Understanding Genesis: Abraham and Isaac

think of the lord saying to saint peter you know when you were a young man you tied your own belt where you wanted to go okay but when you're an old man like abraham uh someone else will tie you up and take you where you don't want to go whether someone else is the holy spirit and so the the salvation story in a way begins with this man who was willing to listen and so we call him the father of faith that's what it means i think faith here in the really primordial sense means trust welcome back to the word on fire show i'm brandon vot the host and the senior publishing director we are back together with bishop barron to discuss genesis we're continuing our series on understanding genesis today we're going to learn about one of the central figures not just of the bible but of the whole western tradition namely abraham and we're gonna try and understand that really pivotal prickly episode where it seems god is commanding abraham to kill his own son how do we make sense of all that that's what we'll be discussing here but before we do bishop good to see you welcome hey brandon always good to see you i'm glad to be home after a lot of weeks of traveling around i was on i think five separate trips the last about six weeks yeah let's talk about some of that it's been a while since we've connected and updated listeners on where you've been what you've been doing so let's talk about a couple of the big events among those five one was a trip to west point uh what were you doing there loved it you know i spoke at the naval academy about a year ago and then i guess the word got out so the army invited me to west point and i was delighted to go i'd never been to west point but i you know i'm a kind of a history buff and i love military history so just going to that place was fascinating we got a wonderful tour of it then i gave a talk that evening to the cadets in the in the great chapel at west point then the next day i went to a football game and turned out to be the highest scoring game in the history of that stadium it was like they were playing wake forest an army lost but army scored 56 points and lost by two touchdowns they lost 70 to 56 so it was like the highest scoring game ever so i saw that and then that evening i had mass at there's a catholic chapel right on the campus of west point had a chance to meet some of the catholic cadets and i just i loved it it was a great trip it's like a basketball score 70 something it was yeah that's right another big event one of the highlights i think of the year for ward on fire was this big good news conference which i was happy to help host down here in orlando everyone came down to orlando for the conference we had i think 570 ish people from all over the world mostly word on fire fans and followers there was speakers including yourself father mike schmitz chris stefanik um we had abbott jeremy driscoll a whole great great great lineup of breakout speakers but for me the best part of this was interacting with people who who have been shaped molded formed by word on fire and not just hearing their gratitude for word on fire but seeing how they themselves are now evangelizing as a result of word on fire talk about your experience at this conference i loved it uh as you say down in orlando and um seeing a lot of the our own word on fire folks that i hadn't seen for a long time because of covid and because i'm out here and you guys are different parts of the country so getting together with the team was a marvelous thing for me and i spent i think it was three and a half hours signing books and what that enabled me to do was meet a lot of the people who came to the conference i think i met two-thirds of the attendees uh and as you say just sensing their excitement and sensing their enthusiasm for the evangelical you know project uh was marvelous and the liturgies were great uh the speakers were terrific we had a chance it'll be coming out soon uh father schmidt and i sat down for a recorded conversation just about the work we do and all that so i just loved all those encounters it was terrific and it rained it rained you know it never rains in california i never see rain anymore and so i think it was the first day of the conference i had a little break in my room and it was just pouring rain and i sat on this little like little balcony off the room and i just i just listened to the rain for like an hour i remember you came down we're like bishop did you get some rest and you said yeah i listened to the rain for an hour yeah philosophical i loved it it never rains out here in california so i miss that all right let's turn our attention now to genesis this is i think the third in our series on understanding genesis we explained during the first video genesis is maybe the most misunderstood text in the bible lots of confusion of how to read this or that passage so we thought we'd go through it almost passage by passage now we're up into you know the the 10th through 20th chapters roughly of of the book of genesis um we've talked about creation uh adam and eve the fall now we're going to be looking at abraham and isaac the very first word that god speaks to abram remember that was his name first before it was later changed abram is that he has to move god says go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that i will now show you abram must leave behind everything everything he knows and go to a country that he knows nothing about you say that this is the the critical moment in abraham's abram's life he has to listen to the voice in fact you've said i'm quoting you here the entire narrative of the people israel turns on this question do they listen or not say more about that yeah look the thing begins with uh creation with god's great gift of the world and his his desire that we share in the fullness of life but he gives us that one command you know the one prohibition which of course we don't listen to so not listening to god not listening to the divine word was the source of the problem from that came the expulsion from the garden from that came all the sins laid out in genesis like now four through um through 11. you have this description of all that goes wrong with the world what we see now in the abraham cycle of stories is the beginning of the rescue operation that's why it's so important we're a salvation religion right we're not just a bland mysticism christianity biblical religion is a is a salvation religion god has taken action to save us from the problem where does it begin by someone who is willing to listen so here's abram as you say an old man at this point he's 75 and especially in the ancient world that meant you were you were ancient 75. settled in his ways he's followed his own instincts and done what he wanted to do and then comes this voice this higher voice beyond his own ego beyond his own plans a higher voice the voice of god that summons him to obedience and to mission well do you listen or not the the stance of most of us sinners is to say no i'm going to resist that voice i'm going to listen to my own voice man today in our culture are you kidding that's just massively on display my voice listen to me respect me don't tell me what to do you know bible has no truck with that sort of thing the bible's interested in an openness to the voice of the unconditioned the voice of the sumumbonum the voice of god which will always summon us outside of our to use our cliche today our comfort zone right he'll move us beyond what we're accustomed to what we're willing to accept think of the lord saying to saint peter you know when you were a young man you tied your own belt where you wanted to go okay but when you're an old man like abraham someone else will tie you up and take you where you don't want to go well there's someone else is the holy spirit and so the the salvation story in a way begins with this man who was willing to listen and so we call him the father of faith that's what it means i think faith here in the really primordial sense means trust are you willing as a basic stance of your entire life to trust in a higher voice in that way brandon every one of us is a son or daughter of abraham right we're all members of the abrahamic family because we've said yes to this higher voice that's why this cycle is so important so god sends abram off to this new land when his family comes to canaan the lord appears to him and says to your offspring i will give this land and that theme then reverberates throughout the rest of genesis it's so centric on on the land and not just the land and the abstract but a particular plot of land you know this plot of earth that's east of the mediterranean west of the jordan from dan in the north to beersheba in the south why is this particular piece of land so important in genesis well in a way it isn't and what i mean by that is it's not so much this particular plot of ground here i'm following matthew levering our great friend and a wonderful theologian that the land functions here in the old testament as a symbol of of our flourishing in relationship to god let's put it that way so think now the garden of eden another place but it's evocative of the life and fecundity and joy that comes from real friendship with god sin involves a loss of that place the the garden becomes a desert so the the promised land you might say is the recovery of eden it's the recovery now this land flowing of milk and honey it's a place of of full flourishing in friendship with god see so i would press it again following matt levering here the land is evocative of the church you know the promised land is the space the place of the church now go even further because the church is only in anticipation of what of heaven where we are fully engaged in friendship with god the land that is ultimately flowing with milk and honey is the land of heaven so think of the plot of earth you were describing you know west of the jordan east of the mediterranean and so on it's it's a symbol it's a anticipation and evocation of salvation of the garden that god wants to call us back into so abraham abram again at the time abram is convinced of the lord's offer of the land but he quickly becomes worried that he has no physical heir so him and his wife are barren but then god's word comes to him and says look toward heaven and count the stars if you are able to count them so shall your descendants be you'll have as many descendants as there are the stars say a moment about that and then i want to get to the seal of this covenant which is um a ritualistic thing but say something about that promise first well you know whenever we come across that reading in the liturgy whenever i come across at my own reading i find it deeply moving because brandon amen go go back in your mind's eye to this figure that abraham abram would he ever have imagined that two of those stars that he would see in the sky would be you and i you in orlando florida he had no idea where that was i in santa barbara california no idea where that was talking to each other by means of a technology that he couldn't have dreamt possible but yet here we are you and i are both two of the stars in that firmament we're descendants of abraham because we're we're born of the faith that he uh exhibited and so it's the it's all of the followers abraham across all of space and time that's what those stars signify and it's it's the beauty of god's providence that through this particular figure this guy from orr of the chaldees the 75 year old man the end of his life but by his willingness to listen he became the progenitor of this absolutely extraordinary spiritual family that includes us and we'll include people long after you and i are gone you know uh there'll be stars that that we can't imagine who will be descendants of abram and his faith and so i think that's just deeply moving to seal that promise that your descendants will be as many as the stars god then institutes this ritual and i i know a lot of my non-religious friends see that ritual and think it's so crazy because what he effectively does is tells abram to get a bunch of animals i think it's like a goat a ram a turtle dove a pigeon cut each of them in half split the two halves apart and then walk through them what's going on here how do we make sense of that yeah read scott hahn and others on this the term that's often used in the old testament for the making of a covenant is the term cut to cut a covenant and they think it might be related to this ritual the idea being uh may it happen to us what has happened to these animals if we break this agreement that we made so the two covenant partners say we're going to do this and that you know i'll do this for you you do that for me or i belong to you you belong to me and if we violate that may we suffer the fate that these animals have suffered they think that's one one meaning of the cutting of the animals then moving in between them so what's lovely in this account is abram does that but also god does it in the form of that you know flaming brazier and so on that god himself becomes a partner in this covenant he's cutting the covenant with uh with abraham and then that marvelous theme of covenant i mean go back before abraham to noah but then it runs right through the whole scripture up to jesus of course himself this new and everlasting covenant that he's going to make and and we represent that every time we celebrate the mass i mean so it's very resonant moment but it's also this i think brandon that all covenant in a fallen world will involve pain right so in a perfect world i i'm utterly without sin i'm not conditioned by sin in any way to to walk with god is effortless but see i'm a sinner i live in a sinful world and so getting myself online with god will always involve pain and so that's part of the symbolism of all of animal sacrifice is that what's happening to this animal by right should be happening to me that in the pain the animal's undergoing it's my own spiritual kind of being twisted back onto lying i think that's part of the logic as well of of all the sacrifice and covenant language as you mentioned earlier when we start this story abram's already an old man i think he's in his 70s but then when he turns 99 god reiterates his covenant with abram and at this point changes his name so that's when he moves now to the famous abraham which means father of many but as a sign of this covenant god asks that every male in the family of abraham be circumcised which establishes thereby in the flesh this this divine covenant this connection between god and his people i know a lot of people even within the church wonder why circumcision what does that have to do with god's promise so how do we understand that well i'd say a couple things brandon first of all look in in the now very rich literature about the initiation rituals of primal people so this is all over the world when a young man is brought from his home and then he's moved through a whole series of challenges and so on very typically in those processes something like this happens namely the scarification of the body and in some cases it is indeed circumcision other times the scarring of a cheek or a knocking out of a tooth marking in one's body the fact that life is painful life is hard and you're going to be called upon to make sacrifices for the sake of your family and your society that the days of your being coddled at home by your mother and father are over it's time for you to assume responsibility so in that sense there's nothing uh terribly unusual here it's part of this this signaling in one's body that there's something painful and demanding right about a mature relationship but then press it further now in the more specifically jewish or israelite context the fact that the covenant is written and indeed cut as i've used that term already it's cut into the reproductive organ of a man it's very telling so it's not just scarification of the cheek let's say you know it's the fact that the reproductive organ of a man is involved shows that somehow this promise of god this covenant of god is going to take place through family through reproduction through the you know being fruitful and multiplying right that that's essential to what god wants to accomplish in his friendship with us so the fact that it's marked not just in the flesh but in in that particular part of the flesh is of of great religious significance um it's tied to to the fecundity and fertility involved in god's covenant when we're friendly with god life comes from us in all sorts of ways right so circumcision i think is literally cutting into the flesh of someone a deep reminder of that truth all right let's move on from abraham to isaac so abraham and his wife sarah are in their upper 90s when suddenly they give birth to a son whom they name isaac but then in this startling twist god demands that abraham sacrifice his son as a burnt offering this is often described as the binding of isaac i know this is a perennially tough episode in the book of genesis for people so help us understand why god would who is against murder and for life why he would command abraham to kill his own son and and even more why would abraham obey him wouldn't abraham know that that's a bad thing to do help us understand this probably still the best text for uh interpreting this passage is soren kierkegaard's great text called fear and trembling and the title gives away the game kierkegaard says if you read this text and you don't experience fear and trembling you haven't read it right in other words you're reading it in a superficial way you're finding some kind of easy excuse or easy answer it's meant to produce in us something that's beyond our normal categories whether they're philosophical or ethical even religious right so there's something going on here that is deeply challenging to all of our assumptions let me try to say it as simply as i can something like this that our dedication to god must be greater than any other dedication or devotion that we have even to the best and highest and loveliest things so here we are in the world and and we're drawn into the world because of its beauty and goodness and truth and we make commitments to it and we love it we savor it good good but god is more important you mean more important than my country uh-huh therefore you must be if you have to be willing to sacrifice your relationship to your country if god's calling you to something higher or deeper uh my culture all these wonderful things in my culture that i savor yeah they're great but the friendship with god is more important and if it means i have to sacrifice even these things in the culture that i love yeah i i have to be willing to do that now press it further so it makes us really nervous my wife my husband my kids i mean what you're a father brandon i mean you in your bones i mean you have this visceral visceral connection to your family that's the greatest good in this world right great is good you you'd happily give your life to defend your kids i know that my father would have died for me i know that without the slightest hesitation but the friendship with god is more important even than that relationship are you willing therefore to sacrifice that's to say to render secondary even that relationship vis-a-vis god the story it seems to me of the akira or the binding of isaac is meant in this hyper dramatic way to bring this right before our our mind's eye um to me a parallel is always in in the new testament when the man says to jesus you know oh lord i want to follow you but you know first let me bury my father well you know come on who would ever refuse that hey you know hey bishop i i'd love to come to your conference but you know my dad died and i've got to attend the funeral well yeah of course i mean of course but the fact that jesus responds seemingly so coldly to him right let the dead bury their dead what's being signaled there is not his indifference to this man's affection for his father what's being signaled is but the love of god is higher than even the highest loves we experience in this world and are we willing therefore to sacrifice even those for the sake of what god is asking of us um terrible truth and they terrible it makes you tremble right fear and trembling because it means you've got to be willing to let go of everything in this world for the sake of god right and you know let's let's face it every one of us we're all going to die we're all going to face the moment when we have to let go of everything in this world to to enter fully into the friendship with the lord i think brandon that's why the story is so great and so powerful and so disturbing because it's making this point in a sort of unavoidable it's just in your face but i think that's how the great tradition has has read it abraham's faith is complemented throughout the rest of the bible especially in the book of romans chapter four paul says it was because of abraham's faith that righteousness was accounted to him and i often think of that line in light of this binding scene that abraham who had just been promised that his heirs would be as numerous as the stars in the sky and yet his only son he has to kill and so it's it's like this test of faith where he just has to believe that some way even though he has no conception of resurrection some way that isaac is going to be alive even even if he's killed here yep that's why kirkgard calls it calls faith the passion for the impossible now that's it's kind of a protestant way of doing it's a little bit dialectical and over the top okay but it's getting to your point if it's real faith it's calling forth a trust beyond our capacity to know and control you know it's like brandon all these conversations whenever i get in these debates with people with with non-believers and atheists about the problem of suffering you know and of course we can we can all bring forward you know a million examples of terrible uh seemingly unjustifiable suffering well i know i know and faith is a kind of passion for the impossible it's it's a trust even in the face of all of that even acknowledging all that think of abraham about to raise the knife to kill his own beloved son and talk about awful awful suffering but it's placed within the context of god's uh purpose and that he demonstrates this trust makes him the father of faith and you could argue the fact that you and i all these centuries later are are up there in the firmament of uh abraham's descendants is only because the sheer intensity of the faith that he demonstrated the trust that he demonstrated now flash forward to jesus on the cross right god my god why have you abandoned me but yet yet even there i trust that's the space we're being invited into by these these dreadful and wonderful readings let's close with one more look at isaac so we actually don't know much about isaac of the four major patriarchs in genesis abraham isaac jacob and joseph isaac is the least developed um other than this episode as a boy there's not much when he's an adult other than his meeting with rebecca who becomes his wife and the story of their betrothal um the discovery of rebecca takes place at a well talk about this and why it's significant yeah a servant of of abraham goes and and to find a wife for isaac and finds her precisely by the well and then of course in the story of moses he discovers his wife zipporah by a well so that in the biblical imagination a well becomes a kind of trusting place a place where where husbands and wives meet it's a place of marriage if you want and you know a well with all the the associations of water and life and you know oasis and all that well now flash forward to that remarkable scene in the gospel of john when jesus sits down by a well now you're a jewish reader in the first century right away you know your antennae go up like okay well that means this could be a place where a tryst will happen there'll be some kind of meeting you know of a husband and a wife and of course to that well comes the samaritan woman and then there's that marvelous exchange and it's read the church father suggests properly as a proposal of marriage because jesus says to rihanna you've had you know uh five husbands the one you have now is not your husband that implicitly he's saying i'm proposing that i become your husband not in the in the physical order but in the spiritual order it's jesus the uh the bridegroom and the woman is the bride so augustine reads her as the church coming from the many nations of the world and they meet at this tristan place a well like rebecca like zipporah and it's now yahweh it's the god of israel in person uh seeking marriage with us seeking to share intimacy with us and that of course then calls to mind all the themes in isaiah and many others you know is that the lord will marry his people that that god will will command his people or bosses people around or give them orders or make demands of them that's in all the religions but this weird weird idea in the old testament that god says i will marry i will marry my people well can we see in isaac and rebecca and moses and zipporah and then jesus and the woman at the well this marvelous marriage of god and his people uh i think that's how you know john whoever the author of john's gospel this debate about that he was someone certainly immersed in the jewish literary and theological tradition he knew these texts and deals so artfully with them so he tells that story with all these overtones and undertones you know and that's how i think we're meant to move into that story well now it's time for our question from one of our listeners and today we are hearing from alex in st louis who is asking about one of your favorite theological principles namely the non-competitive transcendence of god so here's alex's question [Music] grace and peace to you my name is alex and i live in saint louis missouri and my question is regarding god's non-competitive transcendence bishop you've spoken on this several times in response to governor cuomo as well as just simply describing the nature of who god is and who god isn't what sources would you recommend to learn more about this concept uh besides that par excellence thomas aquinas thank you so much yeah thank you for that and you're right it's one of my central ideas and uh i'll go first back in time uh one of the most important sources is the great saint irenaeus recently declared a doctor of the church look in the adversities do you find over and over again irenaeus has claimed that god doesn't need us god doesn't need the world and see that sounds cold but it's not it's it's liberating good news because god is god fully happy in himself and so on it means he's not going to manipulate the world in any way so he's transcendent to the world and non-competitively the world isn't isn't adding or subtracting to his being god doesn't need something from the world which means god can utterly love the world right with the freedom of spirit you're right and suggesting aquinas develops that in all sorts of ways and i got the idea from my theological hero robert sokolowski when i was a young kid at catholic university years ago and he laid out that idea so look in his book called the the god of faith and reason is the best place to find it but it echoes throughout a lot of his writings uh to me it was an idea that shed light in every direction and i did know the time when i was 21 years old and and kind of grasping that idea for the first time did it ever occur to me that a lot of my work as a writer and as a as an evangelist and now the media and so on would hinge upon that idea i don't think so but i took it in with great delight as i say it sheds light on so many different aspects of the faith so i'd say psychology for contemporary go back to irenaeus for the ancient church and where do you write about that bishop it's in priority of christ pretty heavily isn't it everywhere yeah i bring that idea up and i guess practically every every book i've written you know good well thanks alex for the question and for all the rest of our listeners if you'd like to ask bishop a question send it in to us at the website askbishopbaron.com listen as we get closer to christmas word on fire has a bunch of amazing deals on all of our books films products if you are looking for someone something to give to a friend or a family member this christmas check it out you can find it all at wordonfire.org thanks for listening to this understanding genesis series look forward to uh the next episode where we're going to be focusing on the figure of jacob thanks so much for listening and joining us and we'll see you next time on the word on fire show [Music] thanks so much for watching if you enjoyed this video i invite you to share it and to subscribe to my youtube channel you

Channel: Bishop Robert Barron

Views: 70,274

Keywords: bible, old testament, isaac, abraham, genesis, book of genesis, book of genesis explained, book of genesis explained catholic, bishop barron old testament, bishop robert barron, bishop barron, understanding genesis, understand the old testament, understand genesis, understand the bible, abraham and isaac, isaac foreshadowed jesus, isaac and abraham bible story, abraham and isaac bible story, explain the old testament, explain genesis

Id: 4iO_UCOI9Q0

Length: 31min 50sec (1910 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 29 2021