Genesis 22

This chapter contains a minor little story--just a footnote, really--about how God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, revealing just before Abraham skewers his son that it's just a test. The real attraction of this chapter is the scintillating account of Nahor's sons (Nahor is Abraham's brother). All kidding aside, I do find one point of interest in Nahor's account. The author's use of the passive voice in verse 20--"Abraham was told"--makes me wonder just who did the telling. We are always taught to avoid the passive voice (a form of "be" plus a past participle for you grammar fiends) unless we're writing a lab report, and here we see one of the reasons why: It can make your writing vague. Of course, whenever I use the passive voice, it's because I'm intentionally being vague. In my writing, passive voice is never used for any other purpose. Ever.

Abraham's near-sacrifice of his only son of course demonstrates his deep faith. Yes, he told a half-truth about Sarah because he didn't trust God to work matters out, but here, the patriarch really comes through. As I've mentioned before, few of us hear audible commands from God. Yet I don't know if I'd be eager to follow God's command if he told me to do something out of my comfort zone, much less kill my child. We know now that God never asks anyone to offer human sacrifices, and we know that God is just testing Abraham. But if I really have deep faith in God, I suspect I'll have to make decisions that will cause me anguish (or, at the very least, distress). And yet God is the only balm through which we can find true and eternal succor.

Nowadays, this "God told me" business is more the domain of those who should belong in the loony bin. God told me to kill my family. God told me to disrespect these people. God told me that Jurassic World deserves to be the top-grossing film of all time. People can "pray" or "hear God," but the concept of "prayer" is not exclusive to Christianity. People can "pray" to their ancestors' corpses, Roger Rabbit, their fecal matter, or--you guessed it--Frank Stallone.

I'm no apologetics expert, but I do think we need a balance of prayer, Scripture, fellowship, and service to develop our relationship with the one true God. Only then can we truly discern whether it is God is speaking to us or our own neurosis. And I do want to acknowledge that even in Scripture, we do not literally follow everything it says. We are not sinning if we're wearing something woven out of two types of material (Leviticus 19:19) or if we clip the edges of our beards (Leviticus 19:27). Determining what Biblical precepts we should or should not follow opens up the proverbial can of worms, but the teachings of Jesus serve as a light that can illuminate the rest of Scripture. I'm about 1.85% through the Bible so far, so, slowly but surely, I'm getting there.