Today's Scripture Reading (August 20, 2021): Genesis 22
In his classic novel, "Dracula," Bram Stoker writes, "We learn from failure, not from success." He is right. While most of us wish that we would
never fail at whatever it might be that we try to do, if we never failed, we would
never learn. The anguish that we often feel amid our failure drives us to learn and prosper. Sometimes, it is the pain of failure that causes us
to surge forward so that we don't have to feel it again. I am thankful for my failures
because they shaped my life and pushed me into some unknown areas that have
proved to be a blessing.
I have to admit that I have never liked the story of Abraham and the
sacrifice of Isaac. The story has not made a lot of sense to me. It is a story
filled with pain. Each phrase of God's instructions seemed to cut at Abraham like a
scalpel in the hand of someone with murderous intent. Take your son, your only
son, whom you love, and sacrifice him as a burnt offering. Abraham felt the pain, the hurt,
and likely felt like he was a failure with every swipe. Why would God intentionally do something like this
to someone who had served him so faithfully?
But there is, as always, another side of the story. The
truth of Abraham's
existence is that he lived as a stranger in a strange land. And in the place in which he lived, the gods who ruled over the
territory thought nothing of demanding a human sacrifice, and the people
thought nothing of giving one. As Abraham understood it, the human sacrifice
would be ritualistically killed and then burned as an offering to the gods. Was
it possible that his God would demand a similar kind of action? It might even have
been that Abraham had begun to wonder who it might be that his God would want
him to sacrifice. Could it be a servant that Abraham barely knew that could be offered as a sacrifice, or would God demand
a sacrifice of someone who was more critical to the aims of Abraham?
If these questions had entered Abraham's mind, then maybe that explains why God demands a sacrifice from him. If Abraham's God were going to require a sacrifice, it would not be an obscure servant; it would be of someone more significant to Abraham; it would be his only son, Isaac. God wanted Abraham to feel the intense pain of human sacrifice and see how far the patriarch
would go to follow his imagined plan of the gods.
And Abraham follows the demands of God until God stops
him. God is impressed at how far Abraham had taken the sacrifice. And he knew
that the pain and the failure that Abraham experienced every step of the way
was genuine. This was a lesson that Abraham was not going to
forget, and he would never again wonder if his God would demand a human
sacrifice in service of him. Human sacrifice could never be something that God
would require from his people, especially not the sacrifice of someone so loved and
needed by his father. Life was precious, and the sacrifice of a life was always
a last resort and could
never be done for just a symbolic reason. If someone were to die, it could only
be to effect real, needed change. And generations later, it would be God who would sacrifice his own Son, not as some symbolic act to appease
the gods but to save a world in pain and need.
Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Genesis 23
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