Holiday Celebrations

*This post is a couple days late because of slow internet...*

Today is a holiday in Niger, actually in all this religious culture. Our beloved story of Abraham and his son on Mount Moriah is not simply a random one in a string of stories in the Old Testament of the Bible. While the story has special significance for us because of Moriah’s pregnancy story (written here), it is actually a pinnacle story for understanding God’s plan for bringing us back to Himself. The people here remember the story this weekend during Eid al-Adha, “Feast of the Sacrifice.” They literally slaughter a lamb to celebrate Abraham’s willingness to listen and obey God. Since they are celebrating this holiday right now, I wanted to write a little more about the significance of Abraham on Mount Moriah. Since this holiday is as big a deal as Christmas is to us, the story must hold some significance, right?

Remember that Mount Moriah is a descriptive story, it describes. It is not a prescriptive story, it doesn’t tell us what to do. This idea helps me to address my own question of “How is it okay for God to ask Abraham to put his son to death as an offering to him?” In other areas of the Old Testament, God clearly articulates His hatred for the fact that some people, in their total wickedness, offered their children as sacrifices. So, by including Abraham’s story in the Bible, God is in no way implying we should follow suit by sacrificing our kids. He wants us to know that He asked Abraham to do something very significant, and that Abraham obeyed.

So… God says to Abraham, “take your son… your only son, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering” (Genesis 22:2). God says He knows Abraham loves his son. God also points out Isaac is his only son. Abraham and his wife, Sarah, were childless into their late, late years. To prove to them that He could make something out of nothing, God tells Abraham he will have a huge number of descendants. God will uniquely bless these descendants, and God will use these descendants as a tool to bless the whole world. God tells Abraham that through Sarah, his barren wife, he will become a father of many.  You know the song? Father Abraham, had many sons, and many sons had Father Abraham. God promises Sarah will have a son named Isaac. And God says Isaac will inherit the promised blessing as well as the responsibility of being a blessing.

Abraham may have had some deliberations about God’s astounding request, but all we know is that “Abraham rose early in the morning… and went to the place of which God had told him” (verse 3). He lays the firewood on Isaac to carry, and Abraham carries the knife and the tools for the fire. Isaac asks Abraham where the lamb is for the sacrifice… “God will provide for himself the lamb,” Abraham answers. So up the mountain walks Abraham and his son, his only son, whom he loves, carrying wood on his back. Sound familiar?

At the top of the mountain, Abraham lays down the wood, puts Isaac on top of it and takes the knife in his hand to kill his son. “Abraham! Abraham!” says an angel of the Lord. “Stop! I know you trust and revere God because you even gave him your only son” (a paraphrase of verse 12). Abraham looks up. What does he see? A male lamb is caught in a bush. So Abraham offers the lamb instead. In the post about Moriah’s birthday, I summarized our commentary of this story as “God will provide for us what He is asking from us.” What He asks from us is so much greater than energy and strength and patience and love to care for a special needs child we thought we were having. He asks from us total obedience, for us to always do what He says is good and to avoid what He says is bad. He is our Father, so He knows what is best for us. He knows we don’t always understand why it’s best. Still, He asks us to listen to Him on the premise that He is God and we are not. Sadly, we often don’t listen. We don’t believe that He is God and He knows best. This failure to listen, failure to trust? That’s our sin. It’s a problem. It separates us from God. When we are eternally separated from God? That’s hell. A scary place to be sure.

Some people might not see it as a problem. “Sin and hell are what religious people use to scare people into coming to church or doing ‘good things,’” some  say. If you are one of those people, that excuse may work for awhile.  But I’m going to venture... that someday you will be nagged with the sneaking, but unshakable, suspicion that you are, in fact, estranged from the God who formed the universe, the God knows everything about you.

Okay, it’s a problem. This sin. This not listening. What can I do about it? Go to church more? Do more good things? That’s what many people here are doing. They learn that praying, that following standards of not eating pork, that sharing with the poor, that all these duties will take care of their sin problem and restore their relationship to the God who made them. In fact, they are so convinced they have a problem that separates them from God they spend a weekend physically killing a lamb and eating it together in order to make themselves right with God.

We’ve read that before the sacrifice someone writes a list of people’s names on a piece of paper. They slaughter the lamb in order to wipe away the sins of the people on that paper. Are they confident the blood of a simple bleating lamb actually takes care of this huge problem? I don’t think so. I think that’s why dozens of people here are hungry for words of truth about how to mend our relationship with God. Just this last weekend, a local religious leader invited a Nigerien hospital worker and his wife to a large mosque in the region to teach children about the way to God. Why would they ask a Christian to teach in a place where they learn about their own religion? I think they ask because they are keenly aware of their estrangement from God and are hungry to have this problem fixed.

So again, what can we do about our sin problem? God will provide for us what He is asking from us! Did you catch what God was giving a “sneak preview” of with Abraham and Isaac? The son, the only son, the beloved son, carrying the wood on his back, up the mountain, as a sacrifice. It’s Jesus. The sacrifice of Isaac was a preview for Jesus! The Father, who gives up His son? Who would dare ask a Father to give up a Son? God gave up His Son, voluntarily. Jesus carried His cross up that hill, voluntarily. He went through with it. There was no lamb that day. Jesus was the lamb. The Lamb of God. When Isaac asked about the lamb, Abraham confidently responded, “God will provide for himself the lamb.” God required a lamb’s blood for our sin, but clearly no animal was good enough. So what did He do? He required it, and He supplied it. He took on human flesh, walking in the perfection He required of us. And then he offered himself as the Lamb, shedding his own blood, washing away the dirtiest of our sins and making us as white as snow. He provided for us what He asked from us. Sure, we go to church. Sure, we do ‘good things.’ But we don’t do them to make ourselves right with God. We do them because God has made us right with Himself, and now we want to enjoy this closeness with Him.

That’s why we’re in Niger. We are amazed that God has been so kind as to make us right with Him, and we enjoy being close with Him. Truthfully, we enjoy being close with Him more than anything else we ever enjoy. And we know people all over the world are hungry to be close with Him as well. So if Nick coming across the world to give medical care helps some people understand even a hint of the great lengths God went to in bringing us back to Himself, then our time here is valuable. And we believe that is happening. Nick got to pray for a little girl last weekend and ended up seeing a miracle. I’ll leave you hanging and let him write about it in the next post :)