What the prophet Isaiah says was once formulated very simply by a four-year-old boy. He reasoned approximately this way: God created the sea, the sky, trees, and the human being. The human being made the car, the house, and the airplane. If God created such things, then He has intelligence and uses it. But what He made is very different from what I make; therefore His intelligence is stronger than mine. And how much stronger, I cannot measure.

The simplicity of children's explanations is something the Lord constantly calls us to learn. Is the text of the prophet Isaiah difficult? Of course it is; and when you are exhausted and weary, you are not thinking about the greatness of God, or about realizing that He has His own ways for you. It is hard to acknowledge that He is smarter, higher, and wiser than a human being, and to accept this fact not only with the head but with the heart. Yet simple and open observation of the world allows us to discern this fact and accept it.

What a strange theophany at first glance: terror and darkness! What was Abraham to think after experiencing such a revelation? How was he to imagine his God? Meanwhile God repeats all the promises previously given to Abraham, making them even more concrete. So what is happening? Why did Abraham's first meeting with God described in detail turn out to be so strange?

If darkness and terror were the meaning of the revelation Abraham received, we would have every reason to ask bewildered questions. A God who wants to frighten is clearly not the God of love. But does He want that? Or did it happen of itself? What, in fact, was Abraham able and meant to see and experience when he met God face to face? What can a human being see and experience in such a case at all?

As for seeing, of course, he will hardly see anything at all: after all, we are speaking of the One, the Creator of heaven and earth, whom a human being cannot see by definition. And then before the eyes of the one who sees there will, in all cases, be impenetrable darkness, as always happens when we stand before something completely beyond our perception. It is not surprising that, meeting God face to face, Abraham saw only a "great darkness," as the Hebrew text says; more precisely, he saw nothing. Nor is it surprising that before this darkness Abraham experiences terror: it is the terror of a finite human being before the infinite God, who has not yet done anything to lessen His majesty for man's sake.

As we can see, at the first face-to-face meeting God appeared before Abraham as He is. And Abraham responded accordingly. But this was only the beginning. The beginning of the story of God's movement toward man, which in due time would be completed by the final step that would be the Incarnation of God. To the point of complete inseparability.

The Bible mentions several meetings between Abraham and God, but only two of them are described in detail. During the first, God makes an alliance-covenant with Abraham, promising to give his descendants the land where he is now wandering. His descendants will be settled inhabitants on this land, no longer nomads, and they will possess the land on which Abraham is only a sojourner. These are serious promises, and Abraham quite naturally wants proof.

Words alone are not enough here. "How am I to know that everything will be as You say?" he asks God. The answer comes without delay: God tells Abraham to prepare for the making and consecration of an alliance, a covenant that will bind him to God in obligatory relations. God does not need obligations; Abraham needs them, because he wants the reliability of a real alliance-covenant, the kind that is made for years or even for centuries.

Then God tells Abraham to cut open the carcasses of sacrificial animals and lay these split carcasses on the ground. In those days, alliances were consecrated by passing between the two halves of the split carcasses of sacrificial animals. Abraham waits, and God does not delay: at sunset lightning struck the wood prepared for the sacrificial fire; it is described as a fiery tongue that fell from heaven. Lightning was a manifestation of power; it marked the place of a deity's presence, and Abraham, like any person of that time, knew this perfectly well. He understood that his God had come to make an alliance with him. Yet lightning was not the only sign of God's presence.

Another such sign was the spiritual experience Abraham lived through in His presence. Abraham experiences it in a state that in Russian is usually called deep sleep, although the corresponding Hebrew word denotes something between sleep and wakefulness, when a person can hear God's voice or see a vision.

At first glance Abraham's vision may appear strange: the Hebrew text speaks of a great and terrible darkness, or, in another reading, of the terror that seized Abraham as the descending darkness approached him. In substance the difference is small, but such a theophany can indeed seem strange: a dark God from whom terror breathes - how is this to be understood? The answer, meanwhile, is not so complicated.

A person cannot see God as He is, and everything invisible, when a person looks at it, appears impenetrably black, dark, like precisely that fathomless darkness before which Abraham found himself. That terror breathes from this darkness is understandable: here there is not simply sacred awe, but an awareness of one's own nothingness, one's own nonexistence before the One Who Is. God would have remained forever like this for man if He Himself had not chosen to fill the abyss that separates man from Him. But to fill it, time is needed; here there is only the beginning of the path, God's first step toward man. The first, but not the last; others will follow it.