Yesterday, Creator's Bible Discussion focused on God testing Abraham's faith by commanding the sacrifice of Isaac. My thoughts linger on Isaac today.
And yesterday in our country, a public figure, Charlie Kirk, was murdered. For some, this was a tragedy; for others, it may have been met with indifference, or even a grim satisfaction. But no matter our political convictions, one truth remains: the murder of a political leader is not only an attack on one life. It is a wound to all of us. It is a mirror of the brokenness of our time. I simply shake my head today.
Whenever violence erupts, we look to the actors: Who did it? Why? What did they believe? But if we stop there, we miss something deeper. Violence is a flare sent up from the soil of our collective life. It signals that something toxic has been allowed to fester. We can't deny the polarization, alienation, and the inability to live together across our differences.
And as the spiral deepens, silence grows. We seldom pause to grieve together. We turn murder into news cycles, political leverage, and content fodder. What we refuse to mourn, we cannot heal.
This is not unlike the silences we encounter reading Genesis. Abraham is silent when God commands him to sacrifice his son. Isaac is silent as he is bound on the altar. Sarah, who once laughed at the promise of life, is silent here as the promise seems to dissolve into death.
And somehow, in that silence, remains the hope that our world is changing and God, somehow, is interrupting. The knife is starting to stop. There is a ram that will appear in the thicket. God provides life, not death; mercy, not destruction. This is a God who interrupts cycles of sacrifice, who breaks the assumption that violence is inevitable.
Ancient Scripture and today’s headlines met yesterday, for our group. Our world is so fragile. Words can turn to bloodshed in an instant. The vulnerable carry the weight. And too often, we are silent.
But God does not remain silent. God interrupts violence. God provides another way. And God calls us to grieve what has been lost, not to exploit it, not to numb ourselves, but to mourn together so that transformation is possible.
At Moriah, God stopped the knife. In Christ, God absorbed the violence of the world and answered with resurrection. And today, in a world that feels overcome by bloodshed and despair, God still speaks:
“Do not lay your hand on the boy.”
“Choose life, that you and your children may live.”
The question is whether we will hear that voice and live as people who continue to believe it.
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