God created man, the Bible tells us. So man is not self-made or man-made; he is God-made. Abraham learned this fact through deep spiritual experience. The twenty-second chapter of Genesis graphically depicts the near-tragic experience of Abraham and Isaac when the former thought God had commanded him to sacrifice his precious and only son, Isaac. With unquestioning obedience to his highest understanding of good and with adoration for his God, Abraham set out on his direful mission with the voice of God ringing in his ears. But because he listened, he found at the moment of his most extreme anguish that his God was a God of love, in whom was no loss, destruction, or death, for the same voice that he understood as directing him to sacrifice his child called out to his listening ear, "Lay not thine hand upon the lad."
Surely Abraham's God, who was ever-present Love, was proved at this hour of testing to be everlasting Life as well. In this momentous trial Abraham proved for his time and all time that through obedience to God nothing real or right is jeopardized. Trusting God with his most precious possession, he could not lose it. He could not mistake when hearkening to and heeding the voice of God.
If we expect to progress in the understanding and demonstration of Christian Science, the only sacrifice that any one of us is called upon to make is that of identifying every precious, righteous possession as already belonging, in its true sense, to God, the creator of it, and seeing Him as the cause of all and the possessor of all that He causes. God, who made all, owns all, governs all, loves all, supplies all, because He is All-in-all. Man reflects this All-in-all; therefore he can never be a loser. God, being all good, possesses all good, forever holds all good; and man, God's expression of Himself, reflects all that God possesses. What God possesses, man expresses.
