“Abraham told his servants: “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”
Abraham knew. It was as though God quietly messaged Abraham somewhere along the way on this three day walk, “I need you to know that I know. I know that you know Isaac was never in the slightest danger. This was never about Isaac. It was never about me. It was about you, Abraham. These loyalties are not conflicting unless they are competing. Abraham, your loyalty to and love for Isaac, the gift, is grounded in and flows from your loyalty to and love for me, but it can never be the other way around. The minute the gift gets separated from the giver is the moment you become the god, and from there it’s only a matter of time until everything goes off the rails.”
Abraham’s lineage, his security, and his legacy was not in his son but in his God. God knew this, but Abraham needed to know it. Would Abraham trust God in a way that could cost him everything? Would he place the gift back in the hands of the giver—and in so doing would he offer himself? Sometimes it takes the prospect of a burnt offering to get to the place of a living sacrifice.
The writer of Hebrews put it this way. “Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.” Hebrews 11:19.
(seedbed daily text 2/8/20) By JD Walt
I had written about God asking us to surrender everything to him, not to remove it from us but to test whether things have an idolatrous hold over us. That was in the life of David. This is in the life of Abraham.
(2/9/21)