5 But I put my trust in your mercy; *
my heart is joyful because of your saving help.
6 I will sing to the Lord, for he has dealt with me richly; *
I will praise the Name of the Lord Most High.
Many times I have visited with people in the hospital or at the church or in their home facing great challenges in life. They may have recently received a frightening medical diagnosis. They may have shockingly lost a job they depended on. They may be experiencing the struggles of a child they love. They may have just lost a good friend or a partner or a spouse. And as the story pours out, often punctuated by tears, sometimes the person will say, “I believe that God is testing me.” This statement has always troubled me. I do not believe that God tests us by giving us cancer, or having us lose our job, or having a child fall into the clutches of drugs or alcohol. But I have noted that this statement sometimes is accompanied by a straightening of the shoulders and a look of resolute determination.
For those of us raised in a competitive culture, where striving always to be at our best, and working our hardest, and never complaining is expected—accepting a “test” can embolden us, help us be determined to do what we can and endure what we must to get by. So it may benefit our outlook or our desire to control our situation. But I do not believe that God “tests” us by asking us to do what is impossible. I do not believe that God sends us tragedies to test our fortitude. I believe that God provides! I believe that God loves us with an eternal love. God wants good for us. God wants us to be good to each other. God wants life. God wants us to choose life. Sometimes in our days on this earth we are forced to face challenging, even agonizing events. So God provides. God provides love and presence. God provides people who will listen and walk with us. God provides doctors and nurses and lawyers and accountants who will help us. God provides medicine that will strengthen us. God provides a beautiful day that calls us back to God’s promise.
So what do we do with this story from Genesis that we read today. It would be easy to dismiss it out of hand as a relic of a distant, primitive, and inferior past. But this would be invalid. We know too well that this story has profound resonance in our world today. All we need to do is listen to the news, reflect on our history as Christians, and hear the stories of neighbors and strangers. We continue to sacrifice our children in wars that never end. We continue to sacrifice our children on the altar of the economy. We continue to sacrifice our children on the altar of personal security. There is no evidence in our history to claim that there is a superiority of a modern Christian era. We must consider only the 20th and 21st centuries alone.
We also cannot dismiss the God in this story as the violent God of the Old Testament as opposed to the God of love of the New Testament. That would be unfaithful. The God of Abraham is the God of Jesus Christ who loves us, who cares for us, who provides for us.
The story from Genesis 22 tells us that “After these things, God tested Abraham.” God tells him to take “your son, your only or favored son, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.”
Abraham does as he is told without protest and on the mountain, he binds Isaac and is about to kill his son, when at the last second an angel of the Lord intervenes: “Do not lay a hand on the boy. 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.” Abraham then sacrifices a ram that he finds caught in the thicket.
The story we read with “fear and trembling” today is a central one in all three of the great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The Jews call this passage the Akedah, from the Hebrew word for “binding.” Abraham binds Isaac before preparing to kill him. Christians have called it the “sacrifice of Isaac” even though Isaac in the end is not sacrificed. In the Qur’an, Islam’s scripture, it assumes the same story, except it is Ishmael, Abraham’s oldest son by his slave Hagar, who faces his own sacrifice. It is the supreme story of a test of faith, the willingness to surrender completely to God, Allah—which is what the word Islam means, “surrender,” as in surrender to the obedience to Allah.
This story has been told as being one of unwavering faith. Abraham trusted and was faithful to God even up to the sacrifice of his promised and beloved son. Abraham was willing to surrender completely the promise in obedience to God.
It is also told as a story of God’s desire to “know” whether this very human man whose descendants will be the means by which God has chosen to bless the whole world (12:3). Up to this point, Abraham has not always proven up to the task—twice lying about his wife to protect his own safety; taking a slave to use as a vessel for his posterity, and then sending her and his son to the hostile desert when their presence becomes inconvenient. Now God must know whether this man will be faithful even up to being willing to give up what is most important to him for the sake of being faithful to the God who gave him that gift in the first place. Walter Bruggemann, my go to in stories such as this, states that God wants to know something. “It is not a game with God. God genuinely does not know.” Brueggemann sees this story as a genuine movement of history between Yahweh and Abraham. [1]
Some interpretations notice the change in God’s name from the beginning to the end of the story and draw an inference that the God (Elohim) who tested Abraham was a different God from the Lord (Yahweh) who stayed Abraham’s hand at the end. And it has been seen simply as a story about the end of human sacrifice as a practice of God’s people. This seems likely as we see other biblical texts forbidding child sacrifice such as in Micah 6:
Micah 6:6 ‘With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before God on high?
Shall I come before him with burnt-offerings,
with calves a year old?
7 Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams,
with tens of thousands of rivers of oil?
Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression,
the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?’
8 He has told you, O mortal, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
Despite this rich history of interpretation across the three monotheistic faith traditions, it is important that we face how it impacts our relationship with God and with each other today. It is important for you to hear clearly that this is not a story about how God demands child sacrifice! Indeed, God abhors sacrifice. God creates. God does not destroy. God brings life. God does not ever require us to take someone’s life. This is particularly important in our current age when daily we read about horrible violence waged against children, women, and men.
As important as it is to place our total trust in God and to recognize our complete dependence on God for our lives and our place in the world, the sacrifice of another is an abomination. Though Abraham’s faith is upheld in the letter to the Hebrews (11:8-19), we cannot endorse such a blind mechanical faith that would participate in such a terrible act on the basis of our belief in hearing God’s voice. To do this would make us no different than the people who profess to following their Christian faith by placing bombs in abortion clinics or to terrorists who in the name of God strap explosives to themselves and walk into crowded public places. A part of our call as Christians who follow Jesus is to know that God never condones violence. The God of Jesus Christ would never ask anyone to kill in God’s name. Our faith places high demands on us, but abuse and violence are abominations.
I wish today I could tie God up in a big pink bow for you and for me. Reading this passage is troubling in its depiction of God and in Abraham’s docile response. It is a humbling reminder that God is God.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:8-9)
But what we know through Jesus who tells us that those who have seen Jesus have seen the God of Jesus, is that the God we see in Jesus challenges us to reject the dark and violent depiction of the divine in this and other biblical texts; that the God we encounter in Jesus invites us to form communities of hope and healing, where the victims of violent abuse find safety; that the God who comes to us in Jesus is never to be found among the violent and abusive, even when such people drape themselves in religion and claim to be doing the will of God.
God is faithful. God never abandons. God provides.
God never tests us by causing us harm or asking us to harm others. God is the first to cry when harm occurs to one of God’s creatures. God always stands on the side of the vulnerable and the suffering. God creates in us a dis-ease, a physical revulsion, an anger at injustice. These are all tests God give us. Tests that bring life, that bring love, that bring compassion.
We must face our test, by saying “YES to love. “Yes to hope. Yes to our God who provides. And “No!” to violence in any form.
On Mount Moriah where God provides a way out of no way, Abraham builds an altar and names it “Yahweh Yireh,” meaning the LORD will provide. May we as God’s people, the God of Abraham and Jesus, proclaim our faith in the God who in unknowable graciousness, can be trusted to provide.
“O give thanks to the Lord, for he is good;
for his steadfast love endures for ever.” (Psalm 107)
[1] Walter Bruegemann. Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Genesis. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1983.