Abraham Alone

The Lord asked these questions to the people of Israel through Isaiah: “Have I put thee away, or have I cast thee off forever? For thus saith the Lord: Where is the bill of your mother’s divorcement? To whom have I put thee away, or to which of my creditors have I sold you? Yea, to whom have I sold you?”  The questions seem to highlight a complaint of the people that God had left them or not supported them in their trials.  He went on to explain that it was their doing and not His: “When I came, there was no man; when I called, there was none to answer” (2 Nephi 7:1-2).  His hand is not “shortened” and He does indeed have “power to deliver” us when we are faithful to Him.  In the next chapter—in what I think is a continuation of the same theme and a response to these complaints—the Lord gave this invitation: “Look unto Abraham, your father, and unto Sarah, she that bare you; for I called him alone, and blessed him” (2 Nephi 8:1).  To me the key word here in this is alone.  Abraham in many ways had been very alone in his life as he faced difficult trials that would have caused most to think that God had “put [them] away” and “cast [them] off” as the Israelites had complained.  But Abraham didn’t think that; rather he had showed incredible faith and was indeed very “blessed” of the Lord because of his faith in difficult circumstances.  So for any who feel alone or that God has left them or cast them off, He invites us, “Look unto Abraham” and follow his example of faith and righteousness in the most trying of circumstances. 

                  There are several events in the life of Abraham that must have made him feel very alone, but God always helped him to triumph over those experiences.  The first was when he was in Ur and was surrounded by idolatry and wickedness.  His father had turned away from Jehovah, and Abraham was eventually taken and put on the altar to be sacrificed.  How terribly alone he must have felt then with even his father turned against him.  Only at the last moment did “the angel of his presence” come and save him miraculously.   Abraham must have also felt alone when they wandered through unknown places without a home.  After having left his home in Ur and traveling through unknown country to the place they called Haran, he recorded about leaving Haran, “[We] came forth in the way to the land of Canaan, and dwelt in tents as we came on our way.  Therefore, eternity was our covering and our rock and our salvation, as we journeyed from Haran by the way of Jershon, to come to the land of Canaan” (Abraham 2:15).  Later after settling for some time in Canaan they were forced by the famine to again be wanderers: “I, Abraham, journeyed, going on still towards the south; and there was a continuation of a famine in the land; and I, Abraham, concluded to go down into Egypt, to sojourn there” (Abraham 2:21).   Abraham spent much time wandering in the unknown without a home and must have certainly felt alone in much of that journeying, and yet he always trusted in the Lord.  Ultimately he did receive of the Lord a land for himself and his posterity forever: “I will give unto thee, and to thy seed after thee, the land wherein thou art a stranger, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession” (Genesis 17:8).  Lastly, Abraham must have felt so very alone when he was called upon to sacrifice Isaac.  In that long journey to Mount Moriah he must have agonized at the thought of filling this commandment form the Lord and losing the son through which the Lord’s promises to him about an endless posterity were to be fulfilled.  But he trusted in the Lord nonetheless, and not only did he not lose his son, he ultimately gained posterity as numerous as the stars (Genesis 15:5).

                As Malachi said we are to “turn our hearts” to the fathers, and one of those fathers is certainly Abraham.  When we are tempted to feel alone and forsaken, we can “turn” to him and remember that Abraham too was often alone.  But because of his faith in the Lord he always prevailed over all of his difficulties, and it shall be the same with us.