In Genesis 22:2, God told Abraham, “Take now thy son, Thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.”
One might wonder what it would have been like to be Abraham when God told him this. Abraham was to be “a father of many nations” (Genesis 17:5), and his wife Sarah was to be a “mother of nations” (verse 16). To see this through, God miraculously caused Sarah, who had been barren, to have a child at an old age. This child, named Isaac, was the one God would establish His covenant with (Genesis 17:21). God re-affirmed this in Genesis 21:12 when He told Abraham “in Isaac shall thy seed be called.”
Yet in Genesis 22, God told Abraham to offer this very son as a sacrifice.
In hindsight, we know that God was testing Abraham and had every intention of keeping Isaac safe (Genesis 22:12).
At the time though, this was a command that may have been hard to “make sense of.” Yet Abraham obeyed.
Commands such as this are not uncommon in Scripture. God once told Joshua that the Israelites needed to walk around a city once a day for six days and seven times on the seventh day in order for the city’s walls to be knocked down. When trumpets were blown and the people gave a shout, God told Joshua “the wall of the city shall fall down flat,” (Joshua 6:5). It may have seemed hard to figure out how this strategy would work, but Joshua obeyed God’s voice.
God later told a leprous man named Naaman that all he needed to do to cleanse his leprosy was dip in the river Jordan seven times (2 Kings 5:10). We know this did not make sense to Naaman, because he questioned the command and at first rejected it (verses 11-12).
Man in his “wisdom” may not understand how walking around a city and blowing trumpets could knock down city walls, or how dipping oneself in a river could cleanse leprosy. Yet, when God’s voice was obeyed, the walls of Jericho fell (Joshua 6:20), and Naaman’s leprosy was cured (2 Kings 5:14).
What must be remembered through all of this is that “as the heavens are higher than the earth,” so are God’s ways higher than our ways and His thoughts higher than our thoughts (Isaiah 55:9). When His commands do not meet our expectations, it is our mind that must change, rather than His will.
God’s path, no matter how “strange” it seems to mankind, leads to eternal life (Matthew 7:13-14).
There is a saying that if “God said it, and I believe it, then that settles it.” The problem with this statement is that God has said a lot of things that few people believe, yet the matter is still settled. He commands things that “don’t seem to make sense” to some and are therefore rejected, yet they are still truth.
When He says that baptism is necessary for one’s sins to be washed away (Acts 2:38; 22:16), many reason that this can’t be right. Like Naaman, who just “knew” that being dipped in water could not be necessary for him to be cleansed, so too have many determined that immersing someone in water could not be a part of God’s plan for salvation.
Walking by faith leads to the opposite attitude. It leads to trusting and obeying God at His every word.
Walking by faith will not lead us to do the specific things Abraham, Joshua, or Naaman did in the examples mentioned, but it will lead us to obey God’s doctrine as taught in the New Testament, regardless of whether it fits our expectations.
Abraham’s trust and obedience led him to be “justified by works, when he had offered Isaac his son upon the altar” (James 2:21). May we likewise trust and obey God, even when His commands “don’t seem to make sense.”
– Michael Hickox