Standing where Abraham stood

Standing where Abraham stood

‘Then on the third day Abraham lifted his eyes and saw the place (ha makom) afar off’ (Gen. 22:4)
Humans make primary connections to things (or people) from which they believe (or have been persuaded) they will draw life, identity and purpose.
As children we find these in parents, lineage and country. These are important things which constitute our human pedigree and give us a sense of legitimacy.
Until we have an encounter with God through Jesus Christ we are looking for Life. When we are ‘re-born’ (‘born from above’) we receive a new pedigree as adopted sons and heirs—joint heirs with Jesus Christ in an inheritance, as Peter says, ‘that can never perish, spoil or fade...kept in heaven for you’ (1 Peter 1:4).
A different kind of Life now flows to us and within us—we’ve been joined to Life…of the eternal kind that heightens and adds vibrancy and colour to everything in this realm as well (an old hymn truly says, ‘heaven above is softer blue, earth around is sweeter green; something lives in every hue, Christless eyes have never seen’).
Then, His intentions and desires for us supersede the demands of the natural world because we have become new creations in Jesus Christ—adopted by the Father—and given True Life. Heavenly Father has now become the Primary Connection from which we receive life, and our identity is in the Son, Jesus Christ and purpose has become to bring praise to Him. We have been re-connected and re-positioned.
Some Christians don’t get this with clarity—or stray from it, and , as a result, may keep trying to draw life from dead things but when God gets hold of our life, He asks for (demands actually) this dis-connection and re-connection; to find in Him what we had thought we could organise elsewhere!
This is the grand message of Abraham. The Old Testament is full of ‘types’ (physical events or things which ‘typify’ a spiritual principle or truth and often point from the Old to the New). And here is one of them typified and exemplified in Abraham 4000 years ago. He became the father and exemplar of a new way where earthly and familial connections are not the most important—and they are not Life-giving.
To exemplify this and establish it as the principle by which life was to work, God called Abraham. And it was a big call; ‘if you’re prepared to let all that go as the means from which you think you can draw life and identity—and find it instead, from your connection with me, then I will make you...’ (Jesus said the same thing to Simon and Andrew, ‘follow me and I will make you…’
It’s this ‘being made’ that we all seek, but many look for it in the wrong places. Abraham found that disconnecting was just the beginning—the first step—in the process of being ‘made.’ He had to stay in connection; He found himself on a journey into a series of examinations. Each examination passed made this new primary connection the more firm and sure. Yes, he stumbled here and there but it was a journey of disconnection from ‘that’ and into connection with a ‘THIS’ that a loving God was holding out to him! (What grace is here!). It turned out to be disconnection from self-imposed (self-chosen) limitations—and connection to enlargements.
His willingness to begin the journey was the first test; He faced a further lessons and tests—at least three…
Three major tests for Abraham:
1.Primary connection—God; 2. Primary Source—God; 3. Primary Dependence—on God: this is the test he now is facing as he stands, looking ahead to The Place in the distance.
So here stands Abraham: where would he place his absolute dependence? Would his reliance now be on the apparently fulfilled promise of God—now standing beside him—or on the God of the promise?
This is the difficulty we all face once we receive some long-awaited blessing from Him. Now that it’s here we treat it as a destination. But a blessing is never a destination. God Himself and The Place of His next appointment must always be the destination—and our absolute trust and dependence must continue regardless of what he has already given. (This is problem with all His gifts).
Abraham was facing the test of total abdication of his own agendas or ideas to learn to utterly depend on the God who ‘sees ahead’—Yahweh Yireh! This was the special significance of this place—The Place, HaMakom, which was now in view. Would he be willing, even now, to let go the means by which he thought God was going to effect the greater promise he’d been given? Let go—and depend entirely on the God of the promise instead of the promise of God. Hebrews tells us that figuratively Abraham received him back from the dead.
Can you now see the significance in the phrase, ‘Abraham lifted up his eyes...and saw The Place?’ He was standing where it was still possible to change his mind and return to Beer Sheva!
I stood there a few weeks ago and one picture shows what it looks like today. The other, an artist’s impression of what it looked like in Abraham’s day—but with even less buildings. There was just a walled enclosure around a spring known as Gihon and joined to that enclosure, another compound with dwellings in the hillside and above it. It was where Melchizedek (himself being a ‘type’ of Jesus Christ) lived, whom Abraham had encountered some years earlier.
This has significance as we stand on the edge of the new year, 2020. Can I suggest that Abraham too, had 20/20 vision as he stood here? Will we have 2020 vision as we face the year 2020?
Abraham was being brought again to The Place: where he’d encountered with Melchizedek—as we are brought again and again to the place of encounter with Jesus—the place where we first raised our hand in allegiance to Him and said we were ready to follow.
* As we lift up our eyes to 2020, and see the place that God is taking us, we may be tempted to retreat. Will we go on?
* It could be that we are being called to willingness to surrender the very things we thought God was using to bring about His purpose. If so will we go on with everything on the altar?
* At this point Abraham believed that God could effect what He had promised in whatever way He chose. And so he yielded. Will we too, yield again to that all-knowing, all-seeing and wonderful sovereignty—and allow God to do it His way in 2020—whatever that be?
Ian Heard, Dec.29, 2012