“God never really intended Isaac to be killed.”
“This was all just an elaborate role-playing experiment.”
“Abraham knew all along that God wasn’t serious.”
Through the years, I’ve heard all these attempts to explain away the moral ambiguity and ethical paradox presented by God’s demand for Abraham to sacrifice his son in Genesis 22. Without fail, these apologetical explanations tend to devalue the story, turning it from a treasure trove of theological and literary richness into a cheap trinket with a safe “Christianese” slogan on the level of the bumper sticker proverb, “Let go and let God.” For many Christians, the questions that come screaming out of the text of Genesis 22 are muted with saccharine platitudes.
Remember: Genesis tells us that God is testing Abraham, but as far as we can tell, Abraham doesn’t know that. When God commands him to kill his son and burn him on an altar, Abraham never gets the memo: “This is only a drill. Repeat. This is only a drill.”
I believe that the text is purposefully foggy in its implications, and that the author expects us to ask conflicted questions in response. How do we reconcile the God of Genesis 2 who creates man in his own image, then seems bent on the destruction of that image in Genesis 22? How could God ever even suggest child sacrifice? Why does Abraham seem to be more concerned with the fate of Sodom in Genesis 18 than the fate of his beloved only son in this passage? How could Abraham be expected to obey a command from God that contradicts his own express condemnation of murder?
If it’s true from Abraham’s words to his servants that he plans with every intention to return from the mountain with his son still alive, is he just going through the motions in this test? If God hadn’t intervened, would Abraham still have gone through with the sacrifice of his son? If God’s blessing on Abraham was unconditional before, why does it now seem to depend on his obedience? It seems that the very intention of the author in this passage is to irreversibly disturb our simplistic beliefs about God and our self-comforting ideas of what obedience to him might entail.
Abraham’s unquestioning submission to God is a surprising and inspiring model for us. But any serious student of God’s word will finish reading Genesis 22 with more questions than answers. For some reason, I think that’s exactly how God wants it.