Genesis 22:1-19

01/11/12 Genesis 22:1-19 GUMC Youth

Have you ever heard the story of Abraham and Isaac before? It is often called, at least in Jewish circles the "Akedah" or "The Binding of Isaac." It is an amazingly important story if we want to understand who God is and how he has interacted with us. I would say that, for Christians, it is definitely in the top three most important stories in the whole Old Testament. It is at the same time one of the most amazing and also most frightening stories we ever read, depending on how we look at it. We are going to look at this story from a couple of different directions, so I want you to make sure you listen the whole way through, so you don't miss anything or get the wrong idea.

Before we start, I want to ask you, when you heard this story, what did you think of it? Was it a good story or a bad one? Is the God you hear about in it comforting or frightening, or perhaps a bit of both? The fact of the matter is that it has been my experience that many Christians tend to paint a bit of a one-sided picture of this story. We are a little afraid of what we read but we are more afraid of what people who are hostile to the Bible and Christian faith will do with it. Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential philosophers in all of history, argued that the love that a father ought to have for his son is a more certain and binding standard than any command from outside that relationship, even if a voice were to come from heaven. Christopher Hitchens, the recently deceased journalist who was also a strong advocate for atheism made a comment, referring to this story, about how he would reject anyone who suggested that he should be devoted to a God who asked him to sacrifice his child or to respect one who was willing to do so.

If these are the kinds of things that people say about this passage, it can come as no surprise that many Christians and churches simply ignore it, as if they are hoping that it will go away and stop bothering them. But there are several ways that people do talk about this story while trying to point out its positive aspects. One way that people talk about it, which comes from the New Testament, is to emphasize what the story of Abraham and Isaac has to tell us about God, but not that God is a bloodthirsty God who demands child sacrifice. Rather, it draws on the end of the story, where we read God saying to Abraham, "Because you have done this, and have not withheld your son, your only son, I will indeed bless you..." and so on. Paul, in his letter to the Romans says this, clearly echoing the story of Abraham and Isaac. "What then are we to say about these things? If God is for us, who is against us? He who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?" In this way of looking at things, the point that we should get from this story is not that God wants us to sacrifice our children, but that God is willing to stop at nothing to redeem us, even allowing Jesus to die.

Now, the way you almost always hear the story of Abraham and Isaac talked about in church, aside from what we just talked about, goes something like this. "Abraham has gone down as a hero of the faith because he was willing to give the very best of what he had to God. If we want to be like Abraham (and we do), we should be willing to give the best that we have to God." Of course, the problem with this way of thinking is that it is really isn't possible to avoid the conclusion that we should follow Abraham, even when it comes to sacrificing our children. After all, what parent would say that they have something more important than their children? Nobody would. Another philosopher, Søren Kierkegaard, made fun of this tendency. He asked what would happen if someone decided to take a message like that seriously. Someone would, after being told to offer the best he had because Abraham did so might go home and get ready to sacrifice his own son. After all, his child is surely the best that he has. The preacher, if he found out that the man was planning to do this, would come and lay into him and call him a monster and other things. Kierkegaard's point was that the man could simply respond, "It was in fact what you yourself preached on Sunday."

I want to suggest that the story of Abraham and Isaac has a different meaning altogether and, not only that, it is actually one of the very most important stories in the whole Bible; so important that we cannot avoid it but must try to tackle it head-on. Before we talk about how we should understand this passage, I want to say something about how the rest of the ancient world thought about sacrifice. You might be wondering why I, as a Christian pastor, should want to explain how pagan people throughout time and place have thought about sacrifice, but it is actually incredibly important. If we don't understand what pagan people have said and if we can't wrap our mind around why people would find that way of thinking convincing, we can never really understand how radical the gospel really is, how completely different from that way of thinking Christian faith really is.

First of all, you need to know that, though Israel has a long and rich heritage of animal sacrifice, it has never affirmed human sacrifice. The closest Israel ever gets to sacrificing a human is this passage and, it is important to note, Isaac is not actually sacrificed. However, though Israel never affirmed human sacrifice, there were several groups who lived around them who did. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Israel was a lonely island of humanity in the midst of an ocean of child sacrifice. The fact that we do not practice human sacrifice in our country today is just one way in which our culture has been influenced by the Judeo-Christian tradition. In spite of the fact that many of us would find human sacrifice to be obviously evil, there have been many groups of people who have not felt the same way.

Let me give you an example to try to make it clearer. There were some South American tribes throughout the centuries who played a game that is somewhat similar to our modern game of basketball. The greatest athletes of the tribe would train relentlessly to be chosen to be on the team. When two teams played it was for keeps. When the game was over the tribe would sacrifice a whole team, but they didn't sacrifice the losing team, they sacrificed the winning team. Though all the players knew that, if their team won, they would die, nobody played to lose. Everyone wanted to be on the winning team; everyone wanted to be sacrificed to the gods.

This seems a bit odd to modern Americans, doesn't it, so we need to try to understand what was going on. Why would people want to sacrifice the winning team instead of the losing team? It was precisely because the winning team was better and the people wanted to sacrifice the very best. Not only that, but think about what it would be like to live in that kind of culture. If you got to be one of those who were chosen for sacrifice, think about what a huge honor that would be. If you were sacrificed, it would mean that you were the very best in your whole tribe, the best thing to give to the gods, the best offering you could possibly make. That is a pretty intense honor, even if it seems barbaric by today's standards.

The point is that there is something in the depths of our humanity that wants to offer our very best. Though we live in such a consumeristic culture where we are tempted to give the very least we have to in order to get something, isn't there something about the things we care about that makes us want to give the very best we have? If you love to play sports or music or theater or anything else, you don't set out saying, "What's the least I have to do in order to get by," do you? No, you set yourself to work hard and to do the best you possibly can. You work hard, you go to practices, you give of your free time, all to give the best you have.

This deep desire to insist on making a sacrifice of the very best we have to God is, in my judgment, not a Christian desire, but a pagan one and the strongest evidence we have in the Bible for this is the story of Abraham and Isaac. God comes along to Abraham and says, "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 that I will show you." We need to remember that, as barbaric as this might sound to twenty-first century American ears, it would not have sounded strange at all to Abraham, who grew up and had spent seventy-five years of his life in a pagan city that, if it was anything like other pagan cities, practiced human sacrifice. During Abraham's life, he did not have the Ten Commandments to tell him that God did not approve of murdering people; he did not have the whole prophetic tradition, where God carefully explained and nuanced his desires for his people in response to their unfaithfulness; he did not have Jesus to look at and understand what he had to show him about what God was and was not like. He spent his whole life surrounded by people who thought that sacrificing your child made absolute sense. What is interesting is how powerfully God overturns that whole impulse here, and it is much stronger than simply saying, "Don't sacrifice your children."

Abraham and Isaac go to the mountain and Abraham is right about to do what he was told to do, to the point where his knife is already raised. He was prepared to give the very best he had, just like everyone else he knew was willing to do. The story of Abraham and Isaac has more to tell us about the barbaric nature of human beings than it does about God demanding a horrible thing and we know that because of how God handles the situation. God stops Abraham from doing what he is about to do. He says, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him." But what happens after that? This is what we read. "And Abraham looked up and saw a ram, caught in a thicket by its horns. Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called that place 'The Lord will provide;' as it is said to this day, 'On the mount of the Lord it shall be provided.'"

That may not mean much to you at first, but we need to notice what God does here. Abraham is completely prepared to offer his son, the best that he has, but God stops him from doing so. Abraham sacrificed the ram that God gave in Isaac’s place.  What has God done?  God has given a sacrifice that was intended to replace the very best that Abraham could have given.  It is as if God was saying, “The very best that you have is not good enough.  Instead, I want you to give me what I have given you to give.”  You see, what matters most is not the size of the gift, or even how important it seems to us, but the fact that it is God who has called for the sacrifice and that it is God who has provided for it.

The big difference between the Israelites and all the pagan nations around them was that the pagan nations offered to their gods what they thought they should give while Israel offered to God what they were told to give. The pagan nations thought for a while and then said, "This is the sacrifice that I should give. It is the best that I have, so that must be what the gods want." The Israelites said, "It might not seem like what we are giving is the best we have, since our children are surely better than our animals, but this is what God wants us to give, so that is what we will give. In spite of what it looks like, it actually is the best we can give because it is what God has provided."

What this means for faith is astonishing. It means that we don't have to sit around, wondering and worrying about whether we have given God a big enough or a good enough sacrifice. It means that we don't have to lay awake at night concerned about whether we have been good enough for God to love us. God takes the very best thing that Abraham has to offer, allows him to even get to the point where he is really going to offer it to God and then gives him a replacement. In so many ways, that is what God has done in Jesus. We want to give God the best we have, we want to work really hard and earn God's love, but every time we get ourselves all worked up, that now we're really going to give our best, God says to us, "Stop! Do not do that thing that your culture has told you that you need to give. I am glad that you don't want to hold anything back, but what I really want from you is something greater than you could ever give. What I really want is for you to offer me the Jesus I sent for you."

Just like God takes the ram that he provides for Abraham instead of Isaac, takes the sacrifice that he gives instead of the very best that Abraham could give, God takes the Lamb that he provides, that is, Jesus Christ, instead of the best that we have. Now this is where faith comes in. You see, it doesn't take any faith to believe that God will accept the best that we have. After all, we don't have anything better. It is easy to believe that God will accept the best we have, or at least, if he doesn't, then we can rest assured that we did the best we could. It does take faith, however, to really believe that God's ways are better than our own, that God would actually prefer what he has given us to give to him over what we muster up on our own. It takes faith to cling to the fact that what God has done is better than what we can do and to trust in that so completely that we do not live our lives worried that we have not done enough, but rejoicing that God has done it all, so we do things his way.

So, I encourage you, as you go about your business this week to think about all the times you worry about whether you have given enough, or if your faith is strong enough, or whether you've been a good enough person, and every time you do, I want you to think about the fact that God has given us something better than even the best we can do, that we can trust that in Christ, we have what we really need to offer to God. I want you to remember that this is why we try to live like Jesus lived; because he was the one who shows us what God really wants and I guarantee you that it is a better way to live than trying to figure out how to make God happy on our own. God has made us free in Christ and that is very good news. Let us pray.

AMEN