okieinexile
Well-Known Member
Sacrificing sons
Genesis 22:1-14
22:1 After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am."
22:2 He said, "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 shall show you."
22:3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him.
22:4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.
22:5 Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you."
22:6 Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together.
22:7 Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father!" And he said, "Here I am, my son." He said, "The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"
22:8 Abraham said, "God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So the two of them walked on together.
22:9 When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.
22:10 Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son.
22:11 But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am."
22:12 He said, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me."
22:13 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.
22:14 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."
/***/
Let’s begin our discussion today by playing pretend. Let’s pretend that you’ve never heard of Abraham and that you are reading about him for the first time. His story starts off that he is from a comfortable family, but this is not enough for him. He wants to do something to distinguish himself, so he sets off—with a promise from God—to start his own race of people.
We like him. He has pluck, and he just keeps on going. He does all sorts of things that might be required to start his own people. He introduces new rituals, but for a long time the basic thing required to start a people eludes him. He doesn’t have a child. While we might not understand all of the niceties of starting an ethnic group, this would be one that we did. If you are going to go to the next generation, you’ve got to have at least one child. That’s just the way it is.
And it takes years and years, but Abraham and his wife Sarah finally do have their son Isaac. Though the path is by no means straight, and Abraham does turn out to have what they call a 3-dimenisional character, there is never anything that would make us believe he is not a more-or-less decent person.
Yet when we get to today’s part of the story, we have to blanch.
God tells Abraham, “Take that boy of yours and offer him as a human sacrifice.”
And they go and leave the hired men down at the bottom of the mountain. Isaac carries the wood up the mountain on his own back. You’ve got to wonder if he figures out what is going on.
“We don’t have a lamb, Daddy, what are we going to do?”
“God will provide the lamb?” is all that Abraham says.
And he takes his son up to the top of the mountain and lays him down on the wood and he is poised to kill him when God tells him to stop it. It was only a test.
You who are parents, can you imagine yourselves going through this? I hope not.
This is an alien story to us. It is so alien it becomes unreal and we lose its impact.
First of all, we are not in a culture where we understand sacrifice as it was practiced in those days. The idea was to take the very best and offer it to whatever god you worshipped so that he’d take it easy on you. You wanted rain for your crops or rain for grass for your livestock. We don’t think that way. We don’t think that something has to die so that we can survive.
Think about that last statement while you are having a hamburger for lunch today.
In some sense, the ceremonial sacrifice was a way of remembering that, in our fallen world, death in necessary for life. We no longer do carry out this ritual of having a burnt offering.
But it is not the sacrifice that shocks us. It is the fact it’s a human sacrifice ordered by God. Even though we can say it was only a test, how do you counter that it was such a cruel test? How can we claim that God is still a loving God?
These are some big questions, but they are not what I am after today.
I do think that we agree that we don’t like sacrifice and that human sacrifice is right out.
Let me tell you about a book that my wife was reading a few weeks ago. In a family, there was a daughter who had leukemia who needed a bone marrow transplant. None of the members of the family were compatible donors, so the mother took a chance and had another child. That child was a girl whose tissue was a match for her ailing sister and they just sort of used her as spare parts. We are against human sacrifice. Are we against that? Where exactly do we draw the line for this sort of thing?
There are other ways of sacrificing our children than this. If you spend all of your time working so that you can keep up with the Jones and you don’t take the time to teach your children the right way to live, then you are sacrificing them to the God of consumerism.
This goes on all the time.
We can sacrifice our sons and daughters on the battle field to the God of cheap oil. And it goes on and on.
When I look at God’s test of Abraham, I see this as God’s way of showing Abraham how he’d changed. He’d started out as a man who dreamed of founding a great people, but had become a man who’d come to trust God completely. Now I’d say that if you here God telling you to kill anybody, then you ought to seek the services of a psychiatrist, but in the context of the scripture, this story shows the change that has come about. We see what Abraham really values. He has come to value obedience to God over his own dreams, his own desires.
Now we come to the really hard part of the message. We should value obedience to God over our own dreams and desires. This means not sacrificing out children on the altar of consumerism. If I stopped there, this wouldn’t be so hard to say. It also means that our children are not to be the center of our lives either. They are important, but they are not the all. If we treat them as if they were the center of the universe, they will begin to think they are the center of the universe and believe that it is their due. Our very adulation will prevent them from becoming as Godly as they are capable of being.
So it’s not easy.
I don’t know whether I’ve resolved this story to anyone’s satisfaction. I don’t know if everything should be tied up in a nice little package with a ribbon on it. What I do know is that we are sometimes given things we are to struggle with, and having struggled, we are stronger whether we win our struggle or not.
Genesis 22:1-14
22:1 After these things God tested Abraham. He said to him, "Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am."
22:2 He said, "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 shall show you."
22:3 So Abraham rose early in the morning, saddled his donkey, and took two of his young men with him, and his son Isaac; he cut the wood for the burnt offering, and set out and went to the place in the distance that God had shown him.
22:4 On the third day Abraham looked up and saw the place far away.
22:5 Then Abraham said to his young men, "Stay here with the donkey; the boy and I will go over there; we will worship, and then we will come back to you."
22:6 Abraham took the wood of the burnt offering and laid it on his son Isaac, and he himself carried the fire and the knife. So the two of them walked on together.
22:7 Isaac said to his father Abraham, "Father!" And he said, "Here I am, my son." He said, "The fire and the wood are here, but where is the lamb for a burnt offering?"
22:8 Abraham said, "God himself will provide the lamb for a burnt offering, my son." So the two of them walked on together.
22:9 When they came to the place that God had shown him, Abraham built an altar there and laid the wood in order. He bound his son Isaac, and laid him on the altar, on top of the wood.
22:10 Then Abraham reached out his hand and took the knife to kill his son.
22:11 But the angel of the LORD called to him from heaven, and said, "Abraham, Abraham!" And he said, "Here I am."
22:12 He said, "Do not lay your hand on the boy or do anything to him; for now I know that you fear God, since you have not withheld your son, your only son, from me."
22:13 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.
22:14 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."
/***/
Let’s begin our discussion today by playing pretend. Let’s pretend that you’ve never heard of Abraham and that you are reading about him for the first time. His story starts off that he is from a comfortable family, but this is not enough for him. He wants to do something to distinguish himself, so he sets off—with a promise from God—to start his own race of people.
We like him. He has pluck, and he just keeps on going. He does all sorts of things that might be required to start his own people. He introduces new rituals, but for a long time the basic thing required to start a people eludes him. He doesn’t have a child. While we might not understand all of the niceties of starting an ethnic group, this would be one that we did. If you are going to go to the next generation, you’ve got to have at least one child. That’s just the way it is.
And it takes years and years, but Abraham and his wife Sarah finally do have their son Isaac. Though the path is by no means straight, and Abraham does turn out to have what they call a 3-dimenisional character, there is never anything that would make us believe he is not a more-or-less decent person.
Yet when we get to today’s part of the story, we have to blanch.
God tells Abraham, “Take that boy of yours and offer him as a human sacrifice.”
And they go and leave the hired men down at the bottom of the mountain. Isaac carries the wood up the mountain on his own back. You’ve got to wonder if he figures out what is going on.
“We don’t have a lamb, Daddy, what are we going to do?”
“God will provide the lamb?” is all that Abraham says.
And he takes his son up to the top of the mountain and lays him down on the wood and he is poised to kill him when God tells him to stop it. It was only a test.
You who are parents, can you imagine yourselves going through this? I hope not.
This is an alien story to us. It is so alien it becomes unreal and we lose its impact.
First of all, we are not in a culture where we understand sacrifice as it was practiced in those days. The idea was to take the very best and offer it to whatever god you worshipped so that he’d take it easy on you. You wanted rain for your crops or rain for grass for your livestock. We don’t think that way. We don’t think that something has to die so that we can survive.
Think about that last statement while you are having a hamburger for lunch today.
In some sense, the ceremonial sacrifice was a way of remembering that, in our fallen world, death in necessary for life. We no longer do carry out this ritual of having a burnt offering.
But it is not the sacrifice that shocks us. It is the fact it’s a human sacrifice ordered by God. Even though we can say it was only a test, how do you counter that it was such a cruel test? How can we claim that God is still a loving God?
These are some big questions, but they are not what I am after today.
I do think that we agree that we don’t like sacrifice and that human sacrifice is right out.
Let me tell you about a book that my wife was reading a few weeks ago. In a family, there was a daughter who had leukemia who needed a bone marrow transplant. None of the members of the family were compatible donors, so the mother took a chance and had another child. That child was a girl whose tissue was a match for her ailing sister and they just sort of used her as spare parts. We are against human sacrifice. Are we against that? Where exactly do we draw the line for this sort of thing?
There are other ways of sacrificing our children than this. If you spend all of your time working so that you can keep up with the Jones and you don’t take the time to teach your children the right way to live, then you are sacrificing them to the God of consumerism.
This goes on all the time.
We can sacrifice our sons and daughters on the battle field to the God of cheap oil. And it goes on and on.
When I look at God’s test of Abraham, I see this as God’s way of showing Abraham how he’d changed. He’d started out as a man who dreamed of founding a great people, but had become a man who’d come to trust God completely. Now I’d say that if you here God telling you to kill anybody, then you ought to seek the services of a psychiatrist, but in the context of the scripture, this story shows the change that has come about. We see what Abraham really values. He has come to value obedience to God over his own dreams, his own desires.
Now we come to the really hard part of the message. We should value obedience to God over our own dreams and desires. This means not sacrificing out children on the altar of consumerism. If I stopped there, this wouldn’t be so hard to say. It also means that our children are not to be the center of our lives either. They are important, but they are not the all. If we treat them as if they were the center of the universe, they will begin to think they are the center of the universe and believe that it is their due. Our very adulation will prevent them from becoming as Godly as they are capable of being.
So it’s not easy.
I don’t know whether I’ve resolved this story to anyone’s satisfaction. I don’t know if everything should be tied up in a nice little package with a ribbon on it. What I do know is that we are sometimes given things we are to struggle with, and having struggled, we are stronger whether we win our struggle or not.
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