Faith and Mount Moriah - Eugene Peterson

This chapter from Eugene Peterson's The Jesus Way is a wonderfully piercing picture of the Abraham testing, the Abraham faith, and the God of Abraham:

"We need testing. God tests us. The test results will show whether we are choosing the way of awe and worship and obedience (which is to say, God), or whether, without being aware of it, we are reducing God to our understanding of him so that we can use him. Have we slipped into the habit of insisting that God do what we ask or want or need him to do, treating him as an idol designed for our satisfaction? Does God serve us or do we serve God? Do we require a God that we can fully understand and control or are we willing to be obedient to what we do not understand and could never control? Is God a mystery of goodness whom we embrace and trust, or is God a formula for getting the most out of life on our terms? The test results will show whether we have been blithely assuming that God is pledged to give us whatever we want whenever we ask. Have we thought all along that God is there to serve us? The test will tell us. Do we want God in our own image or do we want the God who is beyond us and over us, who we trust will do for us what only God can do in the way that only God can do it--no strings attached...no reservations...no caveats...the whole hog? The test will tell us.

And we will be glad enough to have the test results so that we can get on with the resurrection-shaped life God has for us. This does not always happen without some pain, for we can get very attached to our little projects of self-deification, but it doesn't take us long to be glad to have gotten rid of them.

Nothing in our Scriptures is as demanding on our faith as the Akedah, this Binding of Isaac, narrated in such bare but excruciating detail as to leave no doubt that the stakes are eternally high. We ask, 'Why this quite unimaginable severity at Moriah?' Isn't there another way?...Soren Kierkegaard in his passionate search for an authentic life of faith probed the Moriah test relentlessly and left no room for an easy detour, a comfortable alternative. He warns against every attempt to trivialize faith into a vacation getaway in the mountains, or a place of influence in the city, or an entertainment park in the suburbs. The way of faith does not serve our fantasies, our illusions, or our ambitions. Faith is not the way to God on our terms, it is the way of God to us on his terms.

A three-day walk to Mount Moriah exposes the banality of all such bogus faith. At Mount Moriah we accept and worship a God beyond our understanding. At Mount Moriah we embrace a mystery that is light-filled, but no less a mystery for all that.

Abraham and the Akedah: the Christian way cannot be programmed, cannot be guaranteed: faith means that we put our trust in God--and we don't know how he will work out our salvation, only that it is our salvation that he is working out. Which frees us for anything. We must be the ones tied down, so that we can be the one's set free..." (p. 54-55)