It is not a particularly comforting story, nor one amenable to our modern dispositions. We love the message of liberty from oppression exemplified by the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. We love to root for the underdog David when he meets the giant Goliah in battle. But most of us have to wrestle with Genesis 22:1-19. Most of us have to ask why. Why did God command Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?
Isaac was the promised child (cf. Genesis 17:1-19), the child born miraculously to an aging husband and barren wife – the child through whom God had promised to fulfill His covenant with Abraham, through whom Abraham’s offspring would be reckoned (cf. Genesis 21:12).
How Abraham must have rejoiced when Isaac was born! And how despondent he must have been when God said to him, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I shall tell you” (Genesis 22:2, ESV). Take your son, Abraham. Your only son. Whom you love. The repetition must have been staggering.
Why? Why did God command Abraham to sacrifice Isaac?
And why did Abraham obey? Why did he not challenge God, as he had before (cf. Genesis 18:22-33)? God had promised Abraham innumerable descendants through Isaac! Had God forgotten His promise?
Why?
Abraham Sacrificing Isaac by Laurent de La Hyre, 1650
With the suspenseful austerity that characterizes much of the Old Testament, the narrative neglects to reveal to us Abraham’s innermost thoughts. In fact, Abraham appears to be entirely placid as he prepares to slay his son. When Isaac asks him where the lamb is for the burnt offering, Abraham merely says, “God will provide for Himself the lamb for a burnt offering, my son” (Genesis 22:8, ESV).
Fortunately for Abraham, an angel intervenes and prevents the sacrifice. In Isaac’s stead, Abraham offers up a ram to God and (remarkably) names the mount where he came “The Lord Will Provide.”
There are a number of lessons we could draw from this passage. I could discuss the obvious foreshadowing of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, or the significance of the angel’s intervention in light of the ubiquity of human sacrifice in the ancient world. However, what interests me most about the Binding of Isaac is what it teaches us about faith.
In Hamlet, Polonius advises Laertes, “This above all,- to thine own self be true; / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.” How many times have we been told to be true to ourselves? To be unique? To be our own people? The idea of loyalty to self is engrained within us. In fact, I would venture to say that many people value loyalty to self more than anything else. After all, to whom (or what) should we be loyal, if not to ourselves?
But Abraham was not loyal to himself. Abraham may have loved Isaac more than anyone else on Earth – he may have been willing to die for Isaac – yet when God tested Abraham, Abraham was loyal to God. He trusted in God – had faith in God – and God counted it to him as righteousness (cf. Genesis 15:6).
Why? Why the test of faith? Why the demand, the insistence, that we submit our will to His? Why can we not simply be “true to ourselves”?
Jesus asked very similar questions before he was crucified. But incredibly, even he, the Messiah, submitted to God in the Garden of Gethsemane: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will” (Matthew 24:39, ESV; emphasis added). Not as I will, but as You will.
We learn from Jesus and Abraham that God’s will for us is never “easy.” Abraham was called to sacrifice his son, Jesus to sacrifice himself. This is the difficult lesson to learn, the lesson we instinctively dislike and ignore. After all, if God’s will for us is so difficult – so unnatural – why not follow our own devices?
One response to that question is that we rarely know what is best for us. “There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way to death” (Proverbs 14:12, ESV). Be loyal to myself? Never! I am a sinful wretch with a proud and hard heart. And even if I were a better man, my advice to Hitler (for example) would never be “To thine own self be true.” On the contrary: rather than being loyal to myself, I should be loyal to who I ought to be. I should be loyal to Jesus’ example and teachings, not to my sinful desires.
But the real answer to the question is something that we are prone to forget, a lesson often overlooked when we ponder the Binding of Isaac or Jesus’ death on the cross. The lesson is that God will provide – “that for those who love God all things work together for good” (Romans 8:28a, ESV). In fact, God is so willing to provide “that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16, ESV). “He who did not spare His own Son but gave him up for us all, how will He not also with him graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32, ESV). The promise will never be broken; our faith will never go unrewarded.
“Faith,” said Martin Luther, “is a free surrender and joyous wager on the unseen, unknown, untested goodness of God.” It is the recognition that only in being true to God can we ever be true to ourselves. We can partake of God’s goodness – of real goodness – only if we are willing to put our faith in Him and submit to Him, leaning not on our own understanding (cf. Proverbs 3:5).
The question, then, is whether we will put our faith in God or in ourselves.
Dissenting voice here, from a lay person with minimal theological background.
Let’s start with Shakespeare… Remember, that was Polonius talking – so you have to feel your way through layers of irony and be unsettled in the process. He’s a doddering, pontificating fool who’s holding up his son’s departure even further after rebuking him for same. He mouths a string of platitudes and truisms that Laertes, like most of us, is not likely to remember. He’s trying to catch up on all the parenting he’s failed to do, in five minutes – and haven’t we all been there, parents?!
”
And yet, wisdom is wisdom no matter who speaks it or when. “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”. “To thine own self be true”…and this does NOT mean “be loyal to yourself” in the sense of “serve yourself first”. It’s more akin to Proverbs 11:3 – “The integrity of the upright will guide them”.
We’ve all heard this kind of justifying ‘explanation’ of the Binding of Isaac. And I for one don’t want to hear it again. Why make God out to be the sort of tyrant that would terrify a child and traumatise a family? No, no, NO. The Jewish Rabbis and other commentators have taken a different stance: God *wanted* Abraham to argue back. That was what he was supposed to do! (He was, after all, the first Jew).
True to himself? I don’t believe so. Abraham was NOT true to himself, to the promise that he knew Isaac represented, not even to the God that he was beginning to know as a friend, the God who’d preserved Sarah, given them a miraculous last-chance baby, and saved Hagar in the wilderness. The redeeming God!
One can only speculate as to why Abraham missed the mark; in previous passages, he’s been very busy making deals – first with Sarah, then with Abimelech. Both of them, being people he had previously wronged; and while he seems impassive about binding Isaac for sacrifice, Genesis tells us that he wept for Ishmael. Maybe he was still in grief, still in conflict…and maybe that’s why God tested him, to see whether he understood. Jesus asked “Who do you say that I am?” – and my sense is, God is asking Abraham this question with the test. And still, Abraham does not know…
Whatever. It doesn’t follow that what he did to Isaac was in any way a Good Thing, nor that it was the Will of God for Abraham to go through this cruel charade.
The writer of Hebrews does not commend Abraham for being willing to sacrifice Isaac, but for his ability, in faith, to recognise his historical calling to father a great nation in a Holy Land. That was faith. The binding of Isaac, was failure – but also a prophetic picture of redemption.
Thank you for your comment, Sally! It really made me re-examine what I was trying to argue.
I didn’t mean to offer an in-depth analysis of what Polonius was *really* trying to say or what Shakespeare was *really* trying to communicate through those lines. (In fact, you’ll notice that I don’t offer any direct analysis of the Hamlet quotation at all.) The only reason I brought up the quotation was that I have heard it used in reference to being “true to yourself.” I know that Polonius isn’t making some deep point about listening to your heart.
I know that rabbis in recent centuries have increasingly distanced themselves from the “traditional” explanation of the Binding of Isaac. Of course, modern rabbinical Judaism has distanced itself from its tradition in many ways.
Also, Isaac was probably an adult when the Binding occurred, not a child.
I do not think saying that God *wanted* Abraham to argue back is being faithful to the text. When the angel of the Lord stays Abraham’s hand, God does not say, “You foolish man! You should not have consented!” He says, “Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son” (Genesis 22:12b, NIV). There is *no* indication that Abraham has “missed the mark.”
I do not know how it could *not* be a good thing if God told Abraham, “Now I know that you fear God.” I think you are being too quick to dismiss this as a “cruel charade.”
According to the writer of Hebrews, Abraham reasoned that God could raise Isaac from the dead (cf. Hebrews 11:17-19). So, though it may have been traumatic for him, his faith “triumphed” over the trauma, so to speak.
God is still a redeeming God! If anything, this passage demonstrates a loving God, a God Who is unwilling to accept human sacrifices which the Canaanite gods are so “willing” to accept them.
This is a challenging passage, but I do not think we can circumvent the challenge by saying that Abraham did wrong.