These fifty years, with God and angels as teachers, reveal to us, as no other period does, the results of true education, and merit careful attention. If the workings of the Spirit ever wrought changes in the human heart, those changes came to Abraham. It is not strange that when God called the first time the voice seemed far away, and but partially awoke the slumbering soul. As if in a dream, he, his father, his nephew, and his wife, broke away from earthly ties and from the beautiful Chaldean plains, where luxury and learning were daily things of life, and journeyed toward the hill country.
How God taught faith
It has been stated before that God teaches by the enunciation of principles, or universal laws, and the spirit which comes by faith enlightens the senses that they may grasp the illustrations of these laws in the physical world. That is heaven’s method of teaching the angelic throng, and it was the method applied before the fall. With Abraham the case was at the beginning far from ideal. Here was a pupil lacking faith. How should he be taught the wisdom of the Eternal? God leads in a mysterious way. As Christ lived His visible life, because the eye of faith was blind in Israel, so, in the time of Abraham, God taught inductively, as He now says the heathen are to be taught. To him who had no faith, God came visibly at first, and, leading step by step, developed a faith which before his death enabled Abraham to grasp eternal principles of truth if God but spoke.
In Ur, God said, “I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and will make thy name great.” Years passed, age crept on, and still there was no heir. Could he have mistaken the voice which bade him turn his face toward Canaan, and promised to him and his descendants all the land from the “great river, the river Euphrates, ... unto the great sea toward the going down of the sun”? “And Abraham said, Lord God, what wilt Thou give me, seeing I go childless? Shall it be that my steward, Eliezer, shall become my heir? Shall he be the child of promise? Behold, to me Thou hast given no seed: and, lo, one born in my house is mine heir.”[16]
This was man’s way of working out a promise made by the Maker of the universe. Have we passed beyond this elementary lesson of faith? Can we grasp God’s promise of faith, and, with no fear or thought, leave results with Him who knows?
No, Abraham; think not that heaven is limited by the line which bounds thy horizon. “This shall not be thine heir; but he that shall come forth out of thine own bowels shall be thine heir.” And, standing under the starry canopy of heaven, Abraham’s soul grasped the power of the Creator. He himself to be a father! His face lighted with a holy joy as he related to Sarai his experience with God.
But Sarai bare him no children; and that she might help heaven fulfill its promise, she forsook the divine law of marriage, and gave to Abraham her handmaid, Hagar, to be his wife. Would that man could grasp at least the beginnings of the possibilities of God! Untold suffering was the out-growth of that one step of unbelief. Not one, not two people, but generations then unborn, had their destinies marred by this lack of faith. Hagar, sitting over against her dying child, and weeping because of the bitterness of her fate, is a constant portrayal of an attempt to live by sight.[17] Again, the approach of the angel and the rescue of the child records in burning characters the longing of Him who pities our blindness, and awards us far above what we can ask or think.
Birth of Isaac
Ninety-nine years passed over the patriarch’s head, and still the voice of heaven’s messenger was greeted with a laugh when the promise was repeated. Sarah turned within the tent door when the angel guest, whom they had fed, repeated to Abraham the promise concerning his wife. But she bare to Abraham a son whom God named Isaac, in whom the nations of the earth were blessed. Joy untold filled the heart of the mother and father as they beheld the babe.
This was the joy of sight. Twenty-five years before, the thing was just as true, and Abraham might lawfully have worked upon the basis of its truth; but the stubborn human heart requires many lessons. Twenty-five years after this, the strength of Abraham’s faith was tested at the altar of sacrifice. Leaving home early one morning, he carried fire, laid wood upon the young man’s shoulders, and journeyed toward Mount Moriah. “Behold the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?” asked the son. “God will provide himself a lamb,” answered the man who had at last learned to believe God. It is but the simple story of an ancient patriarch; but the word of God bears record that “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him for righteousness.”