The Faith Of Abraham
Commentary
Faith that would become stronger must become not only a public faith, but a faith that makes commitments. Commitments are tough for us to cope with because we love freedom. We crave it. We don’t want government to restrict us. We don’t want our parents to be too strict. We don’t want our jobs to consume us. We want to be free!
But what is freedom? What does it meant to be free?
Usually freedom means throwing off our bonds and fetters, tearing down the walls that might close us in. It means taking hold of our own destinies, owing nothing to anyone, standing tall at the helm of our ship.
But liberty, by itself, cannot hold our lives together. It can’t steer us or shape us. It can’t give us purpose or direction. Liberty merely opens the gate; if there’s nothing beyond the gate, we stand there staring out into the void. We may end up destroying ourselves by trying to go in too many directions without a purpose.
Listen to this suicide note left by a young woman who had kept herself free by moving from lover to lover, throwing of all restraints: “I am killing myself because I have never sincerely loved any human being all my life.”
She was free! A free spirit, freely giving herself in free relationships. But liberty alone can never give us meaning in life. Freedom opens the door for us, but faith gives us direction when we walk out into the open spaces of our lives.
Abraham had to learn that. The early chapters of Genesis document a series of promises that God made to Abraham, making him truly free. Interestingly, every time God opened a door Abraham went wandering by himself and lost his sense of purpose. In Genesis 12 God promised him a homeland, but when the famines came he ran off to Egypt. In Genesis 15 God promised him a son, but Abraham schemed with a younger woman to find an heir.
God repeats these promises to Abraham in Genesis 17, this time going a step further. God challenges Abraham: “If you really believe that I’m God, if you believe I can keep my word, then it’s time for you to turn your faith into a promise. You do something to show that you belong to me. Cut the skin of your flesh, and remind yourself of where you got your identity!”
Do you see what God was doing? God didn’t want Abraham to hurt, and he wasn’t just out to see blood. God wanted Abraham to take hold of his faith for his own sake. Faith had to be Abraham’s promise as well as God’s, or it would never stick.
Before I met my wife, I had terminated every significant dating relationship I’d had. It happened easily. I’d watch the relationship grow, but when it was commitment time I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sign my name on the dotted line. I couldn’t endorse the check of love. I couldn’t make a vow of promise. And in that instant, the relationship was always over.
Now I am married. I’m not sure I could never love another woman as I do my wife. But this I do know: when Brenda and I gave each other a promise the day of our wedding, it changed everything about our relationship. Because of those promises, our love is deeper today than either of us could have known.
Faith is a promise. If it isn’t, it dies.
Genesis 12:1-4a
Abram is an Aramaean from the heart of Mesopotamia, whose father Terah begins a journey westward which Abram continues upon his father’s death. Whatever Terah’s reasons might have been for moving from the old family village -- restlessness, treasure-seeking, displacement, wanderlust -- Genesis 12 informs us that Abram’s continuation of the trek was motivated by a divine call to seek a land which would become his by providential appointment. This is the first of four similar divine declarations that occur in quick succession in chapters 12, 13, 15, and 17. Such repetition cues us to the importance of these theophanies, but it ought to also cause us to look more closely at the forms in which the promises to Abram are made.
In brief, Abram’s first three encounters with God are shaped literarily as royal grants. Only in Genesis 17 does the language of the dialogue change, and elements are added to give it the flavor of a suzerain-vassal covenant. This is very significant. When Abram receives royal grant promises of land or a son, he seems to treat these divine offerings with a mixture of indifference and skepticism. He immediately leaves the land of promise in Genesis 12, and connives with his wife, Sarai, and her handmaid, Hagar, to obtain an heir in Genesis 16. Even in the stories of Genesis 13-14, where Abram sticks with the land and fights others to regain his nephew Lot from them after local skirmishes and kidnappings, Abram turns his thankfulness toward a local expression of religious devotion through the mystical figure of Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18-20). Only when God changes the language of covenant discourse, bringing Abram into the partnership of a suzerain-vassal bond, does Abraham enter fidelity and commitment to this new world, new purpose, and new journey.
For Israel, standing at Mount Sinai in the context of a suzerain-vassal covenant-making ceremony, the implications would be striking. First of all, the nation would see itself as the unique and miraculously born child fulfilling a divine promise. Israel could not exist were it not for God’s unusual efforts at getting Abram to make Sarai pregnant in a way that was humanly impossible. Second, the people were the descendants of a man on a divine pilgrimage. Not only was Abram en route to a land of promise, but he was also the instrument of God for the blessing of all the nations of the earth. In other words, Israel was born with a mandate, and it was globally encompassing. Third, while these tribes had recently emerged from Egypt as a despised social underclass of disenfranchised slaves, they were actually landowners. Canaan was theirs for the taking because they already owned it! They would not enter the land by stealth, but through the front door; they would claim the land not by surreptitious means or mere battlefield bloodshed, but as rightful owners going home. This would greatly affect their common psyche: They were the long-lost heirs of a kingdom, returning to claim their royal privilege and possessions. Fourth, in the progression of the dialogue between Yahweh and Abram, there was a call to participation in the mission of God. Later, circumcision would become a visible mark of belonging, reminding Israel of the gracious goodness of God, and calling the nation to participation in the divine mission.
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
Once the stage has been set for Paul’s readers to realize again the pervasive grip of evil in this world (Romans 1:18--3:20), Paul marches Abraham out onto the stage as a model of divine religious reconstruction. God does not wish to be distant from the world, judgmental and vengeful. Rather, Jesus comes, the fullness of God’s healing righteousness revealed.
The story of God’s righteousness as grace and goodness begins with Abraham. God has always desired an ever-renewing relationship with the people of this world, creatures made in God’s own image. Paul describes God’s heart of love in 3:21-31, using illustrations from the courtroom (we are “justified” -- 3:24), the marketplace (we receive “redemption” -- 3:24), and the Temple (“a sacrifice of atonement” -- 3:25). Moreover, while this ongoing expression of God’s gracious goodness finds its initial point of contact through the Jews (Abraham and “the law” and Jesus), it is clearly intended for all of humankind (3:27-31).
This is nothing new, according to Paul. In fact, if we return to the story of Abraham, we find some very interesting notes that we may have glossed over. “Blessedness” was “credited” to Abraham before he had a chance to be “justified by works” (4:1-11). In other words, whenever the “righteousness of God” shows up it is a good thing, a healing hope, an enriching experience that no one is able to buy or manipulate. God alone initiates a relationship of favor and grace with us (4:1-23). In fact, according to Paul, this purpose of God is no less spectacular than the divine quest to re-create the world, undoing the effects that the cancer of sin has blighted upon us (Romans 5). It feels like being reborn (5:1-11). It plays out like the world itself is being remade (5:12-21). This is the great righteousness of God at work!
John 3:1-17
Already in the prologue of John’s gospel, the concepts of “light” and “darkness” are identified to explain the meaning of everything in our world. Right up front, John helps us think through life and values and purpose in a stark dualism that is engaged in a tug-of-war for everything and everybody.
This comes to expression vividly in today’s gospel reading. Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the darkness of night (3:1), only to be serenaded by Jesus’ fine teachings about walking in the light. Later, the blind man of chapter 9 is actually the only one who can truly see, according to Jesus, because all of the sighted people have darkened hearts and eyes. Further along in the gospel, Judas will enter the room of the Last Supper basking in the light of the glory that surrounds Jesus (chapter 13), but when he leaves to do his dastardly deed of betrayal, the voice of the narrator ominously intones “and it was night.” Even in the passion story that brings the gospel to culmination, evening falls and darkness deepens as Jesus dies (chapter 19), but the floodlights of dawn rise around those who understand the power of his resurrection (chapter 20). All of this is confirmed one last time in the extra story added as chapter 21: the disciples in the nighttime fishing boat are bereft of their netting talents until Jesus shows up at the crack of dawn, tells them where to find a great catch, and is recognized by them in the growing light of day and spiritual insight. Darkness, in the gospel of John, means sin, evil, and blindness, and the malady of a world trying to make it on its own apart from its Creator. Light, on the other hand, symbolizes the return of life, faith, and goodness, and health and salvation and hope and the presence of God.
As Jesus tells Nicodemus, we need to be born again. While we have been brought into this world physically, the darkness of evil has shrouded us, and only when we get close to Jesus, the true Light of the world, penetrating its secretive and demonic recesses, will we thrive and grow, bending toward the brilliance of heaven.
Application
When Pepper Rodgers was struggling through a terrible season as football coach at UCLA, everything in his life seemed to be going wrong. No one would speak with him. Even his home life was on edge and uncertain. “My dog was my only friend,” he said. In fact, he mentioned that to his wife one day, telling her that a man really needs two friends. He was hoping to get a little sympathy from her. Instead she went out and bought him another dog!
The Chinese have a saying: “When men are friendly even water is sweet!” And so it is. The character of the world is changed when friends surround us. Even our own selves warm up to greater things. As another old proverb puts it: “The best mirror is an old friend.” When poet John Dryden penned an elegy in honor of his late friend Eleonora, his words showed how true that is:
The Souls of Friends like Kings in Progress are;
Still in their own, though from the Palace far:
Thus her Friend’s Heart her Country Dwelling was,
A sweet Retirement to a coarser place:
Where Pomp and Ceremonies enter’d not;
Where Greatness was shut out, and Bus’ness well forgot.
Dryden’s idea of a friend’s heart serving as a “Country Dwelling” was powerfully revealed in a story Scott Camp told of a university student who was working on a doctorate investigating the social culture of the Navajo people. For a full year the young man lived with a Navajo family, participating in all the regimen and rituals of their lives.
Since Navajo households are often intergenerational, the grandmother, a wizened old woman, was matriarch of the home. She moved slowly and quietly among them, ever-present even without speaking. Though she knew little English, she soon became fast friends with the doctoral student. Somehow they shared a communication that needed few words. When the time finally came for him to leave, she uttered a single sentence that gathered into it the essence of what it means to be soulmates. She said: “I like me best when I’m with you!”
Queen Victoria of England said something similar when she reflected on two great men who had served the country for terms as prime minister. Of William Gladstone she opined, “When I am with him, I feel I am with one of the most important leaders in the world.” On the other hand, she confessed that when she was with Disraeli, he made her feel “as if I am one of the most important leaders of the world.”
A good friend brings out the best in us. Certainly God brought out the best in Abraham. That’s understandable. But notice carefully the way James puts it. He doesn’t say that God was Abraham’s best friend, even though that was certainly the case. Instead, he tells us that Abraham was called a friend of God! There’s something in our relationship with God that brings out the best in him too!
We call it grace, no matter which way it flows between friends. The Pioneer Girls Leader’s Handbook says it this way: “A friend hears the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.” Maybe that’s why God delights in our music. He’ll never forget who he is so long as we keep singing “Amazing Grace.”
Alternative Application
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17. You remember the story... Abraham was a great old man, probably 125 or so. God had come to him in the past in strange and wonderful ways. When he wore a younger man’s clothes, the VOICE had called him on a journey with no fixed destination. But the beckoning was always one of blessing: “I’ll give you land beyond measure! I’ll make sure you have a child, old as you are! Your descendants will populate these hills and valleys like rain!”
Well, the land sort of took him in. Moreover, after some fits and starts he and Sarai did get a child. And even though his pension plan was still not entirely clear, life in these later years was peaceful and prosperous. After all, there was Isaac. His boy’s name meant “Laughter!” and that’s certainly what he brought Abraham these days. Life had turned out okay.
Now the VOICE came to him again. But was it really the same VOICE? “Sacrifice your son Isaac on the altar to me!” it said. What kind of God was this? Or was it perhaps a demon’s mocking mimic? “Kill your boy! Choke out the Laughter!” God forbid! Please, God, let it not be so!
There would be no sleep this night. Abraham’s mind whirls while his old bones crawl in pain. Get the servants... Get the transportation... Get provisions... Get wood... Get the son...
Three days travel they go, with every step harder than the last. Isaac chatters his usual banter, laughter echoing in Abraham’s cold heart. Reluctantly Abraham spies the high place finally. The mountain of doom. The plateau of death.
Strangely gruff, Abraham orders the servants to stay. “The boy and I will go it alone from here.” Two on a murderous mission. Only one will return. The father-son hike soured even more when Isaac’s laughter lilted a deadly chilly question: “Where’s the lamb, father?”
What could Abraham say? Does he tell Isaac the truth: “Son, the God who said he loved me enough to give you to your mother and I now says he wants you back, and I’ve got to do the dirty work!”? How do you lie with a straight face when heaven is ripped apart by hell? Is it a spiteful retort, spat out in unholy jest, that finally clears his throat: “My son, God will provide...”?
So here they are, clearing and building and preparing. And now the end creeps with horror into Isaac’s eyes. His father binds him. His father thrusts him on the wood. His father stands over him with a glinting knife. And the Laughter dies...
But not yet. In a miraculous moment, time stops and grace points to another sacrifice. The son is free, and faith is affirmed. And he calls the place Moriah.
Moriah is one of those delightfully ambiguous names that can mean several things at once. It probably has to do with seeing at this point, or knowing. Where God sees, he will be seen. Something like that.
But what is it that God sees on a mountain called Moriah? For one thing, he sees a man. A weak man. A stumbler on the earth. A businessman who got ahead in life. A husband who cheated on his wife. A father who knew the joy of bringing new life into being.
Even more than that, God sees a man who was willing to put it all on the line. Here was someone who counted his relationship with the God of the VOICE to be the one thing that mattered, the one thing that put everything else together, the one thing that could raise even heaven out of this stench of hell.
Probably the most important thing about the moment of seeing is not only that God sees Abraham there on Mount Moriah. In some mysterious way God is also seen by Abraham.
A geography lesson tells the rest of the story. On this same barren spot of ground, centuries later, David would urge Solomon to build the Temple of God. It would stand as a doorway between earth and eternity. And then, in the mysterious design of the ages, one day another Father would walk these slopes with another Son. That Son, too, would raise his voice to his Father, and the Father for a time would be silent. The wood of the offering would be prepared, and the Son would be lifted as a sacrifice. On what the world would later call “Good Friday” this other Father would shed tears of pain as his Child died, this time with no escape.
Somehow history would repeat itself and more with a vengeance. Yet this Lamb would also be chosen by God for the altar. And Laughter would be silenced for three days while all the world looked on in wonder.
Abraham found his faith that day on Mount Moriah, but it cost God his Son on the same spot. The mystery of life is found now not in a faith that pretends Laughter, but in a promise that God knows Pain. Because he has walked a mile in Abraham’s shoes and ours, God will never leave us. He will never forsake us.
The poet put it powerfully:
Often you wondered why tears came into your eyes
And burdens seem to be much more than you can stand.
But God is standing near; he sees your falling tears.
Tears are a language God understands!
God sees the tears of a broken-hearted soul.
He sees your tears, and hears them when they fall.
God weeps along with man, and takes him by the hand.
Tears are a language God understands!
But what is freedom? What does it meant to be free?
Usually freedom means throwing off our bonds and fetters, tearing down the walls that might close us in. It means taking hold of our own destinies, owing nothing to anyone, standing tall at the helm of our ship.
But liberty, by itself, cannot hold our lives together. It can’t steer us or shape us. It can’t give us purpose or direction. Liberty merely opens the gate; if there’s nothing beyond the gate, we stand there staring out into the void. We may end up destroying ourselves by trying to go in too many directions without a purpose.
Listen to this suicide note left by a young woman who had kept herself free by moving from lover to lover, throwing of all restraints: “I am killing myself because I have never sincerely loved any human being all my life.”
She was free! A free spirit, freely giving herself in free relationships. But liberty alone can never give us meaning in life. Freedom opens the door for us, but faith gives us direction when we walk out into the open spaces of our lives.
Abraham had to learn that. The early chapters of Genesis document a series of promises that God made to Abraham, making him truly free. Interestingly, every time God opened a door Abraham went wandering by himself and lost his sense of purpose. In Genesis 12 God promised him a homeland, but when the famines came he ran off to Egypt. In Genesis 15 God promised him a son, but Abraham schemed with a younger woman to find an heir.
God repeats these promises to Abraham in Genesis 17, this time going a step further. God challenges Abraham: “If you really believe that I’m God, if you believe I can keep my word, then it’s time for you to turn your faith into a promise. You do something to show that you belong to me. Cut the skin of your flesh, and remind yourself of where you got your identity!”
Do you see what God was doing? God didn’t want Abraham to hurt, and he wasn’t just out to see blood. God wanted Abraham to take hold of his faith for his own sake. Faith had to be Abraham’s promise as well as God’s, or it would never stick.
Before I met my wife, I had terminated every significant dating relationship I’d had. It happened easily. I’d watch the relationship grow, but when it was commitment time I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t sign my name on the dotted line. I couldn’t endorse the check of love. I couldn’t make a vow of promise. And in that instant, the relationship was always over.
Now I am married. I’m not sure I could never love another woman as I do my wife. But this I do know: when Brenda and I gave each other a promise the day of our wedding, it changed everything about our relationship. Because of those promises, our love is deeper today than either of us could have known.
Faith is a promise. If it isn’t, it dies.
Genesis 12:1-4a
Abram is an Aramaean from the heart of Mesopotamia, whose father Terah begins a journey westward which Abram continues upon his father’s death. Whatever Terah’s reasons might have been for moving from the old family village -- restlessness, treasure-seeking, displacement, wanderlust -- Genesis 12 informs us that Abram’s continuation of the trek was motivated by a divine call to seek a land which would become his by providential appointment. This is the first of four similar divine declarations that occur in quick succession in chapters 12, 13, 15, and 17. Such repetition cues us to the importance of these theophanies, but it ought to also cause us to look more closely at the forms in which the promises to Abram are made.
In brief, Abram’s first three encounters with God are shaped literarily as royal grants. Only in Genesis 17 does the language of the dialogue change, and elements are added to give it the flavor of a suzerain-vassal covenant. This is very significant. When Abram receives royal grant promises of land or a son, he seems to treat these divine offerings with a mixture of indifference and skepticism. He immediately leaves the land of promise in Genesis 12, and connives with his wife, Sarai, and her handmaid, Hagar, to obtain an heir in Genesis 16. Even in the stories of Genesis 13-14, where Abram sticks with the land and fights others to regain his nephew Lot from them after local skirmishes and kidnappings, Abram turns his thankfulness toward a local expression of religious devotion through the mystical figure of Melchizedek (Genesis 14:18-20). Only when God changes the language of covenant discourse, bringing Abram into the partnership of a suzerain-vassal bond, does Abraham enter fidelity and commitment to this new world, new purpose, and new journey.
For Israel, standing at Mount Sinai in the context of a suzerain-vassal covenant-making ceremony, the implications would be striking. First of all, the nation would see itself as the unique and miraculously born child fulfilling a divine promise. Israel could not exist were it not for God’s unusual efforts at getting Abram to make Sarai pregnant in a way that was humanly impossible. Second, the people were the descendants of a man on a divine pilgrimage. Not only was Abram en route to a land of promise, but he was also the instrument of God for the blessing of all the nations of the earth. In other words, Israel was born with a mandate, and it was globally encompassing. Third, while these tribes had recently emerged from Egypt as a despised social underclass of disenfranchised slaves, they were actually landowners. Canaan was theirs for the taking because they already owned it! They would not enter the land by stealth, but through the front door; they would claim the land not by surreptitious means or mere battlefield bloodshed, but as rightful owners going home. This would greatly affect their common psyche: They were the long-lost heirs of a kingdom, returning to claim their royal privilege and possessions. Fourth, in the progression of the dialogue between Yahweh and Abram, there was a call to participation in the mission of God. Later, circumcision would become a visible mark of belonging, reminding Israel of the gracious goodness of God, and calling the nation to participation in the divine mission.
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17
Once the stage has been set for Paul’s readers to realize again the pervasive grip of evil in this world (Romans 1:18--3:20), Paul marches Abraham out onto the stage as a model of divine religious reconstruction. God does not wish to be distant from the world, judgmental and vengeful. Rather, Jesus comes, the fullness of God’s healing righteousness revealed.
The story of God’s righteousness as grace and goodness begins with Abraham. God has always desired an ever-renewing relationship with the people of this world, creatures made in God’s own image. Paul describes God’s heart of love in 3:21-31, using illustrations from the courtroom (we are “justified” -- 3:24), the marketplace (we receive “redemption” -- 3:24), and the Temple (“a sacrifice of atonement” -- 3:25). Moreover, while this ongoing expression of God’s gracious goodness finds its initial point of contact through the Jews (Abraham and “the law” and Jesus), it is clearly intended for all of humankind (3:27-31).
This is nothing new, according to Paul. In fact, if we return to the story of Abraham, we find some very interesting notes that we may have glossed over. “Blessedness” was “credited” to Abraham before he had a chance to be “justified by works” (4:1-11). In other words, whenever the “righteousness of God” shows up it is a good thing, a healing hope, an enriching experience that no one is able to buy or manipulate. God alone initiates a relationship of favor and grace with us (4:1-23). In fact, according to Paul, this purpose of God is no less spectacular than the divine quest to re-create the world, undoing the effects that the cancer of sin has blighted upon us (Romans 5). It feels like being reborn (5:1-11). It plays out like the world itself is being remade (5:12-21). This is the great righteousness of God at work!
John 3:1-17
Already in the prologue of John’s gospel, the concepts of “light” and “darkness” are identified to explain the meaning of everything in our world. Right up front, John helps us think through life and values and purpose in a stark dualism that is engaged in a tug-of-war for everything and everybody.
This comes to expression vividly in today’s gospel reading. Nicodemus comes to Jesus in the darkness of night (3:1), only to be serenaded by Jesus’ fine teachings about walking in the light. Later, the blind man of chapter 9 is actually the only one who can truly see, according to Jesus, because all of the sighted people have darkened hearts and eyes. Further along in the gospel, Judas will enter the room of the Last Supper basking in the light of the glory that surrounds Jesus (chapter 13), but when he leaves to do his dastardly deed of betrayal, the voice of the narrator ominously intones “and it was night.” Even in the passion story that brings the gospel to culmination, evening falls and darkness deepens as Jesus dies (chapter 19), but the floodlights of dawn rise around those who understand the power of his resurrection (chapter 20). All of this is confirmed one last time in the extra story added as chapter 21: the disciples in the nighttime fishing boat are bereft of their netting talents until Jesus shows up at the crack of dawn, tells them where to find a great catch, and is recognized by them in the growing light of day and spiritual insight. Darkness, in the gospel of John, means sin, evil, and blindness, and the malady of a world trying to make it on its own apart from its Creator. Light, on the other hand, symbolizes the return of life, faith, and goodness, and health and salvation and hope and the presence of God.
As Jesus tells Nicodemus, we need to be born again. While we have been brought into this world physically, the darkness of evil has shrouded us, and only when we get close to Jesus, the true Light of the world, penetrating its secretive and demonic recesses, will we thrive and grow, bending toward the brilliance of heaven.
Application
When Pepper Rodgers was struggling through a terrible season as football coach at UCLA, everything in his life seemed to be going wrong. No one would speak with him. Even his home life was on edge and uncertain. “My dog was my only friend,” he said. In fact, he mentioned that to his wife one day, telling her that a man really needs two friends. He was hoping to get a little sympathy from her. Instead she went out and bought him another dog!
The Chinese have a saying: “When men are friendly even water is sweet!” And so it is. The character of the world is changed when friends surround us. Even our own selves warm up to greater things. As another old proverb puts it: “The best mirror is an old friend.” When poet John Dryden penned an elegy in honor of his late friend Eleonora, his words showed how true that is:
The Souls of Friends like Kings in Progress are;
Still in their own, though from the Palace far:
Thus her Friend’s Heart her Country Dwelling was,
A sweet Retirement to a coarser place:
Where Pomp and Ceremonies enter’d not;
Where Greatness was shut out, and Bus’ness well forgot.
Dryden’s idea of a friend’s heart serving as a “Country Dwelling” was powerfully revealed in a story Scott Camp told of a university student who was working on a doctorate investigating the social culture of the Navajo people. For a full year the young man lived with a Navajo family, participating in all the regimen and rituals of their lives.
Since Navajo households are often intergenerational, the grandmother, a wizened old woman, was matriarch of the home. She moved slowly and quietly among them, ever-present even without speaking. Though she knew little English, she soon became fast friends with the doctoral student. Somehow they shared a communication that needed few words. When the time finally came for him to leave, she uttered a single sentence that gathered into it the essence of what it means to be soulmates. She said: “I like me best when I’m with you!”
Queen Victoria of England said something similar when she reflected on two great men who had served the country for terms as prime minister. Of William Gladstone she opined, “When I am with him, I feel I am with one of the most important leaders in the world.” On the other hand, she confessed that when she was with Disraeli, he made her feel “as if I am one of the most important leaders of the world.”
A good friend brings out the best in us. Certainly God brought out the best in Abraham. That’s understandable. But notice carefully the way James puts it. He doesn’t say that God was Abraham’s best friend, even though that was certainly the case. Instead, he tells us that Abraham was called a friend of God! There’s something in our relationship with God that brings out the best in him too!
We call it grace, no matter which way it flows between friends. The Pioneer Girls Leader’s Handbook says it this way: “A friend hears the song in my heart and sings it to me when my memory fails.” Maybe that’s why God delights in our music. He’ll never forget who he is so long as we keep singing “Amazing Grace.”
Alternative Application
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17. You remember the story... Abraham was a great old man, probably 125 or so. God had come to him in the past in strange and wonderful ways. When he wore a younger man’s clothes, the VOICE had called him on a journey with no fixed destination. But the beckoning was always one of blessing: “I’ll give you land beyond measure! I’ll make sure you have a child, old as you are! Your descendants will populate these hills and valleys like rain!”
Well, the land sort of took him in. Moreover, after some fits and starts he and Sarai did get a child. And even though his pension plan was still not entirely clear, life in these later years was peaceful and prosperous. After all, there was Isaac. His boy’s name meant “Laughter!” and that’s certainly what he brought Abraham these days. Life had turned out okay.
Now the VOICE came to him again. But was it really the same VOICE? “Sacrifice your son Isaac on the altar to me!” it said. What kind of God was this? Or was it perhaps a demon’s mocking mimic? “Kill your boy! Choke out the Laughter!” God forbid! Please, God, let it not be so!
There would be no sleep this night. Abraham’s mind whirls while his old bones crawl in pain. Get the servants... Get the transportation... Get provisions... Get wood... Get the son...
Three days travel they go, with every step harder than the last. Isaac chatters his usual banter, laughter echoing in Abraham’s cold heart. Reluctantly Abraham spies the high place finally. The mountain of doom. The plateau of death.
Strangely gruff, Abraham orders the servants to stay. “The boy and I will go it alone from here.” Two on a murderous mission. Only one will return. The father-son hike soured even more when Isaac’s laughter lilted a deadly chilly question: “Where’s the lamb, father?”
What could Abraham say? Does he tell Isaac the truth: “Son, the God who said he loved me enough to give you to your mother and I now says he wants you back, and I’ve got to do the dirty work!”? How do you lie with a straight face when heaven is ripped apart by hell? Is it a spiteful retort, spat out in unholy jest, that finally clears his throat: “My son, God will provide...”?
So here they are, clearing and building and preparing. And now the end creeps with horror into Isaac’s eyes. His father binds him. His father thrusts him on the wood. His father stands over him with a glinting knife. And the Laughter dies...
But not yet. In a miraculous moment, time stops and grace points to another sacrifice. The son is free, and faith is affirmed. And he calls the place Moriah.
Moriah is one of those delightfully ambiguous names that can mean several things at once. It probably has to do with seeing at this point, or knowing. Where God sees, he will be seen. Something like that.
But what is it that God sees on a mountain called Moriah? For one thing, he sees a man. A weak man. A stumbler on the earth. A businessman who got ahead in life. A husband who cheated on his wife. A father who knew the joy of bringing new life into being.
Even more than that, God sees a man who was willing to put it all on the line. Here was someone who counted his relationship with the God of the VOICE to be the one thing that mattered, the one thing that put everything else together, the one thing that could raise even heaven out of this stench of hell.
Probably the most important thing about the moment of seeing is not only that God sees Abraham there on Mount Moriah. In some mysterious way God is also seen by Abraham.
A geography lesson tells the rest of the story. On this same barren spot of ground, centuries later, David would urge Solomon to build the Temple of God. It would stand as a doorway between earth and eternity. And then, in the mysterious design of the ages, one day another Father would walk these slopes with another Son. That Son, too, would raise his voice to his Father, and the Father for a time would be silent. The wood of the offering would be prepared, and the Son would be lifted as a sacrifice. On what the world would later call “Good Friday” this other Father would shed tears of pain as his Child died, this time with no escape.
Somehow history would repeat itself and more with a vengeance. Yet this Lamb would also be chosen by God for the altar. And Laughter would be silenced for three days while all the world looked on in wonder.
Abraham found his faith that day on Mount Moriah, but it cost God his Son on the same spot. The mystery of life is found now not in a faith that pretends Laughter, but in a promise that God knows Pain. Because he has walked a mile in Abraham’s shoes and ours, God will never leave us. He will never forsake us.
The poet put it powerfully:
Often you wondered why tears came into your eyes
And burdens seem to be much more than you can stand.
But God is standing near; he sees your falling tears.
Tears are a language God understands!
God sees the tears of a broken-hearted soul.
He sees your tears, and hears them when they fall.
God weeps along with man, and takes him by the hand.
Tears are a language God understands!
