Our sufferings make sense only when we realise that there is nothing God cannot ask of us.

It does not take an astute observer to see that life is full of heavy demands made on us.  Much as we hope that it is, our lives are dotted, sometimes very densely, with things that take us to terribly dark and scary places.  Misfortunes, losses (both financial and otherwise), when we fall in life (in literal and metaphorical terms) and ill health.  In the face of what we have as idealistic lives free from all of the above, it is when we are plagued with these troubling and stressful moments or phases in our lives that we struggle to make sense of them and hope for an easy way out.  Religion used wrongly will often be seen as escape routes from these ‘mired moments’ as I would like to call them.

But the Judeo-Christian religion, when understood in the most holistic and healthy way, is never an escape route or a means to find a solution to life’s challenges.  Perhaps the one thing that many cannot accept or comprehend is that God actually uses these moments, difficult thought they may be, to truly enter into our lives and give us a new vision both of life and of him.  Praying ourselves out of these in any quick way could often be the very thing that prevents us from truly becoming better people, and having eyes that see God’s love in ways that we were unable hitherto.

The entire drama of Abraham taking that painful journey with Isaac his beloved son who was to be the sacrifice Yahweh asked of him is our story as well.  But most of us just read it as something that happened to one unfortunate man in history, and hardly take the time or the effort to put ourselves in Abraham’s position.  I am certain that when we do this and do it frequently enough, we will come away with much more confidence to trust and obey God when difficult things are asked of us in life. 

When Abraham was on the mountain which he later named Jehovah Jireh, he must have had a truly transformational moment when he was about to raise his hand to offer up his son Isaac in answer to God’s request.  Abraham didn’t have the entire plan of God’s laid out in front of him before going up that mountain.  Certainly things would have worked out far differently if the Lord’s messenger had told him even before he started that ascent that his son would be replaced by another sacrifice that will be provided.  But as things turned out, it was only when Abraham was about to use that knife to slaughter his son that salvation came.  Our minds struggle hard to wrap around this very bizarre story.  The hard truth is that faith requires and even necessitates an ascent, and it does make heavy demands on our lives and what we hold on to so dearly because when faith is removed and isolated from love, faith becomes removed from life. 

It cannot be just a tiny detail when the author of Genesis tells us that Abraham tied up his son Isaac before the intended offering.  In our struggle with what we need to offer up to God in deep devotion and love, especially when they are things that we are so attached to and clinging on so tenaciously in life, there necessitates a binding and a tying up.  Our faith concretized when we can clearly and identify what it is that we need to offer up to God.  Not that he needs it, but that we need it – we need that honest act of fully identifying our sorrows, our struggles, our incapacities not in some generic way, but to be able to name our inabilities in an upfront way.  Articulating this becomes our way of tying up what we need God to receive from us.

Our faith is made real when heavy things are asked of us, largely because there is no salvation in cheap grace.  Yet, isn’t it true that this is what most of us want?  We don’t say it out loud, because it makes us sound crass and shallow to admit that for most of us, we are in the faith so that hard things will not be asked of us in our lives and from God.  The ‘hard work’ of faith is not so much in loving God when things are smooth and plain sailing.  The ‘hard work’ of faith is when we willingly make those ascents up the mountain and take those burdens and struggles which seem to make no sense in life, and believe that this is something good for us. 

When God is asking something so seemingly difficult and painful of us, perhaps what we need to ask is this “is there anything that is too great for God to ask of me?” or “Does God have any right to demand so much of my own life?”  These are the raw and honest questions that I am quite convinced that any serious disciple of Christ needs to ask himself or herself at some time in our faith journey.  In peaceful times, when there are no demands made on us and when the doctor gives us a clean bill of health, when we are acing those exams and we are having those ‘blue sky’ days, these necessary questions don’t even need to be addressed.  But notice how things change and how poignant the answers and emotions are when the times are tough. 

When the chips are down and when there are no clear answers to our dark horizons, when the cancer markers are all up and we experience terrible losses in life, these questions are the questions that we need to ask and dare to articulate.  “If this is what God is asking me to go through, does he have a right to demand so much from my life?” Any answer that steers clear of an unambiguous “yes” will show that the God that we claim to believe in is not really God at all, but some notion of a deity that we only partially submit our lives to.  He is not the “most high” that we boldly say that he is in the Gloria on Sundays.  He is somewhere near there, but not the one to whom we are willing to place all our trust and all our hopes on.  In short, he is not truly our ‘salvation’.  Instead, we are our own salvation, and it makes us at best, nominal followers of Christ. 

When Jonah was in the belly of the fish, at his darkest moment of his life, he prays not a prayer of petition and deliverance, but instead, a prayer of thanksgiving.  Why thanksgiving?  He was in a time of darkness and uncertainty and he prayed a prayer of thanksgiving.  He was doing what a man of faith does.  In thanking God in such a time, he is displaying great faith, and actually is saying that there is no demand that God cannot make in his life.  The last line of his prayer is extremely telling.  He says “deliverance is from the Lord”. 

In other words, he knows that it is not anything that he does in life that brings salvation, brings wholeness and healing, but such an amazing thing as deliverance is always grace, and always something from God, simply because in God’s hand is life itself.  And because God is our ultimate cause for salvation, there is nothing too much that he can ask of us.  Not in Abraham’s case, not in Jonah’s, and certainly not in ours.  If we are truly men and women of faith, when that piece of bad news comes, when that time of trial and suffering comes in life, when our children do not make the wisest of choicest but instead seem to be bringing the family name down a few notches because of foolish behavior, in short, when we find ourselves climbing up that mountain of sacrifice, we are actually given the golden opportunity to show just how real our faith is.  God appears to want so much from us not because God is bloodthirsty, but because God wants us to display in our lives a willingness to give of ourselves what we hold most tenaciously on to in life.  When we are able to do this with love, with a willingness to let go, we are, in a word, so much like God, and begin to fulfill Jesus’ instruction to be holy as God is holy.  When we show a bold refusal to be bitter, we cannot but become better.