This is an archived copy of a post written by Conflict Of Justice (conflictofjustice.com). Used with permission: Conflict Of Justice may not agree with any alterations made.
The king approached young Abraham, bound tightly on a sacrificial altar.
“Worship the fire!” he ordered.
Abraham struggled and then looked up at king Nimrod. “But water puts out fire. Shouldn’t I worship water?” he replied sarcastically.
“Then worship water,” said Nimrod, turning away.
“But clouds carry water, so they are even greater than water. Yet the wind scatters clouds, so they are greater still. Yet the human is greater than them all, because he can stand against the wind.”
Nimrod turned back and leaned in. “Well I bow only to fire,” he said, “Now let us see which is greater, you or fire.”
What Is God?
This violent scene resulted from a rebellious man’s search for reason and logic. In his childhood, Abraham fiercely challenged the culture of his time, with relentless skepticism. He changed the world’s understanding of truth. His personal virtue of faith enabled great events in his life.
Abraham’s father Terah served as idol-maker for the king, perhaps the equivalent of a Hollywood director today. Abraham enjoyed all the education and privileges of the upper class, but he could not see why his father’s idols made people happy. Why “worship things that have no spirit in them?” What was the point of this after all?
So one day, Abraham set up a test. He smashed all of his father’s idols but one, and placed a club in the hand of the remaining idol. “The biggest idol wanted all the sacrificial offerings for himself, so he smashed the others,” he explained to his father.
Abraham’s father, Terah, did not see the humor in this, and he handed Abraham over to the local ruler, Nimrod, to be that year’s human sacrifice to the fire god. In another account, Terah gave Abraham as human sacrifice because he had burned down his father’s house of idols, and Abraham’s brother had perished in the fire.
Abraham’s ultimate question was about to be answered. What is the ultimate force in the world? Death? Man? But then a miracle occurred. An angel appeared, and a great earthquake killed 83,000 people at the sacrificial gathering. Abraham survived. Abraham’s theory that God was an all-powerful man was thus proven.
What Is Right?
After this, Abraham led a good life. He married a gorgeous woman, ran a very successful business, and enjoyed widespread fame. Success only comes through hard work, but Abraham proved his masculine virtue of handling a complicated and momentous life.
He continued to test the godly forces in the universe, for example with his excursion into Egypt. Everything he did was a search for truth. This is why continual search for truth is considered the “work of Abraham.”
As the years went by and Abraham’s wife did not produce a son, Abraham questioned God. “What is the point of all this if I don’t produce an heir?”
As we look at the corrupt condition of mankind and his inevitable route toward failure, we must likewise ask ourselves, what is the point of all this? What is right? We instinctively seek to control the world and impose our own judgement. But can we ever solve the quandary of imperfection and death?
In pursuit of right, Abraham had not realized the absolute power of faith until he laid on that sacrificial altar, as a consequence of his relentlessness. He was ready to die for his search, and this sacrifice led to great understanding.
Faith is a simple equation in natural law. How could one go through life by relying only on what they could see? Small trials of faith can be made every day, like scientific tests, for small issues. ‘If I do this, will I get the promised good results or will it turn out bad?’ Such tests on unseen forces is necessary to gain an understanding of life purpose, for life purpose and spiritual light are unseen realities and must be tested to know they exist. Justice and mercy must be discovered this way.
Or one could dismiss spirituality completely and go on focusing only on things he can see. The idol-making people of Abraham’s youth displayed a focus on only what they could see. Based on their scientific knowledge of the time, it was perfectly natural to believe some of the falsehoods that they did.
I find the story of how Abraham found God refreshing. It helps me in my life, as I see myself in an illogical secular society. Traditionalists point out lunacy on the left all the time, but we need to recognize that the reason they behave so irrationally is because they refuse to give place for faith and unseen truth.
What Is Unseen Truth?
Social justice is an ideology that rests entirely on what can be plainly seen. Each mechanism of progress for leftists–class growth, societal value, and equality—is achieved adamantly without faith. For example, with abortion there is no scientific evidence of personhood in an unborn child, so why not kill the child before it is born, or even soon after it is born, some may think?
With such hasty reasoning and a total absence of faith, the social justice morality is constantly in flux. It is all subjective to the social justice ideology, as there is very little visual evidence to work with when it comes to moral reality. They can make a few guesses based on history, logic, and theories, but ultimately justice comes down to what they fundamentally believe. There is only the ideology. What do Leftists fundamentally believe? If you look into it, really look into it, the answer is scary.
But this is not how truth works. Justice is not relative to philosophies or ideologies. It does not change. Truth does not change. The consistency of truth is an important reason why faith is able to work, why we can use scientific testing models to determine unseen realities.
Idolatry Today
Why did ancient people bow to idols? They were superstitious. What is superstition, fundamentally?
Superstition is the attempt to answer visual truths with nonvisual means or nonvisual truths with visual means. For example, some conspiracy theories say the Nazca Lines are evidence of flying saucers in ancient America. How or why would ancient people create such remarkably straight earth works on such a massive scale, unless aliens were involved?
The scientific model for this explanation of the Nazkca Lines is obviously shaky. But how can we possibly know if aliens were involved or not? We can’t. It was thousands of years ago. If you go strictly by what you see, aliens are just as likely an explanation as anything.
Though they pride themselves in their scientific supremacy, Leftists are incredibly superstitious. Global warming is an obvious example. But there are many, many cases of naiveté, shaky scientific models, and faulty logic in Leftist groups. To get the root of the matter, you need to look at how their ideas spring from their fundamental ideology of social justice.
One of the most shocking examples to me is those who say Jesus may have lived, but was just some feel-good guy who promoted some good ethical principles. C.S. Lewis famously pointed out that the words of Jesus in the bible leave little room for this explanation; either he was a raving lunatic who thought he was God or he really was God.
To social justice proponents, it is not really important what actually happened 2,000 years ago, since there is no way to know such a thing. What matters is how they can cherry-pick lines from the scriptures that build a narrative and help achieve their goals today. This “alternative Jesus requires working for social justice — such as stopping human trafficking. But you can do what you want in your personal life… They want to find the real Jesus, whom they say wasn’t the Son of God, but a noble person with a powerful message.”
This kind of approach requires no faith. It does not answer the question of natural realities behind morality or get us closer to unseen truth. We are simply cherry-picking some good ideas to make people less racist or less violent. With this approach, the bible becomes nothing more than an idol, a mysterious object we can see that we use to glean unseen truth. It is no different than seeing a face in spilled wine or the cross of Christ in a piece of wood somebody found in Jerusalem.
If we remove the intolerant focus on the seen realities, the confirmation bias, and the superstition, faith can be a tool that we use constantly every day, for little things as well as important things. Ultimately, we can face the question of what the supreme force is in the world and if there is something greater for us than death.
The Ultimate Test
Abraham’s faith got more difficult as he did not produce children, especially considering God had promised him children, a posterity that would fill the earth. He was well beyond the age of having children when finally Isaac was born. It looked impossible.
But when his wife miraculously gave birth, the test of faith was not over. God commanded him to do the unthinkable: strap his son on an altar like his father had done to him and kill him.
Was moral truth inconsistent after all? Was God actually subject to death? How could a loving God tell someone to murder their child?
Abraham did it. His devotion exceeded his desire. But as he was about to plunge the knife into his son’s heart, God stopped him, let his son live, and explained the symbolic significance of this test of faith. Everything he felt at that moment was exactly what God would feel when He would offer His only begotten Son as a human sacrifice, to die on the cross. The atonement of Christ would not be some superstitious sacrifice on a ritual altar, a waste of human flesh, but the power of this event would be the ultimate trial of faith that God would exert on behalf of mankind. God Himself would use the same kind of process for discovering truth using faith in order to redeem mankind from its imperfect nature.
The worldly ideology of Social Justice does not have a concrete sense of right, not a method for redemption. This explains also why Leftists have an inferior definition of love. Love to them is all emotion.
By standing for his convictions and discovering the method of faith, Abraham ushered a new standard of ethics that developed self-sacrifice and charitable conviction rather than bodily pleasure or governmental compulsion to make people get along.