From Despair to Faith

Abraham is the paragon of faith because he chose to believe in God's possibility over his own impossibility. God asked him to step into an unknown darkness on the basis only of His promise to make of him a great nation, numberless as the stars. To accomplish that through Isaac made sense; to sacrifice Isaac made none. Yet he followed when God said it was permitted to cast Ishmael, his other son, into the desert with his mother Hagar. After all, it was in his interest to do so, to extinguish claims to his inheritance by others than Sarah's firstborn, despite Hagar (and Ishmael) being his own (less faith filled) strategy of helping to accomplish God's promise of progeny. Could he now, in good conscience, and in light of God's continued promise, withhold his son Isaac from God's command?

To his eternal credit Abraham did not hold back, but stepped forward into the darkness of faith, believing in God's promise despite the impossibility of its being fulfilled in any way he humanly could imagine. (This based on Eleonore Stump's chapter on Abraham in Wandering in Darkness.)

As Giussani has observed in the Introduction to At the Threshold of the Christian Claim), Abraham took a step into the dizzyness of faith, the ultimate experience of our humanity. For only in faith can man enter into his greatest capacity: actively to surrender to God.

Listen to "Come to My Rescue" by Hillsong.

Listen to "At the Cross" by Hillsong.