Andrée Seu Peterson on the "Time" cover 
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Thick air
“Here on the mountain the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind” (The Silver Chair, C.S. Lewis).
The mountain is my morning Bible study. The drop to Narnia is life as I find it the rest of the day, and the air gets thick indeed. Some things are not going at all as I think they should go if God is in his heaven and I am his child. He seems to contradict his own Word.
Some have had it worse than I. What would you do if the voice of God told you to kill your son? This is the murkiest scene of all. Not only because He is requiring the death of the apple of your eye. Not only because this is the son of promise. But because the request goes against everything you know about God’s character. Honestly, I think if I were Abe I would have replied to the command, “Get thee behind me! I know the voice of Satan when I hear it!”
This is all the ammunition scoffers need: “See! It’s all a swindle! Where is your God!”
Here, then, is the great divide. The believer, facing the same dark cave as the Nikabriks, proceeds with faith worn down to the metal. This is faith reduced to one part confidence and 99 parts willpower. He says, even now I will trust in God. And because, in the end, there are no words of life to be found elsewhere, he says through his exhaustion, “Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him” (Job 13:15).
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Better to die in God’s will than to live outside of God’s will.
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We can be confident that God does not come and tell us to kill our sons. The case with Abraham was different in that he was living in a time when such things were routinely done. He was taken away from that when he went off from his kinfolk and followed God. His was a unique situation for a unique purpose.
Karen–so true.
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I totally get Andree’s point. It’s not about killing sons, it’s about things we perceive to “know” about God and discover that indeed, we have boxed Him in and made Him too small, because He does something that totally confuses us. We put something in His hands, genuinely wanting to give it over to Him, and then are left reeling because He chooses to do something with it we think that He surely never would. A missionary finds herself home from the field where work was successful. We wake up Nov. 5 and find that the “wrong” person won the election. And we wonder if it was God. And we wonder what we know about Him. And we start pronouncing railing judgments against spiritual forces, rather than in humility giving it all back to Him to deal with, and trusting His character even when we can’t define it.
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thank you for all you write every day before 8 am usually! it’s hilarious to me that the time of your posts is recorded….
i’m a regular reader and would post things more often but there’s not enuf time in a day to try to say what is evoked by your writings on a regular basis. i’m still back on a previous post, pondering the significance of your hair loss (and my and our other trials) and whether they are God using them to teach me or planning them so He can teach me…..anyway, just wanted to thank you for the work you’re doing and the lack of posts is NO reflection of your impact, just FYI.
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I agree with #3. I think sometimes, too, we expect God to work in a certain way because of our particular “theology”? However, our theology is not always biblical even though we’ve held it as such for so long.
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I once asked God for a deeper faith, and as a result of that prayer, God asked me to place my cherished marriage on His altar. For me, in doing that, I was accomplishing several things:
First, I was taking my husband and my marriage off of the throne that rightfully belongs to God in my heart.
Second, in performing a small, seemingly irrelevant act of obedience to God which accomplished this, I knew that I was staking my marriage to an at the time unbelieving husband against what I knew intellectually to be true of God.
I was convinced that my act of obedience to God would spell out the death of my marrriage. A marriage that I had heretofore clung to desperately. God, who hates divorce, was asking me to essentially do something that I believed would put my marriage in jeopardy. But I also knew that God, who hates divorce would redeem my marriage. I had no idea how, but He would.
I laid it on the altar. My husband was angry. For the first time in my life, I put my God before my husband. Things were rocky to begin with. My husband told me that if he could have afforded to, he would have sent me on the first thing smoking back to the United States. (He was in the military at the time and we were stationed in Germany)
For what it’s worth, that was the first time I ever thanked God for not having enough money.
My husband did not divorce me, and things were not easy in their working out, but they did work out. God showed me a lamb: My husband’s blasphemous talk ceased, and some ungodly things disappeared from my house. Within a short time, I saw my husband at chapel, and ever since, he has been a regular at cuurch, and I know he is a believer. I have tested and seen God’s faithfulness, as he tested mine. And grew in me an unshakable faith.
I would make a few observations about this:
1) Faith untested is no faith at all. and
2) Abraham’s test of faith was not for God to see what Abraham was going to do. He is omniscient. He already knew what Abraham would do. Abraham’s test was so Abraham could see what Abraham would do, and how much he trusted His God. I would suggest that Abraham’s faith grew deep roots in the experience and became unshakable.
3) If you ever take the risk of asking God to grow your faith, most assuredly, you will receive an opportunity to exercise what little faith you think you have.
4) Trust in Him is never misplaced.
5) Faith is a “use-it-or-lose-it” prpopsition; it must be exercised.
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Klasko – Thank you for sharing that. I’ve had a similar-yet-different thing happen to me.
God is always faithful.
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Klasko – that is a wonderful story of faith.
It’s hard sometimes when we watch and wait, knowing that we can’t solve the problems – only GOD can take the reins of our hearts and bridle our sorrow with his divine love. Courage comes from our LORD, faith is knowing that HE knows our hearts as we surrender to HIM.
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