The
following quote is taken from evilbible.com:
"Genesis, the first book of the
Bible, has Abraham preparing to sacrifice his son to God. "Take
your son, your only son – yes, Isaac, whom you love so much – and go to the
land of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the
mountains, which I will point out to you." (Genesis
22:1-18) Abraham takes his own son up on a mountain and builds an altar
upon which to burn him. He even lies to his son and has him help build
the altar. Then Abraham ties his son to the altar and puts a knife to his
throat. He then hears God tell him this was just a test of his faith.
However, God still wanted to smell some burnt flesh so he tells Abraham to burn
a ram.
Even though he didn't kill his son,
it is still an incredibly cruel and evil thing to do. If Abraham did that
today he would be in jail serving a long sentence as someone's
prison-b---. It amazes me how Christians see this story as a sign of
God's love. There is no love here, just pure unadulterated evil."
Let's examine the story of Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis chapter 22.
First of all, whenever you read a
verse from the Bible, it is important to examine that verse in context; that
is, to read the verses before and after it, to familiarize yourself with what
is going on in the story. It also greatly helps to examine the lives and
characteristics of the people involved, as well as the historical and cultural
context.
For those of you who have not read the book of Genesis (the first book of the
Old Testament of the Bible) and don't know the story of Abraham, here's a quick
summary of what happened before this point in his life: Abraham was a man from
Ur (an ancient Mesopotamian city). Scholars debate when Abraham lived;
his lifetime has been placed roughly anywhere from 2100 BCE-1800 BCE. God
called him out of his home to go to the land of Canaan (Palestine), and God
promised to give him a son and many future descendants, who would inherit the
land of Canaan. Abraham, up until that point, had no children, a
catastrophe in ancient Eastern culture. In that place and time period, a
person who had no children was considered to be cursed.
Fast forward several years; God promised that Abraham's wife would bear him a
son (both Abraham and his wife Sarah were in their old age). God's
promise came true; Sarah had a baby boy, and Abraham named the child
Isaac. (Abraham had had another son with Sarah's slave woman Hagar, a son
named Ishmael, but that's a discussion for another time).
Now we come to the story in Genesis 22. You can read the full text
here:
The evilbible.com author makes
several assumptions regarding the story that are not mentioned in the Biblical
text. First of all, Abraham did not lie to Isaac when Isaac asked him
where the sheep was for the offering. He had faith that both he and Isaac
would return (verse 5), and he predicted that God would provide the sheep for
the offering (verse 8). Even if Abraham meant that Isaac was the sheep
that God would provide, it still wasn't a lie, for Isaac's birth had been
brought about miraculously by God (Genesis 21:1-3). Abraham built the
altar himself; the text does not state that Isaac helped him (verse 9).
Abraham didn't put the knife to Isaac's throat, or injure him in any way.
The text clearly states that the angel of the Lord called out to Abraham as
soon as he picked up the knife (verse 10).
We do not know how old Isaac was when this occurred; the text does not
say. Verse 12 refers to Isaac as a "boy" (the Hebrew word used
here is na'ar, which can be used to
refer to a boy anywhere between infancy and age twenty). [1] It is
possible that Isaac was a child when this event occurred, but it is just as possible
that he was a young adult on the verge of manhood. In any case, the text
never gives any indication of how Isaac felt about his father nearly
sacrificing him on an altar. From verse 9 until the end of the chapter,
he is silent. We learn later in the book of Genesis that God greatly
blessed Isaac, and that Isaac embraced his father's God as his own (Genesis
26:2-6, 12-13, 23-25).
We now come to the question of why God asked Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
Up until this point in the Bible, God had never commanded a human sacrifice of
anyone. A whole burnt offering of an animal symbolized the complete
surrender of the worshiper and complete acceptance by God. God's
command in verse 2 was all the more puzzling, since Isaac was the son that God
promised to give Abraham. The covenant that God made with Abraham would
continue with Isaac and his descendants (Genesis 17:15-21). Abraham
responded with obedience, remembering God's earlier promise, and trusting that
God would fulfill what he had promised. Abraham demonstrated his faith in
God by obeying the confusing and difficult command, realizing that nothing was
too hard for the Lord (Genesis 18:14). The book of Hebrews in the New
Testament offers this commentary regarding Abraham's near-sacrifice of Isaac: "By
faith Abraham, when God tested him, offered Isaac as a sacrifice. He who had
embraced the promises was about to sacrifice his one and only son, even though
God had said to him, 'It is through Isaac that your offspring will be reckoned'
(Genesis 21:10). Abraham reasoned that God could even raise the dead, and so in
a manner of speaking he did receive Isaac back from death" (Hebrews 11:17-19).
Abraham told his
servants that he and Isaac would return (verse 5), and he told Isaac that God
would provide the sheep (verse 8). His act took a great deal of courage
and a great deal of faith - Abraham proved that even though he loved Isaac
greatly, nothing could surpass his love for God, and he put nothing and no one
above God. The first lesson of this story is Abraham's great faith.
God did not let this go unnoticed. His response was one of overwhelming
favor - he confirmed his covenant with Abraham, and swore by his own name that
Abraham would be blessed, that his descendants would fill the earth (a very
appealing promise to a formerly childless man in the ancient Near East), and,
most importantly, that all nations of the earth would be blessed through
Abraham's descendants.
This promise brings us to the second lesson of this story - the foreshadowing
of the Messiah, Jesus, God's Son. Throughout the Torah (the first five
books of the Bible) and the rest of the Old Testament are foreshadowings of
Jesus. This chapter is a foreshadowing of Jesus' sacrifice on the cross
to atone for the sins of humanity.
The mountain that Abraham took Isaac to for the sacrifice was called Mount
Moriah. The Bible indicates later on that Jerusalem, and Solomon's
Temple, were built on that same mountain (2 Chronicles 3:1). It was
outside the city wall of Jerusalem, on that same mountain, that Jesus was
crucified about 2,000 years later (Hebrews 13:12). One proposed literal
translation from the Hebrew in verse 8 is as follows: "Elohim (a name of
God which means "God of Gods") He will provide Himself, the lamb, for
the burnt offering, son of me." Verse 14 reads, "And to this
day it is said, 'On the mountain of the LORD it will be provided.'” It is important to note that the proverb does not say that
it was already provided; the action is in the future tense: it will be provided. The people of
that time looked ahead to the Lamb that God would provide for atonement
(Genesis 3:15; John 1:29; 1 Corinthians 15:3).
God was providing a picture of what was to come - Abraham was about to
sacrifice his beloved son on a mountaintop. God sacrificed his beloved
Son on that same mountaintop. The author of evilbible.com commented that
he didn't see how this story could be a sign of God's love. Where is the
love in this story? First, God showed his compassion for Abraham and
Isaac by stopping the sacrifice, providing a ram as a substitute, and greatly
blessing both of them in the years to come. Also, God foreshadowed how he
would demonstrate his love to the world, how Abraham's descendants would
be a source of blessing for all nations - out of Abraham's descendants would
come Jesus. "For
God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes
in him shall not perish but have eternal life"
(John 3:16).
(As for the comment about God wanting to smell the burning flesh of a ram, I
will address that in the next article on Leviticus 1-7, that deals with the
purpose of animal sacrifices in the Old Testament.)
References
[1]
Gesenius's Lexicon, Heinrich Friedrich Wilhelm Gesenius (translated by Samuel
P. Tregelles), 1847
