Abraham's Sacrifice

How do you cover this story in a short blog? This story serves as one of the high points of ancient literature. One of my favorite thinkers, Soren Kierkegaard pointed to this story as a picture of authentic faith. I remember Michael Card’s song, “God Will Provide a Lamb.” I get chills every time I hear that song… so poetic.

There’s an incredible backdrop to the story that’s important to understand. This is what I get the privilege of unfolding this in the Commons in late July. What’s really important for the purposes of a short blog is that this story really is about God giving increased clarity to the picture of salvation and what it will ultimately look like.

Here’s a thought I want to leave you with today. A “call” comes again to Abraham: Go and offer your son as a burnt offering. Ethics aside, God again invites Abraham to participate in something. Remember God originally called Abraham to leave the familiar and to head out into the unknown. Abraham obeyed. Again, when God calls Abraham to do this, he obeys. There is a cultural reason why he understood (God uses the culture of the times to speak into our lives) this call but just note for now that when God called Abraham he obeyed.

Why does God keep calling Abraham? Why does He keep inviting him to participate in the grand story of redemption? It certainly isn’t to save him over and over again. It seems to me the real conflict that Abraham struggled with was not the ethics of it. Rather, what he struggled with was the seeming contradiction between what God originally had called him to and this particular calling.

Here’s how I might put it for us today. Why does God keep coming after us? Why does He keep “calling” us to risk for Him in life? Why does God invite us to jump in with Him when it seems so counter-intuitive or even “irrational”? It’s because He’s re-clarifying and re-clarifying in our lives what it means to have Him as our all in all. It’s not that He keeps saving us, like we can lose salvation and then gain it back. By inviting us to join Him, by asking us to live by faith and actually risk instead of playing it safe, He’s re-clarifying what it actually means to leave it all to follow Him. Jesus says exactly those kinds of things to those who follow Him. What is it to gain the world and yet lose your life? What is it to put conditions on your following me?

When God re-calls us, what we often find in our hearts that keep us obeying are the very things that we find more important than Christ. It is what we consider to be sacred, or precious, or the thing that we consider to be of great beauty or giving of life. When the call comes in our lives, it’s God saying it’s time to re-examine the very things that grip our hearts.

Lord, today for those very things that I find of ultimate value other than Christ, let me remember the gospel… there is only one person who is ultimately beautiful and His name is Jesus. What He’s done for me I could not accomplish by myself. I’m more of a sinner than I ever thought yet I am more loved than I have ever known because of Christ. God, as You foreshadowed in Abraham’s day, a Lamb was ultimately provided.