Sacrifice

By now, you've probably seen this familiar story about the parents who didn't take their 11 year old daughter for medical help when she was showing terrible symptoms from a treatable form of diabetes. After they prayed over her for days, she died. Sadly, this type of thing happens quite frequently among believers.

Obviously, it's a terrible tragedy that this poor innocent young girl is dead. And it's a lesser tragedy that these parents blame their own "lack of faith" on the fact that god didn't heal their daughter. I imagine that as she lay dying the daughter also felt guilty about her own "lack of faith" and blamed herself for not being healed by god. Horrible.

I think that much of this needless suffering and death can be laid specifically to one story in the Bible, the binding of Isaac by his father, Abraham. The story is generally regarded as recounting a test of Abraham's faith by god who orders Abraham to sacrifice his son. An angel stops Abraham just as he's about to kill Isaac. Abraham has passed the test.

Quite often people who take the Bible literally read the story of Abraham and Isaac and apply it to their own lives. If the "test of faith" is a simple problem, there's usually not much harm in them finding god's hand in their suffering. But when they believe god is testing their faith by making one of their children ill, tragedy often results.

The ironic thing is that these parents blame their own lack of faith when in fact, they passed the test better than Abraham. They had so much faith in god that they accomplished their own awful, terrible sacrifice.