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Genesis 22:1-14
Last Sunday was Father’s Day and that usually invites some interesting posts on social media particularly on the religious side of things. Take this one for example from a Facebook page called ‘God Is Not Real’. It reads:
“I'm bothered when religious people make claims about God taking sides in a war or favoring any specific country. If God were a loving father, as he is alleged to be by his followers, then he would PREVENT wars from happening in the first place. Can you imagine a human father with a son and a daughter brutally fighting each other over some trivial matter, like property or political discourse? And their father knows about it and allows it to happen, or worse yet, aids one sibling in the destruction of the other? That would be absurd, and we'd say of that father that he is a horrible parent. That is why I wrote in a 2013 essay that ‘We know for fact from listing qualities of a ‘loving father' that God most certainly isn't one.’”
I’m not going to argue this one down because it would just begin to sound like two fifth graders in a contest to see who can stand the furthest from the urinal and still hit it. That might be fun for the boys involved but who wins pales in comparison to the mess that’s left behind. Just ask the custodian, teacher, or parent who has to clean it up. Back in the day, we would have made the kids responsible clean it up. But not today. I can only imagine the lawsuit that loving parents would wage against a school system should it make the children responsible clean up that kind of mess. Should God be any different with the horrible, horrible, horrible messes that we humans create by doing things God has for millennia said don’t do? Should God make humanity clean up its messes and learn from them? We humans have a propensity to do things we know are horribly wrong, indeed evil.
But I will say this to those standing on both sides of the argument this post invites. It is problematic to reduce biblical faith to a matter of beliefs vs facts or what God says vs what Science says. The Bible is the story of the fidelity of God to a people and the fidelity of that people to God. It is about fidelity between two parties, a relationship. In that relationship one of the parties, the people, have a problem with fidelity for being overly self-involved and becoming addicted to things. It’s not about who has the right beliefs and most accurate facts. It’s about how God continues to deal with the infidelity and addiction of his people to heal them. God stays faithful, holds them accountable, forgives and heals. It’s not a pretty story and there are areas to find fault, but it's an accurate portrayal of who, what, and how we humans are. Don’t smash the mirror. Study the person that’s in it.
I would also warn against being what is called anachronistic which involves judging the moral standards and values of past cultures by the moral standards of our present culture. What a Western Gen-Xer or Millennial calls a “loving father” should not be used to judge what we define as a biblical definition of fatherhood. There’s a couple thousand years between those two definitions and they are very different cultures. The task for us is to know what they did and why they did it. So also, we should neither ignore lessons learned over the past couple thousand years. Both times and cultures would agree that fathers (parents) should discipline their children and that doing so is love. But…sparing the literal rod? That comes from a time when children were regarded as a little more than livestock. How literal do you want to be about that? How many of you could take a wooden stick and beat a child? We now know that there are better ways to correct a child than traumatizing them with physical abuse. Maybe we should let that spare the rod stuff stay in the past and pursue better avenues to discipline.
I would also say that I am a bit sympathetic with what the poster is saying. Political leaders and religious communities should not be running around claiming God is on our side. If God is on the side of anybody in a war, it is the side of those who are seeking to love, feed, and house the enemy, the side of the children who are being scarred for life by bombs and bullets, the side of those having to suffer the horrors of war. Why doesn’t God prevent it? Good question. I would like to know that too.
One answer is that love involves giving the one you love freedom and free will which involves the harsh reality of eventually letting the people you love make their own mistakes. Loving fathers (and mothers) will from time to time have to let their children suffer the consequences of doing what they have told their children time and time again not to do. This is especially true when it comes to matters involving addiction. So, it is with war. War is rooted in the revenge addiction, power addiction, wealth addiction, and usually narcissism of certain powerful individuals at the top of the food chain. They are the ones who tell the lies that delude the masses who unfortunately buy into the stinking thinking of wanting to rule the world. Unfortunately, “God is on our side” is one of those lies. The only way humanity is going to learn that war is not an option is to suffer the consequences of it. Unfortunately, we keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and the only lesson we seem to be learning is how to do war with bigger and more effective means.
The best way to approach this subject is to try to determine as best one can what the biblical definition of a father is and hold God accountable to that. If you’re interested, the best definition of what the Bible would call “Fatherhood” I have found for why we call God the Father “Father” is from a book written by a woman, Marianne Meye Thompson (spelled with a “p” if some of you Chesley Thomson’s are wondering). She looked at a couple of Old Testament examples of fathers, particularly Abraham and Job, to garner an understanding of what Jesus may have meant by calling God the Father “Father.” She gave a list of things that a father did: the father brings a family into existence, provides his children with an inheritance, protects and provides for his children, and is a figure of authority to whom obedience and honour are properly rendered. I would add disciplines or rears rightly his children, himself has faith, and rears his children within the context of faith. If a father fell short in these responsibilities, he would be seen as dishonourable in the eyes of the broader community. The standard was not whether or not you were a loving father. It was whether or not you kept your responsibilities and were honourable. Oddly, things like affection and attending to the emotional development of your child, and helping them to pursue their dreams would have been absolutely foreign ideas back then.
With respect to a child’s responsibilities, children were to honour and obey the father and serve the needs of the family, and be faithful stewards of the inheritance until it became theirs. This be all you can “be all you can be”, “the world’s your oyster”, child-centred, go to therapy world we live in would have been utterly foreign to them…as it was in our own culture not less than 100 years ago. We might want to ask if our ideas of “loving father” which involves a whole lot of pandering to individualism might actually be an aberration that we as a culture need to put a check on.
Having said all that, let’s play a game called “Let’s not jump to conclusions”. We just read together the story of God commanding Abraham to take his son Isaac, the child of the promise, on a three day journey to Mt. Moriah (which would later become the Temple Mount), and there offer Isaac as a burnt offering. Abraham set out and even made Isaac carry the wood. He lied to Isaac profusely about what was going to happen, that God would provide the sacrifice. Abraham himself couldn’t believe God would have him do such a thing. He followed through right up to the point of raising the knife to bring it down to kill Isaac when an angel stopped him and there suddenly was a ram in the thicket.
I hear this story and I am appalled. The trauma that Isaac must have suffered, Abraham too. He loved his son, which was something uncharacteristic of a father in those days. What kind of a God would demand such a thing? What kind of a “loving father” would follow through on it. It would be very easy to dismiss this God and this faith on the basis of this atrocious treatment of a child. But…let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let’s dig a little deeper.
The nations around Abraham practiced child sacrifice. It was not uncommon for a father who sought to be a powerful leader of a great nation to sacrifice his firstborn son to the Canaanite-Phoenician-Moabite god named Molech. If this passage says anything, it is that Israel by command of its God will not sacrifice children as did the surrounding nations! Even so, as the centuries went on, the kings and oligarchs of Israel and Judah (in like manner of today’s presidents and billionaires among the Epstein class) began to sacrifice their children to Molech believing that sacrificing their firstborn, their namesake, would make them powerful and all the more wealthy. Guess what God did? When they began to do that, God first sent the Assyrians and then the Babylonians to rout them and carry them off the Land into exile as a humiliated nation. God even let the Babylonians destroy his Temple. The sacrificing of children in the pursuit of power and wealth would not be tolerated by God among God’s people, then…nor now for God is on the side of the children.
Atrocious things still happen to children today. In the pursuit of their own wants and desires, adults inevitably sacrifice their own children. We are not remiss to ask God why he allows it. I certainly have my questions as to why God let things happen to me in my childhood that scarred me. I could have gone the route of revenge and prayed to God to get them or found some way myself of getting back at them. But revenge can become an addiction. Grudging is an addiction before which we will become powerless. If I chose that route, I might feel as if I got even but the law of generational trauma dictates that I would only wind up sacrificing my children just as I was sacrificed. The route I chose was to do everything I could not to do unto others as was done unto me and more so to seek to forgive, something which took God’s help and which he showed up for and led me to do.
I’ll close by saying let’s not judge the stories of the Bible at face value nor the God to which the book gives witness. They are multi-faceted and meant to be mined deeply. But, let us also not be so shallow as to say its God’s rule book meant to be followed or else. Remember that just about everybody around you has suffered some sort of childhood trauma to varying degrees. Tread lightly, gently. Amen.
