Just passing through

What do you remember about Isaac? In the Genesis account, there’s not much about him. He casts a pale shadow next to his father: No military conquests, terrifying covenant ceremonies, entertaining angels, or bargaining with the LORD. Our most striking image of Isaac is of a teenager tied up and lying on an altar—a mountaintop experience more traumatic than exhilarating.

Isaac prefigured Jesus as a promised son and a sacrifice. He echoed Abraham as a covenant bearer and Promised Land wanderer. His chief virtue seems to be keeping out of trouble: When challenged, he moved. When enemies stuffed his well with clay, he dug another, and another. And when his own wife and son joined forces to deceive him, he took it, because what else could he do? He had his suspicions that Jacob wasn’t Esau, but didn’t press in, so his blessing stayed on Jacob the supplanter. Which was God’s plan all along, even though we may despise poor Isaac, just a little, for letting the world walk all over him.

But Abraham’s covenant son lived his life just as we do. He made his choices, as we do. He acted in accord with his upbringing, personality, conscience, and circumstances. Like everyone who ever lived on this earth, he told his own story. And not just his own, for (also like everyone who ever lived) Isaac was a transitional figure.

He happens to be one of the most significant transitional figures in redemption history: the link from great Father Abraham to Jacob-renamed-Israel. If the connection between those two colorful characters looks unimpressive in comparison, he served his purpose, and more importantly God’s purpose.

Thinking over Isaac’s place in history reminded me of this: We are all Isaac, in that we tell our own stories complete with development, character arc, climactic events, and denouement. But we are also transitional figures in God’s story, passing something of ourselves on to the future.

Previous generations understood this sense of obligation to posterity, if not in theological terms. My parents’ generation, after slogging through a great depression and a world war, wanted their children to go further in life than they had. We baby boomers, arrogant and reckless though we were, shared some of that desire for our own kids. Our children and grandchildren, though, may be losing that sense of duty to future generations, or to the future itself.

Since peaking in the early 1960s, the world’s total fertility rate has dropped to 2.2 births per woman, the lowest in recorded history. Social critics whose main concern was overpopulation are now fretting over not enough people to sustain our civilization. The big question is, why?

Young people are anxious and depressed, we’re told. They’re facing a world of rising costs and shrinking opportunity. They have no confidence in traditional institutions. All that may be true, at least of a significant number. But, I would add, individuals are losing the sense of themselves as transitional figures. What astute observers like Carl Trueman call “expressive individualism” has closed doors to the past and to the future, leaving the young and not-so-young stranded with only themselves as their primary obligation.

I recall stumbling across an essay about “self-actualization” in high school and thinking, “Wow! I need to start actualizing myself!” The idea was new to me then, and there’s nothing wrong with making the best of the abilities God gives. But when children are told that they are perfect as they are, and only need to realize their awesomeness to be happy, they are set up for a feedback loop of obsessive self-­focus. Self-actualization is one thing; self-creation is another altogether.

We might have seen young lives closing in on themselves when the truth became my truth. When respecting became affirming. When disagreement meant erasure and correction meant violence. An individual intent on self-creation will admit to childbearing only if it conforms to a certain image. Subsequent generations have no claim, especially if subsequent generations cease to exist.

I don’t believe it will come to that. Gen Xers still have some growing to do and may not be as lost as we imagine. More importantly, God cares about the human race and will close it out when He’s ready. Until then, we are our own story, but also transitional figures like Isaac. Where do you see yourself in that scheme?