So, if you think last week’s look at Abraham’s treatment of Hagar and Ishmael was a bitter pill to swallow, things aren’t going to be much better this week. Here, God puts Abraham’s motives for faithfulness to the test by asking him to do what other kings in the area do to make themselves great: child sacrifice. It was typical of the kings of some of the surrounding pagan nations to sacrifice their own children to certain gods in order to get divine favour and gain power, so God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac as a whole burnt offering.
Oh, but wait a minute. Those kings had many sons by many wives and many concubines and could spare a child every now and then for such a purpose. But Abraham had only one son, Isaac, the child of the promise. If Abraham were to sacrifice Isaac, then what would become of God’s promise to make Abraham’s descendants a numerous people and a great nation through which all the nations of the world will be blessed? Why would God himself put the promise into jeopardy after giving Abraham and Sarah a child in their old age after decades of childlessness?
Oh, but wait a minute. Isaac isn’t Abraham’s only son. There’s still Ishmael; Abraham’s first born son by Sarah’s slave Hagar; the child born because Sarah and Abraham were trying to play God and make God’s promise to Abraham come about because Sarah was barren and had become too old to have children; Ishmael, the child whom Abraham in a great display of “privilege” just disowned and cast out into the wilderness with his mother; the child who would by now be dead from exposure if it weren’t for God’s compassion and awesome ability to make lemonade from raw sewage. (Please forgive me for putting it that way, but Abraham really did wrong by them.)
Let’s dive in. There are two noteworthy phrases to mention. Our passage begins with the simple phrase, “after these things”, which means that what God is asking Abraham to do to Isaac is somehow a consequence of all that had happened before. Also, God keeps referring to Isaac as “your son, your only son” to Abraham. Well, we know that Isaac isn’t the only son. This inclines me to say that what God has asked Abraham to do here to Isaac is a consequence of what Abraham did to Ishmael and Hagar…and a few other things. So, God wants to test Abraham’s motive for being faithful. Just like in the Book of Job where Satan makes the accusation that Job is only faithful because God has blessed him, so God seems to want to know if Abraham is being faithful because God has promised to bless him or because Abraham is devoted to him. You see, so far, Abraham has been acting like he’s simply being faithful for what he can get out of the promise.
God’s case against Abraham is pretty strong. Ever since God called him, Abraham has acted like a wily, wheeler-dealer skilled at saving his own neck and had done so by means unbecoming of the promise. If God had promised to give Abraham a land and numerous descendants who would become a great nation, one would think that God would protect and provide for him. It seems that Abraham doesn’t really trust God to provide. Here’s the case.
It begins with Abraham’s treatment of Sarah. Sarah was a very beautiful woman and she was also his half-sister, the daughter of his father by a different mother. As God’s promise to Abraham required that they leave the security of Abraham’s father’s household and go out on their own, Abraham got Sarah to promise him that wherever they went she would tell everybody that she was his sister and not his wife so that no one would kill Abraham in order to take her. If Sarah’s simply his sister, they would more likely just take her and maybe even pay a dowry.
Well, this agreement between Sarah and Abraham soon comes into play. Not long after God called Abraham, he and Sarah and nephew Lot go to the land and settle at Mamre and a famine broke out. So they decided to go to Egypt for food. When they got there Abraham of course lied and told the Egyptians that Sarah is his sister and not his wife. Well, it is Pharaoh who wound up taking Sarah to be his wife and he treated Abraham very well by giving him lots of livestock and slaves thinking he was paying her brother a dowry. God didn’t like that and so he plagued Pharaoh and his household. Pharaoh soon figured out Sarah was the reason and he sent her back to Abraham and sent them out of Egypt letting Abraham keep the wealth he had accrued so long as Abraham prayed for Pharaoh’s healing. Abraham did and they returned to the land of Canaan a wealthy family.
A couple of years later, they went south to the area of Gerar in the land of the Philistines where a man named Abimelech is the primary king. There, Abraham did the same thing. He told everybody that Sarah was his sister. King Abimelech wound up taking her to be his wife, but before they consummated things God appeared to him in a dream and threatened his life with a deadly disease if he didn’t give her back. So, Abimelech gives Sarah back to Abraham with a big accusation against Abraham’s lying and the harm it could do their relationship. Yet, to appease Abraham’s God he gave a generous gift of livestock and slaves to Abraham and lets them live wherever they want. They are now a very wealthy family.
So twice, to protect his own life, Abraham put Sarah at great risk. Where’s his trust in God to protect and provide for them? Moreover, everybody knew back then that if you went into a land and had a beautiful sister somebody was going to want to marry her and that somebody would pay generously to do it. It seems that Abraham, for lack of a better word, pimped his wife to save his life and it made him a wealthy and powerful man with the appearance of being blessed. If it weren’t for God protecting Sarah’s dignity and the sanctity of their marriage, things would not have gone well for her. She would have wound up being just another wife in the harem to somebody and being unable to bear children really jeopardized her. Abraham treated his wife as if she were expendable and got wealthy. That’s called patriarchy and male privilege, not faithfulness to God.
Moving on in the case against Abraham. Last week we discussed how Abraham and Sarah dealt with the promise being jeopardized because Sarah was not able to have children. You remember how Sarah told Abraham to have his way with her personal slave and by their customs the resulting child would be considered Sarah’s own. But then God made Sarah conceive and gave them the miracle baby Isaac. Realizing Isaac’s inheritance might be in jeopardy, Sarah orders Ishmael and Hagar expulsed from the family so that Ishmael has no claim to the promise God made to Abraham. You remember Abraham emancipated them and disclaimed Ishmael and cast them off into the wilderness of Paran, which was a death sentence. Nothing lives there. But God saved them. He opened Hagar’s eyes to see a well that mysteriously had just appeared in the desert.
Abraham and Sarah disregarded the basic human dignity of their slaves and regarded them as expendable. That’s called slave-owner privilege, the privilege of wealth, there was even the privilege of saying God is for us and so it doesn’t matter what we do. That’s not faithfulness to God.
God seems to have had to clean up a lot of messes that Abraham created because Abraham didn’t really seem to trust God to make the promise come about and so he has wheeled-and-dealed and acted according to privilege to make the promise seem to come true. Abraham just didn’t seem to be able to simply go to the land and let God give him numerous descendants to make him into a great nation. He went but he’s not quite “standing on the promises”. Abraham keeps trying to make God’s promise come about by his own deceitful and “privileged” efforts and the results are huge messes that only God can clean up.
So, God puts Abraham to the test. God calls to Abraham in a language formula very similar to how he first called him. God’s initial call to Abraham was: “Go, (Hebrew lek-lekah) from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.” This time God calls him saying: “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go (Hebrew lek-lekah) to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”
In both cases God tells him to “go” (Lek-lekah). In the first one it is to a land God would show him and in the second, as he was living in the land, it was to a particular mountain that God would show him. In the first call God promised to give him descendants, and now God asks him to offer his only descendant as a whole burnt offering like pagan kings do. And, the fact that God keeps referring to Isaac as “your son, your only son” in the wake of the injustice Abraham just did to Ishmael due to “slave-owner privilege” or what I call “promise privilege” just adds a sense that God is calling Abraham to account for his actions.
So, what’s the test? If Abraham does not sacrifice Isaac, then he is deliberately disobeying God hoping to protect the promise for himself out of self-interest. But, if he does sacrifice Isaac, then the promise is void unless God makes another miracle baby like Isaac even though God has promised that it would be through Isaac that Abraham’s descendants would be named. Abraham is in a predicament. What is Abraham to do?
Abraham has to consider who this God is. This God to whom he has aligned himself has suddenly by this new command started to act like he is just one of the god’s – you know, cruel, fickle, self-interested, humans are simply toys for his amusement. The God has Abraham has thus far experienced has proved himself impeccably faithful to Abraham and has kept his promise. This God has even cleaned up the messes Abraham created by his own unfaithfulness. Abraham could have lost Sarah to Pharaoh and to Abimelech. He could have murdered his own firstborn son, Ishmael, had not God saved Ishmael and his mother. This God had cleaned up Abraham’s messes when Abraham had acted faithless and even done evil and in the wake of those messes everyone ended up blessed. The gods don’t do that. They tend to just let the powerful do injustice and ignore the misfortune that ensues, but Abraham’s God keeps putting things to right for Abraham…and yet, this is also the God who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah. This God is not to be toyed with.
Abraham decides to go ahead with what God was calling him to do, to sacrifice his child to gain divine power in order to be a great king. It didn’t make sense, but he knew he needed to follow it through. Maybe, he’s realized that he did not deserve God’s blessing on him, that the promise wasn’t a privilege for his own gain, and that God had every right to end the relationship.
They set out to the mountain. I could spend some time going into the horror of what the next few days of his life were like for Abraham and the two men with him and especially for the young Isaac. Isaac keeps wondering where the lamb for the sacrifice is. Abraham hoping against hope lies to him, “God will provide the lamb.” God makes Abraham take it right up to the moment of bringing the knife down on Isaac to kill him and then stops him. A ram shows up stuck in a thicket in the same way the well showed up in the wilderness for Hagar and Ishmael. Point made. This child is not expendable. Children are not expendable. This God is not like the other gods. This promise and its ensuing blessing are not to be Abraham’s ‘privileged” vehicle to make himself great like the kings of the land. The promise was God’s vehicle to bring Abraham to faith. Humbly doing what this God asks is how this God will put the world to rights not the means for Abraham to make himself a king in the land like all the other kings.
Normally, when we interpret the story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac we explain away the horror of it by pulling out the Jesus card and saying that this horrible story points forward to how God is saving the world through Jesus and his death and resurrection; of how God sacrificed his own son to defeat sin and death; of how Jesus is the lamb who dies in our place. We’ve heard all that. But, you know, when we too quickly try to Christianize the Old Testament especially when difficult stories are involved, we too often miss the message that was originally there. I think this story tells us that we should not be self-serving with God’s promise to be our God and us his people.
Abraham’s track record was to make God’s promise about what he could get out of it in his own lifetime, not about what God was doing through him to save the world, the results of which he would not see in his own lifetime. All God wanted Abraham to do was to go to the land he would show him and have a descendant and from that descendant his descendants would become a great nation. God would provide and bless.
Abraham seems to have misinterpreted and taken advantage of that promise. He was looking through the eyes of “it’s all about me” and so attempted to make himself a great king in his own lifetime. That pursuit led him down a road of acting according to privilege and treating others as expendable. Those efforts could have cost him his wife and made him a murderer of children had it not been for God stepping in and cleaning up his messes.
But here in the end, God opened Abraham’s selfish eyes to see the faithfulness of God, a ram stuck in a thicket to offer instead of Isaac just like God opened Hagar’s eyes in the desert to see a well. When we see the present through the eyes of “it’s all about me” we will start acting according to privilege and treat others as if they are expendable, especially those closest to us, and we will make terrible messes. Yet, when we humbly and simply do what God asks of us our eyes will be open to God’s working through us to put this world to rights.
The Abraham story leaves me with a question: what would have happened if Abraham humbly and simply did as God asked rather than sought his own gain by it? So also, what would this world look like if people humbly and simply did what God asked rather than seek their own gain? So also, what would our own lives be like if we humbly and simply did as God asked rather than seek our own gain? I don’t know the answer to that but I suspect there would be a lot less of our messes in this world that only God can clean up. Amen.
