Genesis 22:1-19

The Bible contains many troubling stories that require us to wrestle with them. Not since I was a young child could I accept that God would ask Abraham to sacrifice his beloved son, Isaac. Sure, verses 11-12 seem to suggest that God was testing Abraham, and I could accept that as a child, but I can’t accept the notion of testing anymore.

If God loves us, would God not simply love us? Why would God need to test us? Is God’s love conditional, such that God needs to know if we are worthy of His love? And does God not know our hearts already? What the heck is all this about? I cannot believe in a God that would test us. I cannot believe in a God that acts like a Spartan, sending out all children at a certain age to live alone in the wilderness to see if they can survive. We are God’s creations, and if we are going to believe in a God of love I think we need to struggle quite a bit with this Abraham and Isaac business because it paints the picture of God as a flip-flopping, unsure and demanding tyrant.

I quite honestly don’t know what to do with this passage. But I am struck by verse 8, when Abraham says to Isaac, “God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son.” I cannot help but think that the ‘point’ of this passage is so that God can point forward to the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus Christ. God will provide a lamb for the burnt offering—Jesus Christ is offered up as the Passover Lamb in the Gospel of John. God will provide the sacrifice so that we need not, we can live in joy and peace and not worry about who or what we will need to sacrifice next.

Personally, I like the idea that God will provide so that we can live in joy and peace, but again I have difficulties in thinking that Christ’s crucifixion was part of God’s plan from the beginning. That would make God a perpetrator of premeditated child abuse, and it would make God a vengeful god that requires a sacrifice to calm His wrath. That is another god that I cannot believe in.

For me, I will never be able to definitely say that this passage means anything. I’m sure it does have a meaning, but I am as of yet unaware of what it could mean that would not transform God into something that I’d feel I need to rebel against. And there’s nothing wrong with that. We say that no person can know God in His infinite and mysterious entirety. I think it is much more honest to take this passage and throw up our hands, saying, “Geez, God, I don’t know what the frick you want me to understand from this, but I’ll keep searching.” We find God in our searching, in our living in the full reality of the confusion of life. So instead of trying to understand this most difficult of passages, keep searching. Keep searching.