Jehovah-JirehSample

Abraham’s knowledge of God as Jehovah-Jireh comes in the midst of God testing Abraham. 

In Genesis 22:2 God decided to test Abraham by asking him to sacrifice the thing that he loved most, his only son Isaac: 

“Take now your son, your only son, whom you love…and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you.”

Isaac was the child of promise that both Abraham and Sarah had waited so long to bear, and his death would also signal the death of God’s covenant with Abraham that He would make him a great nation (Genesis 12:2). Why would God ask Abraham to do this? 

The essence of this test is a question that Abraham and all of us must answer: when faced with a choice between the blessing (in this case Isaac) and the One who blesses (God), which will we choose? All of us can fall so deeply in love with the blessing that we have or that we yearn for, that God becomes a means to an end. The blessing becomes an idol and thus an object of worship, when God alone is to be the object of our desire and reverence: 

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).

What in your life would you be conflicted to give up if God commanded you to?  

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