My wife and I were having a great conversation recently about Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac, or more accurately about Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac and God's provision of a substitute. We were specifically discussing whether or not we as Christians today are called to be like Abraham and sacrifice the things that we love. It's a hard topic and definitely not one to be taken lightly, so we talked it through and I wanted to share some lessons we learned from the conversation. Before we look at the text itself I think there are two important things to keep in mind.
#1 - Be careful about coming into a study of any biblical text and looking primarily at what the people in it do. The Bible is, in the end, not the story of humanity, it is rather the story of God and of how he relates to humanity. So we should be careful with any biblical passage where our first instinct is to look at what so and so did, rather than to look at what God did.
#2 - The context matters greatly. Abraham was living in a pre-Torah society. Human sacrifice would've been demanded by many of the deities worshiped in his land and he had no way of knowing that the act of sacrificing a human would be abhorrent to God. This was also a world pre-Mosaic covenant. Man did not have a set way of interacting with God yet. Abraham was doing the epitome of the saying, "flying by the seat of his pants".
So with those two points in mind, what does this passage tell us about God and about our relationship to him? To read the passage yourself (I always recommend reading more scripture) go to this link. To find it on your own, it's in Genesis chapter twenty-two, verses one through fourteen.
I think there are a number of great things to learn about God and about our relationship to him in this passage, but like most preachers, I have a subtle fascination with the number three, so I'll limit myself to that many points.
First - It is never too early to teach your children to have faith. This one is inspired by the devotional my wife and I are reading currently (J.C. Ryle's The Duties of Parents). In it, Ryle exhorts parents to train up their children into a habit of faith and points to Isaac as an example thereof. Isaac asks his father, "where is the lamb for a burnt offering?" and is given in response the spiritual version of, "we'll get there when we get there!" with Abraham only telling him that God will provide. Now most children these days (probably including myself at that age) would continue questioning, but Isaac puts his faith in his father and in his father's God, and I think there's definitely something great about that.
Second - If God is omniscient (all-knowing), why did he need to test Abraham? I think this passage is a great test of the old argument against divine omniscience that runs along the same line. I think the answer gives us a great mindset to turn to during suffering. Because suffering doesn't exist for no good reason, we believe in a God who uses even the worst life brings for his glory. In this case, Abraham's mental suffering is turned into faith, into a memorable example of God's faithfulness, he even names the place where this all happened with a Hebrew word meaning "The Lord will provide". Martin Luther in a lesson on this passage remarked "We say, 'in the midst of life we die.' God answers, 'Nay, in the midst of death you live.'" Luther points out beautifully the nature of this story as one of God's providence.
Third - It's not about us. This is the most important point in the story because this is a story that is more about God than it is about us. This story is blatantly and glaringly a parallel to the story of Christ. Abraham had been given the child of a covenant and was asked to give him back up. A father asked to give up his only son. But there is God, providing a sacrifice of his own so that the boy can live. I've heard people point to this story as being about us as humans being willing to sacrifice for God. But that's not really it, because Isaac's sacrifice wouldn't have changed anything. It is only through God providing the sacrifice in Christ that anything changes. This passage is often pointed to as an example of divine cruelty, in fact, Martin Luther's own wife said she did not believe the story when the family went over it for devotions! She said, "I do not believe it! God would not have treated his son like that." Katherine Luther would've meant Abraham's son, but Luther adroitly used the other possible subject of the pronoun and said simply, "But Katie, He did."
As we go forward this week, let us remember that we are followers of the God who did. The God who gave up his child for lost and broken sinners like me. In the end, I do not believe that God calls us as Christians to give up our children, spouses, or families in order to earn his love or be close to him. But I do believe he calls us to live lives characterized by sacrifice, not in trying to give up something in our lives in order to be worthy of his love, but in seeing the ultimate value of his sacrifice and living in a way that all our decisions, all our actions, and the entirety of our lives might be directed to the glory of the one who already gave a greater sacrifice than we could ever imagine.
