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God and Our Petty Isaacs


       Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place The Lord Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the Lord it will be provided.” (Genesis 22:13-14)

          One of the complaints I hear about God is that He didn’t have to make people with free will. He could have (and should have, they say) created  us without the ability to sin. The fact that He chose to create us with the capacity to sin makes our sin His fault. Or when the acknowledge that free will might be a bad thing to lose, they claim that since He’s omnipotent, He should fix things so that the negative consequences of our sin don’t take place. 
          Putting aside the logical issues with those ideas, today’s passage is about God’s take responsibility (or being response-able.) He provides the sacrificial substitute for Isaac. He would do so again for all of us on the cross. This while idea is one of the things that most convinces me that God is the right god to worship. If God had been made up by humans, he would follow the same pattern that all the other gods seem to – which would leave salvation up to humanity. Almost all religions teach that if you are good enough, you get to go to heaven. 
         Christianity teaches that you flat out aren’t good enough, can’t possibly be good enough to work your way to heaven. Your only hope is in God’s provision. And provide, He does.
          Now, consider for a moment the phrase, “On the mountain of the Lord, it will be provided.” Where’s your mountain of the Lord? As noted earlier, the New Testament seems to move away from the physical and into a spiritual arena, The mountain of the Lord was at a distance from where Abraham and Isaac lived. They had to pack up and travel, and among the things they packed were the wood and the knife with which to make the sacrifice. Abraham either knew that they’d need the wood, or didn’t want to take a chance that where they were going might not have the wood needed. It wasn’t easy to get there, and it wasn’t easy for Abraham or Isaac to do what God told Abraham to do. It wasn’t in the comfort of their home that God provided. 
          So where is our Mountain Moriah? I suspect it changes every time we have to face it, but it is there, wherever that there might be, that God calls us to make a sacrifice, and it is there that God provides. What does God call us to sacrifice? In Abraham’s case it was not just a child, it was the child on whom all his hopes were pinned. God had told him that it was through Isaac that God’s promises would be fulfilled. What do you pin your hopes on? Are you willing to sacrifice it? One of the sad things I’ve found is that my Isaacs are often pretty petty things. That should make it easier to sacrifice them, right? Wrong. It doesn’t matter what the thing is, if we have set our hearts on it. Right now, I seem to have a lot of petty Isaacs.

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