Is God Our Adversary?

Let me make a confession to begin with. I don't particularly like the Bible. I find many of its stories difficult to understand and then hard to accept when I do understand them. Take the story cited in this weeks lesson; Abraham's almost-sacrifice of Isaac. The thought that God would command child-sacrifice troubles me beyond measure!

Now, let me make another confession. I can't get away from the Bible no matter how much I would like to completely reject it. For some reason I am compelled to struggle with it despite all my critical objections to its content. I'm like Jacob wrestling with the angel and refusing to let go "unless you bless me." And yet I find that like the angel the biblical text often leaves me limping and yet blessed. Or should I say the God of the text leaves me limping and blessed!

So let me limp along here with a few observations on the story of Abraham's almost-sacrifice of his son Isaac that I hope might be a blessing. First, I would love to be able to view this as just a big mistake on the part of Abraham. Maybe he misunderstood what God was calling him to do. I mean, to think that God would command child-sacrifice is quite terrifying. And the reality is that Abraham came out of a religious culture that is known to have practiced human ritual sacrifice on behalf of its blood-thirsty gods.

Although I'm not really sure what this story truly teaches us about God it does contain profound truth. The one thing I do grasp about this story is that Abraham clearly experienced God as an adversary. As Abraham saw it God was threatening to take away the very thing (the son of the promise) that gave meaning to his entire existence. The birth of Isaac was after all the culmination of Abraham's faith journey.

The truly amazing thing about this story is that Abraham continued to trust God. Somehow in spite of what he experienced as the dead-end of his God-sponsored hopes at the hands of God Abraham believed. This strikes me as comparable to Job's stunning affirmation that "though he slay me yet will I trust in him." And Habakkuk's ridiculous assertion, "Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord." These outrageous expressions of faith fly in the face of all you-scratch-my-back-I'll-scratch-yours theology (as does the whole book of Hosea). Such audacious faith makes the calculating logic of the young Jacob look paltry, "If God will be with me and will watch over me . . . then the Lord will be my God."

Honestly, it is rather easy to trust in the God that blesses and gives and empowers and encriches. The much more difficult, all-but-impossible, thing is to trust in the God that we experience as our adversary. If we let them, I think that Abraham and Job can move us by faith beyond the God-that-takes-and-crushes toward the God-that-gives-blesses-and-provides!