Faith Vs. Fanaticism

Wade Butlers states that the rest of the bible is about one man’s family, which is Abraham. It is about how God kept his three promises that he made. There are many obstacles that the family goes through, but the stories show how God never disappoints his people. In the end he fulfills his three promises.

One of the first major events in Abraham's life is that of his calling. We first meet Abraham while he is living in the Ur of the Chaldeans in the east. We don't know much about his life prior to his calling by God but once steps into Abraham's life things change in radical ways. God

Critics who suggest that the relationship between God and Abraham was caustic are incorrect and miss the whole dynamic of the relationship. The relationship between God and Abraham is one of teacher and student. God is attempting to teach Abraham how to raise himself out of savagery and into civilization. The Binding of Isaac is just another test, although a mentally agonizing one for Abraham. The entity of the story of Abraham is God trying to impress upon Abraham how important goodness is to the survival of a people.

The story of Abraham and the binding of his son Isaac displays one of the ways God tested man in those days. Abraham was ordered to sacrifice his only son in the land of Moriah. Not letting his love for his son withhold him from God’s wishes he goes to the mountain and right before he readies himself to kill Isaac an angel calls out to him. He is told that his faith in God has been demonstrated and he doesn 't have to sacrifice his son after all.

Abraham had a vision, where God promised to protect him. Abraham had a hard time believing that him and his wife would ever have children. God told Abraham that the amount of descendants that he would have, is equivalent to the amount of stars in the sky.

In Genesis the word of God leads humanity in the direction of self preservation, urging them to procreate, to ”Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 9:1), and to minimize hostility and violence among people. As Freud asserted, “Besides the instinct to preserve living substance and join it into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and bring them back to their primeval, inorganic state” (Freud 77). Genesis exemplifies the struggle between the two opposing human instincts, with God acting as a moderator between them. Forms of justice are put into place in an attempt to control these drives, one example being the proclamation that “Whoever sheds the blood of a human, by a human shall that person’s blood be shed” (Genesis 9:6). The ethics and laws that develop throughout Genesis seek to “prevent the crudest excesses of brutal violence” but are unable to control “the more cautious and refined manifestations of human aggressiveness” (Freud 70). Since they cannot be completely eradicated, the scriptures instead play into the more negative aspects of human nature, especially narcissism, and manipulate them into a force for conservation rather than annihilation.

Abraham’s response to God’s promises were obedience (4-6) and confirmation (v. 7). In Genesis 15 the writer states that the Lord took upon Himself alone the responsibility for fulfilling the covenant. Genesis 17 adds the revelation that the covenant would be everlasting. One cannot research the Covenant and not about the narrative of Abram’s life.

Another biblical example of a moral or intrinsic evil is the result of Adam and Eves disobedience of God’s free will in the Garden of Eden and becomes even more clear to them with the birth of their two sons, Cain and Abel. The birth of these two sons brings the evil of lethal violence to society. It begins with rivalry amongst siblings of jealousy and family fighting. Cain’s jealousy finally ends with him making the decision to commit murder and kill his brother Abel. This decision of moral or intrinsic evil made by Cain is the first taking of human life and the deterioration of humanity’s condition. The act of murder is not an act of God, it is an act of man and because of man’s action, evil succeeds in society. Again, the problem of

God told Abraham to send Ishmael to the mountain (add name of the mountain) (21: 12-13), and now demanded of him to bring in Isaac. While you are waiting on God to fulfill your wishes, it is not difficult to convince yourself and others that you trust in his word. However, it is quite another thing to trust and obey the word after the expected promise is received. Did Abraham prefer "to keep to himself," his long-awaited son, or listen to God and return to the Lord? In other words, the test was to proof, if he really believed that God would somehow fulfill His word, and not take his promised heir?

Christianity has been around for thousands of years, and the difficulties that Christians have faced have been around just about as long as the religion has existed. There are new difficulties introduced every day that are new or get worse by the modern society’s lack of enthusiasm towards religion in itself, and advances in technology that creates images and ideas that go against the Christian beliefs. Cassie Bernall, for example—she is not a celebrity, a politician, or a well-known public figure, but she is a survivor. Cassie Rene Bernall was viciously murdered in the Columbine High School Shooting in Columbine, Colorado. It was reported at that time that during her attack, one of the shooters asked her if she believed in God as she hid her

The use of limited narrow diction suggests that in simply following God’s orders and completing his covenant with God, Abraham will find himself blessed and God will approve of his actions. The way Abraham “hearkened to [God’s] voice” emphasizes their relationship and Abraham’s undoubted conviction to God and the covenant (Genesis 22:18 ). Abraham takes the task that God gives him and he completes it without question or doubt of the meaning or reason behind it. Abraham acts upon God’s orders because Abraham has “hearkened” God. In Abraham’s view, the only way to fully hear God’s orders would be to follow them no matter the cost. God merely tells Abraham to

In his famous work Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard declares that “no person has a right to delude others into the belief that faith is something of no great significance, or that it is an easy matter, whereas it is the greatest and most difficult of all things.” The difficulty of faith lies in the requirement of sacrifice. The story of Abraham’s near sacrifice of his beloved son, Isaac, is what Kierkegaard utilizes to demonstrate how costly faith in God is. Here is a man, who after seventy years of waiting for God’s promise of offspring finally received his son, is commanded by God to slay his promised son with no stated reason for doing so. Kierkegaard, in attempting to experience what Abraham might have experienced in those moments, cries, “Now all is lost, God demands Isaac, I shall sacrifice him, and with him all my joy – but for all that, God is love and will remain so for me.” What bold words! The cost

God selected Abraham to be the father of the His people. The bible does not directly state why God selected him, but after reading scripture one can conclude that God selected Abraham due to his great faith. Abraham’s life lends itself as an example to all who desire to walk with God.

The debate between whether religion cause war or not based on their impression of religion; furthermore, it is unreasonably clear about what does and does not permit like a religion. Countries such as Islam are fated while certain others, like nationalism, are subjectively ignored. Authors used different theories such as absolutist, divisive, and absurd to explain why religion is so predisposed to violence. Sometimes authors combine these arguments to make their case.

     Abraham stands as one of the most important figures in the Hebrew Bible, and is central to the understanding of God’s solution to the problem of mankind. Man, the mysterious creature that God wraught as a semi-experiment, is constantly prone to believe he is self-sufficient and capable of survival without God, the central problem God must deal with in the Hebrew Bible. To solve this problem, God decides to strike fear in the heart of man and to revolutionise his lifestyle by creating laws and empowering a chosen group of people, who will spread the word of God by example. These people are the Hebrews, and Abraham is the father of their race, the man from whom all