Simple, Not Easy
I am currently making my way through reading the bible.
I’m as far as Genesis. To be fair, I am also making my way through a book about a pill popping therapist with a serial killer father who is prison when really it is the brother who is the serial killer gasp, and the reason I know it is the brother is because I have read the book before but I didn’t realize that until I was about 30 pages in so I decided to just read it again because I do not remember how it ends but I know I have read it before. I digress….
So much happens in Genesis. So many amazing stories of faith and promises and trust in the Lord. So many stories of sadness and despair and destruction. Any story in Genesis could be made into its own true crime novel. I love to read true crime. I love the set-up, the character development, the mystery, the internal struggle of the characters. It’s my favorite genre to read. Hundreds and hundreds of pages dedicated to one story, one crime, and all of the characters involved. The pages keep you guessing and get you in the mind of the criminal, victim, detective, etc.
It's fascinating.
But Genesis is different. We’re not given hundreds and hundreds of pages for a story. Some stories do not even get a full chapter. Some only get a handful of verses. The bible contains endless stories but those stories often do not have a lot of detail which is why I often find the bible difficult to read. I love detail and character development and I like to know context and the history of things. I like a story to drag on a bit.
I was reading the bible last night and I was reading Genesis 22 where God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. 19 verses are dedicated to this story. Less than a page of the bible. God asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son and there’s less than a page of a story about it?!
A travesty if you ask me.
God asks Abraham to sacrifice his only son. The son he waited 100 years to have: THE NEXT morning, Abraham got up and started his journey to do exactly that.
That is like no turnaround time.
I spend more time figuring out what I want for dinner than it seems Abraham did to decide if he was going to sacrifice his son because God told him to.
Then, less than one verse is dedicated to Isaac’s part in all of this.
“He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.”
As someone who loves story telling, I want to know more about this story! What was Abraham’s internal struggle? What did it feel like to know you were going to sacrifice your only son? How mad was he at God? What did it feel like in his body? Was he crying? Could Isaac tell something was up with his dad? What about when his dad went to bind him, did he struggle? Did he yell at his dad? What did they say to one another thinking it was their last words to each other?
I want more!
This one story would make a great book!! One I would read!
And the whole bible is full of stories like these where we get the smallest snippets of a story. We get the bare minimum on details at times.
Sometimes reading the bible is like this: God asked. They did. Or they didn’t do. God blessed them. Or cursed them.
Simple as that. Black or white. Where is the gray? Where is the character development? Where is the internal struggle? Where is the context? What about the other person in the story? What about them? What happened next? These are things I ask myself when reading the bible. I want more information, crave more text, more of the story, but often the bible just gives us what we need to get to the point of the story. We do not get to know all the other details.
Our current culture really wants everything to make sense. We want to know what makes people tick and why people do the things they do. We are concerned about everyone’s past and their traumas and their healing. Okay, maybe we are not as concerned about that for others as we are for ourselves but we are concerned about it for others too because it makes a good story.
Someone kills someone? We want to know why. Their motive. Their purpose. We want to know if it was justified.
Someone gets divorced? We want to know why. What happened? Who mistreated who?
Someone resigns? Why? Someone moves? Why? Someone cuts all of their hair off? Why?
We desire to make sense of things in others and ourselves. It’s why self help books are so popular. Why therapy is having its moment. But maybe the point isn’t the why. Maybe we focus so much on the why that we miss the point of the action.
Abraham obeyed. And Isaac did too.
And God blessed Abraham for his obedience.
We may read the story and see a blind obedience that makes no sense to us, and it very well could have been blind obedience. Maybe Abraham never argued with God. Maybe he didn’t struggle to bind his son and place him on an altar. Maybe Isaac willingly was bound without asking a question. But I doubt it. I bet there is so much that went on with Abraham internally and with God and with Isaac that we will never know about.
But the point was that he obeyed. Not that it was hard to obey or that Abraham questioned God or struggled with the choice but that he did as God asked. And he was blessed because of it.
We may not get context or history or detail in all of the stories in scripture but we get the point of the matter.
It is a simple concept: obey God. At every turn, obey him. Every time. Every day.
Simple, not easy.
Sometimes the bible only shows us the simplicity and not how hard obeying is. We don’t get the illustration that I would love to get that would paint a full story for me that would oftentimes help me relate to biblical stories but maybe that isn’t the point at all. The point for all of us will be, did we obey him or did we not?
Jesus promises to be with us through all of the context we have in our lives that makes obeying hard many times and we never walk alone through it but at the end of the day, how well we lived this life will be about our action, not our traumas or our mental health or our difficulties or our trials but what we chose to do despite them and while that is not easy to do, it is simple.
