On the Edge

From every angle, Abraham had a rather comfortable life up until the age of 75. He didn’t have any kids, but he did have the comfort of family and friends in his hometown, and a beautiful wife. He also seemed to be gainfully employed and rather successful in the family business.

But God called Abraham to leave his home, and his country, and his family, and head miles away to a place he’d never been before in order to possess it.

So, Abraham leaves the comfort of home and heads for the Promised Land. Along the way he experiences famine, war, family feuds with Lot, his wife, his mistress; threats to his life in Egypt, the possibility of losing his wife to Pharaoh and Abimelech, and his own son to the terrifying altar of sacrifice.

To top it all off, he died (Genesis 25:7-10) without inheriting the very thing he was promised. Canaan ( Acts 7:2-5).

By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to go out to a place that he was to receive as an inheritance. And he went out, not knowing where he was going… living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise… These all died in faith, not having received the things promised, but having seen them and greeted them from afar (Hebrews 11:8-9, 13).

Abraham could have counted his blessings, stayed at home in Ur, playing Mario Kart in his mum’s basement?

But Abraham went, and in doing so, he not only opened the way for the Saviour of the world to leave His father’s house, become one of us, and redeem the world from sin, he also set the template for a life of faithfulness. This is why we call him our father of the faith (Isaiah 51:2).

Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness… Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham (Galatians 3:6-7).

God’s call to Abraham was a call to adventure. It wouldn’t be safe, and it wouldn’t be easy. But that would be okay. As Helen Keller once said,

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or it is nothing at all.

Go Helen!

Abraham was willing to dance on the edge. Not out of a reckless, bungee-jumping, life-wasting spirit, but out of a desire to obey God and receive the things that God had promised him.

And all such adventures, which adventures you and I were created by God to have, involve risk.

It’s interesting to read end of life surveys on the question of regret. By and large, people do not regret the things they tried to do, which failed. They regret not trying the things that might have succeeded.

Risk or regret. God may not be coming to you with visions in the night – visions of great adventure – but He speaks to us daily in His word. And if we seek to follow His word faithfully we are going to encounter risk; we are going to have the adventure of our lives.

Likewise, if we are not living as God has called us to live and we are not dancing on the edge as God has called us to dance, then we are not living as the children of Abraham.

In fact, we are barely living. We are simply dust, waiting to die.

Men like Soren Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky saw the creeping anxiety and danger of those who avoided risk and pursued comfort at all costs and warned against it. They saw the failure of pursuing happiness through security.

Dostoevsky saw that if you gave people everything they needed so that all they had to concern themselves with was cake and the continuation of the species, it would not be long before they became so miserable that they started to break things and destroy their own world just so that something remarkable and something adventurous might happen. Such is man’s need, made in the image of God, to not simply exist but to experience the adventure of life that God has given us.

As someone once said, the boat of human happiness and security is easily capsized. If what floats your boat is happiness then you’re going to be devastated by the first decent wave. And so, if you’re going to suffer, and you will, let it be on account of the adventure and the risk and not the unattainable goal of safety and security.

Abraham could have lived out his days enjoying a doting mother and father, peeling grapes in his tent and humming the Bee Gees by the fire at night. But he didn’t, and neither should we.

So, where do we start? We start by living life’s biggest adventure: The adventure of telling the truth. The truth about ourselves and our world as God sees it. We take up the adventure through obedience to God day by day.

And we do it knowing that He who calls us forth to the adventure of our lives is able to deliver what He has promised to those who put their hope and trust in Him.

It’s the life anticipated in the life of Abraham and lived out to the full in the life of Christ. It is a life that necessarily entails easing the burdens of others while accepting the providence of God in our own sufferings.

It doesn’t really matter if we end up in Egypt, Ur or Dundee. The sacrifices may be painful or not and the suffering difficult or easy. But at least we will have run the race we were created to run, rather than regret not running at all.