MCLEODS, New Brunswick, November 15, 2023 – Every once in a while, I’ll do a slow read of the Bible, letting every word of every phrase sink in. In slow reads, it will take me months to get through the old and new Testaments rather than the usual month and a half, but the revelations are worth the slower pace. Yes, I’m reading a translation of a translation of a modernization that’s gone through God-only-knows how many revisions, but it’s God who’s reading his Word to me as I read his Word, so he’ll make sure I get what I need, regardless of how many changes have been made over the years.

Today I learned that God tempts people. It was hammered into me previously, based on (I guess) one of the letters in the New Testament, that only the devil tempts, but scripture says that God tempts, too. It’s right there in the chapter about Abraham being tempted by God to offer up Isaac as a sacrifice.

I was also reminded, in reading about God tempting Abraham, that the temptations don’t stop at a certain point in our lives. We don’t retire from getting tempted. It’s never “one and done” during our time on Earth, never “once saved, always saved” because even as born-agains we’ll be tempted right up to our final breath in a human body. Jesus was. And being tempted up to our final breath, we’ll likewise have the potential to fall, right up to our final breath.

There’s no retirement age for temptations. Abraham was well over 100 when God tempted him to sacrifice Isaac. By that point, God had already promised Abraham that his seed through Isaac would inherit the promised land, and yet God was still tempting him. God was still pushing his buttons to see what kind of stuff he was made of. God was still demanding that he give up that one thing none of us ever want to give up (in Abraham’s case, Isaac). We all have that one thing that we clutch and envision clutching even in our death throes. For some, it’s money. For others, it’s a cherished relative or possession. For still others, it’s a mindset or belief. And for still others, it’s the breath of life itself (or better said, the fear of death). Isaac was that one thing that Abraham had banked his whole life and posterity on, and so Isaac became Abraham’s temptation.

Be warned that God will be after your Isaac some day, whoever and whatever that may be. And like Abraham, you’re going to have to unhesitatingly give it up when God asks for it. God will never leave you or betray you, but he very likely at some point will ask you for that one thing you don’t want to give up. Just a reminder, so you’ll be prepared when it happens. You don’t want to fail that test. Of all the tests that God and devil will put you through, that’s not the one you want to fail.

Something else God showed me in this latest slow read is that animals used to get along. They didn’t used to eat each other. That was a revelation to me, as being a child of the 20^th century, I was raised to believe that all God’s creatures (including us) are natural born hunters and killers, and that we need to kill to eat (in other words, we need to kill to survive). There’s a pecking order, we’re taught. There’s a “food chain”, we’re taught. And yet scripture tells us that all the animals in Heaven get along and eat “grass” rather than each other. It was like that in the Garden of Eden, too, the animals eating “green herbs” and all getting along and even being able to communicate with each other and with Adam and Eve.

When God decided to destroy the world with a flood, killing the animals at the same time as the humans, it was because the animals had, like the humans, given themselves over to violence. They had “corrupted their way”, indicating that animals have free will. If they have free will, then they have souls (which anyone whose ever had a pet already knows, even without scripture implying it), and if animals have souls, they can go to Heaven. I knew this already, because God has shown me animals in my visions of Heaven, and scripture describes all the animals getting along in Heaven with no more violence (that is, no more killing and eating each other).

Still, it’s good to see it all laid out in black and white. It’s good to see it laid out in black and white, because there are many false prophets who claim that animals don’t have souls and so there are no animals in Heaven. When you come across a false prophet who claims that animals don’t have souls and therefore can’t go to Heaven, you can use the “black and white” evidence to refute it.

Something else about Abraham and Isaac that the current slow read revealed to me is that God referred to Isaac as Abraham’s “only son”. And yet Abraham at that point already had another son, his first-born, Ishmael, whom he actually seemed to favour over Isaac. But the lineage of the promise was to be through Isaac, and so God referred to Isaac as Abraham’s only son. Isaac wasn’t the elder, and yet he was preferred by God. Similarly, when Isaac had the fraternal twins Esau and Jacob, with Esau emerging from the womb first, it was Jacob who became the lineage of the promise, even though Isaac favoured Esau. God favoured Jacob, and so it was Jacob who received the blessings allotted to the promised lineage. In both of those cases, it was God who chose, and he didn’t choose the first-born or the earthly father’s favourite. The same happened with Jacob, when Joseph (his youngest at the time) was chosen by God, and later with Jesse, David’s father, with David being the youngest of seven and far from favoured by his father.

We, as Christians, are also not God’s first-born, but we are God’s chosen children by the spiritual lineage of the promise that runs through Jesus. We and we only are now God’s children.

So the slow read showed me that it’s God who chooses the lineage of the promise, not “nature” or genetics or the parents, and it’s also God who denotes who is and who is not his child. We are not born children of God; we are chosen to be children of God. God alone chooses and designates who are his, and those he doesn’t designate as his are not his, regardless of what they call themselves. Still, God looks after those he doesn’t consider his children, blessing them and protecting them, like he blessed and protected even Cain.

Finally, and because Adam’s gotten such bad press over the millennia, I was happy when God highlighted for me during this latest slow read that Adam is in fact the start of the lineage of the promise. Yes, through sin Adam lost his place in the Garden of Eden, but his third-born son Seth (not Cain and not Abel, Adam’s first- and second-born sons, respectively) carried on the promise. It began with Adam and was carried on through Seth. Adam is our spiritual forefather of the promise, and as such is worthy of honour. He isn’t a dead branch on a tree. He isn’t the one who messed it up for the rest of us and therefore should be trash-talked. He’s our great-great-great (etc.) grandpappy, spiritually speaking. God chose him to be the lineage of the promise, and after him Seth, and after him Enos, and so on, all the way down to Jesus, and through Jesus to us. So we should honour Adam – not malign him, honour him – in our spiritual family tree.

And speaking of Adam and trees, isn’t it interesting that God warned Adam to steer clear of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil but gave him no such warning about the tree of life? Why do you suppose that was? The tree of life was literally infinitely more valuable (probably the most valuable tree in the Garden), and yet no warning was issued to stay away from it. Only after Adam was expelled from the Garden did the tree of life come under special protection.

There’s a reason for this. I don’t know what it is yet. I have a few inklings, but I don’t know for sure. Maybe during my next slow read of that passage God will reveal it to me….