Remember as a kid wanting to be a firefighter, astronaut, ballerina, or even professional athlete or politician. Growing older, ambition replaced these childhood dreams. Driven by direction or passion, even dreams or promises, we plow our future. The patriarch Abraham was no different.
Abraham had been promised a lineage, a nation. When/How was God going to fulfill this promise? Age wasn’t on Abraham’s side. With nothing happening, Abraham and Sarah took matters into their own hands. Don’t we do the same? When promises don’t fulfill themselves, we like to give them a little help.
Instead of a promise fulfilled, we end up with an Ishmael. With Isaac still in the womb of promise, we neglect its unlikely origin—sterile, old Sarah. Keeping the promise and dream is no different than seeing it first fulfilled. Complete dependence on God to fulfill and sustain is pertinent.
With Isaac a youth, the Lord asks Abraham to sacrifice him. You know the story, and not until Abraham raises the knife over his son, the promise fulfilled, does God provide a substitute sacrifice. Isn’t it the same for our own dreams and promises? We have to remain dependent upon God to see them fulfilled, and even after they materialize God tests our dependence on Him. Sacrificing those dreams and promises carries us to the point of death. Then we see God step in with provision. God was revealed to Abraham as provider, and Abraham named that place—The Lord Will Provide (Gen 22:14).
It isn’t until we follow God to the point of death that those promises and dreams are resurrected and God’s provision truly understood.
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