A God Named Desire by Ty Gibson

Author:Ty Gibson [Gibson, Ty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780816323975
Publisher: Pacific Press Publishing Assocaition
Published: 2010-06-02T05:00:00+00:00

Taking Abraham to the edge was not enough. The Lord now pushes him over the edge for a really strange and scary freefall. As Abraham is dropping through mid-air, his faith concentrated in the execution of an act commanded by God and yet utterly foreign to His true character, the Lord intervenes to catch His loyal follower in such a way that he lands feet-first with a brilliantly enlightened and purified faith . . .

a faith that can now see the beauty and power of the coming Messiah.

After all the trouble the elderly couple went through to finally get the son of promise, God tells Abraham to do something very odd from our vantage point in covenant history; odd to us, but in keeping with Abraham’s cultural and religious upbringing in Babylon:

“Take now your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:2).

Taking into account the various pieces of biblical information regarding Abraham’s story, along with the historical setting Scripture portrays, I’d like to suggest that a convergence of three things is happening here:

1. God is testing Abraham’s faith. Does he now understand that God is faithful to fulfill His promises, that human impotence is no hindrance for the Lord, and that only a lack of obedient faith can interfere?

2. God is cleansing Abraham’s faith from every lingering trace of the appeasement or salvation-by-works theology with which he was raised in Babylon, initiating a theological lineage of enlightened faith free from the pagan idea that God demands suffering in exchange for His favor.

3. God is creating in Abraham a sense of the mental and emotional anguish He Himself will endure on a much larger scale of intensity in the giving of His only Son for the salvation of the world.

Severe Object Lesson

From our place in history we can’t help but wonder, What in the world was God thinking when He told Abraham to make his son Isaac a human sacrifice? The same God later told Moses that this practice was an “abomination” in His sight and one of the reasons it was necessary that the Canaanites and their demon gods be defeated (Deuteronomy 12:29-31). If any post-Moses follower of Yahweh were to hear a voice requiring human sacrifice, the voice would be regarded as that of any god but the true One. Then why would God command Abraham, His faithful follower, to lay his child on an altar, slit the boy’s throat, and burn him to ashes? We find the story difficult to swallow.

Ah, but this strange biblical drama, so out of character for a God who abhors human sacrifice, begins to make sense in Abraham’s historical and spiritual context, if not in that of Moses or ourselves. Making Abraham walk such a daunting spiritual gauntlet could only possess rationale if the possibility of God requiring human sacrifice was an existing fear lurking in Abraham’s time and culture. And watching God intervene at the

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