Nightlion wrote:You cannot imagine that with every step up Mount Moriah Abraham was willing by sheer faith against all odds for God not to allow him to complete his task? Or that he was thereby proving unto God his obedience even against his own will? I say he always had that hope.
I’m of the opinion that the original story actually had Abraham killing Isaac, and the part where the angel intervenes is a later addition by an editor that had theological motivations.
I didn’t see hope in the text, I saw a grim duty.
Nightlion wrote:And Job, who had lost all hope, would not forsake his integrity against utter loss. These epic tales speak against wasted abuse. Abuse that crushes the soul to make up a jewel by not giving way but resisting mercilessly under the strain. None more that Christ alone at the last moment.
The text of Job explicitly denies any reason behind suffering, recall that Job was never told about Satan’s challenge to God. When Job finally met God in the whirlwind, all he was told was that God is so above him in status and he had to right or grounds to call God into question.
Nightlion wrote:Have you ever really needed hope at all? How would you know what it is otherwise?
We all hope, each of us has hundreds of petty hopes each year. We hope for good weather, that our headache will go away, there is no traffic and out of all these hopes, how many do we forget? Hope is always rooted in a time to come, never in the present.