September 30, 2019 – Genesis 22:14

So Abraham called that place The LORD Will Provide.
—Genesis 22:14

Note what we are to do with the provision when we get it.88
Abraham christened the anonymous mountaintop, not by a name that reminded him or others of his trial, but by a name that proclaimed God’s deliverance. He did not say anything about his agony or about his obedience. God spoke about that, not Abraham. Abraham did not want these to be remembered, but what he desired to hand on to later generations was what God had done for him. Oh, dear friends, is that the way in which we look back on life? Many a bare, bald mountaintop in your career and mine we have names for. Are they names that commemorate our sufferings—or God’s blessings? When we look back on the past, what do we see? Times of trial or times of deliverance?
This name enshrines the duty of commemoration—yes! and the duty of expectation. “The Lord Will Provide.” How do you know that, Abraham? And his answer is, “Because the Lord did provide.” That is a shaky argument if we use it about one another. Our resources may give out, our patience may weary. If we go to a storehouse, all the corn in it will be eaten up some day, but if we go to some boundless plain that grows it, we can be sure that there will be a harvest next year as there has been a harvest last.
So think of God not as a storehouse but as the soil from which there comes forth, year by year and generation after generation, the same crop of rich blessings for the needs and the hungers of every soul.
“You have been with me in six troubles, and in seven you will not forsake me,” is a bad conclusion to draw about one another, but it is the right conclusion to draw about God.
And so, as we look back on our past lives and see many a peak gleaming in the magic light of memory, let us name them all by names that will throw a radiance of hope on the unknown and unclimbed difficulties before us and say, as the patriarch did when he went down from the mount of his trial and deliverance, “The Lord Will Provide.”
—Alexander Maclaren