I wrote this as a comment on a blog.

One of the most precious images Jesus gave us is the father image. Culturally we instinctively define freedom as “absence of external constraint” and we project this definition upon a blank screen. Every wise parent of a young child knows this not to be true. The blank screen doesn’t exist. Let’s imagine the complex relationship between freedom and candy for a young child. The child may imagine that “freedom” means mommy never saying “no”. The mom knows better. There is freedom “from” candy as well as freedom to enjoy candy and freedom “for” candy. The wise parent trains the child to enjoy candy understanding that true, long term enjoyment of it requires some advanced “goods” the child must develop within herself such as self constraint and delayed gratification. What the child is learning from the parent is the gradually increasing participation in the dance of enjoying God’s good creation. A good creation is populated by numerous powerful players, the power comes from the goodness, but all good powers must be respected. The parent trains the child to grow in power to be able to participate in the dance.

Another analogy might be if you have a large dog. You train the small child how to handle the large dog. You train the dog how to be handled. When all are trained the dance can be far more enjoyable and artful than if none of the parties had learned the harder lessons that training enables.

Think now of the Abraham story. What is God doing through calling Abraham, promising him a child, watching, and allowing (with providential constraint and occasional intervention) all the missteps of Hagar, Egypt, and on and on? The story line reaches its climax obviously in Gen 22 where “God tested Abraham”. (if you want to hear a Jewish sermon on this text that hauntingly shouts for the Christ absent from the sermon listen to Robert Krulwich do it for NYC Radio labs http://bit.ly/12NOJp, also don’t miss reading the comments on the website).

This testing of Abraham is horrific. Who would ask Abraham to do such a thing, even if he always planned to stay the knife? Only God could do such a thing because all along we’ve seen that Isaac was a gift from God. No one else could lay claim to that gift. The request illuminates all of the stories that came before. God was training Abraham to dance with him, but if you are going to dance with God, you had better be able to dance in that context and that requires enormous strength, maturity, and most of all faith. There is no blank screen. There is no blank stage. The drama of heaven and earth involve all the major pieces and players. There is soaring, climactic joy, and crushing, deep sorrow. There are prizes worth winning, and losses that devastate. The creation is rich, powerful, demanding, real.

One might say “I wish to be a gold fish in a very small bowl rather than engage in the dance of the cosmos!” People make this choice every day, and that itself is an example of loss. The choice to engage, however, was made long before us by our first parents. Adam and Eve decided that they wished to be “like God, knowing good and evil”, and this is the process by which we in fact get exactly what we (corporately) have asked for.

Our Father is a good father, and he guides us through this dangerous and very real world. Every good parent raises their child for freedom, and this is what God does for us. Like a good parent he limits our choices sometimes, and watches as we make poor ones other times. He exercises his power and his authority within “the house” for the sake of the children’s development, sometimes upsetting the kids and eliciting complaint from them of him not being fair or loving. The wise Father knowns when to absorb such protests and though they sting simply ignores them knowing better than the mouthy kids. In the end as the child grows in wisdom he or she learns to trust, continues to grow, and increasingly is welcomed to move from the kid’s table into the larger world of the adult table set with a banquet of wine, meat, sweets, vegetables and other things that children need to grow up a bit to learn to appreciate.