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Welcome to today’s Daily Scripture Reading and Meditation covering Genesis 22:10-12 wherein we see a God who tests and provides, who transcends all and yet enters our lives.
Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to slaughter his son. But the angel of the Lord called to him from heaven and said, “Abraham, Abraham!” And he said, “Here am I.” He said, “Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, seeing you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me.”
This might be the single-most difficult passage in the Scriptures for me to deal with. Many of the things that make God “comfortable” for us to think about don’t seem to fit with what he asks Abraham to do in this chapter. But God is like that. He desires greatly that we know Him but will not permit us in any way to conquer Him or make Him fit into a mold of our making. The command that He gave to Abraham was that he sacrifice his son Isaac as a burnt offering. This is the son that was long promised and brought joyous, shake-your-head laughter to everyone who loved Abraham and Sarah. This is the son that was given to bring about the great nation that God spoke of as He made a covenant with Abraham. And now, the same voice was commanding the boy’s death by the hand of his father. There’s nothing easy about that. If Abraham was going to disobey God (something we see him doing on multiple occasions), certainly this would be a time where he would go his own way. But instead, Abraham’s faith shines through. In fact, his trust in God was so profound that we’re told later on in the book of Hebrews that he believed God could simply raise Isaac from the dead and so keep His word of building a great nation through him. He followed God to the point of taking the knife in his hand and only stopped at the command of the angel of the Lord. We’re told at the beginning of the account that God was testing Abraham, and we see as it plays out that the knife raised was as far as He ever meant to take the challenge. We get to see this in hindsight; Abraham had to go on faith.
But the difficulties in these verses don’t end there. The angel of the Lord, after putting a stop to the sacrifice, comments that He now knows that Abraham fears God. Did God not know this before? We could try to weasel our way out of the question by saying that this was simply an angel, a messenger from God. But though there is truth to this, when such a title is used in the old testament, it appears that the author is referring in some way the Lord Himself, perhaps the Son of God specifically. What is clear throughout the Bible is that God is all-knowing, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done (Isaiah 46:10), but it seems that as He makes history to play itself out, He also interacts closely with it in an experiential way. For instance, we’re told that Jesus learned obedience through what He suffered (Hebrews 5:8). Jesus was never disobedient and yet in some way learned what it was to be obedient. There is a tension that we might feel here, but we would do well to embrace the knowledge that God holds and controls and directs all things while also involving Himself intimately in our experiences.
He is the God who might push us to the limit and provide amazingly at just the right moment. He is the sovereign and mighty God of the universe who still interacts lovingly with you and I, ultimately through sending His Son to dwell among us, die for us, and live in us. Fear Him, praise Him, and let your faith rest in Him alone.
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