, that life partner who you long to build a future with...whatever it is take a moment and look it in the eye. Are you willing to let all of it go for no other reason than to choose G-d's will over your own?
Do you hear the voice of your G-d asking, "Will you give me everything...even this? Will you trust my plan more than your own wisdom? Will you follow me even if you don't understand what I am doing or why? Will you love me more than anything this life can offer, even more than any future hopes and dreams?". I hear Him asking me to sacrifice everything in my power to give, my free will, and to trust Him to keep His promises even if I cannot understand how He will begin to do so.
Climbing the Mountains of Moriah
In the account of Abraham given in Genesis chapter 22, we are told about one journey in Abraham's lifetime but I wonder sometimes if we realize that his life was full of many journey's to that mountaintop. The mountains of Moriah exist in each of our hearts, that sacred place where we are called daily to make the sacrifice of our spirit, our free will, and turn over our hopes and dreams to a faithful G-d who's ways we cannot hope to fully understand. Do we know that sometimes a sacrifice has already been prepared in the place of what we are willing to give up and sometimes what He asks us to give is not meant for us and in those moments we must be willing to follow through, to rip out and burn away any part that is required of us trusting that He knows there is something greater yet to come? Do we love and trust Him enough to do what He asks without knowing what the outcome will be?
May G-d bless and hold each of His children up and give them the strength to climb that mountain of sacrifice every day and say, "Here am I Lord, let my will be your own.".
Oh...Amen. I needed every word of this today.
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