M O R I A H

 "My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord".

Battle hymn of the republic.

"Go to the land of Moriah".

Genesis 22:2.

Sometimes, indifference is not an option.

After a lifetime of journey, harvesting the discovery of a union with the Creator and Redeemer of life, Abraham and his child of promise find themselves, by divine decree, facing the mountain where all is to be finished (Genesis 22).

In the conventional, nominalistic world, the moment the men are facing equates to an end without resolve - death is before them, and there is no manner of exit beyond the extinguishing of life. If we look at the world through our own eyes - through the brutal weight pressing upon us by exile from Eden - then there is nothing here but despair, nothing but fury that our own depravity should end in such a conclusion, but something more is evidenced in their moment at Moriah.

Abraham "sees" beyond the darkness, beyond the awfulness of the requirement.

He knows, because of an established fellowship with the one who had called him to this act, that there is another sacrifice and because of that (Genesis 22: 8), there is a future, even for his sacrificed son (Hebrews 11:19).

Centuries later, the hope that defined this moment is evidenced in the very same location as the 'Lamb of God' is offered up for the world on a Roman cross.

Abraham's faith finds its true resolve, not in a ram caught in a thicket, which provides an immediate, provisional assistance, but in the offering-up of the life at the hill of the skull, provided by the eternal Father in His beloved Son (Isaiah 53:1-12).

Like the children of Israel, we as church stand between two mountains (Deuteronomy 11:26-32) - the high place of the Law, Sinai, where angels administer the requirements we cannot keep, or Moriah, the threshold where the exact consequences of our evil are disclosed, but where unmerited mercy is abundantly provided.

Which 'revelation' holds us?

Do we bind ourselves to methods and means of analysis and behaviour that make us children of the 'bondwoman' (Galatians 4:21-31), where all we have to offer ourselves and others is the finality, the misery of ruination by a method which leaves us justifiably guilty, or does that horror drive us to the Lord who provides what we cannot - mercy, forgiveness and reconciliation?

Fallen nature has no issue with furnishing a measure of morality (Law, by any other name) - that was our first refuge when found naked (Genesis 3:8), but how inadequate this is found when the true measure, the actual depths of meaning, become revealed and applied (Isaiah 55: 8 & 9).

In reality, both places to where are brought equate to a dreadful discovery of our lack of anything good, hence, death must follow, but at Moriah, God makes the death that heals that of another (Romans 5:6).

We live at a moment where fear, which makes us hide, has produced a retreat into crippling morality. "You Shall Not" has become the single ruling principle, and this, more than anything else, is the very doctrine which lead us into inescapable bondage, that calls for the Lord Himself to be taken 'outside the camp' to be executed, because the one thing we cannot allow is a genuine way to liberty - to life!

When all we seek to offer one another is such 'religion', then we do no more than throw what we value into the fire to produce a 'god' that leaves us enslaved to what is poison.

The people of God have been made free because all that is done to them is outside of their own ability, their morality, their doing. If we truly desire to be children of promise, we must look only to the life and work of another.

The book of Hebrews tells us that like Abraham, we have not come to place of unquenchable fire and unachievable law, but to the throne of grace - the very mercy-seat where the blood avails between the cherubim (Hebrews 12:18-22, 9:12). To avoid evil, then, we must seek to follow this advice -

"The church confesses that it has not proclaimed often and clearly enough the message of the one God who has revealed Himself for all times in Jesus Christ and who suffers no other gods beside Himself. It confesses its timidity, its evasiveness, its dangerous concessions. it has often been untrue to its office of guardianship and to its office of genuine comfort. And it has often denied to the outcast and the despised the comfort that it owes them. 

It has, then, failed to speak the right word in the right way at the right time.

The church confesses that it has taken the Lord's work in vain - standing back while violence and wrong were committed under the cover of its very name.

This is where we must begin".

Dietrich Bonhoeffer - Ethics.