Surrender
There have been a few occasions during our study of the life of Abraham where I have had to confess that I disliked the story. And now we come to my least favourite episode in the entire Bible - the call to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. It is horrifying, and one commentator offers me relief in my anger at this story, and says that we should be horrified, because the entire Old Testament is completely opposed to child sacrifice. The very notion of it was clearly prohibited by God. So now why on earth would that same God ask Abraham to take a knife to his own son? First, let’s see that a woodenly literal approach to the bible, especially where we pick out a text and make it a command for us, is highly dangerous. Absurd as it may seem, some might randomly fall on this text and use it as reasoning to kill. And then, let’s realise that this was only a test. But perhaps this event was not only about total obedience to the command of God, but was the Lord’s way to convince Abraham once and for all that child sacrifice was abhorrent to him.
And even though the very reading of this event chills my blood, let’s not miss the point that faith is about obedience. Faith is not an emotion - Abraham lived with the knowledge of what he thought he was going to have to do for three days. There are times when we have to come to a place of surrendering to God that which we cherish.
Tom Patterson, a wonderful Christian who lived through many trials, taught me that surrender takes strategy. As we carefully review our lives, what we have, what we want, where we’d like to go, what we’d like to be - as we lay them on the altar before God, we show ourselves to be people of authentic faith.