Preached at First Presbyterian Church of Rolla on June 28, 2026. Based on Genesis 22:1-14.
Back in December, I decided to preach primarily on the Old Testament passages from the lectionary. Seemed like a good idea at the time, before I realized I would have to preach about the Binding of Isaac.
Let’s situate the story in the narrative arc, and then see if we can redeem it. When last I spoke, Abraham and Sarah welcomed three travelers who turned out to be angels. The LORD once again promised that Abraham would father a great nation, and that Sarah would be the mother of the son who carried that legacy. In due time, Sarah conceives and bears Isaac.
There’s a problem, though. Back when Sarah was barren, she contrived to have her slave Hagar bear Abraham’s son, Ishmael. Now that she’s a mother, Sarah cannot bear the presence of a rival, so she has Hagar and Ishmael sent away. God rescues them, and Hagar gives God the name “El-roi,” the God Who Sees. Abraham and Sarah meant harm, but God worked through it for good.
Next, Abraham and his household move to Gerar and he has some conflict with Abimelech over Sarah and over access to wells. To resolve the conflict, Abraham enters a covenant of loyalty to Abimelech.
Now wait a minute. A few chapters back, Abraham entered a covenant with the LORD! He isn’t supposed to serve two masters. He is supposed to serve God alone!
All in all, these couple of chapters don’t paint Abraham in the best light. He sends his slave and the son that he fathered with her off into the wilderness to die. He acts deceitfully, and then enters a covenant with a worldly king. Is this really the kind of man who could father a great nation, a priestly nation?
So as the opening verse of today’s reading says, God decides to test him. God needs to make sure Abraham has the right stuff to carry forward the covenant.
There are two questions in this story. The first is, what kind of man is Abraham? But the second, more important one, is, what kind of God do we worship? What kind of God promises, and promises, and promises that Abraham will have a son to carry on his legacy, and then as soon as the son is born, asks Abraham to sacrifice him? What kind of God asks for human sacrifice at all?
I am not the only person who struggles with this story. It has been discussed and debated for millennia. It’s tempting to just skip it, to just turn our attention to the New Testament instead. But I think it’s important to read the whole Bible. I think the whole Bible has something to teach us, if we approach it with the right lens.
Zach Lambert wrote an excellent book called Better Ways to Read the Bible. I highly recommend it, and also, he’s leading an online study of it in July. I’m happy to tell you more about it after worship. At any rate, he identifies four harmful lenses that many people use, and then four better lenses. Let’s skip the harmful ones.
The first helpful lens is context. We tend to focus on the ancient Israelites as if they were the only culture, but they were just a small part of a big world. Throughout the ancient Near East, there were many cultures that worshiped many gods. The Israelite understanding of God was colored and shaped by their interactions with these other cultures. We know that at least two of the regional gods demanded human sacrifice, Molech and Chemosh. In fact, human sacrifice, including child sacrifice, is well-attested throughout the ancient world, not only in the Near East but also in far-flung cultures like the Celts, Mongols, and Aztecs. So when God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, it fit his understanding of the kinds of things that gods would demand. Abraham probably didn’t understand why he had to do this horrible thing, but it fit his worldview at least.
In the end, God did not require human sacrifice of any kind. God prevented it in dramatic fashion, thereby establishing that kings should not sacrifice their sons, and indeed no human should ever be sacrificed to satisfy the God that we worship and hold dear.
Which leads to our second lens, fruitfulness. The interpretation of a scripture shall be judged by its fruits, which should be fruits of the Spirit. Well, one fruit of this story is that untold thousands of humans were not sacrificed. Isaac was not, and so he had two sons, Jacob and Esau, who became patriarchs of Israel and Edom, respectively.
The fruits of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Through this encounter, Abraham learned what true faithfulness is. He learned to trust God entirely. He learned to put his trust in God’s promises, rather than substituting his own plans. Throughout the Abraham story, we see that he is learning patience—a lesson that we all need. God’s promise is deferred, again and again. Abraham needed to learn patience, that God will provide. This episode reinforced his need for patience, as he took a three-day journey not knowing how it would work out.
As a result, maybe we all can learn patience. We can learn to wait on God’s time, rather than human time. Humans operate on chronos time, the kind of time you measure with a clock and a calendar. We want things to happen “on schedule.” There is a social schedule in every culture: you should get married by a certain age, have kids by a certain age, buy a house by a certain age, retire at a certain age, and so forth. But Abraham was WAY behind schedule. By maybe sixty or seventy years. People who don’t follow society’s plan can be reassured by the Abraham story that God will provide. God operates on kairos time, acting when the time is right, never early, never late. We usually don’t understand God’s sense of time, but we aren’t supposed to—we’re just supposed to accept God’s timeline and rely on the Spirit’s gift of patience.
The third lens is flourishing. Admittedly, this is my favorite lens, through which I read all scripture and view the world around me. I believe that the core of the Gospel is that the kingdom of God is at hand! And that God’s kingdom is universal human flourishing.
So how does this story guide us towards flourishing? Well, throughout his life, Abraham tried to do God’s will. He messed up a few times along the way, though. He was deceitful with Pharoah, and again with Abimelech. Both times, he claimed Sarah was his sister, which was a half-truth that disguised their marriage. He tried to name one of his servants as his heir, against God’s plan. Then he and Sarah contrived for him to father a child by his slave. That’s all kinds of wrong. He exploited Hagar, he didn’t trust God’s promise, and then he cast out Hagar and Ishmael—his own flesh and blood—to die in the wilderness. The fact that God rescued them only accentuates how wrong Abraham was to cast them out.
God promised that Abraham would father a great nation, if only he would fulfill his covenant and obey God. After all these times when he went against God’s will, Abraham faced the ultimate test—and passed!
As they say, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. In each of these examples, Abraham did what he thought was the right thing to do. He thought that deceiving Pharoah and Abimelech would save himself and Sarah. He thought that fathering a child through Hagar would cement his legacy. And yet in all these ways, he was drifting further and further from God’s plan.
That’s the way evil triumphs. Hannah Arendt wrote about “the banality of evil.” She particularly noticed it in the trial of Adolf Eichmann. He was ultimately responsible for a great many atrocities. However, he was no psychopath or sociopath or fanatic. Rather, he was an ordinary bureaucrat, following his orders, obeying the law. He didn’t think for himself but instead relied on clichés and talking points given to him by his superiors. His motivation was professional promotion, not Nazi ideology.
Abraham didn’t go far down that road, but was taking a few steps along it. We see the same thing with King Solomon later, as he gradually introduces foreign gods into Temple worship under the influence of his foreign wives. Each step we take seems innocuous, but you look up one day and realize how far you’ve gone. A key piece of advice my dad once gave me was, “Beware of making a series of small decisions that add up to a large one.”
And so, God put Abraham to a test. This was one of those times in his life when everything coalesced. There was no nuance. There was only the stark choice: Would he obey God? Or would he choose the comfort of his wealth, his wife, and his son who had finally been born? Choose this day whom you will serve. He finally realized that he was making bad choices, and that he had to love the Lord his God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength.
We too need to make that decision. We should always choose to follow God, but it’s easy to make little decisions that gradually lead us away from the narrow path. Then one day, you’re faced with a choice. Will you choose the comfortable life you’ve built, or will you choose to follow God’s calling? Will you accept God’s claim on your life? Abraham confronted that choice, chose correctly, and was rewarded with a legacy that still lives on today. Through this dramatic test, Abraham re-calibrated his commitment to a path that led to his flourishing and ours.
Last but certainly not least, we can read the Bible through the Jesus lens. That’s the principle that the entirety of scripture reveals something important about the Messiah. Jesus was the fullest expression of God’s nature, but God was revealed throughout the millennia that preceded Jesus’s birth and is still revealed in people’s encounters today.
One term that comes up when you read the Bible is “type.” A type is an Old Testament person or thing that foreshadows a person or thing in the New Testament. Most significantly, some types foreshadow Jesus Christ.
I think we can see Isaac as a type of Jesus. Both of them were specially designated to fulfill God’s plan for humanity. Both of them carried the means of their own deaths—Isaac carried the wood for the fire, and Jesus carried his cross.
In the Isaac story, we learn that God does not desire human sacrifice. We learn that God’s plan centers on life, not death. Isaac was apparently destined for death on the altar, yet was rescued and replaced by a ram that God provided.
I’d like to give you two possible interpretations, and maybe both of them are right. First, we can consider this a demonstration of God’s power over death. Isaac was just a man; Jesus was both human and divine. Jesus demonstrated that death has no ultimate power, that our triune God conquers death in all its forms. Jesus demonstrated that physical death leads to physical absence, and yet spiritual presence remains. We have confidence that through Christ, we have all received eternal life. There is still sadness when we lose someone we love—not sadness about the finality of death, but an extreme version of the sadness we feel when we are separated from our loved ones. We know that just as Jesus still lives, all the departed saints still live as well and will be together in God’s eternal kingdom.
At the same time, there is real value to our time here on earth. Isaac had work to do. He was needed to father Jacob and Esau so that God could have a priestly nation to carry God’s message down through the ages. So death has real meaning, real impact, but is not the end.
There’s another way to see this story, though. God demanded Isaac as a sacrifice. Throughout the Torah, there are rules about substitutions that can be made in sacrifices. For example, God took the tribe of Levi in place of the firstborn of the Israelites. Here we see God providing a ram in place of Isaac. In the same way, God provided Jesus as a sacrifice in place of the entire sacrificial system. As it says in the book of Hebrews, the high priest enters the holy place year after year with blood that is not his own, but Christ appeared once for all at the end of the ages to remove sin by the sacrifice of himself. And so, the entire sacrificial system has come to an end.
Hosea said, and Jesus quoted, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” From the beginnings of Israelite culture until the destruction of the Second Temple, sacrifices were the central act of worship. But the essence of the Gospel, and the lesson of the cross, and the lesson that Abraham learned, is that sacrifice is not ultimately what God demands of us. What God has ordained is that the world would be transformed into an existence of universal human flourishing. God desires reconciliation, of each of us to God and of each of us to one another. God desires strong, loving relationships. God desires that humans would support one another, in word and deed. God desires mercy: restorative justice, not retribution.
This story from ancient Israelite traditions is one that people have struggled with for millennia. I know I have. But in it, we find the true character of God, the character of Abraham, and an inspiration for how we should live. God desires mercy, not sacrifice. God desires human flourishing. God has abolished the old sacrificial system. Jesus Christ instituted a new age, one marked by reconciliation and restoration and relationship. Let us seek ways to live in God’s kingdom, a way of life dedicated to loving God by loving our neighbors. Amen.
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