THE GREAT TEST
‘It came to pass after these things, that God did prove Abraham,’ etc.
Genesis 22:1-8 (R.V.)
It is by trial that the character of a Christian is formed. Each part of his character, like every part of his armour, is put to the proof; and it is the proof that tests, after all, the strength both of resistance and defence and attack.
I. The voice of God to Abraham was not heard in audible words; it was a voice in the soul constantly directing him to duty and self-sacrifice. The voice told him, as he thought,—I do not for a moment say as God meant,—that his duty was to sacrifice his son. The memories of olden days may have clung and hovered about him. He remembered the human sacrifices he had seen in his childhood; the notion of making the gods merciful by some action of man may still have lingered in his bosom. We have here the first instance of that false and perverse interpretation which made the letter instead of the spirit to rule the human heart.
II. As Abraham increases in faith he grows in knowledge, until at last more and more he can hear ‘Lay not thy hand upon thy son.’ ‘God will provide Himself a sacrifice’ bursts from his lips before the full light bursts upon his soul. In this conflict Abraham’s will was to do all that God revealed for him to do. In every age and in every station faith is expressed in simple dutifulness, and this faith of Abraham is, indeed, of the mind of Christ. We may be perplexed, but we need not be in despair. When we arrive on Mount Moriah, then the meaning of the duty God requires of us will be made clear. And as we approach the unseen, and our souls are more schooled and disciplined to God, we shall find that to offer ourselves and lose ourselves is to find ourselves in God more perfect.
Canon Rowsell.
SECOND OUTLINE
Abraham was not picked out as a model of excellence. He was apt to fear, apt to lie. What he was apart from his Teacher we see in his journey to Egypt: a very poor, paltry earthworm indeed, one not to be despised by us, because we are earthworms also, but assuredly worthy of no reverence which was his by birth or which became his merely in virtue of his call. What he was when he was walking in the light, when that transfigured him from an earthworm into a man, his after history will help us to understand.
I. The thought may have struck our minds that the circumstances of Abraham were eminently favourable to the cultivation in him of a pure, simple, monotheistic faith. A man living under the eye of Nature—on open plains, amidst flocks and herds—was likely, it may be said, to preserve his devotion unsullied and to give it a healthy direction. But we must remember that there was nothing in the perpetual beholding of natural objects which could preserve him from the worship of those objects. You cannot, by considerations of this kind, escape from the acknowledgment of a distinct call from an actual, personal, unseen Being, addressed to the man himself and confessed by him in his inmost heart and conscience. But if you begin from the belief of such a call, the more you reflect upon Abraham’s outward position the better. His work was the image of a Divine work; his government over the sheepfold, and still more in the tent, was the image of the Divine government of the world.
II. This we shall find is quite as important a reflection with a view to Abraham’s personal character as it is with a view to his position and office as a patriarch. His faith carried him out of himself; it made him partaker of the righteousness of Him in whom he believed. He became righteous in proportion as he looked forward to that which was beyond himself, and as his own life was identified with the life of his family.
III. Abraham’s intercession. Abraham believed God to be a righteous Being, not a mere sovereign who does what he likes. On that foundation his intercession is built. It is man beseeching that right may prevail, that it may prevail among men,—by destruction if that must be, by the infusion of a new life if it is possible. It is man asking that the gracious order of God may be victorious over the disorder which His rebellious creatures have striven to establish in His universe.
IV. As the life of the family is inseparably involved with the life of the individual, the most awful experience in the personal being of the patriarch relates to the child of promise—the child of laughter and joy. If we take the story as it stands, we shall believe that God did tempt Abraham—as He had been all his life tempting him—in order to call into life that which would else have been dead, in order to teach him truths which he would else have been ignorant of. God did not intend that a man should be called upon to make a sacrifice without feeling that in that act he was in the truest sense the image of his Maker. A filial sacrifice was the only foundation on which the hearts of men, the societies of earth, the kingdom of heaven, could rest.
—Rev. F. D. Maurice.
Illustration
(1) ‘Abraham and Isaac are an example of the unhesitating obedience of faith. Abraham knew that his own son had been named as the appointed victim; yet even so he could feel that God would provide that victim, and therefore he could submit. Isaac acquiesced in his father’s submission, content that God should provide the victim, even though it were himself.… We have here an example which finds its perfect antitype in the compact of sacrifice between God the Father and God the Son. The sacrifice of Calvary was as much the eternal design of the Son as of the Father: the Father laid nothing on the Son but what the Son freely took on Himself.’
(2) ‘ “God did tempt Abraham.” The seed did not drop by accident into the patriarch’s mind; it was not self-sown; it was not put into him by the suggestion of some of his fellows. It was his Divine Teacher who led him on to the terrible conclusion, “The sacrifice that I must offer is that very gift that has caused me all my joy.” ’
(3) ‘It would have been strange if commentators had not called attention to the beautiful classical story of Iphigenia. According to it her father, Agamemnon, was on the point of sacrificing her when the goddess carried her away in a cloud and substituted a stag for her. In several ancient religions animal or other sacrifice came to be looked on as taking the place of human sacrifice. We are told that amongst the Egyptians the animal “was marked with a seal bearing the image of a man bound and with a sword at his throat.” At the Roman Lemuralia thirty images of men made out of rushes were thrown into the Tiber from the Pons Sublicius by the Vestal Virgins. An officer recently returned from India informed the writer of this note that near one of his stations was a rock, over which a man used to be precipitated at a great festival every year, after some months’ preparation by the priests. Our Government has prohibited this, and now, instead of a man, a goat is thrown over. The story of the twenty-second chapter of Genesis shows how “the inhuman sacrifices, towards which the ancient ceremonial was perpetually tending, were condemned and cast out of the true worship of the Church for ever.”
It may be true that we cannot now teach this narrative as it was taught to us. We cannot, for example, say that all difficulty vanishes whenever you quote the words, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Nor can we any longer obliterate the patriarch and his son, and make the whole story an allegory of the sacrifice of our blessed Lord. But we have suffered no loss in having these avenues closed. For the one way is still open that leads to the patience and comfort which Scripture is sent to give us. And that way is to accept the story in the light of all its human circumstance and colour, and be resolute not to leave God out of it.’