If this is true, and all God’s evidence says that it is - then Abraham was truly blessed by his position, not just as an individual, but as one who could go on to the bless the world. One thing seems clear from Abraham’s calling to sacrifice his son – God could have blessed the nation through Abraham’s seed without the call to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, yet He still chose to do so. In fact, this is broader than just Abraham - there are undoubtedly many pre-emptive things God could do if He wanted a world with no suffering or hardship whatsoever. But given that God is omnipotent and could have, I presume, set up a world of no suffering, it seems evident that because there is suffering that must have been a key element in our being created. He allowed what He needn’t have allowed because the creatures that would emerge from this world unscratched and untouched were not the kind of creatures He wanted. If the fall put an end to God’s world of goodness, the subsequent restoration injected an abundance of grace wholly consistent with His Divine nature, and that, I presume, is what we are to discover. 

 

To see the truth of this statement, let us look at the situation the other way round and picture our God unreservedly agitated and disconcerted by anything other than an unscratched and untouched existence for each of us. Try to imagine what it would be like to be denizens of such a world. If I crash my car and hurt my leg, God instantly fixes my leg and my car. If I lose my house keys, God makes them magically appear in front of me. If I buy a lottery ticket and do not win, God returns the money to my pocket. If I make a mistake, God corrects it for me. If I sin, God wipes away all my bad feelings and those of the person I’ve sinned against. Certainly in the midst of such activities I may hope that God would act in such a way beneficial to myself. The moment my house keys are lost and I’m in a hurry, it would be marvellous if God made them appear in front of me. If I crash my car and hurt my leg, I would love to have them both fixed in an instant. But these are only feelings directly connected to my appeals or wishes (in the subjunctive form) subject to the appearance of such events. I do not think for one second that the world would be a better place if God acted in this way. Living in a gilded cage wrapped in cotton wool seems much worse than what I have. 

 

Given the strength of the human intellect and the power of emotions such as love, grace, joy, generosity, solicitude, doubt, guilt, shame, regret, and longing, the unscratched and untouched would be an existence more like hell than heaven. In fact, it would be pretty pointless, as everything I did would have no consequences other than inducing the actions of a supremely benevolent God ready and waiting to fix things as soon as they happened. I would never get the chance to learn or grow or empathise, nor experience the joys of discovery and edification, nor the wonders of togetherness, bonding, human solidarity, heroism, nor the many other qualitative fibres that are woven into the human fabric. In fact, with such an existence, I would never get to be myself at all; any emotional faculties would be merely instances in the present moment that would bear no relation to any incremental development at all. And even more importantly, I would have no progress to make regarding my coming to know God. The real alternative must be much better; instead I find the real delights in the relationship that God chose for man – my need to trust Him, the joys at realising he has answered a prayer, or acted in my life, or helped me adjust my personality, or helped change my character for the better - this is the learning and growing that will make us better and more blessed. This is the reality that God knew would build souls and generate warriors in Christ. To wish for it another way would be to wish for something not better but much worse – the grass on the other side would not be green and fresh and attractive, it would be patchy and dry and unappealing.

 

This can be identified in Abraham’s life; his soul was built by being tested – but in passing the test we saw that the unity between God and Abraham was an outward expression of faith but even greater an inward expression of love and trust. Ironically many atheists suggest that Christianity is totalitarian, with God being the ‘celestial dictator’ (to use Christopher Hitchens’ term) able to convict us of thought crimes as well as crimes in action. But I hope the above explanation has shown the irony of their fault in reverse. The same God they wish would be present at all times is the same God that would seem totalitarian – picking up after us and correcting us as soon as we erred. As I’ve said, that would be more like hell than heaven, and as we’ve just seen, it is better that we are free to err and doubt and look for Him subtly, as they are essential parts of our growing.  The real qualities of having a relationship with God are not just assumed from full knowing or from God being palpably on our backs all the time; just like human relationships they are about unexpected joy and discovery and growth and mutual exploration – the very opposite of a dictatorship. The atheists cannot have it both ways; freedom to live must include freedom to doubt. God could no more reveal His entire self to us anymore than a newfound friend could give you every aspect of himself straight away, or a child could know the whole world at the time of infancy.  These things take time, and patience, and growth, and discovery, and commitment – these are the souls that God is making bit by bit, day by day.

 

The love of God can be found by all those who search for it, but as Abraham discovered, this does not entail a life without some trials and hardships. In fact, our soul-making seems to require them – it is through our trials and hardships that God can do something quite extraordinary. It doesn’t always seem obvious, particularly to those who live their lives expecting the world to conform to set patterns which they themselves have created in their own head, but the soul who is encircled by injustice, beleaguered by pain, tormented by anxiety, plagued with insecurity, and assailed by grief and sorrow, he is the one whose weight hangs heaviest before God; he is the one that can be strong through weakness; he is the one who God can bless like no other; he is the one who has the capacity to understand the real nature of blessedness. 

 

The boy who takes months to learn how to ride his bike will get much more out of his playtime than the boys that mastered it straight away. His frustrations will teach him the real nature of reward and perseverance and patience. A man reads the bleakest poetry because he can find no such inner-conviction himself. A wretched man will see things in his first reading of Dostoyevsky that a saint will not; a saint will see things in his first reading of Aldous Huxley that a scientist will not; a bad man can sometimes flee from the Devil only by knowing the Devil; a good man can sometimes find God by thankfulness alone. But you will find no rhyme or reason if you attempt to rationalise every emotion and place it an already established ‘marked box’.  Things are scarcely as we imagine until we get to know our real God.

 

It is standard in the minds of individuals that with any destination the culmination must wait until all its precursors have passed – the journeys often have as much to teach us as the destinations, thus we cannot short cut the exploratory process and expect a true soul to be made. If a man is really to learn anything about himself from the things which precede the culmination, he must be prepared to see each stage as a necessary factor of the bigger picture. No man can know his true state at the beginning if he is using the culmination as his vehicle for judgement – he must make destinations of journeys and journeys of destinations, for as soon as he masters this he will see that every stage of his development is a signpost to a further step of progression. The very nature of a journey with God is that we are always in transition and always must consider ourselves to be a work in progress. It with this in mind that we realise there is always opportunity for growth.

In observing the trials and tribulations of Abraham, I get the feeling that in contemplating him in preparation for the sacrifice we too are being called to weep for ourselves in recognising our own distance in those times we should have been closer to God.  Even Christ Himself told those contemplating His sacrifice that one ought to ‘weep not for me but for yourself’ (Luke 23:28). This does not mean, of course, that one cannot do a great service in empathy – after all, the husband who weeps because of his wife’s suffering stands in a different position to the one who weeps and asks others to weep for her too. But equally he ought to know that a man who is sorrowful for the sins of his companion or his loved one ought to be sorrier for his own sins. Equally, whatever we learn from Abraham means little if we do not learn the same about ourselves.

 

Abraham’s faith was rewarded by a new cognitive dimension – he sets out to please in a way that no normative intervention can ever obstruct him, for in stepping into this new domain he is doing something wholly natural to the self – assenting to the will of God and not labouring with any doubts about his own morality - for if he were he couldn’t have gone through with the sacrificing of his son. Any attempt to suspend his desire for the assent would be as impossible as trying to make a man believe that goodness is a bad thing or that good ethics are immoral. At whatever level of cognition a man is working he cannot suspend the universal imperatives unless assenting to God brings about the suspension.  Thus any appeal for Abraham to refrain from taking his son would have been a sin against duty - not a sin borne out of malevolence but out of ignorance of his real situation. 

 

This is the part of our life we must ‘lose’ in order to ‘save’ it. Many people have great difficulty with Christ’s words, ‘He that wants to save his life shall lose it’ (Matthew 16:25) - after all, surely an all-loving, all-powerful God wouldn’t want every part of us, would He? Many will ask, ‘Why have we got to lose everything - can’t we keep some of the enjoyable bits?’. But to ask this is to be guilty of confusing two different types of pleasure and thus confuse ‘blessings’ with ‘correlatives of blessings’. If all blessings come from God then all pleasure must ultimately be a gift from Him too; in which case, our faithfulness and obedience to God is really our own blessing too, and losing our life is not a loss but a gain. But we do not enter into a relationship with God through the obedience, we enter through the blessing itself, for obedience, like faith, is a gift from Him. We cannot have obedience without Him giving us a foothold in grace, anymore than we can worry about our hunger for him and complain we’re not searching. Once the hunger is recognised you know the spirit has ignited a search, and if carried through, revelation will occur.

 

The qualities of knowing God are such that for blessedness to occur everything we do should be seen first through our relationship with Him. The loyalty to our husband or wife is loyalty only in so far as the real nature of loyalty is seen firstly through our relationship with God. The faithfulness in loving our neighbour as ourselves is faithfulness only in so far as the real nature of faithfulness is seen firstly through our relationship with God. Our love for the world is love only in so far as the real nature of love is seen firstly through our relationship with God. This does not mean, of course, that these things aren’t good in themselves and that a man cannot do these things if he does not know God. But the real blessing from Him is that all of these things work because of Him. 

 

That is why those who think that these things by themselves are tantamount to loving God are hugely mistaken - for such people love not God but their own conceptualisation of the Divine created through solipsistic tendencies. To those people, a big shock shall surely occur; they will find that their love for God was really a love for the self. They are probably the ones of whom it will be said by God ‘away from me, I never knew you’ (Matthew 7:22, 23).  But the man who can say that his love for his wife, or for his neighbour, or for the world in which he lives is part of his blessing because of God’s love for him - he is the man who is truly blessed. 

 

The duty to God is summed up in the injunction to love everything less than Him (Luke 14:26). Now this has surely brought difficulty to many; after all, how can one be told to love one thing more than another? Does not love splash upon us rather indiscriminately - existing in a province entirely separate from planned responses? In a sense this is true, but the moment a man begins to think this way he becomes lost in evasion. The man who can be blessed by God has to find a way to love less the things that are less than God in order to love everything more. He must adopt a weaker sense of pleasure by stepping out of evasion - then he will see that in loving God more he loves other things more. The man who fails to understand this will be forever trapped in evasion; he will see nothing but disenchantment when he looks at the Christian faith. But when he becomes in touch with the eternal, with the universal plan of the Divine, he will see that love can only increase to its fullest potential by loving the One who is love. 

 

This is another of the great paradoxes of Christianity - one can follow the injunction and see its true benefits without ever having very much of a struggle to do what it says. In other words, no man tries to love God more by trying to love his wife, or mother, or brother, or best friend, less. He finds the way to love God by recognising that he is loved by God; by admitting the glorious nature of the injunction without ever placing oneself in front of the real situation of having to love someone less. Anyone who can achieve this will not be detached from the beauty of the Divine plan. And just as God saw Abraham’s love for him by his love for his son, he too will see the love we have for him by the love we have for each other. We see that this love involves a suspension of duty - if not, we could call for Abraham to be vilified on grounds that because of the unethical act that he was about to commit, he was taking his fervency too far (in the same way that we would say a crusader who used great zealousness to convert people is taking his belief in God to a level beyond what is wholesome). 

 

But the principal difference is this. The moment Abraham raised up the knife with his son in hand was the moment he knew for sure that the loss of his son would be devastation - both for his inner-self and for all the families who were to be blessed by his seed. Thus he knew that the pain and doubt was a signification to the contrary; that is, he knew because of his pain that God would either stop him or be impelled to raise him from the dead. When Abraham knew that Isaac was to (eventually) produce the seed of God’s own Son Jesus Christ, he knew that he must love Isaac more through God than through himself, just as a man loves his wife even more because of his love for God. It is only through God’s love for His own Son that Abraham can make such a sacrifice. Only when the action contradicts every part of his innate understanding can he fully appreciate the Divine plan. Only when the moral law is alive to him, and only when the ethical imperative is non-existent to him, can he act in accordance with the Divine plan - just as Christ can only die for us when He has become fully man, when He has become sin for us so that we can be cleansed by His precious blood. And this is the truest reason why God became man, so that the burden is lifted from us - so that we can be blessed because of His grace. 

 

There are, I would say, two kinds of people standing outside of Christianity and not outwardly searching; those who know nothing of Christ’s sacrifice and those who choose to disregard it and stay on the outside. Here we see another of the great constraining effects of Christianity - there is no middle position, only searching, which, as we have already said, is a hunger led by the Spirit. From the outside one will find either the most glorious blessing or self-exiled separation of the very worst kind. 

 

It is widely believed that living for the self is the easiest thing of all and that stepping into the Divine plan is an inconvenience. But I think this is pure fantasy. Nobody who really understands the true nature of the self can fail to be perturbed by an absence of God. Nobody who is afraid of the worst that is in us can possibly be inconvenienced by the greatest of all - the One who can turn even our most egregious faults into true human qualities. But it is only when we are prepared to stop being our own master that our real Master will take over.

 

And this challenge stretches into the Christian life too; even church life can impede a man’s self-honesty if he thinks the collective can compensate for his own failings, not realising that his growth is the self’s primacy before anything else. Any attempt to do the good work of the Spirit which involves passing its glory into the vague window of collectivity is really an attempt to diminish its true power in order to evade the responsibility of the self. We cannot live life vicariously through others. If we are going to be warriors in Christ our individuality must illuminate the great work that Christ is doing in each of us, for in the most real sense, He does not do good work in groups, He does good work in individuals who can bring those qualities into groups. 

 

With this in mind, one must never forget what I said earlier - that each of us is still a work in progress – we are getting there, but we are not perfect. That is why a non-believer should never be discouraged when he or she meets Christians who seem to be lacking all the qualities that he anticipated them having. Much of what he should be is still unknown to him - he is still mystified by much of the journey as his work progresses. That is why the least proficient Christians really seem quite empty to the outsider; they have substituted the wonder of growth for the comfort of stillness. The one who can follow in Christ’s path must be a warrior before he can be a teacher; he must learn about his real position as regards the Divine plan before he can impact upon others. And even then, if he reclines in happiness and contentment, he will be shocked to find the established position is ever-changing - that the Divine plan had for him more facets than the initial delight which came his way when he found out a little of how God was going to bless him. 

 

To know the real glory of knowing Christ is to know that it must be available to everyone - that even the strangest antagonist in the room could have his life transformed in a heartbeat. This is joy that cannot be mistaken for anything else. To have it is to know that it is the pathway to all the deep mysteries of our existence. And if this seems absurd to you, do not worry, it can have no other effect. The feelings that are the most peculiar to our cognition are the ones to which we must apply the most attention. The mice will inevitably be hiding in subtle places and we may have to move a lot of things in order to get to them; unexplored wisdom really is the first pathway to the universal plan. Thus in Abraham, we see what all of us need to do; escape from the limitation of earthly thinking, get rid of the concealment and open up our hearts to the Divine plan. 

 

The very term ‘certainty’ is reapplied to the universal, for now to be certain means to free - free to understand the self as Christ meant for us to do when He shed His blood for us. When Abraham went to kill his son while all the time knowing that his son would not die, he showed us the access to the Divine understanding that we can all posses if our faith is sound. Those Christians who doubted this should have known all along, for there is no part of the moral standard which appeals to empiricism, or to the accidental, or to fortuity - it is a priori part of the self’s real essence; thus the appeal to the Divine on behalf of the self comes not from normative experience, it comes when we transcend normative experience – the mastering of which can be, and usually is, a lifelong pursuit.