“As the Ruin Falls”

Photo of a bombed out structure with troops of the US 70th Infantry from Trailblazers magazine

Day 2 continued…

I’m impressed by Abraham answering God’s command so quickly. I have to believe that I would have waited awhile—perhaps forever. I would have asked friends and family what they thought of this divine request. I would have compared it to scripture and moral code. In short, I would not have done the thing. Period. Yet Abraham got a good night’s sleep, it seems, and rose early to do the deed. To bring the act closer to home, just about any time God asks us to do something, we wait and wait and hope he forgets. I have a joke about the business meetings of my church. If a new idea is brokered, they are likely to talk about it for three months, burying it in Old Business and hoping it goes away. God, however, does not go away. Neither do his commands. As strange of an idea as this seems to me, Abraham knows that it comes from God and acts on his demand. Whatever the demand…he acted on it and he acted quickly. John Wesley said that God’s business demands haste. There is no good reason to wait around to do a thing. God intends for me to get on with it and since he is not going to forget, I may as well proceed.

Sarah dies in chapter 23 and Abraham grieved for her so much that he wanted to “bury [her] out of…sight.” (v8) He bartered with the Hittites for a tract of land that, ironically, was his anyway. The land of Canaan included the Hittite lands in the south, west of the Salt Sea and God had given him that land and much more. Abraham chose instead to pay handsomely for his own land. This and similar acts are unexpected, considering the son who will follow him. (Not that Abraham was beyond a white lie to a king from time to time if it meant saving his skin.)

When Abraham died, his two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, buried him in the same Hittite cave (Machpelah) where he had buried Sarah. It is a nice note (25:9) that the boys came together in the grieving of a death when their parents would not keep them together in life. The story stays with Isaac though and he shows himself the product of his environment. He learned to lie to King Abimelech in the same fashion as his father. The king falls for the ruse again and gives Isaac a good deal of wealth to soothe any hard feelings. If the Bible were just a tale about “good” people, I suppose the story of Abimelech would take up more space than Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob put together.

Isaac’s son, Jacob, takes up a good many pages. Without going into any depth about the details of the story (like him cheating his twin), I confess that I am intrigued about the space given this character since I do not care for him. He is conniving and self-serving and there is not much to like about him. I suppose that is partly why he figures so heavily into the biblical account. God made a covenant with him (and with his fathers to make a great people out of Abraham) to be with him and again, Jacob’s righteousness will not rule the day. God’s promise will reign. This is not the case only in the ancient days. It is just as true today. God has not changed.

Jacob is just like me. I suppose that is one reason I do not care for him; I see his flaws all too easily. He is conniving and self-serving or as C. S. Lewis puts it in his poem, “As the Ruin Falls”: “mercenary and self-seeking through and through.” That is Jacob. That is me. But God loves us and keeps his promise anyway. I say that I depend upon him and follow him but the truth is that when it comes down to crunch time (and it always does) that I depend upon myself. When God holds back the blessing so that I might linger in his promise to “be with me” (28:20), I almost invariably depend upon my own schemes to see me through. Even prayer becomes conspiracy at such times, as it became for Jacob after his vision of the angels ascending and descending the flight of steps between heaven and earth (28:10-22). He exclaimed how God was in that place and therefore renamed Luz to Bethel (house of God”) and promised to give a tenth of all his wealth to God. That sounds like me. It sounds like humanity. Luther also made vows to save his skin when the crisis came and he found himself threatened by heaven. It seems like a reliable statement to say that this is human nature. Again, as Lewis’ poem asserts: “I want God…merely to serve my turn.”

The sooner Jacob and I realize the truth about ourselves, the closer we will come to a greater reality. This life I lead with all of its oaths and deceptions is a bombed out shelter for a soul that God wants to save, to depend upon him. My life as I live it is a “ruin” and it must “fall” all the way to the ground so that my soul is bared to God. It is easy to see this but more difficult to accept in the crisis. When kings and brothers and life are seen as threats, we cling to this ruin, this shell, this life…when we should have learned to draw near to God.