What would you do? Here is something I don’t think you would do. I don’t believe you would say, “Wow. I am in awe of your faith. I am humbled by your willingness to obey God even when he commands something difficult. But you’re right. God must be obeyed no matter what. Go ahead and kill your son.” None of us would say that, right? All of us would try to stop him, right?
But how would you do that? I have stipulated that you are disabled. You do not have the quickness or strength physically to stop the murder. Do you call 911? That won’t help. This father is on a mission from God. His son will be dead in a matter of moments, long before the police get there. The only thing that you have at your disposal is your speech, your words - your ability to argue him out of it. Let us say that despite all appearances the father is rational. He will listen to what you have to say. He can follow a train of thought and will heed a fair argument.
So what do you say? Do you say, “Defy God! Disobey him!” That won’t work. He won’t choose to obey you rather than God. So do you say, “You’ll go to prison for this!” I think he has considered that probability and is prepared to accept the consequences. He believes that God must be obeyed no matter what, even if it means prison or death.
I think I know what I would say – or at least the line of reasoning that I would try to use. I would say, “But that wasn’t God! You have been deceived. How do you know it was God speaking to you and not some demon impersonating God and trying to trick you into doing something bad? The Bible says do not believe every spirit but test the spirits to see if they are from God. Well let’s test this spirit. I can show you that God – the real God – does not command child sacrifice. In fact, he forbids it. Here’s what the Bible says.”
And then we would go through some Scripture texts. Exodus 20:13: "You shall not kill." See? God says don’t kill. Jeremiah 32:35: “They built the high places of Baal in the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, to offer up their sons and daughters to Molech, though I did not command them [the Lord says], nor did it enter my mind, that they should do this abomination.” See that? Child sacrifice is an abomination. It was a way of worshiping Molech, not God. God says it never entered his mind to command that kind of worship. And then Deuteronomy 12:30-31: God says to the people of Israel with regard to pagan Canaanites, “Be careful not to be ensnared by inquiring after their gods, saying, ‘How do these nations serve their gods? We will do the same.’ You must not worship the Lord your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the Lord hates. They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods.” Do you see? God hates that kind of thing. God says it is detestable to offer up your son or daughter as a sacrifice. That’s pagan worship, not God-worship. God does not want to be worshiped that way. So, clearly, it wasn’t God who told you to sacrifice your son!
You say all this, and the father stares at you in stunned silence. Then he lays down his knife. He says, “By golly you’re right. I have been deceived. What I thought was the voice of God really wasn’t God at all. It was probably just some demon or something. Sorry about that, son. My bad.”
Well now we have solved the problem of our hypothetical homicidal neighbor, but in doing so we have had to open up a can of worms and spill it all over the page of Genesis 22. I can’t be the only one to whom the question has occurred, “How did Abraham know that it was God who was telling him to sacrifice his son?” Why didn’t Abraham reject that command as the voice of an imposter, a demon clearly opposed to the character of the one true God? And if it was God, how could he command child sacrifice? Even granted that he rescinds the commandment at the last possible moment, how could he order it in the first place? Would God command a man to commit adultery, only to stop him just as he is about to commit the act? How could God command something he declares evil? And what’s to prevent him from doing that now?
It is my very limited purpose in this sermon to provide a response to these troubling questions and then relate them to some other issues that for me at least help shed light on how God deals with humanity, and how we are to read the Bible as a whole.
To do this we have to dive into Abraham’s world. Please understand that Abraham did not grow up in a Christian home. He couldn’t have, because Jesus Christ would not be born for another 2,000 years. There were no Christians then. Abraham did not even grow up in a Jewish home. There were no Jews. In fact we get the word “Jew” from the name “Judah”, and Judah was Abraham’s great grandson. So when we read this account in Genesis 22, remember that the first Jew is decades away from being born.
But at least Abraham would have had some of the Bible, right? No. None of it. The first 5 books of the Bible are attributed to Moses, and he would not be born for another 600 years or so. It is worth pausing to ask yourself the question, “What would you know about God – his nature, his character, whether there was just one of him – what would you know about God if there were no Jesus, no Bible, no church, no synagogue. No 10 commandments. No Lord’s Prayer. No Apostles’ Creed. Nothing like that. What would shape your understanding of God, or gods - or let’s just say “supernatural reality” - if you had none of those things to inform you? It is fair to say that you would absorb, for the most part, whatever was in your environment, or culture. Maybe not 100 percent, but an awful lot of it. Because we all do this. It is impossible not to. We like to imagine that we are independent thinkers, objective and rational in how we form our worldview and make our judgments of right and wrong, and what the world is like and what our place in it is. But the fact is, a lot of that is determined for us by our culture, our group, our era - and through those influences there are formed within us assumptions that we don’t even recognize as assumptions. They are so much a part of us that it never occurs to us to question them.
Now consider Abraham. Do we know anything about Abraham’s religious upbringing? As a matter of fact we do. He was raised as a pagan. I do not mean “pagan” as an insult, but simply as an objective term. Abraham was raised to worship idols. In Joshua 24:2 it says: “Joshua said to all the people, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: “Long ago your ancestors, including Terah the father of Abraham and Nahor, lived beyond the Euphrates River and worshiped other gods.”’”
Abraham’s father was an idol-worshiper, and so Abraham was raised in an idol-worshiping home in an idol-worshiping culture. And that fact wore the grooves in his brain through which could flow thoughts about supernatural reality. Again, I cannot emphasize strongly enough that at this time there was no Christianity, no Judaism, no church, no synagogue, no Bible. If God were to speak to Abraham at all, he would have to speak Abraham’s language. Not just his verbal language but his mind-and-culture language. God must stoop to Abraham’s level and communicate with him in a way that makes sense to him. As God must do with us all, if we are to understand anything he says.
In Abraham’s world, the gods were powerful and involved with humanity – they could wreck your life or enhance it – but I know no evidence to suggest that pagans ever understood their gods to be fundamentally good. Compassionate. Kind. Fair. Loving. Just. On the side of the oppressed rather than the oppressor. The later Roman and Greek gods were certainly not like that. They were a rowdy bunch, and not in a good way. As best as I have been able to determine, while there were people in the ancient Near East who were fanatically, radically devoted to their gods, they did not love their gods. They felt no affection, no warm-hearted delight in them. Nobody loved Molech, or Chemosh, or Baal, or Asherah, or Marduk. How could you love those gods? You feared those gods. You wanted to be on their good side. You wanted them working for you and not against you. So you would give them things to appease them so that they would like you and give you good luck, not bad luck. Think of it this way. If there is a powerful bully in your neighborhood, and no recourse to justice beyond that bully, would you rather he be fighting you or your evil enemies? That’s an easy choice for most people.
When God told Abraham to offer up his only legitimate son Isaac, he was speaking a language that Abraham understood, and understood all too well. Child sacrifice was something that many gods commanded, and were pleased with, according to the thinking of the day. Child sacrifice was a sign of earnest and absolute devotion to your god – the ultimate indicator that you would do anything to have that god on your side. Let me recommend to you, if you have the time, interest and stomach for it, the Wikipedia entry on “Child Sacrifice”. There you will learn how prevalent and universal this custom has been. It is safe to say you will find it on every continent except Antarctica. It wasn’t just Molech. As I started to read that article I was thinking that I couldn’t remember if it was the Aztecs or the Incas or the Mayas who sacrificed children. It turns out all three of them did – and some other American civilizations as well. It was in Carthage and Greece and northern Europe, and you can go on and on. And I’m not even including the infanticide of unwanted children, children who are regarded as a burden or a threat, as when Pharaoh ordered the drowning of Hebrew baby boys in Exodus 1, or when Herod the Great authorized the slaughter of boys two and under in Bethlehem in Matthew 2. That is a separate issue. The slaughter of young innocents for the sake of convenience, power and autonomy has continued unabated to the present day, and has even accelerated. But I am not including that at all. Just restricting ourselves to the concept of sacrificing a child to appease a god – that was all over the place in the ancient world.
So while I believe that while Abraham would have been saddened and grieved that his God would require him to sacrifice his son, I don’t believe he would have been stunned or outraged. Because the gods were like that. They had a right to your firstborn – and more, and they could assert that right, and you had no standing before them such that you could defy them, go your own way, say to them, “No, this is mine, not yours! Stay in your lane, Molech, or Chemosh, or Jehovah, whoever you are. When I want something from you I’ll let you know, and if I give you something it will be on my terms and you better be satisfied with it.” No, no, no. You did not address the gods that way. They had authority over you, not you over them.
I believe that the surprise that Abraham would have felt would not have consisted in the fact that his God required his son, but specifically this son, Isaac, whom God had promised earlier would be the one through whom his lineage would continue. Now that was a tough nut to crack. It was puzzling to say the least. How could God do the impossible? How could he say on the one hand, “Through your son Isaac alone your descendants will multiply and all nations will be blessed” and then also, “Your son must be sacrificed before any of that can happen”? How does that make sense? The book of Hebrews suggests that Abraham had to reason his way to a resurrection.
Before continuing with this theme I would like to relate it to a seemingly unrelated one that I guarantee many of you will find deeply offensive and repulsive. And you should be repulsed. At the end of Genesis 22, we read this comment about Abraham’s brother and sister-in-law. It says in verses 23 and 24, “Milkah bore these eight sons to Abraham’s brother Nahor. 24 His concubine, whose name was Reumah, also had sons: Tebah, Gaham, Tahash and Maakah.” Did you hear the word “concubine” in there? That’s a mistress. Abraham’s brother had 8 sons by his wife, and also 4 more with his mistress.
Would you have a problem with your brother if he had a mistress in addition to his wife? I hope you would. But Abraham didn’t have a problem with it. Not at all. Because Abraham himself had mistresses. Plural. We read that in Genesis 25:6, which says, “while he was still living, [Abraham] gave gifts to the sons of his concubines and sent them away from his son Isaac to the land of the east.” Concubines? He had concubines?
In our day we rightly condemn pornography, and spiritual men resist its temptations. But Father Abraham was such a lascivious philanderer that he didn’t only look at images of unclad women, he looked at the women themselves, and slept with them, and had children by them – repeatedly. And apparently without any sense of guilt whatsoever.
It gets worse. He was sexist. He had an outrageous double standard, as did all the patriarchs. Because while he could have other lovers, do you think his wife could have her share of carnal boyfriends? Of course not. That would be adultery. That would be unfaithfulness. You see for Abraham, marital faithfulness only applied to women. The only way he could commit adultery was by sleeping with another man’s wife. He knew that that was wrong, but as long as his mistresses weren’t married, he felt he could have as many as he wanted. Same with King David. David had 7 wives and 10 concubines. He had 17 women he could sleep with. But in his mind, and in that of the culture of his day, it was only adultery when he took another man’s wife – Bathsheba. If Bathsheba had been single, she just would have become wife number 8 or concubine number 11 and no one would have batted an eye.
Are you disgusted? Please be disgusted. Some of you may remember back in 2009, the world was outraged and sickened to learn that Tiger Woods had about 10 mistresses. His wife may have beaten him up about that. She divorced him, and he was a moral outcast for some time. If we could go back in time and inform Father Abraham and King David of this news story about Tiger Woods, we can well imagine them scratching their heads and saying “This is a scandal? Why? Were any of those women married?”
How unbelievably obtuse they were, morally speaking. I’m not making excuses for men like Abraham and David. They were disgusting, depraved, despicable human beings. I repeat: Abraham and David were disgusting, depraved, despicable human beings. Abraham was so warped in his thinking that he could conceive of a God who would order him to slit his son’s throat and burn him, but could not imagine a God who would keep him from having a harem. How twisted is that?
If you say that Abraham was a disgustingly primitive barbarian, I will agree with you. But please listen to this further point. You also are a disgustingly primitive barbarian. And so am I. We are barbarians too. We just can’t see it yet. Our descendants will see it, if they are worthy. Hundreds of years from now, maybe a lot less, our descendants, if they have not been corrupted, will be revolted and disgusted by us – and their revulsion will be legitimate, and it will concern things that don’t even occur to us to feel guilty about now. They’re things that aren’t even on our radar screen.
Let me give you a historical example. Ask any theology professor who is the greatest American theologian, and number one on anyone’s list is Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758. Even those who disagree with him theologically have to acknowledge that he was a man of stupendous learning, honest, hardworking, extremely devout, self-disciplined, beloved by his wife and kids, highly regarded on both sides of the Atlantic and by the indigenous community with which he worked and by Princeton University of which he was president at the very end of his life. And he was also God’s prime mover in what is now called the Great Awakening, the flashes of revival in the 1730s that have repercussions to this day. Amazing man.
And he was a slave-owner. It wasn’t even a case of him inheriting a slave from his father or marrying into a family that already had slaves – no, he himself actually went out and bought a human being at auction. That was wrong. That was evil. He should have known better. He should have been an abolitionist. He should at least have been wracked with guilt over his participation in slavery, the way John Newton was, the man who went from slave-trading to slavery-fighting and eventually wrote the words we love to sing, “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me.” But there is no indication that Jonathan Edwards ever felt the least bit troubled about buying and owning a human being.
Jonathan Edwards had a moral blind spot that astonishes anyone with moral sensitivity. So did Martin Luther, and so did King David, and so did Father Abraham. And on and on and on. But if you dismiss such people, hold them in contempt, ridicule their barbarisms and refuse to learn anything from them and their stories, be aware that you too will be rightly disregarded by future generations who will consider you to be a moral monster for things that do not afflict your conscience.
Only God, the one eternal Creator God, has and is the unwavering standard of true holiness by which all actions are judged. Now here is something thing that must be understood from the Abraham story in Genesis 22 and from the Bible as a whole. God, despite his holiness and our corruption, stoops. God stoops to our level. Rather than rejecting us out of hand as incorrigible, unteachable failures, God comes all the way down into our limited understanding and speaks in a language that we can grasp. He takes us by the hand to the next step, like a parent holding a toddler’s hand and guiding her up a staircase. The toddler can’t see the top of the staircase and doesn’t even know how far away it is. But by holding tight onto her father’s hand she can struggle to the next step, though later as a 12-year-old she’ll bound up those steps two at a time, running. As a 15-month old she’s not ready for that.
But at the same time, to press the metaphor, there are things that a 15-month old can learn that a 12-year-old can’t, like visual perception and first language acquisition. You have to learn those things very young, and in gradual stages. As we know now, if you are deprived completely of language or sight in youth, then as an older person you will never learn to speak fluently or perceive the dimensions of clear sight even if hearing and vision are restored to you.
I am going to suggest to you a truth that was communicated to this moral-and-theological toddler Abraham in Genesis 22 that could only be expressed to him at that stage of development – and that could never be said the same way to moral and theological 12-year-olds like us.
I believe that God was saying to Abraham – if I, with reverence and fear, may presume to put words in God’s mouth – something like, “Abraham, you must be no less devoted to me than your pagan neighbors are to their gods. You must render me absolute obedience. You must not think of me as a chill, easy-going God who drops in and out of your life like a cool uncle but does not really care whether you trust me and will do as I say. Abraham, I am your God. Everything you think you own in truth belongs to me. So. Give me your son.” That makes cruel sense to Abraham in his time and culture. He does not know, and God knows that he does not know – as we know, 4000 years later, that there is something here that is out of character with the one true God, so much out of character that he will later forbid the practice. But then, just as Abraham is about to commit the act, God intervenes and provides a substitute sacrifice – a ram whose horns are caught in the bushes. So indeed, there will be a sacrifice – that is nonnegotiable – but God is the one who will provide it. God provides the substitute so that Isaac can live and Abraham can rejoice.
In this, I believe, Abraham learns a crucial lesson that we take for granted. Namely, that his God is not like those other gods, those false gods of human imagining. Jehovah does not belong in the same category. He must be obeyed with no less reverence than Molech. But he’s not Molech. The true God stops a man from sacrificing his son, rather than making him go through with it and then delighting in the final deadly result. Abraham’s God is powerful and sovereign. But he is also good.
4,000 years later we who live this side of the cross of Jesus Christ understand so much more of this story that Abraham at his stage could never even have guessed at. Because now we have a wider view of where this story was going all along. God does not say to us, “Give me your son.” Rather he says, “I give you my Son. You don’t offer your son as a sacrifice to me. I offer up my Son, Myself, as a sacrifice for you." For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but will have everlasting life.
As I conclude now, I acknowledge that I have not answered one of the questions that I posed at the beginning: “How did Abraham know it was God telling him to sacrifice his son?” I’m not sure that question is answerable. I can answer to my own satisfaction - if to no one else’s – a different question, the question of whether God could command a man to sacrifice his son today, even as a test. The answer is absolutely not. Because that command was crucially dependent on Abraham’s culture and understanding and moral development 2,000 years before the cross of Christ. Today is a different era, we have a greater understanding of God, and sons of zealous fathers may rest easy in their beds. But can I say anything to that nagging question, “How did Abraham know it was God?” And beyond that, how can we ourselves know for sure that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life?
At the end of C S Lewis' great fantasy novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, some weary and hungry travelers arrive at a table spread lavishly with food and drink. Hungry as they are, they are afraid to partake because they think the food might be enchanted and will do them mischief. A solemn and majestic young woman appears, speaks with them briefly, and invites them to eat and drink at Aslan’s table. Edmund demurs, saying, “When I look in your face I can’t help believing all you say: but then that’s just what might happen with a witch too. How are we to know that you’re a friend?” She replies, “You can’t know. You can only believe – or not.”
After a moment’s pause noble Reepicheep says, “Sire, of your courtesy fill my cup with wine from that flagon. It is too big for me to lift. I will drink to the lady." Soon he and all the travelers are refreshed and full and content. Or, as the Bible says in Psalm 34:8, Taste and see that the Lord is good.
Let us pray.
Almighty Creator, God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, thank you for stooping to us in our foolishness and wickedness, and for speaking to us in ways that we can understand. Thank you for not rejecting us but rather working in us with patience to conform us to the image or your Son Jesus whom you provided to appease the wrath that we provoked and to invite us into an eternal joy that we never deserved. In his name, amen.
Full text of Genesis 22:
Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. 2 Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”3 Early the next morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering, he set out for the place God had told him about. 4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place in the distance. 5 He said to his servants, “Stay here with the donkey while I and the boy go over there. We will worship and then we will come back to you.”6 Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering and placed it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. As the two of them went on together, 7 Isaac spoke up and said to his father Abraham, “Father?”“Yes, my son?” Abraham replied.“ The fire and wood are here,” Isaac said, “but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?” 8 Abraham answered, “God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.” And the two of them went on together. 9 When they reached the place God had told him about, Abraham built an altar there and arranged the wood on it. He bound his son Isaac and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood. 10 Then he reached out his hand and took the knife to slay his son. 11 But the angel of the LORD called out to him from heaven, “Abraham! Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied.12 “Do not lay a hand on the boy,” he said. “Do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.”13 Abraham looked up and there in a thicket he saw a ram[a] caught by its horns. He went over and took the ram and sacrificed it as a burnt offering instead of his son. 14 So Abraham called that place The LORD Will Provide. And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided.”15 The angel of the LORD called to Abraham from heaven a second time 16 and said, “I swear by myself, declares the LORD, that because you have done this and have not withheld your son, your only son, 17 I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, 18 and through your offspring[b] all nations on earth will be blessed,[c] because you have obeyed me.”19 Then Abraham returned to his servants, and they set off together for Beersheba. And Abraham stayed in Beersheba. 0 Some time later Abraham was told, “Milkah is also a mother; she has borne sons to your brother Nahor: 21 Uz the firstborn, Buz his brother, Kemuel (the father of Aram), 22 Kesed, Hazo, Pildash, Jidlaph and Bethuel.” 23 Bethuel became the father of Rebekah. Milkah bore these eight sons to Abraham’s brother Nahor. 24 His concubine, whose name was Reumah, also had sons: Tebah, Gaham, Tahash and Maakah.
