Abraham's Understandable Fall

God tested Abraham a number of times during his life: He called him to come to the Promised Land, had him fight in that foreign land against four kings to redeem his nephew Lot, and promised to give him a baby of his own. Abraham passed all these minor tests very well. When God promised to send Abraham his own son, Abraham believed that God would be faithful to His promise. For his belief, God considered Abraham to be righteous. Everything looked wonderful for Abraham who always did what God asked of him and who always believed in God in his heart.

To fully and truly test Abraham, however, God would need to pass Abraham through a trial of faith. He would have to give him a test that would go beyond his intellectual ability to pass the test; the only way to pass such a test when the intellect is rendered useless is to have a full and pure trust in God. So God delayed in sending the promised son. Time is of the essence to an elderly, barren couple. Every day is like a thousand years. After about 3,650 days, when Abraham was eighty-five and Sarah was seventy-five, which seemed like 3,650,000 days, it became humanly obvious that Sarah was not going to have a child.

Sarah, at her wits end, logically and prudently discovered another path to fulfilling God’s promise: Hagar. Maybe God wanted to give them a son through Sarah’s maid. God helps those who help themselves, so it became time to take matters into their own hands. If God was going to send a son, He would have and could have and should have done it already. It must be that God wanted us to use our reason, she must have thought, to figure out a way to make good on what God said would happen. The rationalization that took place is so easy to understand and relate to for we in the modern world do this sort of thing all the time.

At our worst times, we utterly forget God and His providential care of us and think that everything depends on us. At our best, we work as though everything depends on us, but we always are fully aware that it is really up to God. The first is a totally man centered attitude and the second is God centered. The first is fueled by despair and its fruit is selfishness; the second is enlivened by hope and its fruit is the joyful and peaceful offering of self.

Sarah, understandably, gave bad advice to her husband, and he followed it and fell. All of us can relate to such a logical and reasonable and, at root, faithless response for we have all done it ourselves. Abraham, who had perfectly passed three minor tests, does not endure the ultimate test of faith. He lasted for ten years of hell, but then he fell. God needed to send him another test to purify and bring to maturity Abraham’s faith.

To pass this next test, Abraham would have to have complete trust that God would be faithful to His promises, even though what God asked made no human sense. Abraham would need to eat fully of the tree of life. How is this done? God shows Abraham through the covenant of circumcision. On the one hand, it is a penance showing that it is not by human power or ability that we have life; on the other it is a symbol of the stony heart which needs to be broken so that the heart of flesh, the heart that loves and obeys, which lies underneath the heart of stone may beat once again and trust in God no matter how absurd.

God ends up asking Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac; this seems to contradict God’s promise to give Abraham a vast multitude of descendants through this son. This time Abraham believes God completely, for “he considered that God was able to raise men even from the dead” (Hebrews 11:19). This will be our topic for tomorrow.


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