Isaac, obedient son, even to death

What did Isaac and his father talk about on the way back down the mountain?

For that matter, what did they talk about on the way up?

The servants had been left at the bottom…

And Abraham said to his young men, “Stay here with the donkey; the lad and I will go yonder and worship, and we will come back to you.” Genesis 22: 5

What they spoke about on the way up depends upon what age Isaac was. In most depictions, Isaac is shown as a ‘young lad’.

As mentioned in the previous post, Josephus puts his age as in his twenties, and there are other schools of thought that, since he was a type of Christ, he would have been the age Christ was when He was sacrificed, thirty-three.

But then we have the term ‘lad’. “The lad and I will go…” and I guess that is one of the reasons why I used to believe the version that he was young. But is it not relative? Abraham was over one hundred years old… one hundred plus the age of Isaac, so any age could be classified as ‘lad’ to someone that old. (Interestingly, in my second Christian historical novel, Grow in Grace, the as yet unpublished follow-up to Hold the Faith, the Apostle John calls his fifty odd year old granddaughter ‘child’. John was in his nineties at the time.)

Another factor worth considering in working out the meaning of ‘the lad and I’…

Abraham had another son, Ishmael.

Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore Ishmael to Abram. Gen 16: 16

Now Abraham was one hundred tears his son Isaac was born to him Gen 20: 5

That would work out as a thirteen or fourteen year difference in ages. Enough perhaps for Abraham to differentiate his two sons and call all Isaac ‘the lad’ as opposed to his older half-brother.

To follow the school of thought that Isaac was the same age as Christ when He was sacrificed, the conversation when climbing the mountain

The Father gave up His beloved Son…

For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. John 3:16

Abraham was willing…

So Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and Isaac his son; and he split the wood for the burnt offering, and arose and went to the place of which God had told him. Genesis 22: 3

Christ gave up His life willingly…

“Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father save Me from this hour?’ But for this purpose I came to this hour. John 12: 27 (Bolding mine.)

Isaac, went willingly up the mountain with his father.

Had Abraham reminded him again of God’s promise… that through him, Isaac, would his seed be called….

of whom it was said, “Through Isaac shall your offspring be named.” Heb 11: 18

Christ carried the means of His death…

And He, bearing His cross, went out to a place called the Place of the Skull, which is called in Hebrew, Golgotha, John 19: 17

Isaac carried the means of his death…

So Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on Isaac his son; and he took the fire in his hand, and a knife, and the two of them went together. Gen 22: 6

When they reached the place he was to be sacrificed, Isaac permitted himself to be bound and laid on the altar. He could have overpowered his father, decided to sacrifice him instead. But he did not. He submitted to his father… and to God.

Isaac was quite a man.

The story will continue next time…

Be at peace, and trust God,

Shalom

Susan

What if… by Chris Martin, re-blogged

I Interrupt this short series on Isaac, to re-blog a post by fellow blogger,  Chris Martin.

It is excellent… my only comment is the one I put on his site, What if we stopped telling him how great the post is and start putting it into practice 🙂

You will find the original article here… http://chrismartinwrites.com/2013/06/17/what-if

Shalom

Susan 

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What If…

What if we stepped out of bed every morning with purpose and a desire to make a difference in someone’s life besides our own.

What if we stopped complaining about our Starbucks order being incorrect and bought a meal for the homeless guy standing on the corner with no shoes and a cardboard sign.

What if we stopped blaming inanimate objects for the violence we see in this world and started taking our responsibility as parents seriously.

What if we put the needs of others in front of our own.

What if we gave until it hurt instead of just enough to look good.

What if we turned off the amplifiers, microphones, and smoke machines and just listened for God’s still, small voice.

What if we stopped looking at the color of a person’s skin and started realizing we all bleed the same shade of crimson.

What if we started fixing the person in the mirror instead of those on the other side of it.

What if we looked into the eyes of the outcast and the loner instead of looking through the eyes of society.

What if we put our trust in God and not in the number on our bank account statement.

What if we realized that salvation is a gift born from sacrifice, grace, and mercy and not the result of anything we can accomplish.

What if we actually lived out our Facebook status.

What if Jesus wasn’t only talking to the rich man in Matthew 19:21.

What if we said yes to our children and no to overtime at work.

What if we took the time to listen to someone’s story.

What if we quit talking and singing about how Jesus wants us to live and actually started doing it.

What if the true heroes of this world, like the single mom with three kids, the father, husband, wife, mother, son, and daughter fighting for this country, or teachers were treated with the same admiration and respect as athletes and actors.

What if we replaced racism, hate, jealousy, and pride with love.

What if we stopped killing babies and gave them the right to choose the path they wanted to take in this life.

What if we prayed for the murderer and rapist on death row instead of wishing they would suffer a horrible death. (Matthew 5:44)

What if we stood in the gap for the lost, lonely, homeless, and hurting instead of standing on the sidelines.

What if Jesus had decided that He didn’t want to endure the most horrific pain and suffering imaginable for people who don’t deserve any of it.

What if you knew you had one day to live.

What if you lost everything…all your possessions, your family, your health, your money, your job security, your friends…would you still love God?

What if…

Have a blessed day,

Chris

Isaac, son of Abraham

Recently I have been writing a series on ‘praising God in all things’ in its various forms.

Sometimes trusting God, never mind praising Him is quite a challenge. Looking at examples of this in the Bible, and there are many, I chose this week to look at the life of Isaac, son of Abraham. He is a good example of trusting God… and his father.  Why else would he have allowed his father to tie him up and lay down on the altar?

Let us review his life.

He was a miracle child. His mother, Sarah was well past child-bearing age at the age of ninety.

Sarah’s response to the news…

Therefore Sarah laughed within herself, saying, “After I have grown old, shall I have pleasure, my lord being old also?” Genesis 18: 12

The apostle Paul writing about Abraham…

And not being week in faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead, (since he was about a hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah’s womb. Romans 4:19

Since Abraham was very much alive, and would be for some long years more, it seems feasible to believe that the ‘deadness’ of Abraham was in his ability to produce sperm.

So Isaac, often called the ‘son of promise’ was very much a miracle child.

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Did Abraham fulfill God’s trust in Isaac’s upbringing…

For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is right and just, so that the LORD will bring about for Abraham what he has promised him.” Genesis 18:19

Isaac must have been raised in ‘the fear of the Lord’ and to be obedient to his parents.

Which brings me back to the question… ‘why would he have allowed his father to tie him up and lay down on the altar?’

How old was he?

No one knows but there are many theories. Even if he was a teenager, he could have overpowered his very old father. But Josephus puts his age at twenty five… much larger and stronger and fitter than his father. There is another theory, that Isaac was thirty-three, like Christ. (He is often seen as a ‘type’ of Christ, so this is not beyond the realm of possibility.) Check out this link for a discussion on Isaac’s age. http://www.theologyweb.com/campus/archive/index.php/t-47785.html

When all is said and done, his age does not matter. What counts is his trust and obedience.

Yet, in spite of this, Isaac has the least written about him in the Bible. Let’s dig beneath the surface and see what IS written and what we can learn from it.

His name meant ‘laughing’ or ‘laughter’. Was this entirely because of his parents’ reaction to the news he would be conceived… or did it also describe his nature?

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Did he feel he had to ‘live up’ to his father? If so it would have been a great challenge. After all, his father was the ‘friend of God’, and ‘the father of the faithful’. Remember what God said about Abraham…

“For I have known him, in order that he may command his children and his household after him that they keep the way of the Lord, to do righteousness and justice, that the Lord may bring to Abraham what he has spoken to him.” Genesis 18: 20

The first proof of that was in Isaac’s obedience… he did what his father said.

There were other ways that Isaac showed that he paid attention to what his father taught him, and his attitude towards God. We will look at those next time.

Till then, go in peace,

Tread softly – you may be  treading on someone’s dreams,

Susan

Faith, trials… and disappointments 2

What I discovered I had, was something that is not often discovered until a post-mortem… or so I was told.

I was also told that I was a walking time bomb… (see http://www.holdthefaith.net/#!walking-time-bomb/c14z)

To be told that you have an aneurysm so large that ‘once upon a time we would have told you to go home and enjoy the rest of your life’ was a shock. A bigger shock for my husband was when it was explained that when it ‘burst’, as it would, there was no point in ringing an ambulance. I would have, at most thirty… agonising… minutes left.

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When the shock started to diminish, my first thought (other than for my husband) was ‘am I ready to meet God?’

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Then I saw the many areas where I needed to grow and change.

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Work on them, and do not forget Who is in charge.

We reflected back on the many areas God had already protected me…

When we stayed with our son and his family in Scotland… a breathless struggle up a steep (and I mean steep) hill each day we went out

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And I probably should not mention about lifting heavy suitcases off the carousel on our journey back to Australia… because I wanted to save my husband from further pain.

Yes, I had much to be thankful for and could only trust that whatever happened was God’s will for me. We both did, and we had to face things that we had previously not felt the need to discuss. It was difficult to see my husband’s struggle when he looked ahead to life alone.

But then came the tests, the appointments, the admissions and the ‘pre-surgery’ work-ups’.

The first surgeon introduced me to another surgeon as they thought ‘open surgery’ might have the best chance of success. That plan was to cut my chest open, expose the whole aorta… and replace it with a synthetic one. One surgeon doing that, the other stitching blood vessels back in place. (I had never thought before how many major… and minor blood vessels run off the aorta.)

It was around that time when my daughter backed off, and stayed away. According to our doctor that is quite common amongst families when life-threatening issues are involved. (It did not stop it hurting, but it did explain it.)

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This is what the aorta and its main branches are supposed to be like – on the right.

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According to our first surgeon, on the left is an image of what is nearest to what I had.

The third surgeon, the one who said he would operate drew a rough sketch. Because it extended below the renal arteries it made things much more complicated. He explained that the ‘gut artery’ had to be attached, or I would die. But as he showed us, the gut artery and one of the kidney arteries were very close… one kidney artery had to be blocked off.

I thought of a dear friend in the US with kidney failure.

“Don’t even go there!” the surgeon said.

We knew it took six weeks to make a graft, and we wanted… longed, to attend our church convention, so we counted down the weeks. The surgery had to happen by June at the latest. Nothing happened.

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Now these were the technical details. Living with the knowledge I might die, any minute, in agony –

 I still believe it was harder for my husband than for me.

I had something to think about… the draft of a historical Christian fiction series… so I thought ‘if I don’t write it now, it will never be done. (Book 1 available on Amazon

http://tinyurl.com/cm8efvy

and Smashwords

http://tinyurl.com/c3pgfgg

With book 2 Grow in Grace nearing completion.)

Mostly, that kept my mind on things of God.

My husband who, if you read last week’s post, you would know has major health problems, took over the housework (the cleaner did not clean, she did not think our home needed anything done to it. We did.) She was dispensed with and he took over. He also took over the driving, working out that I could be a health hazard.

Our lives changed dramatically in many ways. We were also counting down the time we thought the surgery could happen and still make it to the convention. Then we were told, by the surgeon, that the graft had been made a long time before, but he had ‘cold feet’ because the risk of total paraplegia was too high. However, now he had a date for us…  It would mean that we could not travel to the convention.

Since we had committed it all to God, although it was difficult to accept, we saw the blessing. An overseas surgeon, experienced in these procedures, would be present to advise the two surgeons who would undertake the procedure.

For anyone who has gone through anything like this… I don’t need to tell you the ups and downs of trusting God on this, and accepting the ‘No’ from God.

Just as it was for the apostle Paul as recorded in Acts.

Now when they had gone through Phrygia and the region of Galatia, the were forbidden by the Holy Spirit to preach the word in Asia. After they had come to Mysia, they tried to go to Bithynia, but the Spirit did not permit them. Acts 16: 6,7

God sometimes says ‘no’

And we have to trust Him.

The surgery is over. The recovery was longer than I had anticipated… but I am back to almost normal duties.

If you know anyone going through health trials, please pray for them. You might not understand what they are going through… but God does. He is looking for people who care enough for others to pray. That is the ‘work of Christ’

My apologies for the longer post… I did not want it to run over into another week.

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Tread softly, you may be treading on someone’s dreams

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Susan

Faith, trials… and disappointments

Over the last three weeks I have talked a fair bit about praying without ceasing, and faith being the substance of things hoped for.

It is easy to write about, and I know many people do, but how many of us who write have experience of the things we write about? I thought it was time to share my credentials in the trusting God department.

As mentioned in an earlier blog, my husband and I ‘lost’ a teenage son. He committed suicide after a string of things going wrong in his life. Some of the kids in the High School where he was bullied came to his funeral… but we didn’t know much at that time. We were in shock. The mother of the girlfriend who ‘dumped’ him that day, contacted us; wanting us to reassure her daughter we didn’t blame her. There were a lot of people we did not blame, nor did we blame God.

Walking through the valley of the shadow of death…

That line from the 23rd psalm took on a different meaning as we struggled through, supporting each other. And this is something we are so grateful to God for… if anything we grew closer together. (Through the Compassionate Friends Organisation, we met so many people who had lost their marriage, as well as a child.)

A long time before, when we married, we had asked a friend, from the Bible College I had recently graduated from, to read a portion of scripture.  My husband and I often relied on part of the reading…

“Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” Eccl 4: 12

We asked God to be the third cord in our marriage. There were times when we believed that it was that third cord that kept us from falling.

God was our strength through my husband’s many illnesses… some caused by the medication used to treat his lung condition.

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No, we did not float through it all, spiritually sound, mature and well-balanced, we had many ups, downs and crashes… but our beliefs remained, although like flickering candles sometimes.

Because of his recurring health problems, my husband had to retire early and go on a disability pension.

If you have not been through it, you probably would not understand, but the change from being employed to being a ‘pensioner’ was a hugely difficult adjustment for him to make. He became quite depressed, but quietly so.

Perhaps I was out doing the shopping at the time; I know I wasn’t home when the minister called. When I came home my husband told me what the minister said he needed to do in order  to turn things around. “Praise God.”

Praising God would not give him his health back; would not give him his job back…

One day he started. No, he did not have a miraculous healing but slowly the depression started to lift.

It is a long climb back from the bottom of the pit of despondency, with many slips on the way… but he made it.

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Again, our marriage strengthened, the third cord held us firm and safe.

Next week… more trials, more triumphs.

Till then,

Tread softly, you may be treading on someone’s dreams.

Susan

Faith… the substance of things hoped for

Faith is the substance of things hoped for… Hebrews 11:1

Another translation of ‘substance’ is confidence, and an alternate is ‘essence’. I like the latter.

Last week I finished the series on Praying Without Ceasing by looking at the fact that sometimes we are too beaten down by what has happened to consider giving thanks in all things. I suggested that at these times thanking God for the strength to endure might be all we can manage. That, however is a prayer of faith. So, I thought this week I would look at faith.

‘The substance, or essence, of things hoped for’… was written by the Apostle Paul, and I would imagine the things he referred to were things like fulfillment of the promises of God, not a new car or home. We might hope that we could afford these, perhaps take steps to save toward them, but in all honesty I do not believe that these things are the subject what we should be having faith in.

There is quite a ‘hall of fame’ listing in Hebrews 11.

Don’t know about you… but in the past I have looked at them and said “ah yes, but they were…” Now I know they were just like me. Yes, some of them heard the voice of God, but they had to act on their own faith in the One who spoke.

Noah started building the ark on the word of God, to the ridicule of his neighbours no doubt, because from what I can find in the Bible, no rain had fallen then.

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Abraham left, with just the instruction. He didn’t know where he was going and he was leaving behind everything he knew.

Moses had settled down, looking after his father in law’s sheep, when God stirred him up and showed him it was time to go back to Egypt.

Jumping to the New Testament… the disciples followed Christ, learning from Him but being rebuked for their lack of faith on more than one occasion. However, like us, they were receiving on the job training.

But…

The disciples thought it was ‘all over’ after Christ died.

Then the other disciple, who came to the tomb first, went in also; and he saw and believed. John 20: 8 (Bolding mine.)

For as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that He must rise again from the dead. Jon 20: 9

They had been with Christ for three and a half years, seen what He had done, but did not understand.

Other notable examples of sight not producing faith were the Israelites in the wilderness. They had seen the awesome judgments on Egypt, had seen the Red Sea open to let them pass through, were led by the Cloud and Pillar of Fire… yet had no faith in the One Who led them.

Perhaps the best example is that of Adam and Eve. Not only did they have the ‘newness’ of God’s creation, He walked in the Garden with them in the evening, and still they chose to follow Satan.

No, sight is not enough.

The Bible is full of other examples where God has intervened, yet the people went back to worshiping idols, even sacrificing their children to them.

If they didn’t succeed how can we?

• ·         We can study the Bible. Even if you do not have a concordance there are many of these free on-line.

• ·         We can pray.

(I love the little quote picture from last week

and I am putting it in again this week.)

• ·         We have the Holy Spirit to guide us.

We are not fully converted, living a life of faith soon after we believe. Well, most of us are not. Like a tree it takes time to grow. As trees need sun and rain and good soil to grow, we need the things listed above.

• ·         We also need to live the life.

Faith is not a spectator pastime, we have to be living and doing.

I know many people who are going through severe trials, long trials. My husband and I have too, but it was in those trials that we learnt to hold on, and faith started to grow.

My husband’s favourite scripture…

And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, who are the called according to His purpose. Rom 8: 28

That scripture has seen him through many trials and tests.

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Be at peace,

Susan