We

            Pronouns are important. Those little words—he, she, it, we, they, you—make a big difference. Sometimes when I’m talking with my husband, he stops me to ask to whom a pronoun refers. Now, it’s perfectly clear to me but not to him. I then need to go back and identify the person I mean.

            A couple of weeks ago my pastor preached on Abraham. As you know from these posts, Abraham is one of the people I think about often. He’s a hero of the faith, someone worth emulating. As the Genesis 22:1-19 passage was read, I stopped listening after verse five. I got stuck on a pronoun, and I wanted clarification.

            An elderly father had an assignment from God:  sacrifice your son. So old Abraham and young Isaac set out after the father tells his servants to wait. So how many are going up the hill for his act of obedience? One, two—two people.  The sacrificer and the sacrifice.

            Before they leave, Abraham says, “We will return.”

            We? We? We! I wanted to scream it. Instead I jabbed my husband and pointed to that pronoun we. He looked, nodded, and no doubt wondered what I was up to with this time with this pronoun. (After nearly thirty years, neither one of us is a mind reader.) What I wanted to know is:  We who?

            At our house we occasionally misquote the Lone Ranger’s Indian companion Tonto by saying, “What do you mean we, Paleface?” In Abraham’s case, I asked, who do you mean, we? Isaac was to be killed. So who were the we  coming back down the hill?

            This is one reason why Abraham is one of my heroes.  “Abraham reasoned that God could raise the dead.” (Hebrews 11:19, NIV) He knew the God who said your descendants will be as the sand of the sea would have it all under control, including a resurrection, if necessary. One word—we—embodied incredible faith.

            Why could this man, who lied twice about Sarah being his wife—to save his neck—exercise extraordinary faith? He’d been through enough faith training to get the point—God is faithful.  And as I think about it, although God didn’t resurrect Isaac, because that wasn’t his plan, he used a resurrection to redeem mankind. That was the plan.

            What are the “impossibilities” in your life today? I’ve got my list. Whatever they are for you and me, there is a ram in a thicket. There is the faithfulness of God waiting for us.

            Perhaps the lesson of we is you—you, O Lord, our God, are always faithful!