Genesis 22:1-14
Provision and Testing
James Sledge June 26, 2011
From time to time I’ve wondered whether we ought to use the updated version of the Lord’s Prayer rather than the traditional one that we say every Sunday. Many of us learned that traditional version growing up, and we can say it without even thinking. It rolls off our tongues with ease. But of course it is a bit archaic. Who says “Thy” anymore? And “Lead us not into temptation.” I like the modern version. “Do not bring us to the time of trial.”
I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about it, but the Lord’s Prayer has several short petitions. We ask for daily bread, forgiveness, and protection from trials or testing; temptation if you prefer. This prayer Jesus gives says that we depend on God for three essential things, our basic needs or daily bread; forgiveness, being restored to right relationship; and finally, help in our trials, tests, and temptations. The prayer seems to assume that testing is a part of faith, but it asks God not to bring us into it, not to give us more than we can bear.
I found myself thinking about the Lord’s Prayer as I was wrestling with the very troubling story of God testing Abraham by commanding him to kill his son Isaac. The notion that God would ask someone to kill his child is troubling enough, but if you’re familiar with the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac, you know that this threatens the very promise God has made to Abraham from the beginning.
God has promised to make of Abraham a great nation, which naturally requires descendants. And even though Abraham is old and Sarah is barren, God promises they will have a child. Abraham and Sarah tried to help the promise along via a child by Sarah’s servant girl Hagar, but God’s promise is a child to Abraham and Sarah, and Isaac is the fulfillment of that promise. Isaac is the promise embodied, but now God says, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”
But despite the horrific nature of God’s command, Abraham, that consummate man of faith, behaves just as he did when he first met God and heard the command, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Once again, without so much as a word, Abraham goes, even though this terrifying, new command threatens all that Abraham holds dear.
Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann has pointed out that there is a striking symmetry in this story. Three times Abraham is addressed, and each time he responds, “Here I am.” The first and third time Abraham simply does what God or God’s messenger says. But in the middle exchange, Abraham speaks a second time. He answers Isaac’s question about there being no lamb saying, “God himself will provide.” And the whole story hinges on this hope.
Give us our daily bread. Save us from trial and testing.
Most religious people are happy with a God who provides, but a God who tests, who demands absolute loyalty even when it threatens our hopes, plans, and dreams is troubling, even disturbing.
But if religious people are prone to seek a God of provision only, much of our modern world is organized around the premise that God neither tests nor provides. America worships the self-made man or woman, the person who is dependent on no one and answerable to no one. The hubris found in much of American business, the obscenely widening pay gap between workers and executives, and the collapse in 2008 of the financial house of cards built by those running our financial system, all bespeak an arrogance that imagines itself neither dependent on nor beholding to anything or anyone.
And even we who are religious have come to accept this as how things are. And we’ve relegated God to some vague, spiritual realm. We can scarcely imagine a primitive God like the one in Genesis who demands terrifying loyalty, but who also provides.
Give us our daily bread. Save us from trial and testing.
There is something primitive about this story in Genesis, and it offends our modern sensibilities. We’re too sophisticated for the sort of God found here. We expect a reasonable and rational God, one as sophisticated as we are. And we want nothing to do with a God who is dangerous, who puts us in difficult situations, whose sovereignty will not adjust to us.
Many Christians deal with this story’s offensiveness by saying that it is from the Old Testament, that it was from a very different era where different rules applied. I’m not sure this really helps very much, but it does conveniently forget that Jesus finds himself in a similar position to Abraham. God calls him to go to the cross, and when Jesus prays in the garden of Gethsemane, it is clear he does not want to. This is a severe test. But in the end, much like Abraham, Jesus goes to the cross, trusting that God will somehow, even in the face of death, still provide.
And of course, Jesus says to each of us who would be his disciple that we must take up our cross and follow him.
Give us our daily bread. Save us from trial and testing.
Provision and testing. A stark tension exists between these in the story of Abraham called to sacrifice Isaac, a tension that I think most of us would like to exclude from our religious life. But as frightening and primitive as this story is, I’m not sure that genuine faith can exist without this tension. For that matter, I’m not sure that any deep and abiding relationship can exist without this tension between provision and testing.
Human beings are meant for relationship, and so we all need what can only be given to us by another. But deep relationships such as a marriage require commitment and trust. Such things are generally easy to give early in a relationship. But marriages must stand the “test” of time. Couples will likely face times when some other path seems easier, when they will be tempted to “meet their needs” elsewhere. They must live in that tension of provision and testing, daily bread and temptation, before it can truly be said, “Now that is a solid marriage.”
I am more than happy to blame some of the more terrifying aspects of our Old Testament reading today on it being the product of a violent culture where sacrifice, even human sacrifice, was well known. I am willing to assign some of the “primitive” aspects of the story to the dust bin of history. But I fear that this in no way mitigates the vital dynamic of faith the story bears witness to, this tension of provision and testing, daily bread and temptation.
Jesus invites each of us to follow him, and in so doing to discover the shape and meaning of our true humanity, as well as the remarkable love and grace and hope that God has for us. But following Jesus is an act of radical trust. We can only walk the path Jesus shows us by turning away from other paths, by rejecting the siren calls of consumerism and consumption, by rejecting the urge to hate and hurt, by loving and giving ourselves to others as Jesus did. To follow him, we must make choices and decisions, sometimes very difficult ones – decisions not to follow certain others, not to walk some very popular paths.
Give us our daily bread. Save us from trial and testing.
I do like to think that this story of sacrificing Isaac is more metaphor than history. But even then, it is more than a bit frightening. Yet Abraham is able to go, and we are able to live faithfully in the face of difficulty, fear, and uncertainty on the hope, the hope that sustained Abraham, the hope that sustained Jesus on the cross, the hope that God will indeed provide. That is, in the end, the hope and promise of resurrection. God will provide.
Thanks be to God!
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