By Tanya Jolliffe
Children look to adults to help them learn how to do new things. Adults often focus on ‘how’ to do something in the teaching process. They explain how to put pieces of material together to create a dress or add ingredients to make a cookie. While all of that is important, I have always wanted to know the ‘why’ of the instructions. For example, I remember my mother teaching me to cream the butter and sugar together and then add the eggs when baking cookies. I wanted to know why that mattered. When my father was teaching me how to pick the horse’s hooves, I wanted to know why we did it that way. Somehow, when I understood the ‘why’ behind a given technique or practice, it made remembering how so much easier.
I was recently re-reading Genesis 22 and the testing of Abraham. The parent in me always gets hung up on wondering what type of relationship Abraham and Isaac had after Abraham passed God’s test. On the journey up the mountain, the answers to Isaacs’ ‘why’ questions regarding the wood and knife they are carrying seem easy. However, I imagine the ‘why’ answers about laying him on the altar they built to be more complicated on the way back down.
Teaching obedience and trust is most effective when demonstrated and lived out, and Abraham provided Isaac with an up close and hands-on experience. But why Abraham did it this way is quite another story. Maybe his answer to Isaac wasn’t too different from many parents today, “because I said so.” Although I guess in his case, he could answer, “because God said so.”
In a recent bible study on the spiritual disciples by Kelly Minter, one of the lessons was on the importance of remembrance. In the lesson, she reminds us that many times in scripture, God’s people recount their history with the Lord, and some choose to remember in the middle of hardship. Why did Isaac have to participate in Abrahams’s testing? I’m not sure, but perhaps it was necessary to reflect on the value of trusting and obeying the Lord and the relief received from his provision to accomplish the plans and purpose ahead.
Asking why God allows hardship, struggle, disappointment, and heartache are common but not easy to answer. Remembering how people in the scripture experienced many of the same things we do can help us reflect and search for the lesson he is trying to teach us. Sometimes that is the ‘why.’ He needs us to learn and understand the cost of discipleship and the willingness to demonstrate our readiness to lay everything we hold near and dear at his feet, just as Abraham did.
Looking at this story helps us remember Isaac’s role in assisting Abraham’s promise to come to fruition. He gained favor in the Lord’s eyes for his role in the test. His faithfulness to God lasted far beyond being saved from death by the provision of a lamb. It reminds us that we, too, are saved from death by the provision of THE lamb.
As the world looks unsettling and doesn’t seem to make sense some days, don’t get caught in the whys of a situation. Focus on how God uses it to teach you something you might need to help you live out your purpose in His plans moving forward.
“Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not rely on your own understanding; in all your ways know him, and he will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5-6 CSB).
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