“In
the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” So begins
the Christian story of reality. And after God had created, the
production of each day was pronounced “good.” God liked what God
had made. Scripture employs no rapturous superlative descriptors for
what God created on the first five days. It is not described as
awesome or spectacular or stupendously magnificent, just good.
Except for the humans. They were declared “very good.” From the
very beginning humans have had a special place in the heart of God.
Not too surprising, really, considering that God made them (male and
female) in God’s own image. Now humans, as the apple of God’s
eye, were immediately given a position of responsibility in the care
of all that God had made. They were told to nurture and enjoy
creation. And all was well in all God’s green earth.
Or
was it? Somehow humanity was distracted from discharging their
prescribed duties in the prescribed way. They had an idea which
seemed to promise to improve their lot, but that idea proved to be
their downfall. Instead of having a better idea, their attempts to
improve on God’s ideas caused the frustration of their efforts.
First they were removed from their idyllic home in the Garden of Eden
so that they could not make their already difficult situation worse
with more mistakes, but eventually things got so bad that the whole
world had to be washed and sanitized, and then the human project was
restarted.
God’s
interest remained the welfare of all that God had made, and the new
instructions reflected that. God promised, God bound Godself never
to allow the destruction of the whole world again. It did not matter
how wicked the people became God would never again allow creation to
be so utterly ravished. Hence, after this catastrophe there came
another opportunity for humans to nurture and enjoy what God had
made.
But
again those humans thought they could do better than merely serving
as God’s peons (which is not an accurate description of what they
were, but in their vanity they thought that their potential was not
being properly appreciated). They would assert themselves, they
would show that they were at the top of the food chain. But then,
why stop there? They would build a city, a huge hulking skyscraper
of a city, one that reached right up to where the gods lived. They
would become like the gods themselves. Why not?
So
once again, God had to intervene, before humans dealt themselves the
same fate that met the last creature with aspirations of deity
(Lucifer, the erstwhile Morning Star). In grace the peoples of the
earth were scattered by the confusion of their languages, and their
dreams of becoming divine were stymied. God was still intent on
blessing what God had created, but that blessing would not come in
the form of a condescending wink at their delusional
self-aggrandisement. God’s intent was to bless Creation with a
blessing that recognized it as Creature, as what it truly was, but
that blessing would bid the Creature to grow, fulfilling their
pregnant promise as those who bear the image of the Creator.
So
God chose, once again, to bless what God had made. God chose Abram,
called him Abraham, and told him that the plan was to bless the whole
world through him, through the son which he and Sara would have. Now
Sara kept getting older, which was a good thing, but there was still
no heir, which was a bad thing. Never mind, in those days there was
a well-known solution for such a dilemma: Let Abraham father an heir
with Sara’s servant girl. In fact, four of the twelve tribes of
Jacob come into being in precisely this way. That must have been
what God meant. (Sound familiar?)
Except
that was not what God meant, and the aftershocks of Abraham’s
misunderstanding continue to rock the world. But God was determined
to bless what God had made so another covenant was fashioned, this
one also a decidedly unilateral commitment. When God and Abraham
ratify this new covenant, they each have their recognized roles to
play, but when it comes to the really important part where they are
to walk together to finalize their individual commitment to this
covenant, Abraham falls asleep and God is left to ratify this
covenant all alone. God’s commitment was to bless what God had
made and that commitment would not be easily thwarted, not even by
the Creature’s pugnacity. Sort of like salvation by grace, prior
to any faith. Abraham and Sara would have a son and through that son
Abraham’s family would grow to become innumerable, and those
descendants would inherit the land which God promised to give to
Abraham.
Which
brings us to the story of God’s request for the sacrifice of Isaac.
Why would God make such a request? Abraham’s whole life, it
seemed, had been spent trusting God to do what God promised to do,
even though a lesser man would have given up hope a long time ago.
Now Abraham finally had the first part of the promise before his
eyes, the long awaited son, the idea which had struck his 99-year-old
wife as an outrageous joke a scant year before that son was born, and
now God wanted this son sacrificed? Child sacrifice was a common
demand of all the other gods but never had Abraham’s God suggested,
let alone demanded, anything like this. Without this son there was
no hope of ever possessing the land God had promised. Then again,
with no son to inherit the land what good was the land? Isaac was
Abraham’s hope for a future. Never mind, he and Sara had been as
good as dead before Isaac came along, and if God could raise life
from death, if God wanted to push the envelope a little further, who
was Abraham to argue? What God wants, God gets, and Abraham might as
well go along with the charade sooner rather than later.
So
Abraham set out toward the mountain of sacrifice and when his son,
whom Abraham was on a course to slaughter as a sacrifice to God,
asked where the sacrifice offering was, Abraham’s response was “God
will provide.” What was Abraham thinking? Did he think all along
that God had a last moment reprieve in mind, in which case Abraham
was not showing faith at all but merely calling God’s bluff? Was
he giving voice to a confidence he did not really have, just putting
on a brave face? Did he simply mean that God will provide whatever
God will provide, thinking that God had already provided the
sacrifice, Isaac, and what God had in mind now God only knew? Who
knows?
Clearly,
aside from the most pessimistic and cynical readings of this story,
what Abraham was doing was giving up everything he had held dear for
all his life in an attempt to be faithful to his God. Whether this
was done as the last desperate, and perhaps exasperated, act of a man
who saw the last hopes of his life rapidly fading into the dark
shades of permanent night, or whether it was a remarkable act of
faith by a man who was so confident in God’s intervention that he
remained relatively untroubled by what he was about to do (which I
seriously doubt), this is certainly one of the most problematic
stories in the Bible. So what can we learn from it?
Let
me explain why I started this meditation with a review of the
covenants God made with God’s Creation, beginning with the people,
but always including the whole of Creation. The theme that strikes
me in every renewal of God’s covenant is God’s desire to bless
Creation, to see Creation prosper, to see the Creature who had been
created in God’s own image enjoy what God had made. It seems as
though God’s joy was indissolubly linked with the joy of God’s
Creation. And when that Creation fell, God came looking for them,
calling them, picked them up, and sent them out to try again; and
when the Creature messed up again, God cleaned them up again, and
instructed them again on how to enjoy what God had made for their
enjoyment, then told them again to go and prosper; and when those
creatures were still defiant, God frustrated the ways which those
creatures set for themselves, ways which could only lead to their own
destruction, all because God was determined to bless what God had
made. We followed this trail of covenant renewal and blessing to
Abraham, but it continues in the same vein throughout Israel’s
history, through the prophets, reaching a pinnacle in the historical
story of Jesus the Christ, and it is repeated through modern history,
and continues to be experienced in each of our lives whether we
recognize it or not.
Abraham’s
story is a concrete example of God’s desire and intention to bless.
God’s intention was always to bless Creation, all peoples, and
God’s covenant with Abraham was the way in which God intended to do
so. Unfortunately, people keep misunderstanding, or worse,
deliberately subverting, God’s plan. God told Abraham to go to the
land God wanted to give him, and Abraham went to the land, but it was
unfruitful, so Abraham kept going till he got to Egypt. There
Abraham chose to lie about his relationship with his wife and let her
be taken into Pharaoh’s bed because he feared for his life. He
tried to “help” God with the promised son. And when God was
making a big ceremony out of the new covenant, Abraham fell asleep
when he was supposed to be keeping scavengers from the sacrificial
offerings.
Abraham
had no idea how grand were God’s plans for his children. Abraham
had no idea that God intended to be born to one of his own
descendants. He had no idea that two thousand years later, God’s
own Son, the One born of Abraham’s descendants, would be hanging on
a cross on the same hill where Abraham went to sacrifice Isaac. Only
this time God would not intervene to stop the sacrifice, because when
God’s Creation messes up, when there is a terrible price to pay,
God would rather pay the price Godself, than to exact that price from
the Creature God wishes to bless. Abraham had no idea that God was
not only giving him family and land, but in all of this God was
inviting him home, calling Abraham to live with Godself.
Abraham
was willing to throw it all away for God, if only because without
God’s help he was as good as dead anyway. But Abraham had no idea
of the enormity of what he was about to throw away. Even less did
Abraham have any idea how God wanted to bless him, and to bless all
people through him. In what must have been one of the darkest days
of his life, he found himself trudging up Mount Moriah, to give back
to God what he had waited all his life to get from God; to give back
to God what God had promised would be his future. Because Abraham
understood that if you trust God only because you think God has your
best interests at heart, only because you think it will go better for
you if you trust God, then you are still serving yourself, and you
are only using God as an instrument for your own benefit. So Abraham
went up the mountain, and there, inspite of Abraham’s self, God met
him, and there God blessed him with such a powerful blessing that
Abraham came away from this encounter and never fully understood how
rich a blessing had been lavished upon him. A blessing of love and
goodwill that refuses to be extinguished no matter how selfish,
disobedient, and un-cooperative Abraham became. A blessing of
relationship and partnership that was not - it could never be -
Abraham’s own doing, because it was a vision far too grand for
Abraham to imagine or understand, much less devise and work out on
his own.
God’s
best blessings come on God’s own terms. They have to be God’s
terms because our terms are too easy, too short-sighted, too anaemic.
God’s desire to bless us far exceeds what we in our wildest
dreams could ever imagine, which is why we can never anticipate them.
We want a home and a land that we must ultimately leave, God wants
us to learn to know Godself, to experience an eternal life that wraps
each finite moment with a depth that cannot be adequately captured
outside the infinity of an eternity. God wants to call us home
forever, and all of this happens in the mundane moments of life, such
that the most mundane moments are the most momentous moments because
of their nexus with eternity. It is in the valleys that God walks
with us though we know it not, and too often it is on the mountains
tops that we forget our need of God because we think we have
everything we need, though we have but the faintest understanding of
what it is that we need most. But God knows, and that is why the
best blessings come on God’s own terms, and are often accompanied
by feelings of having been abandoned by God. That, too, is something
that the Incarnate God understands. In this world things are often
cruelly taken from us and we should not be too hasty in saying that
God took it away. These disappointments -tragedies even- may simply
be the way of this fallen world, but God is not powerless to bring
blessing out of sin-cursed soil. In fact, that is God’s specialty.
The fact that God brings blessings out of curses should never be
understood to mean that God needs the sinfulness of this world in
order to advance God’s plans. Bad things never happen because they
fit into God’s plan. God’s penchant for raising blessing from
sin cursed soil only indicates that even as vulgar a monstrosity as
sinfulness will not easily be allowed to thwart God’s plans for
blessing what God has made.
So
when you find yourself in the blackest night of your life, turn your
eyes to the east, because that is where the sun rises. Wait for
God’s visit because for those whose hope is in God alone morning
follows night with more certainty than night follows day. And if you
wait in faith, God will meet you, ready to shake your world with
blessings that will blow your mind. You may wait a day, or a month,
or years, but never an eternity. And when you meet God you will know
you are home. Sometimes going home calls for patient endurance and
vigilant watchfulness, but never forget while you are going and
waiting that God wants you to enjoy the journey, and that God walks
with you, so listen for the sound of God’s voice, and watch for the
guidance of God’s footprints. But while anywhere with Jesus is
home, don’t forget that every journey has a destination. You, like
Abraham, are going home, so listen for the Father’s call. Learn to
distinguish the Father’s voice from all the siren calls of
destruction. Learn the importance of obedience and faithfulness in
working out your own salvation, but never forget that your salvation
rests first with God, who desires your salvation and blessing more
than you do, more than you know, more than you could ever imagine,
and then follow the Father’s trail of blessing all the way home.
