God Changes His Mind

January 11, 2009

Today's reading: Genesis 21-22 and Matthew 8

I believe that I have previously spoken about how sometimes the Lord is Late. In the case of Abraham, it had to do with the birth of his son, Isaac. It was probably decades before God kept his promise to Abraham before bringing a son, but it finally happened, despite Sarai’s old age.

So then what happens? God changes his mind. He then tells Abraham, “Yo, Abe, I’ve decided that I don’t want your descendents to be as numerous as the sand on the seashore anymore. In fact, I don’t even want you to have the speck you have now. Why don’t you just go kill him?”

“Excuse me,” said Abraham, “child of promise Isaac here. Child of promise. You can’t go back on your word now.”

“Uh, have you forgotten? I am the one who says the word.”

Okay, those last two lines never happened. Or, at least, there isn’t anything in the Bible saying that it happened that way. I suppose that we can infer from previous chapters that Abraham would have preferred not to have sacrificed his firstborn and only son.

You can’t tell me that you’ve been in a work situation like this. Say your boss asks you to do something, and you do it. And then, because he didn’t like it or you did it wrong he says: “I want you to do it again, but differently.”

There is just something inside of you that wants to defend your actions. Something that says: “you should have told me, and I would have done it right the first time”. Most of the time, this is the wrong course of action.

However, I think we all would agree that sometimes it is better to have things done over. It is often here when we discover that there is much room for improvement, and how we can truly improve. After all, most of the books that you read have been edited, edited again, and sometimes as much as eight more times. You probably don’t want to read some of first drafts of classic works.

I honestly don’t think that anyone can say that we would sacrifice our firstborn for God. In all honesty, I don’t think God is wanting that. What he wants is our time, talents, and everything else that is hard to give up, I guarantee it.

So if God ever asks you to change something in your life, try to think about how it will make your life better overall.