Week 3
Faith
By faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though God had said to him, “It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned.” Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death.
-Hebrews 11:17-19
My favorite, most personally challenging biblical example of faith is the one known as Abraham’s test, or Abraham’s sacrifice, or God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
It is the story of the long-awaited, promised son of Abraham. The one who would bless the nations, the one known as the child of promise. One day God asks Abraham to take Isaac and to go and build an alter for a sacrifice … Isaac to be the one sacrificed (I have written a two-part post about this story. To read it, click the following … God’s Test: Isaac (Part 1) ).
At the last moment, in that moment of the eleventh hour, God provides a ram for the sacrifice … a replacement for Abraham’s son … a replacement for all who have sinned (therefore all of us).
This story of Abraham and Isaac hints at the coming Messiah. It hints at the great cost of the sacrifice that would come, the sacrificial lamb who would be our atonement … the atoning sacrifice for the sin of the world.
I think that beyond the hints at the cost that God paid for us, it is also a parallel story that many of us can relate to (even if we do not want, or do not understand). For we all have loved someone and for those of us who have loved a child, the thought of God asking for the spilled blood of one’s child is unimaginable. For to ask such a thing is too much … it is too great a sacrifice.
Yet … that is what God has done. That is the choice he made to save us. That is what the waiting is for … for the birth of one whose life trajectory was toward humiliation, torture, crucifixion and, ultimately, death …
for us …
Faith costs … it cost God, his son and it costs us in having to accept such sacrifice in humility.
itsawonderfilledlife 