Thought I'd share this with my Christian brethren...
There is an incident in the Bible that I believe has a lot to say in today’s reasoning age and it is where God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Issac as a burnt offering on a mountain in the land of Moriah, see Genesis chapter 22.
Consider the position that Abraham was in. God had promised him that his heir would be one that will come from his own body (Genesis 15 v 4) and that it would be Issac (Genesis 17 v 19). Now God is telling him to sacrifice this same son Issac as a burnt offering? A secular, reasoning approach to this would treat it this as a Boolean (an either/or) and conclude that either Abraham was mistaken about God’s promises or that he had heard wrongly about God’s command to sacrifice Issac. How often do Christians nowadays find themselves in a similar type of position, facing an alleged either/or?
From the Genesis account, we see that Abraham was obedient to God’s command. Here is where we can apply a couple of properties of truth. It is independent on what we think about it, or believe about it. Abraham would not have known how this scenario was going to play itself out, but he trusted God and obeyed.
Hebrews 11 sheds more light on this incident:
17 By faith Abraham, when he was tested, offered up Issac, and he who had received the promises offered up his only begotten son,
18 of whom it was said, “In Issac your seed shall be called”,
19 concluding that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which he also received him in a figurative sense.
So Abraham obeyed God and reasoned that if he were to sacrifice Issac, God would have to raise him back from the dead in order to fulfill His promises. It can be seen therefore that trusting God, far from being a safe option which requires no thinking leads to the consideration of other options.
