Each time I read this account, I am stunned by each line.  Scripture tells us this is about God testing Abraham (22:1).  We know it all works out.  Abraham does not know.  Of course God wasn’t going to let Abraham make a burnt offering out of his son Isaac, we say.  Abraham doesn’t know what to say.  He has no idea why God is doing this.  All Abraham knows is that God has told him—I guess it’s a command—to go to the mountain God will show Abraham and, on that mountain, offer up his son as a burnt offering (22:2).

If we try to enter the mental space Abraham is in, hearing this command, we wonder what is happening.  What is God doing?  Why?  What kind of God asks such a thing—no, not ask, there’s no please involved.  God commands, expects, requires.  What sort of God is this?  We don’t know what Abraham is thinking: Scripture records only his actions.  These show perfect compliance with what God requires.  It’s as if Abraham isn’t even surprised.

Why should he be?  Beloved, the Bible tells us about an abomination: sacrificing sons and daughters, burning them in fire.  Scripture records and condemns this as a practice of the Canaanites.  Did such a thing really happen?  It seems unimaginable.  We consider our own children.  No way.  Never.  We don’t say the Bible lies.  It just sort of gets it wrong, here; or, gentler, Scripture just isn’t clear.

Archaeologists have unearthed graveyards, not in Canaan, yet, but among Canaanite peoples.[1]  In the graves are hundreds of small jars, and in the jars ashes and small bones.  Analyzing the bones, the archaeologists estimated the approximate age of the remains to be infants.  Just when you think the Bible might be telling a stretcher, it turns out the Bible is, as always, being very clear-eyed, telling all the painful truth.  It really happened.

What sort of religion must you have, what sort of worship, what sort of god are you worshipping, that killing and burning your own children as an offering is part of that worship, central to that religion, regarded as a good, a righteous, a holy thing?  At Sinai, God instructs the people of His promise in the way they are to follow Him, live before Him and under Him.  He gives very clear warning about the religious practices of the Canaanites: “You must not worship the Lord your God in their way, because in worshiping their gods, they do all kinds of detestable things the Lord hates.  They even burn their sons and daughters in the fire as sacrifices to their gods” (Dt 12:31).  God doesn’t want that, yet here God seems to be commanding Abraham to do just that.  We know, and the people of God’s promise in the days of Moses knew how it all worked out, so the tragedy of it all, the lingering, festering sin in it all, is that, despite God’s clear command, the people of the promise eventually do just as the Canaanites (2K 17:17, Jer 7:30-31, 19:5).

Did they believe they were worshipping God in this way, when He clearly commands them not to worship Him that way?  No, beloved.  God’s people weren’t worshipping God.  They had finished with Him long before.  They were worshipping the gods they had chosen, the idols they had fashioned for themselves, gods after their own image, their own fallen hearts.  Oh, I’m sure they believed they were offering their very best worship, the very best of themselves—“See how devoted I am?  See how praiseworthy and righteous I am?”  Along with everyone else, all doing the same, going along together, commending each other, seeing how righteous they all were, together.  Destroying themselves because they would not heed the Word of the Lord.

When Abraham hears what God tells him to do, I don’t think Abraham was terribly surprised.  Isaac is no infant at this point.  It’s later than usual, but the time has come.  Abraham was afraid it would come to this.  He had hoped it would not, but when it comes, he doesn’t say no.  He doesn’t run away, like an Elijah, afraid, or a Jonah, refusing.  He doesn’t change out God for a new god, as much as to say any God who says such things is not my God.  Abraham may have hoped, may have thought, that this God who had called him when he was as a stranger to God, this God who made a stunning promise to Abraham, a promise of many offspring and of a sure place for them all, Abraham may have thought that, perhaps, this God might be different from the others.  Now, Abraham knows this God is just like the rest.  He isn’t surprised at all.

Does Abraham still believe the promise God made?  How can the promise be fulfilled, if Isaac is sacrificed, burned on the altar Abraham builds, upon the wood Abraham arranges upon the altar (22:9)?  Is this the end of the promise?  Yet God made this promise.  Some of you have had the crushing experience of the death of a child.  That’s holy ground I can barely contemplate.  The awful silence of that space is too much for me to bear.  At seminary, we discussed occasions of pastoral care.  We weren’t given suggestions about what to say so much as instructions about what not to say: things like, “You can always have another.”  I hope no one has ever said that to anyone, though some people who don’t know what to say feel as if they must say something.  Beloved, there is no harm in silence, only let it be the silence of faithful, prayerful empathy.

Maybe Abraham thought to himself, well, I can always have another.  Really?  No he didn’t.  Isaac was the miracle child, the child of the promise.  If Sarah was old, well beyond the years of conceiving and birthing when Isaac was born, how much more now!  And Abraham older!  No.  If Isaac is dead, the promise, surely, is dead.  This is the death of the promise.  Abraham knows now that this God is just like the rest.  Yet God, who commands this sacrifice, is the God who made the promise.  Does God have the power to fulfill a promise, even when there is no earthly reason to expect it or believe, the power to fulfill, when everything seems to be against it?  Abraham doesn’t know what is going on.  His heart is confused, his mind darkened, but he knows what he must do, that much is clear: he must do what this God commands.  He must kill his son, his only son, whom he loves—how right God was about that!

But that’s crazy!  How could this be faith?  How could this be God?  Let me put the question differently: what is faith without obedience?  We love God.  As disciples of Jesus, we no longer live for ourselves or to ourselves.  We live for God, to fulfill God’s purposes, to live in the power of God here and to enjoy the fulfillment of God’s promise in God’s own time.  God is our all in all, as we sing and teach our children to sing.  Thank God He doesn’t command us to sacrifice our children!  We’d say no.  We would have to: that is the only right response . . . to God.  Oh, God, how I love you . . . and I’m not going to do what You tell me to do.  Oh, God, how I love you . . . and I will do the things You tell me that I like and already agree with.  What is faith without obedience?

But the question won’t be confined, there.  This isn’t an abstract consideration.  Isaac is right there: the delight and joy of Abraham’s life, his all in all.  Isaac walks with his dad, talks with him.  For the boy, the journey is an adventure together, just him and his dad.  He gets to help.  He carries the wood on his own back (22:6).  Abraham, you cruel, cold man—how could you!?

Maybe Abraham is just beaten; maybe, when God told him to sacrifice Isaac, hope, even faith, died.  What sort of God would do this . . . to me?  What sort of God could do this . . . to me?  But the habit of obedience was still there.  I asked what is faith without obedience.  Now I ask what is obedience without faith?    Slavery.  Slavery seems to be in the news again, it has been nearly all year long, with this 1619 Project, with the aim, so far as I understand it, to rewrite American history, to begin with the first importation of slaves from Africa.  In other words, the very foundation of America is criminal and grossly immoral: now we all must see it and confess it.  But that’s always their argument, no matter the date.

Christians know, ought to know, something about slavery.  Apart from Jesus Christ everyone is a slave to sin which enslaves us.  Don’t you bear a few scars, yourself, a few stubborn wounds?  Just see the evidence of enslavement all around us in these times, sin running rampaging, ruining.  Sin, as ever, clothing itself in the garments of righteousness, justice, change, progress—but not peace!  Violence, anger, barely concealed hatred, slithering.  Without faith, the only obedience that can be offered is the obedience of slaves.  Faith or slavery—our two choices.  People get caught up in politics, the new religion, the secular religion: they will have nothing to do with the historic faith, but their inmost being still cries out, hungering, thirsting for faith, some kind of salvation and hope, some desperate chance for wholeness and  happiness.  God is calling, still calling, always calling us to be caught up in the power of the Spirit, the Spirit of freedom that comes with faith.

Is Abraham being faithful, or is he just dead, inside, going through the motions of obedience, now that Abraham knows this God is just like the rest, now that God has betrayed Abraham and demanded what Abraham loves best?  Who is Isaac to Abraham?  Everything.  He is Abraham’s hope, his joy, his life, his future, his fulfilment.  God asks if Abraham will put everything on the line, on the altar, for God.  And if God should ask us?  We can say, “Oh, Yes!” but when it comes time to live up to our words?  Everything?  Could you be more specific, God?  You mean, like, some money?  Some spare food around the house?  An hour out of one day, each week?  I mean, what are we talking about here, God?  Let’s try instead to be as clear-eyed as Scripture.  It causes me to tremble!

Scripture praises seeking the Lord with all the heart (Dt 4:29, 2 Chron 15:12, Ps 119:2, Jer 29:13).  Jesus teaches that whoever does not hate his or her parents cannot be his disciple (Lk 14:26).  These are highly-charged ways, shattering ways, of saying the same thing about priorities.  Both are shocking ways of asking who or what we put first in our lives.  We can sing “I Surrender All” because we don’t expect God will ever ask us to.  What we do not surrender we do not want God to have.  Oh, certainly, God can have a little money, a little time, a little faith, maybe even a little obedience, but let’s not get crazy with it.

We don’t know what went through Abraham’s mind when he heard God tell him to sacrifice Isaac.  Scripture only records Abraham’s actions, prompt, obedient actions: no delay, no excuses, no conjured reasons to put it off for a bit.  What he does stuns and staggers: his actions are meant to.  This deep inward silence cries out to be filled.  We fill it, but I wonder if the point is that this deep inward silence is meant to be filled by God, to be filled with God, rather than our uncomprehending, indignant, stunned chatter.  If I must fill the silence, imagine Abraham’s thoughts and feelings, I would have him wonder this, cry this aloud into the night sky, demanding an answer: why would God tell me, command me, to give up everything I had counted on?

Power is ability.  There is no ability like possibility.  There is no possibility so radiant, so fine, as possibility in the midst of impossibility.  Isn’t that the glory of power, that it overcomes impossibility?  That’s the tale told by the movies we love to watch again and again.  And the times we live in, are these times of possibility or impossibility?  If they are times of possibility, what story is being told out there about the power that overcomes?  What must be overcome?  By what power?  And who has that power, such power?  Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there were songs about power to the people; now it seems to be power to the right people, and the wrong people can go to hell, and ought to, silenced, condemned, beaten, beaten into submission.  Fear and anger are a dangerous, a lethal combination, beloved.  The bitter sorrow of the Fall, of that fatal choice made in that perfect garden of God’s joy, was the choice to take power for ourselves, that we would become our own gods of possibility, that we would name good and evil.  We considered our God-given capacities, abilities, and made the deathly error of assuming that being in the image of God was sufficient to make us God, masters and mistresses of our own destinies.  We’ve been paying the gory price of our disobedient pride ever since.

A man named Jesus, from the region north of Jerusalem, was just another bloody payment to the god of the fallen, the god demanding blood, always ravenous for more, as all our epic slaughters attest.  What eleven men on earth knew at the time, though they could barely believe it, could hardly receive it, was that the blood of Jesus was not yet another offering to sin but was instead The Sin Offering that atoned, that cleansed and reconciled.  They could barely believe it, hardly receive the teaching of Jesus, repeated and clear, that this offering was not given by man but by God, in the person of His own, only Son, whom He loves.  The cross and the man dying upon it are powerful, earth-shaking testimony that this God is not just like the rest.

That man on that cross, in that tomb, and then miraculously in that room, with them, alive, empowered, alight; that man was, and is, the promise of God, God’s Word, the word He gives us.  He is God’s purpose to be glorified, rightly, truly known.  We have been drawn to him, and we are in him.  He is God’s power, possibility where there seemed only impossibility, the power of faith, the power of hope, the power of love: the same power in which Abraham cut the wood, walked with Isaac, built the altar, arranged the wood, bound his son, his only son, whom he loves, and reached out his hand to take hold of the knife; the faith, hope, and love by which Abraham knew God would make a way, though Abraham could not see it, could not see it for the tears and the anguish over this costliest sacrifice; the faith that, with God, there is possibility, the power of possibility that no impossibility can overcome; the faith that this God is not just like the rest, that there is no God beside this God, only the bloody idols of fallen hearts; the faith that made it possible for Abraham to offer up to God all Abraham had, all he was, all that was most precious to him here on earth, because, you see, Abraham yet treasured one even more than all he had, all he was, all he loved most here on earth.  Abraham did surrender all, faithfully.  God knew it already and rejoiced in his servant, but Abraham couldn’t know it, couldn’t possibly know it, until it was asked of him.

And what shall we say, and what shall we pray, contemplating that?

“So Abraham called that place The LORD Will Provide.  [How truly, how completely Abraham knows that, now.]  And to this day it is said, “On the mountain of The LORD it will be provided” (22:14).  Lord grant us all the faith of Abraham.

               [1] https://biblereadingarcheology.com/2016/05/13/did-the-canaanites-sacrifice-their-children/