ABSTRACT
Abraham is called by our Prophet God’s “friend,” and he is so designated also in the Second Book of Chronicles. The essence of friendship is whole-hearted communion of spirit. There are no reservations between friends. Each mind, each heart, is to the other an open book. For the greatest manifestation of friendship is sacrifice—not the laying down of one’s life for the friend, as the Gospels insist, but the surrender, for his sake, of what is dearer than life—surrender of it, too, with a readiness, a certain blitheness of spirit, born of conscious service of the beloved. Abraham was God’s friend because he made a friend of God. He had the insight, the faith, the love which made that choice possible. Like Abraham, we must make God our friend if He is to be ours.
