I’ve been reading The Ancient City, and it’s been rather enlightening. It’s helped give light to the questions that I’ve had regarding the greatest known Patriarch: Abraham.
I feel like it’s natural for Christians to find that God emphasizes a verse, a passage, a chapter, a book, a story, or a person in the Bible at times in their lives. I know it happens to me often with sometimes bigger God-given obsessions overlapping with more minor interests. For many years, I have loved Ezekiel, the book and the experience of the man as written, and I still do. Nevertheless, for the past 3 years, God has emphasized the life of Abraham to me more and more.
There is just something oddly peculiar about the journey that Abraham went on with God. There’s an ease to it, a simplicity to it. Yes, he has moral failings often, but he never stops walking where God is leading him. Along the journey, through all of his failings, God never stops pouring out blessings upon him. That’s the kind of life that I want, one where I never stop walking where God is leading me, receiving the rewards of a well-lived life. If I really reflect, I would say that Abraham’s story is a more detailed version of Noah’s story, and I recall when I began my walk with God 10 years ago (as I started college) that I had an obsession with Noah back then (synchronicity?). I was entranced by the line that says
These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God.
“Noah walked with God.”
What does that mean? How does one walk with God? What does it mean to be “perfect” in his generations? Is it possible for me too?
The internal dialogue only overflows as you begin to ponder just this one verse. How can one walk with God? In other versions, it says “Noah walked faithfully with God.” Maybe that’s the key? Faith. Still, this verse stirs up a deep mystery for me because of the peace that is conveyed within it. After all, walking with God must be peaceful, right?
In my time on the Earth, most of my suffering has come from the enemy tormenting me within my own mind more than anything else. I’m sure others can relate, but I’ve experienced a lot less outward suffering than inward suffering proportionately speaking. All I desired at that time and even now is to find a place of rest in God. Something about Noah’s walk with God and Abraham’s walk speaks to me.
Noah somehow remained holy before God while being surrounded by promiscuous people, ready and willing to give themselves over to any kind of idol. Abraham’s journey is different. He starts in a place of peace, not one of chaos. He begins his journey somewhere safe, still in his father’s house. The magnitude of that always gets to me. He was in a safe place. He was in a cozy place. He was in a place no one would willingly choose to leave.
I’ve always wondered why God awarded Abraham with so much wealth and riches in life if all he did was leave his father’s house, but as a 28 year-old who owns very little but is in a relatively comfortable place, I am starting to get it.
1 Now the Lord had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee:
2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:
3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.
In The Ancient City, it is explained that the customs of ancient Indo-European peoples are derived from an ancient religion of the hearth that is even older than the pagan gods that they worshipped later.
The religion of the hearth is a unique religion for every family and every household, and it passes from father to son, where every family has their own prayers, rites, and worship to their “household” gods. These gods would have been ancient ancestors that they prayed to for guidance and blessing. Along with complex burial rites for the dead, this hearth religion formed the basis of the worldview of every household.
Abram (his name before God changed it) didn’t just move out of his father’s house. He left everything he thought he knew about the world behind and chose to follow God instead. He left behind his earthly inheritance from his own father as the inheritor of the position of the household high priest—among other things—and gave it all up to inherit from his heavenly Father instead. He gave up all that he knew about the world even ancient beliefs that his family had held about the metaphysics of the world for generations, and he traded that to walk into the unknown with a strange, foreign god, a god unknown to his family’s ancient worship, customs, and traditions.
He made the ultimate sacrifice of his time, giving up his entire life to follow the one true God to an unknown land through unknown dangers. He was naturally overcome by fear at times, but he never stopped walking in the direction God led him. He left behind the small world that his family had cultivated for generations for the mystery of whatever this new God would lead him into.
For many years, he saw wealth and riches pour out from God, but he did not see what he had desired for so long, a son to which he could pass on the new faith, customs, traditions, and map of the world given to him by the God that he came to love and trust so much over his journey. But God does not disappoint, and he blesses him with the son that he promised to him in a miraculous way. Later, God tests Abraham further in this and also proves that he is the God above all gods by providing a ram instead of Isaac, his son, for the sacrifice. Abraham gave up all that he had, and God gave him more than he could have ever imagined.
It’s hard to grasp that kind of trade. When you have so little, it’s hard to let go of what you feel like you have. Sometimes we truly have nothing, but we still don’t want to let that go for fear that we’ll be empty if we let the nothing that we have slip away. I still struggle with this fear as I truly feel like I have very little in life right now, and the fear that comes upon me when I think of giving it up is monumental. However, no one can deny that God delivered more than what Abraham ever expected to receive out of life on top of what he asked for which was a son.
To admonish myself and you on the fact that we just “need to have more faith” would come off as childish. I won’t do it because that doesn’t really unveil the level of sacrifice that Abraham endured and why God blessed him so much. Most people have a fear of the unknown. People who are afraid of swimming in the ocean often sight that they are afraid of the unknown beneath the waves. They do not know what’s under the surface. Imagine that there is no map of the world and everything you believe and know comes from the people and things that are in your neighborhood.
What if there are no ways of knowing what’s beyond the borders of your neighborhood? What if there are no higher institutions with people figuring out how things work? What if there is no knowledge base except the knowledge passed down by family members and tribe members that have lived on that same street for generations? Let’s say they’ve traveled 20 miles around the neighborhood over the last 50 generations, but that’s it.
Imagine Abraham, in the fields with livestock looking into the distance in a direction, and God shows up and says, “I want you to walk that way.”
So, he starts walking, and he gets passed his fields, and God says, “I want you to walk even further.”
Let’s say God keeps nudging him along until he’s at the borders of the known world of his tribe, and God says, “Now go even further.”
Can you imagine that kind of fear? No one knows what’s beyond the 20-mile horizon of his family’s household. They don’t talk about it because it doesn’t exist to them. They’ve lived in that 20-mile radius for generations. Even their gods have lived inside that 20-mile radius. There is no ancient wisdom for what happens outside that 20-mile radius. Truly, that first step outside that radius for Abraham would be the biggest step he’s ever taken in his entire life, a step into a different world, a world filled with chaos. It’s also the biggest step anyone in his family has taken in generations. Why leave the safety of his father’s house for the terror beyond the boundaries? There are so many ways that he could perish in the outside world, and no one in his family would ever know.
Usually, there is an area of your life where you’re more willing to make this leap. For me, it’s in the area of knowledge. In middle school, I remember learning about the Enlightenment and pre-enlightenment thinkers that launched Europe into its technological growth acceleration that we still experience today in the Western world (though things are slowing down now). I remember Newton and Descartes, and I had a love for Kepler the moment we started learning about him.
I just looked at these guys’ resumes in textbooks. Descartes, regardless of the merit of his discoveries and observations, brought new ideas to so many different fields including philosophy, mathematics, and science. It wasn’t just him, so many of these men were polymaths, going from one field to another somehow all within the same singular lifespan with the allotted time given to them by God.
I wanted to be like them. I loved the stories of their lives. I started wondering if I could be a polymath too, a philosopher too.
The truth is that I truly have that kind of nature, though it’s taken me another 13 years to understand that. Shortly after originally discovering that I wanted to be a polymath philosopher type, I found out abruptly that higher institutions made one specialize in one field or another. I became deeply depressed. I carried that weight for years. When it came time to apply for college, I decided to choose to do mathematics only. I later changed this to computer science before I started at Georgia Tech.
I knew my path as a 13-year-old, but I didn’t know how to get there. The roads in the modern world are covered with red tape and bureaucracy. There is always a “right way” to do things, and there is always a way in which the world says things ought to be done. When God thought to bring us into the world at such a time as this, he did not intend for worldly red tape to stop us.
In college, I explored computers, mathematics, and science, but it was only after I graduated from college that I could really start to appreciate liberal arts: history, economics, and philosophy as well. I’m no genius, but I’m fairly good at explaining some of the things that I do understand. Those who know me know that I have a tendency to go on long monologues (also diatribes) on complex subjects when explaining things. I have the natural curiosity to look in places most people want to avoid rummaging around in, and I am intelligent enough to dig deeper than mainstream thought would like me to dig.
I ended up on quite an interesting part of the internet due to this inherent nature, surrounded by many “internet autists” who are of a similar type. I’ve never felt gatekept, and I’ve never understood racial arguments regarding this issue. I never needed to see a black scientist to know that I had the same nature as these Enlightenment figures and pre-enlightenment figures that I learned about in school. All they had were 3 things really: persistence, intelligence, and childlike wonder/curiosity.
Part of the reason that I was so resistant to social justice brain mush is because I never had the thought that I needed to be a white male to contemplate the nature of the metaphysics of the universe. That thought never crossed my mind as kid or as an adult until social justice messaging kept shoving it into my face. As a child, I just knew instantly that I had the same nature as any curious thinker regardless of race or sex. I’ve never felt the need to elbow my way into someone’s intellectual conversation, announce that I am a black woman, and command that people kneel before my profound ethnic woman thoughts (most of “black intellectualism” these days is 100% this—thank God that Thomas Sowell and Justice Clarence Thomas still live to outshine the losers who do this). I’m no genius, but I’m willing to explore with childlike curiosity and that makes all the difference.
I’m not afraid to pick up a book that is supposedly “racist” or “antisemitic” and read it and give an honest critique of it—I might do this for Imperium by Yockey in the near future but we’ll see. Anyway, I’ve never feared following a thread of a whisper of intuition on a pathway of discovering how the world actually works (compared to how it’s presented to work). But there are some things that I am afraid of taking steps in. In fact, anything outside the realm of freeform intellectual pursuit of metaphysical truth is probably in the realm of “fearful” for me. My following of academic interests wherever they lead is easy just as Abraham staying within his father’s house was easy. It takes boldness, courage, and faith to walk outside the borders of what’s easy, and that boldness, courage, and faith are what yield the greatest rewards when you are walking with God.
Again, I’m not here to admonish you. It’s just clear that the greatest rewards come from pioneering with God. I struggle too with what things God wants me to step out of and what things he wants me to step into. I’ve stepped out of many things already even through my freeform intellectual pursuits, but there are more things that God has for me and for you too. Leaving where you’ve been is terrifying because you don’t know what’s on the other side. Leaving with full trust in God and faith in your covenant with him changes everything. It makes the walk easy, not because you don’t run into trouble but because you trust God in the midst of the trouble.
I still don’t know how to get to that greater place of faith myself, but I know that now is the time to step out of something and into something (or its coming soon). It will require faith in God to do that. Are you ready to walk into something new?
8 But thou, Israel, art my servant, Jacob whom I have chosen, the seed of Abraham my friend.
9 Thou whom I have taken from the ends of the earth, and called thee from the chief men thereof, and said unto thee, Thou art my servant; I have chosen thee, and not cast thee away.
10 Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness.
11 Behold, all they that were incensed against thee shall be ashamed and confounded: they shall be as nothing; and they that strive with thee shall perish.
12 Thou shalt seek them, and shalt not find them, even them that contended with thee: they that war against thee shall be as nothing, and as a thing of nought.
13 For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.
- Isaiah 41:8-13 KJV, emphasis added