Genesis
22:1-14
June
28, 2026
After
these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" And he
said, "Here I am." He said,
"Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of
Moriah and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I
shall show you." So Abraham rose
early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with
him and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering and set out and
went to the place in the distance that God had shown him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw
the place far away. Then Abraham said to
his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over
there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you."
Abraham
took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he
himself carried the fire and the knife. And the two of them walked on together. Isaac said to his father Abraham,
"Father!" And he said, "Here I am, my son." He said,
"The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt
offering?" Abraham said, "God
himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." And the two
of them walked on together.
When
they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and
laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar on top
of the wood. Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his
son.
But the
angel of the LORD called to him from heaven and said, "Abraham,
Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am." He said, "Do not lay your hand on the
boy or do anything to him, for now I know that you fear God, since you have not
withheld your son, your only son, from me." And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught
in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a
burnt offering instead of his son. So
Abraham called that place "The LORD will provide," as it is said to
this day, "On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided."
Let me just jump into the middle of
this passage by saying that I have a problem with it. If someone killed their son and said it was
because God told them to do it, I would say they are criminally insane. I’m not alone in struggling with what I
read. Karen Armstrong’s book A
History of God says,
“…to
modern ears, this is a horrible story: it depicts God as a despotic and capricious
sadist, and it is not surprising that many people today who have heard this
tale as children reject such a deity.”[1]
Before
doing that, though, look at it more closely.
Hold it also in mind beside other parts of the Bible that raise similar
questions, like Joshua, for instance, or where one of the judges leads an army that
massacres the Canaanites or other tribes living in the land, saying it is by
divine command. Is that really who God
is? Is that really what God would want
his people to do?
I don’t believe that it is. I do believe, though, that it tells us
something about who we are, and our sinfulness, and what God does about that.
First off, we are not so different
from the people we are quick to condemn.
Instead of going back thousands of years, just go back three. Look at the October 7th massacres,
where Palestinian insurgents from Hamas killed hundreds of civilians – men,
women, and children – not all of them even Israelis. We’ve seen the Israelis retaliate against how
many thousands of Palestinians – men, women, and children – and their towns
reduced to rubble and the people dying in terrible ways. What justifications are offered by either
side? Plenty of hurt and harm on both
sides, all of them equating retribution with justice. And as much as I can (especially from a
distance) condemn everybody’s actions, I will admit that I understand in my gut
where their decisions and actions come from.
That itself troubles me.
These things are part of human life. They’re part of our own, fallen human
nature. We can look to all sorts of
examples where horrible things are done and God’s name is invoked, implicitly
if not always spoken outright. Are we
not all ready to do and say things that sentence the next generation to all
sorts of trouble, and even death?
Yet explore this passage
closely. It is not only about our
willingness to sacrifice the future, but about God’s intervention. We are told that this episode in Abraham’s
life took place because
“God
tested Abraham.” [Genesis
22:1]
We see the
test. But what was the test actually
about?
I had an American Studies teacher in
eleventh grade who gave a quiz about the Great Depression that had the question
“True or False: Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to repeal the law of supply
and demand.” That was one of his little
jokes. When we got our papers back,
somebody raised their hand and said that she couldn’t find anything about that
in her lecture notes or in the textbook.
The teacher then said, “Can you tell me what the law of supply and
demand is?” She said, “No,” and he asked her, “Then why didn’t you ask that
when you saw the question? That’s the
real lesson here.”
So
if the command to sacrifice Isaac was a test, what was it testing? Certainly it was a test of Abraham’s
obedience, and he passed that with a high mark of approval but beyond that, the
lesson was that God did allow him to follow through.
“He
said, ‘Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him, for now I know
that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from
me.’" [Genesis
22:12]
So maybe
we are being tested, too, when we hear about the whole event. We want to know what kind of God would want
to see Isaac killed. The answer is, “Not
the God Abraham worshiped.”
When
we are also tested and tried by extreme motives that drive us. Those are not always the will of God. Even when we are absolutely sure that we are
justified, God may step in and say, “Enough!
Stop right there!” Part of the
test Abraham faced, a test that we all face more often than we like to admit, is
to obey that voice, the one that says to put the knife down. The real God is
the one who says to drop our angry claims to righteous wrath, to stop
justifying things that both attract and repulse us at the same moment, and to back
off instead – even to offer mercy. That is
the real sacrifice to make.
Honestly,
it can be much more costly to give up resentment and bitterness and hatred than
to offer any material gift. That act of
obedience is the worship that is welcomed and touches God’s heart.
Again,
we have an advantage in that we have heard the promise that
“Blessed
are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” [Matthew 5:7]
Those are
the words of the one and only person who ever had no need to justify himself
because he was the one and only person who has gone through this world without
sin. In fact, he would take on all that
the world could aim at anyone, and he did it not on his own account but on
ours. That is the ultimate
sacrifice. We call him the Lamb of God,
who takes away the sins of the world.
That ram caught in the thicket took Isaac’s place, but Jesus has taken
ours, and our enemies’. And that makes
him exactly the one worthy of worship and gratitude and emulation. His sacrifice
puts every one of us back on an even ground with one another, and restores us
to our place as beloved children of God.
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